White noise

Don DeLillo

In this frightening essay, originally published by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, in Dimensions, DeLillo develops links between Nazism and contemporary millenarian movements.

SILHOUETTE CITY: HITLER, MANSON AND THE MILLENNIUM

We find messages of death and danger almost everywhere. On the nightly news, in the medical column, on the health channel, in the images of the homeless and the AIDS-afflicted, in the junk mail, in the public service advisories, in the supermarket tabloids and their cult worship of the celebrity dead. It's all mixed together, routinely braided into our lives—murder, torture, superstition, satire, grueling human ordeal. Information shades into rumor and mass fantasy, which convert to topical entertainment. Our levels of perception begin to blend. It isn't always easy to separate disease from its mythology or violence from its trivialization. Not that we're necessarily eager to make distinctions. We depend on an environment that softens and absorbs, that receives the impact of dangerous things without recoil or echo. The message is processed, assimilated and made into something else entirely. Idi Amin became a T-shirt. Racial hostility is a frequent subtext of commercials for beer, soft drinks and running shoes. In these 20-second sociodramas, danger appears in the form of angry-looking blacks, who are then instantly reconstituted as happy Pepsi drinkers. We try to obscure threats and disruptions by tailoring them to a format of consumer appeal.

There is another danger we must think about. It reaches us across the decades, subject to the same occasional blurring. We know it mainly by its original markings, its blazonry of the death's-head and the swastika.

Is there something missing from your life which the imagination of the Nazis can helpfully provide?

Nazi lore and notation represent a rich source of material to be consulted in the service of fantasy and self-fulfillment. For your sub-erotic side, there are bondage hoods and tooled black leather. For your violent or racist side, there is inspiration to be drawn from Aryan publications and white power music. For wholesome family entertainment, you have the Holocaust thriller. This is the category of book, movie and TV drama in which the madness of Hitler and the suffering of the Jews function as story apparatus, easily inserted components that are recognizable at once for their vivid qualities of suspense and melodrama. For your sentimental side, there are many detailed studies of the last days of the Third Reich running their melancholy course as Bruckner's Romantic Symphony is performed in an unheated concert hall before music lovers in overcoats. Even the collapse of the Nazi empire had its play list, designed by Albert Speer as if to organize the longings of future generations. For your collecting pleasure, you'll find Third Reich memorabilia everywhere. There are perhaps 50,000 collectors and most are American. The prizes range from Goering's hunting dagger to Hitler's Mercedes, and the excitement, of course, abides in the touch of objects once owned by the authors of unspeakable crimes.
There is some element in the soul that creates in us a need to know the worst about ourselves. If we are a species called Thinking Creature, then let's think to the limit, let's imagine the worst, let's set out to find the purest representative of the species that can imagine the worst. We are obsessed by the Nazis finally because they were masters of extremity. They not only imagined the worst; they did it. They engineered a level of pain and death that takes us to the end of self-knowledge. Beyond this point, what is there to know? We tend to see even their own eventual death as self-inflicted. Only masters could produce such extravagant ruin. There is also something in the Nazi era that addresses us as individuals. Each of us spins on a life-axis of power and submission. The Nazis were so steeped in the uses of power, so determined to force mass capitulation, that we can't help using them as final measures of our personal flaws. They make us uneasy about ourselves, our occasional blind obedience to authority, our willingness to abandon ourselves to a strong personality. We may refer to them unconsciously when we think about our attempts to dominate certain people, to oppress and control, and when we wonder why our lives seem empty without these routine shows of power. Are there particular words one person says to another when the struggle between them grows intense and unequal? "Fascist!" "Nazi!" Foolish to use these words so randomly. Ridiculous to compare ourselves to men who subjected innocent millions to extremities of horror. But these men have aroused a watchfulness in us. We see their shadow not only at the nightmare edge of collective perception but in the office where we work and the rooms where we live.

And as we monitor ourselves on one level, we may think about the limits of state power and feel a different kind of disquiet. It is clear that our weakened position in the world, after Vietnam and other emblems of decline, has led us into a moral pause, a homesickness for the experience of power unleashed. It was not so long ago that many Americans watched the Soviets march into Afghanistan and pointed out how quickly and brutally they would crush the rebels—no equivocation here. The air of wistfulness was unmistakable (and seems almost touching in the light of subsequent events). It appears to us today that only terror succeeds, only fanatics win unconditional victories, and that every vital design of our democratic mandate must pass through a network of compromise and distortion. This has caused a wavering of the grace of moral vision. In our confusion we may find ourselves seduced by the imagery of force and domination, by the spectacle of an empire that made a systematic attempt to reach the human limit—the limit of fantasy, myth and murderousness.

And do we have a glimpse, today, of something strange working through the margins of the heartland, a new fantasy that takes us beyond the various pornographies we have minted from the Nazi esthetic? The theme of this fantasy is apocalypse and the rewards it offers the conscientious dreamer are an escape from conflict and a direct route to earthly rapture and salvation. There is a formal sense of millennium here. It not only looks ahead to the year 2000 but recollects as well. The operative nostalgia centers our attention on a small group of true believers clustered in the fuehrerbunker as howitzers fill the night with muzzle flash and holy thunder.
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In his study of millenarian movements [The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements], Norman Cohn traces the secularized form of this ancient longing—for destruction to hammer down, for history to end, for harmony and well-being to sweep the world—directly into the totalitarian core of twentieth century fascism and communism.

In their naive form, millenarian movements may appear as isolated rustlings among oppressed or displaced people, the offscourings of society, flea-ridden and illiterate. These are minds open to mirage, to the strong voices of prophets and wonderworkers, messianic figures who tend to lay their most effective claim to legitimacy against a setting of chaos or terror—plague, famine, revolution, the shock of an encroaching culture. Often these men will make predictions of calamity, some Utopian disaster that carries salvation with it, the cleansing onset of a perfect age. Here the millenarian group will be free of complicating forces, free of enemies, conspiracies, evil. In the face of these prophecies and astonishments, members of such groups may abandon the patterns of generations, walk away from the landowners' fields, leaving crops to rot. Then the desperate ecstasies begin, the frenzies and aberrations—trance states, dancing manias, self-flagellation. People have visions and speak in tongues.

In medieval Europe certain themes began to develop around the millenarian experience. There were legends of dead men returning, leaders of mass movements (such as Baldwin IX and Frederick II) whose followers had every expectation that the Last Days were near. This wishful credit we extend to heroes is clearly still part of our psychology, detectable at the ironic level of pop culture where dead rock stars routinely reappear in ordinary places, poorly photographed. But there is also, tellingly, our continued reluctance to accept the death of significant figures. It could be argued that our reconstruction of the details of President Kennedy's assassination, a quarter century's grim labor, is in some sense an attempt to rewrite time, to put the man himself back together. A strong leader stands, in Ernest Becker's phrase, as our "bulwark against death." And when a master of death such as Hitler dies, what do his followers do with the secret yearning only he could answer—the yearning to be spellbound, unburdened of free will and self-command? They redirect their feelings to Argentina, where the leader is said to live on, breeding expectations of magical return.

Another early millenarian theme concerns the relationship between a spiritually elevated sense of mission and a harrowing earthbound reality. Or how visionary joy and order tend to float above a landscape of panoramic violence. In Crusader days the central apparition was a jeweled city at the end of time, liberated Jerusalem. Multitudes of the poor, prophecy-driven and racked by disease, formed journeys of exalted purpose, advancing toward the Moslem towers. Carrying a shared fantasy of the Last Days, they passed from town to town, barefoot, with crosses sewn on their shirts, massed in hardship, in imitation of Christ, and wherever they went they searched out Jews and killed them. The massacre of Jews was a preparation for some Crusades, an accompaniment to others. Seen as demon-conspirator, the Jew had to convert or die before the millennium could properly come to pass. With him, at times, went the local bishop and abbot, killed for their worldliness. Ascetics, hermit kings, runaway monks all preached the Crusades and won total devotion from the horde. Crop failures brought messianic hopes, prophecies of apocalypse, new Crusades and new atrocities. Bands of flagellants began moving across parts of Europe, their leather scourges fitted with iron spikes. The movement spread, becoming a penitential epic of torn flesh and a prayer for deliverance from the Black Death. In the eschatological drama of the plague, the flagellants led slaughterous assaults on the Jewish populations of many cities. Death answering death. In time the movement degenerated into obscure sects, officially suppressed. Members were pursued and burned at the stake, but others continued to meet in secret, flogging themselves relentlessly, still assembling the vision of a renewed society, harmonious and whole. Among the many ways we can live secretly, perhaps the most satisfying is in the passionate service of a fantasy, our doors double-locked against the impure world, our sense of expectancy rising to a sacred and dangerous pitch. This is the rapture of living in the Last Days.

When these tides reach our own century and become the transforming rage of nations, we may feel the need to consult the source books, the very prose of apocalyptic struggle. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote of "the world empire of Jewish satrapies" and "the approaching fulfillment of their testamentary prophecy about the great devouring of nations." The Jew will continue to advance "until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer."

Once the "millennial Jew empire" is destroyed, the state can comfortably begin its Thousand Year Reich.

Norman Cohn writes, "This is the vision that accounts for the otherwise incomprehensible decision to undertake, in the middle of a desperate war and at immense cost in labour and materials and transport, the massacre of some six million Jewish men, women and children."
In newsreel Germany, the flickering gray country on our TV screens, we see social and political moments dressed up like miracle plays. Torchlight parades, tributes to the martyred dead, halls hung with mortuary wreaths, enormous rallies built around dramatic displays of sound and light. The sound is mainly Hitler's voice and he seems at times to be a medium of revelation, a man in a dream state, able to pick up signals from some layer of race memory and transmit them to the crowd in the form of commandment and harangue. Sometimes the older and more shaky the film, the greater the sense of mystical intensity. We know there is something rising above the geometric ranks of thousands of flag bearers standing among columns of sculptured light and it is the same spirit of world-shattering glory and terror, the same race hatreds and millennial enthrallments that informed the crusader rabble moving across Europe with pitchforks and pointed sticks. The medieval vision of the Holy City has become "the force of the national idea"—Hitler's total state. Even the name of this state, the Third Reich, gains in resonance from its similarity to the Third Age, the late twelfth century formulation of a new order of peace and understanding. Based in large part on a "decoding" of the Book of Revelation, the prophetic themes and patterns of Third Age belief became part of European consciousness, periodically reinterpreted but always centered on the conviction that the third age is the last age. In some cases the doctrinal experts specifically taught that the road to the millennium must pass through the city of death, the shadow city where the godless are arrayed for extermination.

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In a small frame church in Indiana, people wait for the great tornado. God has spoken to the preacher's wife and said it is coming any time now, a towering column of dust and wind that will cause death and vast destruction. The church members don't send their children to school anymore. They've stopped going to their jobs or attending to their illnesses. The church is their home, their refuge and their seclusion. At night they fold up the metal chairs and set them against the walls. Then they spread out the bedding.

In a little town in Arkansas, not long after the communists took Saigon, two dozen people entered a small house and began a vigil. They were keeping watch for the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world as we know it. They thought it might happen around Christmas and they put on their white ascension robes and waited. Neighbors complained about "bloodcurdling screams." The sheriff showed up to take custody of the children and the judge who tried to end the vigil couldn't help noticing the hate mail that began to fill his mailbox.

These are instances of one kind of American millenarianism. Its heart is stubborn and fundamentalist and its summons is powerful, carrying believers toward the wondrous year that will begin a new century. The more immediate promise is escape, a release from all the old bitterness and misery and bad luck. King Jesus stands in the safe land that waits behind the wall of fire and wind.

There is another kind of millenarian summons, a militant call that tends to place the faithful in barricaded buildings, often in remote mountain country, with a stock of ready weapons. Groups of white supremacists and neo-Nazis have established retreats, compounds, brotherhoods, networks, all linked to homegrown churches that mix apocalyptic reverie with violent anti-Semitism.

This is a membership of the dispossessed and betrayed. These are the outnumbered—"stout Aryan yeomen," as one manifesto puts it, who have been superseded by immigrants and stricken by "the cancer of racial masochism." They are sometimes joined in deep concealment by tax resisters, polygamists, Klansmen and other fugitives from justice, heavily armed.

The barricaded gunman is a lyrical fixture of our time. He is what remains of the wilderness and he feels a pulse in his brain that beats for desolation. Bring it all down. Down with complex systems, centralization, the whole scheming technocracy of welfare and banking. He knows where to put the blame. The enemy is called ZOG, or the Zionist Occupational Government.
Near the Missouri-Arkansas border a group called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord established a 224-acre compound that included computer equipment, a bomb factory and a church. The spiritual leader issued predictions of famine and race war. In the training area there was a rifle range known to the members of the group as Silhouette City. When police raided the area, they found a series of targets—man-shaped shadows on rectangular white backgrounds. Sketched on the chest area of every shadow was a Star of David.

These groups have been responsible for murders, synagogue bombings and many other crimes. But their deepest ambition has so far been restricted to the level of rhetoric—the overthrow of government and the founding of a separate Aryan nation. They know from the start they can't succeed. This accounts for the theme of heroic fatalism that runs through the movement. Even the far-seeing are resigned to a limited destiny, a warriorhood of the day-to-day. The one unsullied vision is the barricaded cabin in the hills, the sense of taking part in Armageddon, even if the final battle is small-scale and local, with FBI agents lofting tear gas over the ponderosa pine. It is our sense of truth that suffers when we deny that heroes are immortal.

There is a possible reference point for this romance of the isolate, the armed solitary with his mixed wish for survival and doom. It is the handed-down tale of Hitler, folk hero of death, hearing the world come to an end above his study in the bunker. One of the men of the extremist group the Brueder Schweigen, or Silent Brotherhood, built a shrine to Hitler in a crawl space in his house near Sandpoint, Idaho. The founder of the Brotherhood, killed by police, was honored in a memorial service held on Hitler's birthday. His widow said he was murdered because he was "brave enough to stand up and fight for God, truth and (his) race."

His brother said, "I'm not so sure he didn't want to die."

The death that rains on history and entices the modern imagination brings with it the lure of personal destruction. The fuehrerbunker is a myth of self-fulfillment. The Norse legends, the hall of slain warriors, the Heavenly Reich, the fate of all white kinsmen who raise the sword against ZOG. These are glories past naming.

The motto of the Brueder Schweigen reads like this: We are the army of the already dead.

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Before the Aryan groups came to prominence, there was a spree of cult violence not widely recognized as millenarian but in fact showing so many signs of the medieval form as to seem a knife-happy parody. But there was no parody; only a system of belief and a set of actions that pursued traditional paths to world-end rapture. The group in question operated against a background of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of the 1960s—a collection of about seventy people, including drop-ins, drifters, bikers and ranch hands, led by a messianic figure who sent shock after shock down the goat gullet of the media and smack into the faces of gripped millions.

The Manson Family, carrying its own built-in sitcom title, lived for much of the time in Death Valley. Charles Manson, a guitar player and ex-convict, came out of nowhere, poor and dirty, like those charismatics of the Middle Ages who claimed to be risen kings, great leaders returned to life by the need of the people. Charlie told the Family he had lived and died before, almost two thousand years ago, drawing his last breath on a wooden cross. He made much of the fact that his last name, with syllables reversed, works out to Son (of) Man. He had no trouble finding believers. One of them said, "Just before we got busted in the desert, there was twelve of us apostles and Charlie."

The Manson cosmology comes out of the Bible, Scientology, Hopi Indian legend, the Beatles and Hitler. Manson spent serious time with the Book of Revelation, finding contemporary references everywhere. He believed that the last war on earth would be a racial conflict known as Helter Skelter. This phrase, from a Beatles' song, was found printed on a refrigerator door in the blood of one of the Family's victims.

The stranger the material, the more it fits the pattern.

The Adamites, a fifteenth-century millenarian sect, practiced free love but only at the direction of their leader, who didn't always give his consent, much like Charlie, in 1969, orchestrating the sex lives of his followers. The Adamites thought of themselves as holy avengers and ran night missions against local villagers, killing avidly. The Manson Family referred to their own night visits as "creepy-crawlies." Nobody knows how many dead they left behind.

The child in play builds a world of hypnotic intensity. Manson wanted to develop "a strong white race" and he set out to do this by eliminating every vestige of a connection between his followers and society. Family members folded themselves into Manson's world to the point where identities vanished. They entered a spell, a privileged state in which all the old conflicts and restraint yielded to the will of the leader.

It's a magical time. Charlie knows your thoughts.

He tells you what to do and you do it, and what to believe and you believe it. What could be better than this?

Manson was not unaware of the precedents.

He told the Family that "Hitler had the best answer to everything."

He said, "Hitler was a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews."

As the murder trial progressed, new members were seen among the original Family every time Charlie made an appearance in court. When Charlie carved a swastika on his forehead, members did the same. And when the guilty verdict was announced, female members shaved their heads and warned America, "You'd better watch your children because Judgment Day is coming."

Charlie wasn't afraid of the death penalty. He'd faced death many times in this life and others.

"Death is Charlie's trip," said a member.

In the American air, with every thought permitted, the distance between thought and action becomes ever slighter, and in the malls and city streets and in the shadows of closed factories there's always someone who will shave his head so he can run with the other shaved heads, and together they will enter the culture, welcomed for their vividness and swagger, their adaptability to consumer format.

The San Francisco skinhead poses for the news camera and appears on TV with his tattoos and swastika T-shirt and that pale stubble on his head. He is a working-class boy proud of being white. It happens there are other skinheads from other cities who are also doing the talk shows and soon they've all been absorbed, exhausted, talked away, put in the product box—declassified. They are part of America's Sunday brunch. But somewhere along the way we've noticed something. The skinhead has raised an unexpected image, that of the shorn European Jew filmed by Allied liberators at places like Dachau and Nordhausen more than four decades ago. And we are helpless to break them apart. It is one more dread, one more victory of ignorance. The bullyboy has consumed and incorporated our memory of the victim without even realizing it. They are horribly locked in single bare face, the neo-Nazi and the death camp inmate, and this complex image collapses time and meaning and all sense of distinctions. It is one more haunted message in the river of blur and glut, the painted stream that passes daily through our lives.