That 70s Schau: How Neo-Nazi Science Fiction of the 1970s Captured the Present

• In Event: Genre, Subcultures, and Politics

Abstract

The 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building brought William Pierce’s racist utopian novel The Turner Diaries into the American consciousness, while Jean Raspail’s racist dystopia, The Camp of the Saints, took a more circuitous route that peaked with its inclusion in the “Bannon Canon” (of Trump’s adviser and eventual co-conspirator Steve Bannon) in 2017. Though the novels come from the United States and France, respectively, they share a common moment in time (Saints, 1973; Turner is serialized beginning in 1975), and as importantly both are works of speculative fiction. Following recent work that explores the importance of genre to right-wing politics (Anker, Orgies of Feeling; Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation), in this essay I discuss the importance of speculative fiction to the post-2016 emergence of an openly racist and xenophobic American Right. In the case of both novels, the recent failures of colonialist and imperialist projects (Indochina, Algeria, Vietnam) loom large, and are coupled with fears of “pollution” (by invading hordes of non-Europeans, in Saints; by multiracial coalitions of Black and Jewish Americans, in Turner) that threatens to result in “white genocide” (the eradication of white Europeans). While Saints is a dystopia and Turner a utopia (from the Rightist point of view), the tension between these texts has been (unfortunately) a rather productive one, and given the proliferation of racist conspiracy theories in the US (QAnon, etc.), it is crucial to understand how these texts continue to shape the imaginary of the anti-egalitarian American Right.

Author

• Stefan P. Dolgert, Brock University