Millenarian aspects of ‘white supremacist’ movements

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Abstract
Since the mid‐1980s, press accounts have widely reported the activities of a new variety of radical right‐wing groups often characterized as ‘white supremacist’. Among groups to which the label has been attached are Aryan Nations, The Order, Posse Comitatus, and The Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord. These groups share a belief system made up of five elements: (1) ‘Identity’ theology, which asserts that whites of Western European extraction are direct descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel; (2) a doctrine of racial superiority, which places ‘Aryans’ at the summit of a four‐race hierarchy; (3) belief in a world Jewish conspiracy; (4) admiration for Nazism, together with acceptance of ‘Holocaust revisionism'; and (5) a millenarian view of history, emphasizing the imminence of the ‘last days’. Such organizations typically draw from this belief system implications directly relevant to the study of violence: (1) the desirability of withdrawing into self‐sufficient, often paramilitary, communal groups maintaining minimal contact with outsiders; and/or (2) seeking direct confrontation with political authority in the form of terrorism and guerrilla warfare (for example, The Order's crime wave in 1983–84).

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