Aryan Odes & White Power Ballads
Selected readings from Stormfront’s poetry section
The people who frequent the white nationalist Stormfront forum aren’t exactly what you would call “cultured”— but they aspire to be. Being a member of the Master Race is a huge responsibility. You can’t simply ride on the coattails of of your pasty forebears, reminiscing about their cultural accomplishments. It’s your duty as a white man to make some of your own.
Stormfront’s “Poetry and Creative Writing” subform provides “inspiration and motivation” for members, a place to “expand your vocabulary and discover the secrets of our language.”
The subforum and its offerings point to an interesting contradiction. A defining characteristic of fascism is anti-intellectualism. Italian writer Umberto Eco described fascism as a “cult of action for action’s sake.” To the fascist, action is beautiful in its own right and should be undertaken with little thought before or after because “thinking is emasculation,” he wrote.
But at the same time, the case for white supremacy rests in part on a claim of intellectual superiority. The scribes of Stormfront don’t look at poetry as something with intrinsic value. It’s symbolic of the mental prowess they believe to be their birthright. When a bunch of racist goons who are fundamentally hostile to thinking write poems to show how smart they are, the result is comically pretentious.
In an untitled entry, the user SMR1488 breaks up a banal statement about his own supposed superiority into separate lines, thereby making it “poetic:”
i would never ask
them
to be anything more
than
what they are
so never expect
me
to be anything less
than
what i am
He then drives it home with a non-sequitur sequence of SAT words:
postulating
pedantic
pedestals
provocate
infinite
proclivities
But it’s about more than just flexing their big Aryan brains. Their fetishizing of poetry has a reactionary quality. They (wrongly) think of poetry as some forgotten art no longer practiced in an era of degeneracy. It’s something quaint that people did in that bygone Golden Age of the white man they so desperately long to return to.
Many are filled with all sorts of old-timey affectations:
Our father, who is forever, grant that we may march
in thine army, ever mindful of our need in thee.
Strengthen us to please thee in all things through
obedience to thy law, Give us the vision of true
understanding so that we, thy people, may become
worthy to take our place within the frame work of thy
Kingdom.
This idealization of the past translates into a fondness for Norse paganism and high fantasy. There’s a childishness to it that would be endearing if it were literally anyone else. A user named Tony SS shared a poem by William Butler Yeats with the introduction: “I thought this was a cool poem by Yeats. Almost like something that could have been in the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings.”
They see themselves a modern-day skalds documenting the struggle of “their people.” In a poem called “BerSerkr,” Leto Atreides II writes:
Don I now my bear shirt
Preparations for my final work
Mushrooms ground into a fine paste
The Gothi smears them on my face
I hoist my shield and heft my sword
Swear allegiance to my chieftain lord
My brother takes an axe in each hand
As we make ready for our final stand
These sorts of fantasies are silly but no less disturbing. When combined with racist ideology, Scandinavian folk beliefs about the glory of violent struggle and the righteousness of death in battle can be dangerous. Such delusions of bloody heroism drove mass-murderer Anders Breivik, a self-described Odinist, to slay 77 people in Norway. According to court records, he named his rifle “Gungnir” after Odin’s spear and his handgun “Mjolnir” after Thor’s hammer.
Norse imagery is also a way to dress up garden-variety racist sentiments. A poem titled “Odin’s Tears” goes:
Drip drip
Drip drip
Enough to launch a viking ship
Though once was pure
Now most thick-lipped
The state of modern England
Other entries are somehow even more artless and direct in their messaging:
Demographics is destiny
Especially when
The demographics
Cannot
Feed themselves
The same message but “humorous:”
MUSLIM NEW TO COUNTRY
I cross ocean, poor and broke. Take bus, see welfare folk.
Nice man treat me good in there. Say I need to see welfare.
Welfare say, ‘You come no more, we send cash right to your door. “
Welfare checks — they make you wealthy! Medicare — it keep you healthy!
By and by, I get plenty money. Thanks to you, you American dummy!
Write to friends in homeland. Tell them ‘come fast as you can.”
They come in hatred driving Toyota trucks, and buy big house with welfare bucks!
They come here, we live together. More welfare checks, it gets better!
Fourteen families, they moving in, But neighbor’s patience wearing thin.
Finally, American guy moves away. Now I buy his house, then I say,
‘Find more immigrants for house to rent. “ And in the yard I put a tent.
Everything is very good, and soon we own the neighborhood.
We have hobby, it’s called breeding. Welfare pay for baby feeding.
Kids need dentist? Wives need pills? We get free! We got no bills!
American crazy! They work all year, to keep the welfare running here.
The poetry of Stormfront is meant to provide “inspiration.” But what is it meant to inspire? A 2014 SPLC report dubbed Stormfront the “murder capital of the Internet, observing that in a five-year period the forum’s users were connected to more than a hundred murders worldwide.
While white nationalist poetry might seem crude and ridiculous to the average reader, it would be foolish to underestimate the effect on its intended audience. In a story about the popularity of Odinist religion among white supremacists, PRI focuses on the radicalization in prison of a man named Leo Felton: “Gradually, the Christian Gospels began to grow cold for Felton. But the poetic writings of Odinism vibrated within him, eventually catching fire.”
Felton left prison with a plan to kill as many people as possible and die in a blaze of glory so that he might take his place in Valhalla. That plot was thwarted, and he’s now serving a 21-year sentence.
The flowery, overwrought prose of his autobiography would be right at home in Stormfront’s poetry section:
I would become a living expression of our true Gods, transmitting Their blessed rage into the mortal world, like an overcurrent that flows through a fuse, causing it to burn brighter than it ever has and at the same time, destroying it
