Sci-fi, fantasy, and fascism

After being sworn in, the current U.S. president spoke to an audience of billionaires and tech CEOs about numerous plans for his second term in office. Among them is an endeavor reminiscent of a sci-fi novel or fantasy epic: broadening U.S. expansionism beyond Earth and deeper into space. 

The oligarch-in-chief stood beneath the Capitol rotunda and bellowed to the crowd, "The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars." 

This objective truly encapsulates the spirit of Western colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist greed—conquest and expansion quite literally to otherworldly proportions. However, it is not unprecedented. Grandiose notions evocative of sci-fi and fantasy have long been entwined with fascism. 

Under the stars 

"Manifest Destiny" was coined by newspaper editor and columnist John O'Sullivan in 1845. In an essay advocating for the addition of Texas to U.S. territory, O'Sullivan articulated a belief that was already widely held. 

"[O]ther nations have undertaken to intrude themselves … in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence."

In the white supremacist imagination, white people are divinely ordained and, therefore, endowed by "the creator" with the right to colonize the entire continent. Just like the Christofascist doctrine which once justified the enslavement and torture of stolen Africans, the Manifest Destiny ideology is rooted in fantasy and bolsters the violent removal and destruction of native people, families, language, and culture.

Since his second inauguration, the sitting president has signed a swath of executive orders, one of which seeks to end birthright citizenship nationwide. At the time of this writing, the directive has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but the threat still looms. Dismantling birthright citizenship would make a multitude of non-white residents, even those native to this land, significantly more vulnerable to the threat of deportation. The birthright citizenship of Indigenous Peoples has also been questioned by the current administration and members of the Navajo Nation have even been detained by ICE in the increased aggression. 

This administration's ambitions are set on completing the original intention of Manifest Destiny, inching closer to creating the white ethnostate fascists have long craved. Even more, they intend to metastasize to worlds beyond our own.

But when it comes to white supremacy and fascism, there is nothing new under the stars. 

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830. During his second State of the Union address, Jackson reiterated his wholehearted belief in this legislation, as he saw the incremental genocide of Indigenous tribes as righteous and necessary. In fact, along with most Euro-Americans at the time, Jackson did not recognize them as Indigenous at all. He declared, "In the monuments and fortifications of an unknown people, we behold the memorials of a once-powerful race, exterminated to make room for the existing savage tribes." 

These "unknown people" were deemed the Mound Builders, a lost race of native whites supposedly killed off by "Indians." They were named after the thousands of "mounds" found across North America by settlers, which they believed held the remains of the mythical extinguished race.  As one ThoughtCo piece explains,

"From the colonial era into the twentieth century, it was widely accepted that certain earthen structures and burial grounds proved the existence of 'white' or Indo-European peoples who settled North America only to be wiped out."

Like the modern myth that ancient aliens built the Egyptian pyramids or that Peru's Nazca lines are the remnants of landing sites for extraterrestrial spacecrafts, white "scholars" often create their own sci-fi and fantasy legends surrounding architectural marvels that allow them to credit the work to beings other than "savages." The prehistoric mound structures across North America were far too advanced for uncivilized non-whites to have built them. Therefore, it must have been a now-extinct "once-powerful race." The mathematical and engineering feats of the Egyptian pyramids are far too impressive to have been accomplished by Africans, just like the massive geometric shapes and figures sprawled across the Nazca desert in Peru. 

It must have been aliens. 

These conspiracy theories cannot be divorced from the presence of white supremacy within actual sci-fi and fantasy stories. Norman Spinrad's critically acclaimed 1972 novel, The Iron Dream offers a metafictional alternative history of Adolf Hitler. In Spinrad's rendering, young Hitler immigrates to the U.S. in 1919 and becomes a successful writer-illustrator using sci-fi and fantasy as the vehicles for thinly veiled pro-fascist tales. The novel serves as a glaring indictment of the prevalence of racism and fascist ideology in sci-fi and fantasy works. 

This history is revealed in how non-human races, species, and automata are often conjured up as proxies for Black and other non-white folks in sci-fi and fantasy. It is seen in the indignant white anger and petulance that arise at the idea of Black mermaids, Black elves and dwarves, Black stormtroopers and jedi hunters, Black superheroes—especially ones meant to represent America—and even Black love interests in popular franchises. To many white viewers, these narratives belong to them, and them alone. 

Considering how integral sci-fi and fantasy narratives are to white supremacist mythology, and vice versa, it certainly follows that white audiences—in a society that celebrates theft through colonization— would want to claim ownership over these genres entirely. This, I believe, illustrates the fact that white supremacy is itself a sci-fi fantasy. 

Sci-fi and fantasy stories are not relegated to the screen or the pages of novels and comics. They are also created in the mind of the oppressor as a feature and function of white supremacy and fascism. In these conjurings, whether they be nostalgic longings for an idealized past or "prophetic" insights into the future, the insatiable desire for power is essential to white fantasy-making.

From the depths

At the end of World War II, Adolf Hitler and a group of his followers escaped judgment by descending into the Earth's interior through a secret passage at the South Pole where they have remained hidden for more than half a century. 

At least that's what some modern fascists and Hollow Earth conspiracy theorists believe; the Fourth Reich will someday rise from the depths. It's a theory fueled by occult lore that a number of Hitler's top advisors accepted as truth, and it's possible that even Hitler himself was a believer. According to the legend, the Earth is not only hollow but also home to an ancient master race descended from extraterrestrials who use supernatural force to sustain their subterranean empire. Many generations ago, the superior beings who emerged from the depths to pursue a life on the surface ultimately begat the "Aryan race." 

The theory mirrors a sci-fi fantasy epic—complete with ancient aliens, space travel, magic, and mysticism—because it is literally inspired by a sci-fi novel. It was not Jules Verne's 1864 classic Journey to the Center of the Earth, as one might expect, but a text called Vril: The Power of the Coming Race by the occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton that inspired the Nazi's fantastic "creation" myth. Published in 1871, the saga chronicles a race of magical superbeings who live at the center of the Earth, preparing to one day overtake the surface world. It's not difficult to trace the connection from Vril to Nazism in the decades following its publication. One writer explains:

"The myth of Vril was quickly co-opted by the same Victorian mystics who inspired it, then passed down into the hands of nativist German cults. One of them, the Thule Society, backed Hitler and the Nazis. After the war, writers both pro- and anti-Hitler theorized that, the Führer's impatience with occultists notwithstanding, something called the Vril Society had actually engineered his rise… A few influential Holocaust deniers celebrated the coming Fourth Reich, while more recent American writers have incorporated the theory into the right-wing, New World Order mainstream of conspiracy thought. In short: the Nazis and/or aliens are already here."

Cultish conspiracy theories of this kind can be found elsewhere in the modern world, even in a warm mug of Sleepytime Tea. The founder of the popular tea's parent company, Celestial Seasonings, is a staunch believer in the book of Urantia and infuses its teachings into the culture of the entire company. The Urantia Book, which is said to have magically appeared on Earth in the early 20th century, claims to be "an epochal revelation authored solely by celestial beings," who possessed the body of an anonymous man to put their words to the page. The text discusses mind control; offers an alternative history of Adam, Eve, Jesus, and other biblical characters—who are, of course, aliens; and heralds a fair-skinned "racial superiority order" that will "purify" Urantia (Earth) by eliminating "inferior races." 

As with the myth of the Mound Builders and ancient alien architects, proponents of the white supremacy mythos manufacture fantastical stories to explain their imagined superiority and the apparent necessity of fascist violence. In these narratives, they themselves become the heroes harboring a valuable secret knowledge which proves that white people, allegedly descended from highly advanced alien beings, are the original humans and saviors of the planet—the true Indigenous people. Evident rulers of the past and rightful rulers of the future. 

Back in time 

Nostalgia is a convenient form of time travel. A kind of agony that begs for a return to "something better." Neo-fascist ideology rests on the concept of white prosperity located somewhere in the past, but it is the promise of somehow restoring this prosperity that fuels its violence. This promise clearly echoes in the rallying cry to Make America Great Again; it reverberates in the modern Confederate mantra that "The South will rise again." Even the early 19th-century pseudo-religious reverence for the fictional Mound Builders was a form of nostalgic longing.

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia defines nostalgia as "a sentiment of loss and displacement" that is also "a romance with one's own phantasy." For Boym, nostalgia is located in a nebulous "time out of time," lodged somewhere "between personal and collective memory." But collective memory can be manipulated by gatekeeping education, censoring information, and promoting revisionist narratives—like denying a Holocaust, or burning a sexuality studies library, or banning undesirable books, or decimating a Slavery Remembrance Program.

Rather than being informed by historical truths, collective memory under fascism is instead formed by magical thinking and cultural amnesia. "Make America Great Again" and "The South will rise again" are, in essence, spells cast in hopes of restoration and forgetting. 

As Boym explains, "Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition." By its very nature, restorative nostalgia is immune to reason and attempts to set the historical record straight. It instead functions through internal logic and manufactured evidence of a past greatness that was somehow lost. 

This nostalgic desire to "restore" society to a romanticized "simpler time" thrives in the prevalence of medieval fantasy stories in modern popular culture. Medieval fantasies synthesize supernatural occurrences, magical creatures, mystic arts, and European folklore and set them against the backdrop of monarchies, feudal lords, and brutal archaic warfare. With these elements, medieval worlds of knighthood, wizardry, and dragons become opportune spaces for white supremacists to project their white power fantasies. 

A common misbelief about the European medieval period propels this particular thread of white fantasy-making. Central to the cultural understanding of this era is the idea that medieval Europe was a "pure, white, Christian place organized wholesomely around military resistance to outside, non-white, non-Christian, forces." This is the vision of medievalism that white supremacists worship, and why they model their fascist iconography after the Knights Templar and the Holy Roman Empire. 

However, their fantasy of the past is a false representation of the true racial makeup of the region during this era. Medieval literature professor Cord J. Whitaker identifies modern popular treatments of the Middle Ages, in both visual and literary arts which overlooked or intentionally removed non-white people, as the culprits behind the widely-held misconception of medieval racial homogeneity. 

"Many of those 19th-century texts were bound up with modern British and other European forms of colonialism and imperialism… They're very much bound up with naturalizing the idea that Europe is an ancestral homeland for Europeans, that it was homogeneously European in heritage, and that it should have power over the rest of the world."

But, again, restorative nostalgia cares not for historical accuracy. From the fictive histories of Urantia and Hollow Earth Nazis to the Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons of the KKK—a cabal mired in rituals, rites, and incantations whose members are referred to as Knights—the language, symbolism, and tropes of fantasy and nostalgia abound in fascist circles. As they hope for a future of racial purity, they continually look back in time in search of a utopia they will never find. 

Across the universe 

While the perverse imaginary can be weaponized to promote and sustain white supremacy, imagination can also be used to resist it.

In 1977, a Black Vietnam vet named Cory Moore casually entered a police station and immediately fired three warning shots. He would go on to hold the police captain hostage in his own office for more than 40 hours. During that time, he presented his demands. Moore wanted President Jimmy Carter to issue an apology to all Black Americans on national television and properly address the "misdeeds of whites against blacks since 1619." 

He also wanted all white people to burn their money and leave the Earth within seven days.

This mass exodus dreamed up by Moore is truly a sci-fi fantasy for the ages; a far cry from the stories white folks have been telling about themselves for centuries. Rather than being the conquerors or rightful inheritors of the Earth, the white people in Moore's reverie are bankrupted and exiled from the planet so that all others can prosper. 

Moore, of course, was considered insane, arrested, and convicted on kidnapping charges. In the white imagination, his audacity was inconceivable, his demands were absurd, and his assuredness was disquieting. To offer a different perspective, however, I see Moore's venture, though daunting, as fair and feasible within the context of his lived reality.  

In the intro of "Black to the Future," a collection of interviews with Black cultural and sci-fi writers, Mark Dery theorized that Black folks descended from slaves "inhabit a sci-fi nightmare." During his subsequent interview, beloved Black cultural critic Greg Tate also succinctly observed that, "Being Black in America is a science fiction experience." Indeed, our ancestors were abducted, enslaved, and experimented on by pale-skinned alien invaders and were regarded by them as a different species entirely, ultimately forced to live out the remainder of their lives in a strange new world. That is to say, Moore was already living in a sci-fi nightmare when he walked into that police station with a loaded gun and aspirations of banishing all white people to outer space.

Moreover, Moore's protest came less than a decade after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The space race had dominated U.S. media and fueled the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. While much of the nation celebrated and marveled at the achievement, others offered critique from a disenfranchised perspective, like jazz poet and bluesologist Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon." 

"I can't pay no doctor bills
But whitey's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While whitey's on the moon" 

All in all, white people in space was not so far outside the realm of possibility in the social consciousness of 1977. In fact, it was more plausible than the thought of the U.S. President apologizing for centuries of systematic violence against Black people, especially on national television. 

I often wonder what Cory Moore would think of white people's attempts at leaving the planet now. Voluntarily, no less. As one wealth hoarder feeds an obsession with creating "American superiority in space," another competes with other wealth hoarders to industrialize, privatize, and colonize space. They are indeed reaching for the stars. 

Given the various myths of the white race's extraterrestrial origins, one could conceive of this as their attempt to return home. One might even fantasize about all the oligarchs and fascists rocketing into the great beyond and across the universe, one by one, and stewardship of the land returning to the hands of the Indigenous peoples of Earth. One could imagine. 

When Moore was asked why he had taken such drastic action, he answered, "To free my people." Moore's demands—his indictment of white apathy, his imaginative resistance—resonate still. He understood that for Black people to have a world where we can be free, it would have to be a world without white supremacy. For him, and in truth, that meant the entire planet would have to be free of whiteness itself. That meant writing a sci-fi fantasy of his own to combat white supremacist logic, culture, and violence that created his sci-fi nightmare. 

Again and again, stories indistinguishable from sci-fi and fantasy narratives are used to justify fascist endeavors and uphold white supremacist understandings of race, history, indigeneity, colonization, and the world at large. But we have also written our own stories in disruption of their fantasies: 

When the enslaved rose up and killed their alien abductors, as they did during Nat Turner's insurrection. Or when Black folks escaped plantations to build free, autonomous communities and plot rebellion in the Great Dismal Swamp, or traversed the Underground Railroad under the careful watch of Harriet Tubman. When Octavia Butler distilled her knowledge of the past into her Parables to deliver a warning and prepare us for a future now unfolding. When Cory Moore served his eviction notice. Each of these was imaginative resistance at work. 

In order to realize a better world, one must first imagine it. 

In truth, Moore simply asked: If white people could use their various fictions to create our material conditions, our real-life horrors, why couldn't he do the same? Why couldn't he imagine sending white people (back) to the stars and write their cosmic journey into existence? Why couldn't he write a fiction and have his fiction become a reality, too? The mythology of white supremacy has existed for millennia, and Cory Moore simply felt it was about damn time we write a different story.