Peering Through the Enemy’s Window: Using Everything You Love Will Burn to Inform Party-Building and Communist Movement Development BRG Follow Dec 23, 2019 · 12 min read

Vegas Tenold’s book Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America (2018) is one which belongs on the bookshelf of every committed anti-fascist activist in the United States. I got it a while back, read it, and recently re-read it. I enjoyed it because it was an oftentimes humorous piece that never treated the very serious subject matter flippantly, which many so-called left podcasters and authors fall guilty of (just look at their names for fuck’s sake — Chapo Trap House and Cumtown? Seriously?) Anyways, this book offers a rare inside look at the atmosphere and organizations which led to the “rebirth” of white nationalism in the United States. Of course, as a Black person and a Maoist, I know that white nationalism is inherently interwoven into every thread in this country’s sick fabric. Tenold knows this too — he closes his book with the assertion that the work of individuals like Matt Heimbach (who he spends most of the book’s period following around in an ill-fated attempt to build a sort of alt-right/fascist coalition) is ultimately for nothing. He writes: “Ultimately, I believe that the far right in America, at least the incarnation that I spent years covering, is destined to fail. Not because America is inherently good and that the forces of justice and progress are always stronger than those of intolerance and hatred, but because white supremacy is doing just fine without the far right. The country has spent decades perfecting an ostensibly nonracial form of white supremacy, and it is serving with remarkable efficiency. Private prisons, mandatory sentencing, seemingly unchecked police power, gerrymandering, increasingly limited access to healthcare and abortion — these are all tendrils in an ingenious web designed to keep people poor and powerless. Yes, white people are caught in that web too, but when it comes to those experiencing poverty, African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos vastly outnumber whites. The people Matthew [Heimbach] was ostensibly fighting for — the broken, beaten and forgotten whites of Appalachia and the Rust Belt — weren’t victims in a war against white people but rather collateral damage in a war against poor people and minorities.” America is already a white supremacist country. Tenold challenges Heimbach several times through face-to-face conversation for putting a settler-racialist lens on issues that really boil down to class struggle issues. I and some other colonized comrades recently had a brief bit of “line struggle” (if you can call attempting to reason with a stubborn and arrogant brick wall overly concerned of its own self-importance line struggle) with a white so-called Maoist who claimed that white people as a group (and as individuals) have no “power” in this country. What are the implications of such a line? This is essentially a mirror image, a “left” version of the line that Heimbach puts forward in the book consistently. Heimbach’s position is that settlers once ruled but now they have been cast out of their rightful place and are utterly and completely helpless unless they band together, with weapons, and carve out their own piece of this land their ancestors stole to prevent settlers from becoming a minority. As Heimbach says: “Nobody wants to be a minority. Being a minority fucking sucks. Look at how we’ve treated Black people. Don’t for a second think that they’ll treat us any better, which is why people are starting to realize that we need to think racially”. This fear, fear of being “replaced” or of being retaliated against, is at the very center of the colonizer psyche not just on the far right but also on the left as well. Hence the assertion that settlers have no power, yet a cursory examination of news and a brief conversation with a colonized person would quickly put the lie to such an asinine assertion. This country was built on the backs of colonized people and is maintained at our expense. The colonizer so-called Left, despite feinting at support for self-determination for colonized people and people suffering at the hands of Yankee imperialism, remains unwilling to fully understand the implications of the Third World and internal colonies liberating ourselves because this entails a substantial drop in their standard of living and they do not want this. At best they want a reshuffling of the imperialist arrangement under the banner of “socialism” that would allow them to continue to live at our expense and off our labor. Kwame Turé, Walter Rodney, R.F. Williams, W.E.B Du Bois, and J. Sakai all have said this same thing in some form over the years yet, ironically, their theoretical work remains nearly untouched by the rightists calling themselves leftists in our midst, favoring instead collaborationist narratives and idealist myths of colonizer and colonized joining hands and taking out a small group. It is more than a small group that is responsible for our exploitation — this small group of imperialists could not exist were not the masses of colonizers, working class or otherwise, wilfully complicit in this exploitation. It’s no accident that Heimbach cut his political teeth in a “socialist” organization — even now his foreign policy positions are indistinguishable from those pursued by “national bolsheviks” and the most revisionist of modern revisionists. Heimbach praising Bashar al-Assad, Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin to a rowdy band of Hammerskins who are more occupied with beating the everloving shit out of each other could easily be replaced by crypto-fascist apricot Caleb Maupin, the creature of the Marcyite-revisionist (and near dead) Worker’s World Party.

The book is also a very good éntree into the maze of organizations and personalities that make up the various fascist wings in the United States. We see Heimbach’s development from a vague “leftist” into a full blown Strasserite (the collapse of his Traditionalist Workers’ Party due to him fucking his mother in law and his expulsion from the National Socialist Movement for being a Strasserite are not covered due to these developments occurring after the book’s release), but also meet leaders of the various Klan groups, Hammerskins, Richard Spencer and crew, and NSM leader Jeff Schoep and friends. Tenold expertly exposes the childishness, incompetence and outright stupidity of these people. We see Klansmen admonishing each other regarding the correct way to light and hold a torch so that their robes don’t catch on fire. We see British journalists being invited to film supposedly secret initiation ceremonies the revelation of which is, technically, punishable by death. We see Matt Heimbach and friends reacting with glee to Richard Spencer being punched due to his constantly snubbing them. Ironically, I see a lot of the Left in these interactions. We have our share of fools, egomaniacs, incompetents and blowhards. We also have more than our share of infighting — so does the right. Tenold includes an extremely graphic depiction of a boot party of which a former Hammerskin is the unfortunate victim, with one of his eyes apparently being kicked from his skull. Tenold points out, however, that the right has a semblance of unity against what they (correctly) perceive as the real enemy — the variety of Communist, Anarchist, and vaguely “Left” groups called “Antifa”. We on the Left also have a tactical unity against groups like those covered in this book — if the Klan comes to town we will see Trots, Maoists, Anarchists and MLs drop their squabbling, run them out of town, and then go right back to squabbling. It’s almost like sects, left or right, are more countercultural than political and bear more resemblance to music “scenes” than legitimate political organizations. However, this is a phenomenon I see changing as more people are radicalized and the masses become more and more involved. The masses will impose unity and discipline where personalities can not because people that work 40 hours a week do not have time for back and forths and sectarianism. They demand results that can only be brought about through unity and iron discipline which in turn only come about through leadership of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and eventually millions.

Tenold also offers a refreshing take on the phenomenon of organized (or not-so-organized) anti-fascism. He was present at the notorious “Battle of Trenton” in 2011 (narrowly missing a brick to the face thrown by an anti-fascist) and offers this — “Antifa describes a wide variety of groups, methods and motivations, but what binds them together is that they live to face off against racism and intolerance and that many of them would prefer to leave the cops out of it. They also believe that the litany of sins visited upon humanity by National Socialists and other white supremacists not only justifies violence against them but also advocates it as an effective tool, nicely summed up in their slogan “Smash the Fash”. In that sense, Antifa had been more of a unifier for the movement than Matthew could ever hope to be. As much as the various factions on the right disliked and distrusted each other, they shared a profound loathing for Antifa and would happily travel long distances to square off against them. It didn’t hurt that Antifa seemed about as interested in engaging in a civilized discussion with them as they were in forming a cogent argument, so the two opposing armies had formed a happy marriage based on screaming at each other over the heads of riot police, the National Guard, or whomever else was put in place to make sure the two sides never actually had to fight.” Tenold sums up very well the sort of stalemate that right and left groups find themselves in — again, a stalemate that can only be broken by the involvement of the masses, particularly the basic masses — the colonized proletariat and semi/lumpen/proletariat who are the only forces that can make revolution in the United States. Relying on the detritus of the hardcore punk scene and others of that type, who by and large are white, is an error that again comes from the “sceneization” of Communist and Anarchist politics in the United States. We need Parties, not scenes and cliques. Scenes and cliques are what the right have, and this book shows how that tends to turn out — chaos, bitterness, and violent sectarianism.

Let’s keep in mind that the Right in the United States is the main actor when it comes to political violence. For as much japery as Tenold gives us at these people’s expense, they have bodies to their credit, the bodies of people that we care about and possibly were our organizational or ideological comrades. From the Greensboro Massacre to Charlottesville, the simple fact of the matter is that the Right kills people, the Left smashes windows and spray-paints mean words on things and only reacts. To break out of this reactionary way of being and doing requires, again, reliance on the masses of people. Tenold mentions that organized methods of acting on the Right are not en vogue, because of errors made in the past. They are highly paranoid about informers. Most Rightist violence is not organized, it’s done by lone wolves who have been ideologically trained in internet forums or through the vast array of literature that has come from the pens of people like Richard Butler and William Pierce. These writings are easily accessible on the internet, I myself have read The Turner Diaries. When thinking about fascism, we must keep in mind that it is first and foremost an ideology of action, not of intellectual struggle. The notion of line struggle so cherished by Maoists, the notion that only through rigorous intellectual debate within the Party can said Party grow and discover the correct line, is entirely foreign to our enemies. Mussolini said that the Fascist programme is to smash the heads of the socialists. Goebbels said: “There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.” Failure to understand this leads to defeat and fascists gaining ground. Fascists in the US and elsewhere are driven by myths, by calls to action, by the notion that their race and “nation” is in danger and must be preserved by gratuitous violence. Heimbach, who sought to build a political movement in the streets, has an interesting take on things such as the Turner Diaries: “We use it as a red flag. If someone comes up and says they want to join our group, then starts talking about the Turner Diaries and all that nonsense, it means that the guy is probably an informant or an undercover cop. There’s no group out there that talks about doing Turner Diary stuff. That is a guaranteed domestic terrorism charge”. Heimbach has some semblance of intelligence, it seems. Organizations that talk publicly about such things are indeed setting themselves up for entrapment and domestic terrorism charges, and those who seek to swing political organizations towards these things as opposed to organizing the masses are, more often than not, informants or prey to informants. Attorney Jeffrey Haas discusses in his excellent book about his experiences defending the BPP in Chicago how Fred Hampton had marked William O’Neal (the FBI informant who would eventually provide a floorplan to his apartment to the police) as a possible informant due to his promotion of criminal activities such as burglary, the fact that he built an electric chair for “informants”, and his consistent habit of carrying a gun, which Fred Hampton ordered him to cease. Those who are engaged in “fringe” political activity, whether it be right or left, seemingly are united in the fact that both are plagued by those who take real organizing less than seriously and are attracted to “adventurist” things such as building bombs and weapons and fighting in the streets. Tenold correctly points out that these things alienate the movement from the masses and lead, inevitably, to prison or death. Hence most of the acts of political violence that are successfully carried out being done by small cells such as The Order or the CSA, or individuals such as Timothy McVeigh. An average left formation, with its fetishization for bureaucratism, micromanagement, and formalism, along with the fact that these types of organizations are more often than not already on the radar of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, would undoubtedly be busted on conspiracy, sedition and treason charges long before they would be able to implement any hypothetical plan for armed struggle at this stage. One cannot go up against the surveillance state and the most militarized regime in human history unless said regime is in a state of crisis and the ground has been adequately prepared for such struggle, no matter how militarized your Party is or how faithfully it carries out the lines of Communist teachers. You’ll still die. This has been shown time and time again. What is needed is the building of mass bases and the development of firm links and open and closed cadre at all levels and the building of the Party according to principles determined through practice and study of prior party-building attempts in the imperialist metropole.

Finally, the role of the internet. The alt-right, we know, is an internet based movement that played a major role in getting the current President elected (so they say) and has unprecedented access to the White House for a “fringe” political movement. Many Communists scoff at the internet, despite themselves coming to Communism through materials that would have been cost prohibitive were they not available online. Check the price of a selected works of Mao online. The internet is a tool, for education and for organizing. Of course, the notion of a revolution being developed online is ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as the notion of a revolution being developed via newspapers being sold on street corners in the year 2020. Politics is increasingly digital, yet we are plagued by neo-Luddites who, perhaps for fear of their own inability to produce engaging content that people will actually want to read, or perhaps for fear of their ideas being rejected, claim that the internet does more harm than good. Again, it’s all in how it’s used. Richard Spencer correctly points out in the book that his prestige could be terminated by Twitter in the blink of an eye, yet people only know who he is because of his internet presence in the first place. The thing is to turn this presence into a real life presence and develop hand in hand a hypothetical Party’s mass base along with its internet presence. It’s a tool for propaganda, the spread of one’s Party line and ideas, and a fundraising tool. Nobody is going to read a statement you shove in their hand and nobody is going to buy your newspaper. It’s not just because the things said therein are meaningless jargon and sloganeering, but because the format is mostly outdated and they have a tiny square in their pocket they can watch the latest Black Red Guard video on.

All in all, this book is an indispensable tool for those who are currently engaged in the antifascist movement. Our enemies have the same problems that we have. Let’s figure out how to solve them using their mistakes as a partial guide. Get this book and read it.