Reviewed for History.

Reviews of New Books by Daniel Levitas

Fall 2003 Vol. 32, No. 1

Heldref Publications

Gardell, Mattias

Gods of the Blood. The Pagan Revival and White Separatism.

Durham: Duke University Press 445 pp., $69.95, cloth, $23.95 paper ISBN 0-8223-3059-8 cloth ISBN 0-8223-3071-7 paper Publication Date: July 2003

In Gods of the Blood, Mattias Gardell, a religion professor at Sweden’s Stockholm University, offers a thorough portrait of the racist pagan movement in the United States. Gardell, who has a previous interest in religious black nationalism and is the author of In the Name of Elijah Muhammed: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Duke University Press, 1996), argues cogently that the rise of racist paganism is a reaction to globalism, which white supremacists fear will destroy their presumed racial integrity through genetic and cultural homogenization. Through interviews with numerous leaders and followers Gardell reveals the movement’s obsession with warrior mythology and an imagined pre-history of spiritual and racial purity.

Gardell also links the appeal of racist paganism to the radicalization of the white supremacist movement that began in the late 1970s, when its leaders issued explicit calls for antigovernment violence. He explains how the rise of white power music and the revolution in technology marked by the Internet sparked an influx of young racist, heathen activists, thereby prompting a generational shift and transforming a movement, “that had begun to look like a home for retired people.”

While Gardell’s book is useful, his ethnographic and documentary approach makes for slow reading at times and occasionally obscures his insights. Although Gardell is not a racist, his heavy reliance on sources inside the white supremacist movement occasionally leads to errors of fact and interpretation: he describes the Branch Davidians of Waco as a benign religious sect; he legitimizes the false and self-serving distinction between “white separatists,” and “white supremacists;” and he incorrectly claims that there are “militiamen of all races,” while failing to sufficiently note the endless stream of racist and antisemitic propaganda served up at militia events throughout the 1990s.

Gardell mistakenly characterizes antisemitism as a “marginal” phenomenon, despite the fact that 35 million Americans (fully 17% of adults) scored as “strongly antisemitic” in a May 2002 poll sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League. This 17% figure is an increase over the 12% of “strongly antisemitic” respondents identified in 1998. Gardell believes that the activities of white supremacists and neo-Nazis do not constitute a bona fide social movement because their efforts lack solidarity, common purpose, and collective action. Instead, he defines the diverse activities of the racist right – its paramilitarism, newsletters, zines, Internet sites, music and wide-ranging theologies – as a “white racist revolutionary counterculture.” Whether a movement or a counterculture, Gardell’s final conclusion is right on target: “romantic men armed with guns and religious determination have throughout history been a dangerous species.”