Neo-Nazi terror group Blood Tribe, led by the white supremacist terrorist Christopher Pohlhaus, made headlines when they established a training compound in Springfield, Maine. Pohlhaus’s open invitation for white cisgender men to move to his 10.6 acre property and train for what he believes to be a rapidly impending civil and race war perturbed lawmakers and polite settler-occupants of the state. They presumably wondered what neo-Nazis would even do there, since Maine is already a white enclave — the whitest state in all of the U.S. Empire, where the colonial genocide is the most complete, the “race war” already won. Many of Maine’s police and legal administrators, whose job is to maintain the state’s sleepy idylls (colonial plunder) for its white residents, weighed in on the situation, and attempted to invoke federal action against the neo-Nazis — notwithstanding the neo-Nazis also want to maintain the state’s colonial plunder for its white residents, and are merely more openly expressive about the violence this entails.
State Senator Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, implored it was, “time for the Governor, the Attorney General of Maine, the Penobscot County District Attorney, and the U.S. Attorney to work on shutting these Nazis down and sending this guy back to Texas.” The Sheriff of nearby Aroostook county, Shawn Gillen, also suggested passing the buck to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Infer from their statements the character of these men — do neo-Nazis truly belong in Texas any more than Maine, and must federal agencies determine whether neo-Nazis are, “engaging in illegal activity or just doing their thing?”
That these men believe there is a place (Texas) where neo-Nazis could be free to “do their thing” as long as they don’t disturb the status quo betrays that they have an implicit, albeit unconscious understanding of their class position as settlers.
In the 1600s, settler-residents of Maine began the ethnic cleansing of the Wabanaki Confederacy. This was accompanied by pogroms and the eventual expulsion of its New Afrikan inhabitants into the early 1900s. Despite being a established in 1820 as a “free state,” in which slavery has never been legal, Maine’s economy still depended upon and contributed to the Atlantic slave trade — its weavers transformed plantation cotton into fabric, its shipyards built the ships that conveyed slaves across the Atlantic, and its timber fueled the boilers that transformed plantation sugarcane into sugar, molasses, and eventually the rum that was sold in New England’s taverns. Thus, while the state’s occupants found slavery morally objectionable, they were happy to reap its economic benefits so long as the visibly distasteful aspect occurred elsewhere. They were adamant that Black slaves should be free, so long as none of them actually came to Maine to undercut white labor. Similarly, although the Ku Klux Klan is often perceived to be a Southern or Midwestern phenomenon, Maine was a major northern stronghold for the “second” KKK until the 1930s, with some “klaverns” (local chapters) and women’s associations persisting into later decades. In the late 1970s, President Carter’s administration and the state government collaborated to deprive Maine’s remaining Indigenous tribes of the paltry federal rights available to them, through the legal decision Joint Tribal Council of the Passamaquoddy Tribe v. Morton. Although this decision resulted in a payout of $81.5 million, and the reclamation of some Indigenous land, the tribes ultimately forfeited federal aboriginal title rights that stood to benefit them much more over time. It also bound the tribes to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, which reduced the power of Indigenous land claims to equal those of any settler or corporation. In July 2023 the Maine House of Representatives failed to overturn Democratic Gov. Janet Mills’ veto of a proposed tribal sovereignty bill that would have restored some of the tribes’ federal rights.
To summarize this history plainly: the only reason Maine’s overwhelmingly white population can “do their thing” today is because of the Pohlhauses of the past, who ventured out from garrisons and forts, the compounds of that time, to slaughter and economically dispossess the land’s original inhabitants. Furthermore, this dispossession is ongoing and must be maintained by the state’s current administrators. Why else would the governor fear the legal and financial implications of tribal sovereignty for nearly eradicated people? Indeed, given this history it’s apparent why Pohlhaus chose chowder-white Maine to build his compound, compared to Texas which has the most Black people of any state, and the second highest Hispanic population. Knowing these statistics, it seems strange that Sen. Baldacci would send Pohlhaus back to a state where neo-Nazis “have lots to do,” compared to having him stay in Maine where their project is virtually complete… Unless one considers that, just as Mainers of the past were fine with slavery as long as it happened elsewhere, Baldacci is fine with race war so long as it doesn’t interrupt his spaghetti dinner. Ultimately, Baldacci and Gillen’s cowardice against stating unequivocally that neo-Nazis only belong in graves reflects their absolute unwillingness to comprehend, or even think about the bloodshed and economic violence that underpins their peaceful existence. They may also have an unconscious inkling that if they deprive Pohlhaus of the peaceful enjoyment of his Nazi compound, someone might justifiably deprive them of the land, wealth and privileges they acquired through the treachery and butchery of the past.
Nonetheless, the appearance of new fascist subgroups such as Blood Tribe, which only formed in 2021, does disturb liberal settlers. It may even cause alarm for Communists and other leftists. However, to consider these groups the primary or significant fascist threat in the U.S. is at once both incorrect and chauvinist — the true threat is the U.S. police, who are the hostile garrison ensuring white control of the land. Sen. Baldacci actually lamented the possibility of violence between the state’s fascists and the neo-Nazis when he said, “This is a situation I can’t imagine any of our local law enforcement have had to deal with, and this is a situation they are going to have to deal with.” Of course the local law enforcement officers have never had to fight themselves!
The fraught claim that the presence of neo-Nazi groups is “new” is a frequency illusion; an erroneous framing of the present because it is happening now. Many of these groups aren’t new at all, but are the remnants, successors, and splinters of the infamous second Klan, which was a popular mass movement with millions of members and one that lasted from at least 1915 to 1950— a fact many liberals today either don’t know or would like to forget.
Furthermore, while it may feel as if the number of groups and their activities are increasing, Blood Tribe’s hateful rallies are trite compared to the assassinations, kidnappings, and armed robberies perpetrated by groups such as The Order in the 1980s. There aren’t any more hate groups today than there were in 2011 — their numbers aren’t steadily increasing, but rising and diminishing according to the political progress and needs of ordinary Amerika. For example, due to his skin color and conspiracies about his religion, Obama’s presidency saw an explosion of new anti-Muslim and anti-Black hate groups, despite Obama doing more to globally advance these causes — by destroying Libya and conducting hundreds drone strikes against primarily Yemeni civilians — than many domestic fascist terrorists could dream. In the 1930s, groups such as The Silver Legion (Silver Shirts) and German-American Bund were founded as reactions to Roosevelt’s New Deal, despite it being a resounding death knell for revolutionary Communism in the United States. Today, the Blood Tribe and other hate groups primarily direct their venom against the LGBTQIA2S+ community, who are already reviled by one half of the Amerikan political spectrum, and wielded as a political cudgel against Global South nations by the other. Neither face of American fascism genuinely seeks liberation for the oppressed.
Maine’s nickname, “The Polar Star State,” and motto, “Dirigo” which means “I guide” or “I direct” refer to how, in the same sense that mariners used the Polar Star to navigate, Maine should be the guiding star towards “the ideal America”, its citizens the exemplary patriots. The neo-Nazis understand and have taken this motto to heart. Even if the state’s administrators feign oblivion to the sameness of settlers and neo-Nazis, all those who seek to extinguish Amerika as the guiding star of world fascism should understand it. If there is a forthcoming war, distinct from the internal and external wars continually waged by the U.S. Empire, then its settlers, government, police, and hate groups will all be on the same side. And why wouldn’t they be?
Pohlhaus is, after all, an ex-marine. Many terrorists just like him are active or former members of the police and U.S. armed forces. The U.S. garrison-police and armed forces are merely the foreign and domestic arms of the project of Amerikan genocide. Despite what the lofty rhetoric of high-school history teachers, so-called “Founding Fathers,” and government officials might claim, this continuous genocide is the real respresentation of Amerikan values. Settler-colonialism is the hard core of fascism, a kind of internal and domestic imperialist policy designed to annihilate the inhabitants of the land to make it available for a chosen ethnos — what the Amerikan race-scientists call “race.”
It’s no coincidence that the chosen ethos for both Mainers and neo-Nazis is the same — neo-Nazis are simply more honest about their intentions than most Amerikan politicians. They merely say aloud what Amerika does and has already done, but refuses to admit.
