e
• 164
TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE
- being 100 per cent ngainst immigracion’.
145. Fritt Forum, No. 1(1996).
146. According to Kathleen Uke (note 16), p.3, women in faci make racist organizations more
dangerous, because they spread the ideology througb Iheir family, their personal networks
and local contacts. This makes women’s inlluence often more extensive chan (be men’s. My
analysis suggests thal Ihis might also hold for the Valkyrla woinen sincc. according to my
observations, they have much more contact with friends ouiside the milieu than (be men
do.
(47. lnterview. 9 March 1996.
148. Martin Barker. The New Racism. Conservatives and the Ideology of (he Tribe (Frederick,
MD: Univërsity Publications of America 1982)._
149. Both women interviewed in Det Nye, No.l0 (Oct. 1995).
150. Det Nye, No.i0 (Oct. 1995).
151. Interview, 9 March 1996. For a discussion of the way male activists deal wiih the
Holocaust, sce Fangen (note 50).
(52. Kaplan and Bjørgo (note 36).
153. lnterview. 9 March 1996. Rune Gerhardsen, Labor Pany politician. Flead of Oslo Town
Council.
154. Valkyrins lnstruction Manual.
155. Det Nye. No.iO (Oct. 1995).
156. Ibid.
157. Interview, 24 April 1996.
158. Fritt Forum, No.l (1996).
159. Koonz (ante 20). p450.
160. lnterview. 9 March 1996.
161. Ibid.
162. This argument was also commonly used by Nazi women in the l930s: see Koonz (note 20),
p.449.
163. Jack ICjuus is the leader of Hvit Valgallianse (White Election Alliance).
164. I have desctibed the history of such views in Norway in the report ‘Rasismens historie og
forhistorie (The History aud Prehistory of Racism), SFDH (Sogn og Fjordane College)
report, No.1 (1993).
165. At times, tbe Women’s Klan portrayed itself as a social welfare organization. Sorne
chapters collected food and money for the needy (typically K!an families), aud others ran
free day-nurseries and homes for wayward giris; see Blee (note 16). p.4O. Similarly. Nazi
women collecied money for poor national socialist families; see Koonz (note 20), p.463.
166. lCoonz (noce 19).
167. BIee (nole 16), p3.
168. lnterview, 24 April 1996.
169. Durham (note 37), p.279.
Women and the Extreme Right:
A Comment
MARTIN DURHAM
-
Katrine Fangen’s article presents a thoughtful and well-informed account of
the racist underground in Norway and the role of women within its ranks.
Having achieved an impressive aceess to its activists, she gives us a portrait
of a movement which, contrary to our expectations, does not simply contain
men who dominate and women who accept their subordination. Instead,
male activists are described as.proud that their movement contains strong
women and even as contrasting their acceptance of gender equality with its
rejeetion in other male-dominated subcultures.’ Nonetheless, the movement
remains male-defined and in early 1995, in reaction to their secondary role,
a number of women formed an all-female group. Organised in local cells,
Valkyria functions as the ‘sister’ group of the Viking organisation and mns
activities both with men and separately.
Engaging in weapons training, involved in the inner circle directing the
movement’s activities, Valkyria asserts the equal rights of women activists.
But is this part of a broader trend within the international extreme right, or
is this section of Norway’s extreme right an aberration within a tradition in
whieh patriarchy is usually championed, not challenged? Here the article’s
argumënt is tentative. The Ku Klux Klan in the l920s, Fangen notes, set up
a women’s organisation which declared its support for women’s suffrage
and opposed male domination. Women in the Nazi movement, she
continues, were less likely to make claims of equaiity but, even in such an
unpropitious environment, some were to be found who favoured an
egalitarian stance. As for the modern period, neo-fascist women’s
organisations exist in a number of countries but are frequently contined to
being merely auxilaries of male organisätions.2 While not unique, Valkyria
eertainly appears atypical and this, it is suggested, may well be linked with
the national characteristics of Norway itself. According to a leading
Swedish woman nazi, Norwegian NaÈism during the Second World War
gave greater equality to its women activists than was the case in Sweden or
Germany while today, Fangen argues, the sympatby for women’s equality
among male extreme rightists demonstrates how pervasive the
emancipation of women in Norway has become.3 This account raises
Terrorism and Political Violeace, Vol.9, No.3 (Auwmn 1997). pp.165—lôS
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS. LONDON
i
TERRORISM AND P0LITICAL V1OLENCE
questions both about the distinctiveness of the Norwegian extreme right and
the relationship between men and women on the extreme right more
generally and it is to these that we will turn.
As with the Nazis in (be past, modern extreme rightists have organised
women in different ways. As part of an international skinhead subculture,
Valkyria is different both in culture and age structure from tbe dominant
wàmen’s organisations of the extreme right (those linked with the Front
National in France and the Alleanza Nazionale, formerly the Movimento
Sociale Italiano, in Italy).4 Other women’s organisations, such as the now
defunct British Movement Women’s JDivision, have attempted to benefit
from skinhead militancy but have tended to emphasise more ihe frequent
extreme right equation of woman and family.5 The strongest comparison
would seem to be with two countries referred to in the article, Germany and
the United States. In Germany, as Mushaben has shown, amidst the
diversity of opinion among women on the extreme iight can be founcl an
insistence on equality within the movement and an impatience with
assumptions of male superiority.6 This exists in different sections of the
movement but of particular interest in the present context are the efforts of
the Skingiri Front Deutschland and the German section of Women for
Aryan Unity to oppose sexism within the neofascist skinhead subculture?
As for the United States, when one skinhead-based group, the American
Front, organised a women’s auxiliary, it took the name the Valkyries, while
White Sisters, the newsletter of the Aryan Women’s League, also draws on
an intemationally shared imagery in publishing drawings of skinhead
women as ‘sword-wielding Nordic goddesses.. .fighting beside their men’.’
Similarly, the tendency for some women to be seen as mothers, some as
fighters and yet others to be sexual trophies exists in all three countries, and
that Valkyria activists criticise young women who play the last of these roles
bears marked resemblance to the complaint of female supporters of the
American Front that women they categorise as ‘sluts’ and ‘trash’ weaken
the movement? Seen in this context, Valkyria may be best understood as a
national manifestation of an increasingly international movement, linked by
the Internet, the circulation of literature and face to face contact. How this
has developed needs considerably more exploration, ideally by seholars in
different countries, particularly in the light of Fangen’s references to
Valkyria’s correspondence with women elsewhere and the presence ofsome
of them at its camps (and, we might add, the attendance of the Norwegian
group at the 1995 Rudolf Fless commemoration march in Gerrnany))°
Among Norwegian racist skinheads, as with their counterparts in
Germany, an ongoing dispute encompasses positions which range from
female assertion to attempts to exclude women altogether.” The
characteristics of Norwegian society, of particular youth cultures and of
WOMEN AND TIIE EXTREME RIGHT
167
underground organisation all bring their imperatives, and debates in other
strands of the Norwegian extreme right and in the extreme right in other
countries will differ in important ways. But there are also common strands. In
Britain, for instance, during the I 980s, an activist in one wing of the National
Front, Jackie Griffin, argued that women should play a greater role in the
movement while a member of the other wing, Caralyn Taylor, declared upon
her election to the organisation’s National Directorate that women had ‘been
brainwashed by male members into thinking that running the National Front
is a “job for the boys”.’ Even the British National Party, led by the
enthusiastically patriarchal former NF Chairman, John Tyndall, has published
an articie in which a woman activist denounced male chauvinism and called
for the organisation to prove itself to be one ‘of roughly equal rights’.” In
recent years, amidst the National Front’s continued fragmentation and crisis
in the British National Party, racist organisers have worked among skinheads
in an effort to create an overtly National Socialist grouping. Overwhelmingly
male, in these circles too tensions have been evident in the emergence of a
Patriotic Women’s League whose newsletter, Valkyrie, declares its wish to
emulate women’s organisations in America. Calling for women to ‘ride by the
White man’s side and sing the racial song’, il also suggests that ‘our views’
might ‘in some cases. .differ from those of our menfolk’. One area ofespecial
importance, it continued, was that of violence towards women.’3
In a number of countries and increasingly internationally, a burgeoning
racist skinhead network has shifted the balance of forces between different
strands of the extreme right. Such networks rarely display patience with the
electoral strategy of established organisations, favouring instead a street
politics which frequently takes the form of physical violence. Fangen’s
articie shows a hitherto largely unexplored dimension of this movement in
arguing that rather than simply exaggerating the machismo of fascismo, it is
also developing a strong female role for some of its militants. At times, this
argument can be contested; to claim, for instance, that an anti-pornography
stance evidences a female agenda is problematic in light of the common
ideological opposition to the sex industry of extreme right organisations as
a whole.’4 But while not always agreeing with its argument, anyone
concerned with the issue of women’s role in the extreme right will find this
account both fascinating in its material and fundamental in the questions it
raises and the avenues of inquiry it suggests.
.
NOTES
I. KaLtine Fangen, ‘Separate or Equal? The Emergence of an All-Female Group in Norway’s
Rightist Underground’. Terrorisni andPolirical Violence 9/3 (Autuma 1997) p143.
2. Fangen (note I) pp.l25—7.
—
TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE
168
3: Fangen (nole 1) pp.l30. 160. 156.
4. Italy has not been well served in the exisling literature but for a discussion of different
strands on the French exlreme right. see Fiammetla Venner, ‘Le militantisme féminin
d’extréme droite: “Une autrc manièrt d’étre féministe” V. French Politics aud Sociery 11/2
(Spring 1993) pp.33—54.
5. For women in Ihe British Movement. see Veronica Ware; Women and fire National Front
(Birmingham: Searchlight, n.d.. c1978) pp.l6—lB; Britons in Revolt (Deeside: British
Movement 1980).
6. Joyce Marie Mushaben. ‘The Rise of Femi-Nazis? Female Participation in Right-Extremist
Moveineots In Unified Germany’, paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeling of
che American Political Science Associationr Chicago, 1995. A revised version appears in
Gernian Polities 5/2 (Aug. 1996) pp.24O—6l.
7. ‘Frauen in der faschistischen Skinheadszene’. Antifa-Info. Mai—iune 1993.
8. ‘/illage Voice. 28 April 1992; Klanwatch Intelligence Report, June 1991 reproduced in
Procreating White Suprernacy: Wonren aud lite Far Rigirt (Atlanta: Center for Democratic
Renewal 1996).
9. Fangen (note I) pp.l49—SO; Village Voice (note 8).
10. Fangen (nole I) pp.l’48. 146; Searchliglrt. Oct. 1995.
Il. Fangen (note I) pp.I4O—4l; see Antifa-lnfr (Note 7) re ;he Anti Frauen Organisation in
Germany.
12.: Martin Durhani. ‘Women and the British Extreme Right’. in L. Cheles et at (eds). The Far
Righi in Western aud Fastern Europe (London: Longman 1995) pp.2&l, 282. 285.
13. Valkyrie, I. nd.. c1995.
14. Fangen (nole I), pp.l45. 154—5.
Book Reviews
Mbrdechai Bar-On, In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement,
Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996. Pp.470. biblio. ISBN
1-878379-53-4.
Mordechai Bar-On has writtên an overview of the Israeli peace movement from the
birth of the Slate in 1948 up to the Rabin—Arafat handshake on the White House lawn
in September 1993. li is therefore essentially a well-researched chronological record —
a documentation rather than an analysis. It is also an account of how both the
nationalist dreams of Eretz Israel and Filastin had to be compromised such that both
peoples could attempt to share the land in peace. To outsiders this may seem a self
evident solution that should have been agreed long ago, hat those in the grip ofconflict
would argue that iL was clearly a matter of survival. The kar of the ‘other’ overrode
all other preoccupations.
Jews as well as Palestinians have become the prisoners of their history and
sometimes the perpeLratorS of historical myth. Even 50, two thousand years of Jewish
existence at history’s margins as civilisation’s scapegoat was a psyehological baggage
which could not be disposed of overnight. Add to this, both Arab rejection of partition
and the Jewish desire to create a homeland in 1920 (San Remo Conference), 1921 «be
separation ofTrans-Jordan), 1937 (Royal Commission), 1947 (UN Resolution) as well
as the isolation and murder of the Jews in the Holocaust — aud the barrier towards even
the môst elementary dialogue became insurmountable. This conjunction of events
would have tested even the most rational and moderate of lsraelis in locating a
pathway through the morass of emotions and suffering to establish a dialogue with
Palestinian partners.
Through the declassification and opening of state archives in the 1980s, lsraeli writers
such as Benny Morris have indicated that there were groups, often centred around the
leftist Zionist party Mapam which .wished to entertain a peace option both during and in
the aftennath of the war of independence in 1948, in government and in the military.
Significantly, an Israeli Peace Committee composed of’ Mapam leaders, members of the
Communist Party and several intellectuals was formed in 1949. lt was essentially a
mouthpiece for the Sovjet controlled World Peace Council and therefore its causes were
cold war neutrality, stopping German reannament and banning nuclear weapons. The
pertinent issue of ending the Israeli—Arab confrontation was unceremoniously
circumvented. As Bar-On comments, it was psychologically too sensitive and too
controversial a proposition for Jsraelis to contemplate at a time of state-building.
By 1948. Ben-Gurion had effectively come round to accepting the position which
his Revisionist rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky. bad stipulated in his famous article The Iron
Wall over a guarter of a century previously in that there was an intrinsic contradiction
between Arab and Israeli interests. Yet Ben-Gurion’s more strident policies were
sometimes opposed by his Foreign Minister and later his temporary replacement as
Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett. Peace, however, at that time in the 1950s was an
illusion. As Bar-On remarks ‘Sharett, Mapam and the other moderates could at most
present a pious conviction that by refraining from aggravating the conflict through
aggressive initiatives, Israel might lay the foundation for reconciliation sometime in
the remote aud forseeable future.’ The shedding of the Stalinist era forced many leftist