Previously All-Talk White-Supremacist “League of the South” Now Forming Paramilitary Unit

Photo from the S.P.L.C.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), an Alabama-based non-profit organization which monitors hate groups, announced this week that it has learned that the League of the South is forming a paramilitary unit to be called “the Indomitables.”

The League of the South, whose name is inspired by Italy’s similarly right-wing, anti-immigrant, separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), is the most prominent organization in the United States working toward the secession of the Southern states as what it in particular would call Confederation of Southern States (C.S.S.).  (The original secessionist South, during the Civil War, was officially the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.).  The League wants the C.S.S. to be the eleven core C.S.A. states, without Texas and with Kentucky and Oklahoma added.  Texas, of course, has its own separatist movement.)  Though it claims to be mainly interested in “preserving Southern culture,” its rhetoric is shot through with intolerant, often white-supremacist, ideas, and its membership overlaps heavily with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi parties.  For a while, the League sponsored registered state political parties, primarily in Georgia and the Carolinas, called the Southern Party (S.P.).

Michael Hill, president of the League, has described the group’s aims this way: “We are for the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people.  And when we say ‘the Southern people,’ we mean white Southerners.  We are an ethno-nationalist movement and we want a free and independent South for our people, as our homeland.  That’s pretty much what we are fighting for.”

Michael Hill, president of the League of the South

Information on a novel paramilitary turn for what had until now been mainly a group that makes lots of noise comes from leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the group, according to the S.P.L.C. article on the subject.  One of the internal documents outlining the plans is by President Hill himself, who writes, “We desire that our women and children be warm and snug while the world outside rages.  And as our due for that we must face the world.”

“The Indomitables were conceptualized at the LOS national meeting earlier this year,” according to the S.P.L.C. article by Ryan Lenz, “and appear to be coming online quickly, with Floyd Eric Meadows, 43, of Rome, Ga., who also goes by Eric Thorvaldsson online, in charge of ‘training,’ according to sources within the group and internal documents.”  The article also releases confidentially acquired images from Thorvaldsson’s Facebook presence, which is full of pagan iconography and white-supremacist “dogwhistle” references like “‘earning’ his red bootlaces––awarded in skinhead culture for drawing blood for ‘the movement.’”

The Indomitables’ head trainer, Floyd Meadows, posted this on Facebook
recently using his pseudonym.

Hill responded to the S.P.L.C. revelations by stating defiantly, on his blog, “Even if we are––and you really have no idea on earth if we are or not––setting up a Southern militia or some other form of paramilitary organization, we are doing nothing that free men have not done for centuries.  Deal with it and stop your whining.”

Nazi-style insignia used in confidential
League of the South documents leaked to S.P.L.C.

“The primary targets,” Hill went on, “will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.”

The League has been in the news lately because one of its members, Michael Anthony Peroutka, is running for a council seat in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Peroutka, who ran for U.S. president on the Constitution Party ticket in 2004, says he deplores racism in all forms but refuses to distance himself from the League.  His own Republican Party, however, has distanced itself from him from the beginning of his county council candidacy.

Michael Peroutka, posing with a fellow secessionist, whose former job he once applied for.

Not long ago, Hill told an interviewer, regarding the upcoming September 18th referendum on independence in Scotland, “We think it’s a great thing that the Scottish people actually get to go to the polls and decide their future with a vote.  That’s something that I hope that we can do one day.”  But, unlike the League, the Scottish National Party (S.N.P.) is not backing up its political efforts with an armed terrorist squadron.  Despite constant references to the South’s unique “Anglo-Celtic” culture, the League of the South is starting to sound less like Scotland’s separatists and more like those in northern Nigeria or southeastern Ukraine.

Due to the “Anglo-Celtic” connection, St. Andrew’s crosses and similar insignia recur in League of the South heraldry.
See an article from this blog for more detail on Confederate–Russian–Ukrainian-Scottish separatist vexillological affinities.

Thanks to Jan Pierce for first alerting me to this story.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Quebec Free-Love Saucer Cult Joins Muslim-Headscarf Debate, Suggests Censoring Religious Texts

A discordant note has just been added to the passionate debate in Quebec, Canada, over the ruling separatist party’s reprehensible initiative to restrict the display of religious symbols and attire, in a thinly veiled attempt to target the province’s Muslim minority (reported in detail last month in this blog).  The latest condemnations of the Parti Québécois’s policy comes from a global but Quebec-based flying-saucer cult called the International Raëlian Movement.

Raëlian bishops have publicly announced that religious symbols should not be banned but that all religious texts should be censored in order to remove references to male dominance, intolerance of homosexuality, or the elevation of the superiority of any particular religion.  Raëlism considers itself in some ways a science rather than a religion and it voices respect for all faiths.  It also promulgates a free-love doctrine and freedom for all sexual orientations.

Raël himself

Founded by a French race-car driver turned U.F.O.-contactee named Claude Vorilhon, who goes by the name Raël, the group claims that human life on earth was seeded by extraterrestrials.  Raëlians have had their own controversies over religious symbology.  Their original logo was a swastika set inside of a Star of David (below, left) but a tide of complaints over the juxtaposition—especially when they tried to open an intergalactic “embassy” in Israel, where displays of swastikas are banned—led to its replacement by a more stylized version (below, right):

This has not mollified everyone—despite the Raëlians’ designation of July 20th earlier this year as “Swastika Rehabilitation Day.”  Raël points out (correctly) that, before its use by the Nazis in the 1930s, swastikas were primarily a religious symbol of good luck and harmony and other positive virtues, found around the world in traditional Native American, Egyptian, Buddhist, and many other cultures.  He also points out (far more debatably) that he saw such a symbol on the spaceships of the “Elohim” who contacted him and took him to their planet.  Adolf Hitler’s occultic religion of Ariosophy replaced a common Aryan (i.e., north Indian) counter-clockwise swastika with a clockwise one.  Some scholars believe that some swastikas were originally counter-clockwise because they indicated the direction of the rotating earth (as seen from above).

Other controversies in which the Raëlians have been embroiled have included nude parishioners distributing condoms in front of Catholic churches and, in 2002, a fraudulent but widely publicized claim by Raëlian geneticists that they had performed the first human cloning.

Raëlians celebrating August 25, 2013, as “Go Topless Day”

This week, Raëlians are offering to be the first religious group to submit their texts to a proposed international board of censors for the deletion of any homophobic, sexist, or religious-chauvinist passages—of which they say there are none in their 1975 founding holy writ, Vorilhon’s Space Aliens Took Me to Their Planet.

To many Americans, there is something off-kilter about the entire debate.  As in Europe, Canadian legal institutions and mainstream civil society seem to take it for granted that some forms of expression should be suppressed.  In Canada and much of Europe, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust or to “incite hatred” against minorities, however that might be defined.  As a result, Nazi sympathizers in those countries are emboldened by what they see as an official attempt to suppress the truth, and their logic is understandable: if Holocaust-denial literature is blatant nonsense, they reason, why are the authorities so desperate to prevent people from reading it?  Publishing Mein Kampf and displaying swastikas is illegal in Germany; consequently, Nazi symbology has acquired a rebellious mystique, and the sight of a swastika has a taboo allure about it in Europe which it does not in places like the United States, where it is commonly seen in historical references (and when fringe neo-Nazis make the news).  The U.S. has neo-fascists, but they are the fringe of the fringe.  And the U.S. has many forms of epidemic violence, but large gangs of neo-Nazi skinheads setting fire to immigrant and minority neighborhoods is not a recurring scourge the way it is in central and eastern Europe.  The global center of Holocaust-denial research, not coincidentally, is Canada.  And the suppression of some ideas naturally leads bigots like those in charge of the Parti Québécois to put forth a “Charter of Quebec Values” that sees implicit support for terrorism in the display of Muslim symbols—since where does one draw the line? isn’t jihadist terrorism as bad as neo-Nazi violence? and don’t many suicide bombers wear burqas? etc. etc. ... and then we’re right back where we started.

A German neo-Nazi.  Censorship won’t make this problem go away.

It’s not clear if the Raëlians are serious about their proposal to censor religious texts, just as it’s never clear if they’re serious about anything.  Mostly, I think they just like getting on the news.  But if they prod Canadians and Québécois to contemplate the absurdity of religious censorship, and to question the originally-well-meaning but deeply-illiberal approach to “bad ideas” and “bad symbols” prevalent in Canada and Europe, then they will be making a contribution.

[You can read more about Quebec and other separatist movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]