Appeals to Nostalgia & Shame for a New 'Ethno-State' | Rolling Stone

 

www.rollingstone.com

Nazis Want to Turn New England Into a White Ethnostate

Tim Dickinson

12 - 16 minutes

---

Skip to main content

These Nazis Want to Turn New England Into a White Ethnostate

White supremacists are calling for a “peaceful separation” from the United States — and a ban on people of color moving to New England

Men wearing "Nationalist Social Club 131" (NSC 131) shirts hold a neo-Nazi flag. Brian Snyder /REUTERS/Redux

A neo-Nazi front group is demanding that New England secede and establish itself as a white nation. Decrying “enemies” that are “all around us” and vowing to defend racial “integrity,” the People’s Initiative of New England published a revolutionary manifesto on July 27 advocating “separation from the United States of America.” 

PINE is a creation of the neo-Nazi organization NSC-131. While the latter functions outside of the political system, with often violent street confrontations and stiff-arm, heil-Hitler salutes, PINE is intended to give those same toxic political beliefs a more palatable political framework. If NCS-131 exists to shock, PINE is an effort to seduce — tempting far-right conservatives into explicitly white-nationalist politics.

The PINE document appeals to nostalgia and shame. “Our people, who once built the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen, have been embarrassed, sold out and demoralized.” It alleges that the “only option” is to establish a “sovereign and unified New England” and thereby “set an example for revolutionaries everywhere.” In a nation where a previous secession attempt by racists sparked the bloodshed of the Civil War, PINE fancifully imagines a “peaceful separation.”

The call for a New England ethnostate — posted to Substack — marks a coming out for PINE, or what it calls its “formal introduction.” The initiative was quietly launched in April by NSC-131, also known as Nationalist Social Club-Anti-Communist Action.