PerspectiveAccelerationism: The Obscure Idea Inspiring White Supremacist Killers around the World
In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases in the United States “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” Recent white supremacist terrorists were often linked to the alt-right, but Zack Beauchamp writes that these killers “are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology”: It’s called “accelerationism.”
In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the FBI had made as many domestic terrorism arrests in 2019 as it did in all of 2018 — adding that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”
Many recent killings – for example, the January 2018 killing of Blaze Bernstein in California by member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division; the October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; the March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand; the April 2019 attack on a synagogue in Poway, California; the August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart — were often linked to the alt-right. But Zack Beauchamp writes in Vox that many of these suspected killers “are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.”
He writes:
It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos…and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.
Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.
Accelerationism has bizarre roots in academia…. [but] experts believe it has played a significant and under-appreciated role in the current wave of extremist violence.
