Making Manifest: White Supremacist Violence and the Ethics of Alethurgy

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I examine the growing archive of white supremacist terrorist manifestos to identify how political extremists share a performative ethics inciting them to make manifest the “truths” of their selves through violent word and deed. In doing so, this essay challenges the basis on which rhetorical scholars have interpreted the historical use of parrhēsia (or frank and fearless speech) in political movements that aspire to violent intervention. By tracing how extremist manifestos enact what Michel Foucault called an “alethurgy” (the procedures of disclosing the truth of the self), I demonstrate how far-right terrorists strive to perform parrhēsiastic truth-telling to constitute their own subjectivities within restrictive political imaginaries like white supremacy. Elaborating these dimensions compels rhetoricians to reckon with the political impetus for telling truth to power in and through violence, including the ethical imperatives that become formalized in narratives of resistance.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the National Communication Association conventions in 2019 and 2020. I would like to thank Art Walzer, Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, John Oddo, Stephanie Larson, and the many other colleagues who offered insights and conversation as this project has evolved. I also appreciate the considerate feedback from Ned O’Gorman and the two anonymous Reviewers.

Notes

1. Those killed in Pittsburgh were Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger (Gun Violence Archive n.d.).

2. These are by no means the only far-right perpetrators in the last two decades to have produced manifestos to preface their heinous actions. For the sake of analytical precision, however, I here focus on manifestos explicitly espousing white supremacy. Other extremists who produced manifestos include Seung-Hui Cho (16 April  2007; Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA), Elliot Rodger (23 May 2014; near UC-Santa Barbara, Isla Vista, CA), and Chris Harper-Mercer (1 October 2015; Umpqua Community College, Roseburg, OR). Cho sent a multimedia manifesto, which variously decried hedonists, sadists, and “democratic terrorists,” to NBC before carrying out the shooting (Carvalho 2010; Kellner 2016). Rodger’s and Harper-Mercer’s shootings are directly linked by the racist and misogynistic ideology of the “involuntary celibate” or “incel” online subculture (Kelly 2020). Though related to white supremacy, the ideological motivation for these other shootings warrant separate analysis (Berger 2018).

3. See Pearce (1999) on the generic appropriation of manifestos, and Smith (1991) on the emancipatory possibilities of autobiographical manifestos.

4. For a history of the white power movement in the U.S., particularly its rise after Vietnam and the influential strategy of “leaderless resistance,” see Belew (2018).

5. For more in-depth explorations of the intersections of white masculinity and violence in contemporary culture, see Kellner (2016) and Kelly (2020).

6. Recent special issues and collections include Carstarphen et al. (2017); Houdek (2018a); Kennedy et al. (2017); and McHendry, Jr. (2018).

7. Relevant to this case, for example, see Chávez (2013); Lacy and Ono, eds. (2011); Kelly (2020); and Ore (2019).

8. Moses identifies that a probable origin of the “white genocide” concept can be traced to white supremacist David Lane in 1988 in his own far-right manifesto, which has since influenced white nationalist movements in South Africa, North America, and Australia (2019, 7-8). Though under different guises, the same fearful principle of ethnic “replacement” has inspired anti-immigration and eugenicist movements in the U.S. over the last century (Moses 2019, 8). These ideologies of racist paranoia were propagated in the U.S. during Jim Crow through prominent cultural works like D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation (1914) and Lothrop Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), both of which remain influential to contemporary ideologies of ethnic “replacement” and, in the U.S., the “Lost Cause” myth of the Confederacy (see Franz 2019).

9. Excerpts from The Turner Diaries were found in Timothy McVeigh’s vehicle after the bombing in Oklahoma City, the association of which has helped generate renewed popularity of the book on mainstream retailers like Amazon (Goehring and Dionisopoulos 2013, 384, n1). Similarly, Camp of the Saints is popular with far-right politicians in Europe and the U.S., including leading figures in the Trump administration (Peltier and Kulish 2019).

10. The victims of Breivik’s and Tarrant’s attacks have been named by BBC News (“Norway Attacks” 2016; “Christchurch Shooting” 2019).

11. See Greene (2019) and Kelly (2020) on “redpilling,” a set of themes and strategies that a wide range of far-right online communities leverage toward expanding in-groups while trolling ideological antagonists.

12. Tarrant’s manifesto has drawn particular attention for its trolling aesthetic. At one moment, he even urges his audience to continue creating and circulating memes because they “have done more for the ethno-nationalist movement than any manifesto. …Above all,” he continues, “just don’t be stale, placid and boring. No one is inspired by Jeb Bush” (Tarrant n.d.). For his part, Earnest provides a list of passages from the Christian Bible to justify his hateful actions. In the final passage, though, Earnest quotes the opening lines from the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a common bait-and-switch meme. Earnest notes in a parenthetical: “(I forget where in the Bible this verse comes from, but it’s definitely in there)” (Earnest n.d.).

13. All excerpts from the cited manifestos are reproduced as they appear in the documents as I discovered them, including formatting, typographical errors, or syntactical omissions.

14. Foucault first coined “alethurgy” in his 1980 lectures on regimes of truth and governmentality, published in On the Government of the Living, where he pulls the term from a Hericlatean fragment (2016, 7). At this stage, Foucault did not expressly discuss alethurgy in the context of parrhēsia, as his primary focus in these lectures was the early-Christian “examinations of conscience” such as baptism, penance, and confession (2016, 94).

15. Rhetorical scholars have explored how alētheia mediates engagements with the natural world and phenomenological relations with others (Poulakos and Crick 2012; Reeves and Stoneman 2014), though the concept has otherwise not been accounted for in matters of truth-telling.

16. Rayner (2010) highlights this point to distinguish Foucault’s use of alētheia, which is linked to his conception of power, from Heidegger’s more explicitly ontological development earlier in the century. Heidegger lamented that, due to a history of “metaphysical error” originating from Cartesian rationality, the modern human had forgotten the truth of being; hence, Heidegger’s phenomenological project aimed to recover that truth based on pre-Socratic conceptions of alētheia as a reciprocal mode of unconcealed truth through ontological self-recognition (Rayner 2010, 64). In contrast, Rayner notes that Foucault’s own account of subjectivity demonstrates that “ontological self-recognition is not an originary capacity but a historically determined practice” (2010, 75).

17. In the context of early Christian texts in the first centuries CE, such as John Chrysostom’s On the Providence of God, Foucault notes that parrhēsia takes on the performative function of courageously defending a divine belief system in the face of persecution, at the cost of martyrdom: “The martyr is the parrhesiast par excellence. And, to that extent, you see that the word parrhēsia refers to one’s courage in the face of persecutors, a courage one exercises for oneself, but also for others, and those one wishes to persuade, convince, or strengthen in their faith” (Foucault 2011, 332).

18. Those killed or injured in El Paso are named at the Gun Violence Archive (n.d.).

19. Breivik’s manifesto is unique in this regard. Breivik published his document under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick” as a sort of extremist guidebook with “advanced ideological, practical, tactical, organisational and rhetorical solutions and strategies for all patriotic-minded individuals/movements” (Berwick 2011). In form, Breivik’s document features dozens of essays, half of which he claims to have written himself, on the purported threats of “Islamic colonization” and the sweeping failures of “cultural relativism” represented in leftist multiculturalism (Berwick 2011). The document includes a table of contents, suggested reading lists, and a glossary in an imitation of historico-philosophical tracts. In fact, in contrast to the other white supremacist terrorist manifestos examined here, Breivik’s document most closely resembles the infamous 35,000-word manifesto produced by Theodore Kaczynski in 1995 (Berger 2018, 119; see Kellner 2016).

20. For instance, the Trump-era manifestos (i.e., Tarrant, Earnest, and Crusius) all mockingly distance themselves from the president as inspiration or even affirmation of their worldviews, which has been a consistent narrative of media responses to far-right violence in the U.S. For example, in response to the question “Are you a Trump supporter?”, Earnest vulgarly responds: “You mean that Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, traitorous cocksucker? Don’t make me laugh.”

21. Those killed in Charleston were Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Reverend Dr. Daniel Simmons, Sr., and Mira Thompson (Gun Violence Archive n.d.).