In 1998 white supremacists assembled in Toronto to hear Ingrid Rimland, a doyenne of neo-Nazism. By then in her early sixties, Rimland was highly regarded for having embraced the nascent World Wide Web as an organizing tool for white supremacy. From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, Rimland's site, Zundelsite.org, served as a clearinghouse for Holocaust denialism and fascist news, blasting daily “Z-Grams” into the dark corners of the web.
Even before creating Zundelsite.org, Rimland had been a pioneer of white identity politics, and when she took the podium that day, she explained that she would be discussing her evolution as an “ethnic” writer. It will likely surprise many readers that in her lecture, Rimland credited her embrace of white supremacy to her upbringing as a Mennonite, a faith generally associated with pacifism and agrarianism.
With the far-right surging worldwide, historians have come to better appreciate that the taproots of racism reach deep into local contexts. Rimland's life and writings help demonstrate how an individual's turn toward intolerance always reflects a personal journey, how white supremacists mine biography for the stuff of bigotry. Although factors such as economic recession, mass migration, and democratic malaise can conjure favorable conditions for far-right populism, we know that the paths societies take on the road to illiberal rule are always specific. That means we will never again see a country exactly like Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy. But by the same token, we also know that no country or person or religion is immune from the pull of the far right.
Read Full Article »
