cults of the culture wars: fringe Far Right theories, to obscurity, and its metabolic rise into the digital age. The Generation X 'edgy' backlash, from1990s Fascism "cool" to 2000s Neo-Nazi terrorism (part 5).
When the Far Right began to resurface from the 1990s, after being pushed into obscurity by three decades of the counterculture years. The pre-digital age of the 90s offered these writers, and 'philosophers' a newer market, albeit smaller at the time, as edgy, digressive elements of forbidden books and literature to be "cool" again, and a way of Generation X challenging what they deemed as "political correctness" of the Left into their own ironic detachment, and more so their "Culture of Transgression". From small bookstores in San Francisco, seen as an artistic medium of digress against the Bay Area once hippie stronghold, such as "Naked Eye News & Video" and more importantly the publisher "Amok Books", these proponents of Culture of Transgression for Gen Xers who would have been in their late teens and early 20s at the time, tuned into Amok Books and Naked Eye catalogues for the ultimate taboo, from serial killer books, Cult manifestos to actual Far Right/Nazi writers of the 1920s -1970s, mixing in elements of Left/Anarcho nihilism, as risque coffee table reading, the founders Adam Parfrey, Stuart Swezey, and Brian King in the late 1980s, and well into the 90s unwittley, or wittingly, began to lay down what they camouflaged as an artistic detachment, to be the actual blueprint for the Far Right reading list, and manuals of extremism into the digital age.
1990s Gen Xers 'boomer' counterculture backlash, "Amok/Feral Books". Fascists are the new 'cool': Doomsday Fascists/Neo-Nazis, Guillaume Faye, Jason Mason.
The late Adam Parfrey, who was the quintessential Generation Xer backlasher, transgressional cynic and closet "Neo-Nazi", who created Amok Books based in New York City in 1986, alongside Ken Swezey, who was more of a artistic curator of the transgressive. Although technically both of them were "Boomers", with Swezey relating more to the 1970s mondo bizarre ethos, and Parfrey ustiling the Gen X shock value of the 1990s, as a backlash against the boomer- esque 1960s and 1970s hippie/hedonic lifestyles, by masking his Proto-Fascist and Neo-Nazi fascinations from cultural gatekeepers, to which it caused Swezey and Parfrey to split, later cited as ideological differences of the book store/label content and publications, rather than focusing on transgressive curiosities, it was revealed Parfrey's obsessive interest in Far Right, Nazi occult, and 70s, 1980s white supremacist extremism, which ended the partnership with Swezey.
Parfrey's 'masked' his Far Right interest with the "Apocalypse Culture" analogy, published in 1987, and then republished in 1990 under his "Feral House" publications, after he left Amok books in 1989, and later in 2000 he published "Apocalypse Culture II", with an essay written by 1970s oddball, the late French Fascist Guillaume Faye, who was Alain de Benoist's 2nd in command, until they fell out with other, and Faye became an obscure, radio shock jock and comedian in the 1980s, only to be re-radicalised in the late 1990s with his racist and Islamophobia drenched L'Archéofuturisme ("Archeofuturism") reiterating that tiresome, and psychosis laced Far Right chorus, within its extremity of protecting European/White society from Islamic 'hordes', by collapsing Social Democracy completely into a doomsdayism conclusion, and rebuilding the West under an anti-democratic authoritarianism i.e., Fascism. Parfrey, printed Faye's "Humanflood" essay, in Apocalypse Culture II , decreeing what the Alt Right in 2010 pushed as part of their platform for Trump, and then with Trumpist Fascism being implemented throughout the West as a Far Right political standard, that being the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, and hysteria of Islam taking over the West with mass migration, which as we know now, has become the political norm of Far Right parties.
Adam Parfrey's 'camouflaged', sympathetic Neo-Nazi masking was outed in 2024 via Spencer Sunshine's book "Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism", which showed in extensive detail Parfrey's personal correspondence with 'low tier' Neo-Nazi James Mason during the 1980s and 1990s, which was riddled with racist and anti-Semitic dialogue (Parfrey was actually of Jewish heritage), worst, was Parfrey admitting to Mason, in archived letters, that he was "camouflaging" his Far Right advocacy, with Left/Anarcho theory and artistic digression via Feral House publications. Parfrey passed away in 2018, he was 61. And it was the actual Gen Xer, Michael J. Moynihan, born in 1969, who harnessed the aesthetic edge, and transgressional perspective of Parfrey's art-over-theory masking, conjoining with his Far Right interest and fondness to intellectualize word plays of his own extremism, replacing "Fascism" with the Far Right thrown around term, "Radical Traditionalist" in classical Fascist rebranding. Moynihan was part of Palfrey's Feral House publications, being a key component of rediscovering and attaching Mason's Neo-Nazi terrorism "SIEGE" photocopied pamphlets from 1980 to 1986 into an actual publication, to which a mostly unknown street "Nazi", hijacked anti-State, Left Wing direct action, and ironically to what Guillaume Faye, an old school 1960s Fascist, wrote 10 years later in 1997 with his "Archeofuturism", assimilating it to Far Right terrorism, that a liberal, social democratic system has to be destroyed by 'lone wolf' white supremacist terrorist cells. Even more bizarrely, Mason worked (apparently from a trailer home), at the time, in conjunction with the incarcerated and convicted cult leader, the late Charles Manson, as a Nazi "Holy Man" icon, who was trying to instigate the "Race War". Moynihan, after being advised of the SIEGE newsletters by Nazi 'goth' Boyd Rice, of NOM band fame, to create a detailed publication of all of Mason's SIEGE newsletters, Moynihan, in Proto-Fascist edgy fervor (his written introduction to SIEGE is no less than a Neo-Nazi endorsement of Mason and Manson's race war), released the book in 1992 via his own label "Storm" in collaboration with Feral Books.
Repackaging Mason's "SIEGE" via Moynihan's 1990s edgeness, to a blueprint for Neo-Nazi terrorism in the early 2000s
As the desire to rebrand, scavenge and distribute Proto-Fascist, Neo-Nazi books and propaganda revved up pre Trump's Presidential debut, and at the cusp of Alt Right in 2010 using political correctness, immigration and anti-Left rhetoric as a base to claim Trump's Presidency in 2016. Moynihan's 1992 James Mason "SIEGE" resurfaced, appearing in digital PDF form on the now defunct "Iron March" Far Right forum, assisting or at least directly inspiring the Neo-Nazi terrorist group "Atomwaffen" who were active between 2015 and 2020, made up of mostly late teenagers and early 20 year old millennials who were responsible for several murders and sabotage of infrastructure across the U.S., to perpetuate another term reworked by the Far Right, "accelerationism", which both Mason and Faye never used in their books, despite both having that label attached to their writings. Essentially, accelerationism holds a corresponding meaning to Christo-Fascist doctrines as bringing in the "end times" also known as "Tribulation". Atomwaffen were shut down by authorities in 2020.
And this digital attachment to antiquated texts, sourced by 1990s edgy "Nazis", that were once falling into obscurity, then resourced again by a younger generation, shows that Fascism does not evolve under its own so called intellectual scrutiny, rather it is constantly repackaging and rebranded the content. And this so-called artistic expression, and masking with elaborate word play, maybe less evident under a Far Right political world, yet the blantacy of its "White Supremacy" has to blend in with the broader Fascist networks and current political structure of all encompassing fascism, held together via their common enemy of Socialism and Islam, which remains, at this point in time, the key element to the global Far Right completely hinging itself onto.
___
(A.Glass 2026)

Comments
Post a Comment