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The term “lone wolf” is a metaphor that began to be used by advocates of White radical nationalism in the United States in the 1970s to name unorganized individuals who committed violent crime, including murder, to further White racist and White radical nationalist aims. In the 1980s and 1990s, seminal radical nationalist thinkers, including James Mason, William Pierce, Louis Beam, Tom Metzger, and David Lane, incorporated lone wolf violence as part of decentralized revolutionary tactics, often, although not exclusively, named “leaderless resistance.” Contemplating the fact that White racist organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, had not been able to safeguard the privileges, resources, and powers long attached to Whiteness by US law, Mason, Pierce, Beam, Metzger, and Lane concluded that White racist organizations not only were too dysfunctional but also far too visible, and therefore easy to monitor, infiltrate, and neutralize. While the White nationalist cause still needed public figures and organizations to attract and educate new cadres, armed White racist resistance had to be decentralized and leaderless. White nationalist leaders should issue generalized calls to arms but give no direct orders and have no knowledge about who was planning to do what. The perpetrators would themselves be responsible for preparing and executing their violent crime and securing adequate resources. The lone wolf should go under the radar and melt into the general population by avoiding racist organizations and attributes and should never tell anyone about his—White racist lone wolves are so far predominantly male—opinions and activities. The perpetrator would risk his life or freedom but be awarded heroic status in the White nationalist hall of fame. To White nationalist leaders, the tactics are cost effective. Should the lone wolf succeed, the violence would benefit the cause; should he fail, he could bring down no one. During the Internet age, the lone wolf tactics spread through viral marketing and globalized media throughout what White nationalists call the “once White world” in America, Europe, South Africa, and Oceania. The tactics had by then evolved into two schools or types of lone wolves: the lone racist serial offender, who seeks to avoid getting caught and operates in the shadows for an extended period of time; and the mega-impact lone wolf, who wants to get everyone’s attention by one sensational attack, in which the perpetrator is more likely to die or get caught during, or immediately after, the big assault—a sacrifice that is likely to increase the fame of the perpetrator. Both lone wolf types count on the media to amplify their impact and heroic status, and to spread the message of the White revolution to which lone wolves seek to contribute. Lone wolves inspire copycats, and the number of attacks escalated during the first decades of the new millennium. In early 2020, the increase of lone wolf violence was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, as restrictions closed attackers’ favorite targets, for example, mosques, synagogues, churches, and schools, and imposed curfews and banned public gatherings.

When Brenton Tarrant live-streamed his massacre of fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, he was but one in a series of lone-acting white men committing violent crime to further the radical white nationalist aim to save the white race from extinction and establish a white ethnostate. From where did white nationalists get the notion of an ongoing white genocide? Why should 'resistance' against a perceived invasion of 'white' territory be launched by individual 'lone wolves' massacring noncombatants they have no prior relation to? How could slaughtering children be construed as a heroic act that a perpetrator wants to broadcast to the world? Based on a unique collection of interviews with lone wolves, their victims, and their supporters, and a close reading of lone wolf, fascist, and radical nationalist material and communication, this Element provides solid answers to these and adjacent questions of importance.

Fascism invites its adherents to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their longing for honor and glory, passion and heroism. An important avenue for articulating its affective dimension is cultural production. This article investigates the role of violence and passion in contemporary Swedish-language fascist fiction. The protagonist is typically a young white man or woman who wakes up to the realities of the ongoing white genocide through being exposed to violent crime committed by racialized aliens protected by the System. Seeking revenge, the protagonist learns how to be a man or meets her hero, and is introduced to fascist ideology and the art of killing. Fascist literature identifies aggression and ethnical cleansing as altruistic acts of love. With its passionate celebration of violence, fascism hails the productivity of destructivity, and the life-bequeathing aspects of death, which is at the core of fascism’s urge for national rebirth.

After a brief discussion of the way critique of cultural relativism today often is part of anti-liberal and ultranationalist stances in public debates, Mattias Gardell goes on to trace the concept’s historical roots in cultural anthropology. He points out that whereas in contemporary society, cultural relativism is often understood as a normative doctrine that allegedly legitimates multiculturalism, for cultural anthropologists, it typically served as an analytical perspective where customs, beliefs and institutions must always be analyzed in their proper contexts to be fully understood. The anthropological concepts of truth and knowing are, then, necessarily different from philosophical ditto, and the failure (and unwillingness) to grasp this fact has made it easy to create various relativistic strawmen in academic as well as political discussions. The problem with these strawmen is that they have become ideal opponents for various ultranationalist and/or monoculturalist political movements in their opposition against tolerance and diversity.

White racist serial killer Peter Mangs is the most politically conscious lone wolf terrorist Sweden has seen thus far. Adopting the tactics of Joseph Paul Franklin to the city of Malmö, Mangs committed at least three murders and twelve murder attempts between 2003 and 2010. Well-versed in white power literature and leaderless resistance tactics, Mangs aimed at “igniting a race war” by shooting Black, Muslim, and Roma citizens to amplify racialized tensions, grievances, and anxieties in the increasingly segregated city. Yet, Mangs is not included in any database of single-actor terrorism, as these depend on how a perpetrator or incident is defined by the police, the courts, and the media. In this case, Mangs’ political motives were ignored by everyone, except by people in the targeted communities and the white racist milieu. This fact highlights the importance of ethnographic methods to terrorism studies. Based on ten three-hour interviews with Mangs, an analysis of his own political writings, previously not known to the public, interviews with Mangs’ victims, their friends and relatives, and extensive fieldwork in Malmö among activists across the political spectrum, including people who hailed Mangs’ deeds as heroic, this essay explores the impact of urban lone wolf terrorism.

Sweden is known for its tolerance and liberal policies. Yet, sixty percent of Sweden’s mosques and Islamic centres had been subjected to threats, vandal­ism, or arson. Muslim women, in particular, seem to be targets of hate crimes, but rarely report incidents to the police. In 2014, the Sweden Democrats, a proto-fascist nationalist party, gained close to 13 percent of the national vote after a fervent anti-Muslim campaign supported by a network of social media outlets in which incitements to violence against Muslim-Swedes proliferated. Based on fieldwork, surveys, and open-ended interviews with 100 Muslim citizens and 40 anti-Muslim activist, as well as a review of anti-Muslim online calls to arms, this essay addresses the surge of anti-Muslim hate crime in Sweden, exploring the role of violence in the proto-fascist attempt to ‘recreate’ a homogenous nation that never existed. While the literature on ultranationalist-inspired hate crime typically sees the perpetrators as angry white men, the nationalists interviewed in this study claimed to act out of love, not hate. By examining how love and hate may reinforce each other, this essay argues that anti-Muslim hate crime is a form of political violence that patrols the borders and identities it produces, and shows the extent to which victims may adopt the perpetrator’s gaze and experience their own bodies as deviant, and out of place in their own home country.

So costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom : Human bombs, suicide attacks and patriotic heroes

The synchronized terror attacks on July 22, 2011 was the worst politically motivated assault in post-WW2 Norway. To the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, 22/7 was a “marketing operation,” designed to draw attention to his compendium, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. While Breivik acted alone, his political philosophy is far from unique. Through a detailed analysis of the compendium's content, identifying the original authors whose texts Breivik used but did not always acknowledge, this essay discusses the political traditions that informed the assailant's worldview: Islamophobia (anti-Muslim racism), cultural conservative nationalism, antifeminism, and selected elements of White Power thought, far Right evangelical theology, and the Knights Templar tradition, all permeated by romantic male warrior ideals. The stunning violence of July 22 was a hyper-masculine performative act aimed at producing a heroic avant-garde of nationalist warriors who will rise to purge Europe from the corrupting i...

[The political milieu and motives of Anders Behring Breivik. Expert report delivered at the trial in Oslo, 4 June 2012] When Mattias Gardell was called as an expert witness in the trial of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, his commission was to uncover Breivik’s political world of ideas. Gardell’s report shows that three currents of ideas primarily influenced Breivik: anti-Muslim racism (Islamophobia), cultural conservative nationalism and anti-feminism. To this, Breivik had added fundaments from white supremacist ideology, Christian right theology and the Templar tradition, framed by a romantic masculine warrior ideal. The report also shows that Breivik was not alone in his political conception of the world and that it can be identified as fascist. Gardell points out that Breivik’s spectacular violence was a performative act, aimed at creating what it refers to: a heroic vanguard of male crusaders, who would cleanse the nation from the enemy within (Cultural Marxists, multiculturalists, feminists) and defeat the external enemy (Muslims) as a prelude to national rebirth. Gardell’s expert report was part of a block of six experts, called in to examine the political philosophy of Breivik and the ideological history of fascism, and it became of great importance for the court’s judgement. On 24th of August 2012, Breivik was declared legally responsible for his actions and sentenced to the severest punishment that Norwegian law has to offer. Publication history: Gardell’s expert report delivered at the trial of Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo on the 4th of June 2013, with a new foreword and afterword by the author. (Published 16 September 2013) Citation: Gardell, Mattias (2013) ”Anders Behring Breiviks politiska hemvist och motivbild. Sakkunnigrapport infor rattegangen i Oslo, 4 juni 2012”, in Det vita faltet II. Samtida forskning om hogerextremism , special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift for samhallsanalys , issue 2, pp. 185–215. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.2.7

Pointing out that even countercultural religious movements have their fringe elements, this chapter analyzes and describes the rise of racist Asatru and other Norse-flavored Paganisms in the intersections of American alternative religion and the legacy of white supremacy. With important predecessors among the Ariosophic heathens in the pan-Germanic volkisch milieu and the occult National Socialist tendency in the Third Reich, racist paganism in the United States has come in two waves: the first as a racist sub-current to the 1960s counterculture and the second as part of the radicalization of the white power milieu during the 1990s. Based on fieldwork and interviews with leading proponents of racist heathenry, this chapter focuses on one significant racist pagan vehicle of each wave, the Odinist Fellowship and Wotansvolk, detailing their creed, ritual practices, prison outreach ministries, and political ambitions.

This essay presents a historical overview and analysis of the development of racist religions in North America. White religious racism is not a unified creed, but a heterogeneous category that comprises many different congregations and philosophies, ranging from racist recasts of Christianity to a plethora of racist pagan, occult fascist, and Satanist constructs. The racist religions considered fall into three main categories: racist (particularly Identity) Christianity, religious national socialism, and racist paganism. Though paganism has been gaining ground among younger racists, the importance of Christianity to traditional American culture means that Identity is unlikely to be completely supplanted by racist paganism.