Welcome to Leith

Every society in the world is composed largely of reactionaries mentally stunted to the level of dark age loyalism to some kind of big lie, who long for a world simple enough for their feeble minds to grasp. Given a chance, the masses will gladly degrade us all back to our natural state as apes scrabbling through the underbrush for a brief, miserable existence of starvation and maulings. These multitudes cannot be reasoned with, but only gradually bribed into acceptance of progress through the material comforts supplied by scientific advancement.

Religion embodies such mentality best, but some choose different facets of tribalism and anti-intellectualism, yielding such odd beasts as royalists or anarcho-primitivists. Racial purity makes a particularly nonsensical such shibboleth due to its pretense of "scientific" misappropriation of eugenics. Never mind that if you were trying to select for Homo superior, your last concern would be for nose or eye shape or skin tones. Even the briefest glance at history shows the various geographic regions have at various times easily demonstrated their capacity for inter-tribal one-upmanship. Still, though every extended family must at least suffer that one crazy aunt glancing cross-eyed at your new girlfriend and muttering how you should find yourself "one of our own" nonetheless true racial separatists find little traction in most modern societies. To call them "fringe" might unduly minimize fringes.

Once in a while they'll make the news, usually for beating some unlucky sap to death for daring to eyeball a "sister" of the wrong skin color. Or for conquering some neighbourhood, such as the attempted white nationalist takeover of Leith, North Dakota in the early 2010s, documented quite adeptly in the film Welcome to Leith. Don't worry if you've never heard of the little hamlet, given its twenty-strong population. That the white nationalists even set their sights so high speaks volumes as to their fearsome political clout in today's America. Their plan was to buy up land, move into the town en-masse, take over the local government, then presumably set up their utopian society of tanning salons and freckle research. It was arguably dampened by their fearless leader's arrest for threatening the locals with firearms. One can't blame said locals for getting a bit tetchy about such intimidation tactics, and the documentary does quite a masterful job of chronicling the growing tension between the two factions of this minute North American backwater. More masterful, perhaps, than most audiences would prefer.

The moralistic angle of the story would seem to write itself: evil racists invade tiny community of plucky underdogs, and the good guys finally win. However, uncharacteristically for social historians, the film-makers maintained their observational neutrality, so their result was much more realistically confused. Despite their leader's fervour, only a handful of white nationalists bought land in Leith, and only one family proved dedicated enough to bleaching the world to actually relocate to a one-horse town in North-fucking-Dakota. However many other voices chanted along with their insanity on the internet... stayed on the internet. They were, in effect, fair weather racists. (Or in prison.) (Or both.) They're desperate incompetents seeking an excuse for living, some intrinsic, unassailable faith they can boast in the absence of any personal qualities.

Yet despite the ultimately hollow nature of the threat, the townsfolk of Leith did their part in escalating the tension which made this documentary so watchable. Just don't expect most film critics to acknowledge that angle. They'd rather ignore the many scenes of true-blue, red-blooded, salt-of-the-earth non-racists psyching themselves into paranoia over the imminent invasion. Focusing entirely on the invaders' moral failings (and ignoring how toothless their boasts have become) half the reviewers out there somehow fail to notice the half of the movie displaying Leith's stalwart protectors beginning to go around armed to the teeth, strutting about itching for confrontation against unambiguous villainy. Because, in the cause celebre which happened to land in their laps, they have themselves found an atavistic tribal conflict to allow them to play the victims and/or heroes. They have found something simple enough for them to understand.

Ideological purity makes a particularly nonsensical such shibboleth due to its pretense of...