Emergence of Irish-American neo-Nazis is no surprise

“South Boston shines in St Patrick’s Day parade,” read the Boston Globe’s coverage of this year’s St Patrick’s Day parade. In the same article, I could not help but notice a picture of Boston mayor Michelle Wu and Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker marching through the parade – directly in front of a group of neo-Nazis.

The group is called NSC-131 New England, and they were standing among the crowd watching the parade holding a sign that read “Keep Boston Irish”, decorated with the white supremacist version of the Celtic Cross.

Waltham Night’s Watch, which documents hate groups, hate crimes and far-right activity in greater Boston, describes NSC-131 New England as “a neo-Nazi group founded in early 2020 and based in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. It is an autonomous affiliate of [the] Nationalist Social Club, which has been recognised by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. ‘Nationalist Social Club’ is a play on the official name of the original Nazi party in Germany, and ‘131’ stands for ‘anti-communist action’.”

The presence of Nazis at the St Patrick's Day parade is a reminder of fascism's upsurge

NSC-131’s activities mostly include graffiti, stickering and publicly unfurling racist banners. On St Patrick’s Day, it was about preserving Boston’s white racial “purity”. In February, it was an ominous threat that “white patience has limits”. In recent months, NSC-131 has demonstrated outside of the New England Holocaust Memorial, bragged about attending the January 6th Capitol riot, and targeted doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for advancing racial justice in medicine.

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NSC-131 recently made national headlines for “interrupting” a reading of The Communist Manifesto at a community library in Providence, Rhode Island, but the rise of Nazism has hardly been taken seriously by most of the US media. Even the New York Times seemed to obscure NSC-131’s Nazism, recollecting in a tweet that the reading was interrupted when “a group of people carrying a flag with a swastika banged on the windows and shouted slurs”.

They could have saved some characters and simply called NSC-131 what they are: Nazis. Local coverage of NSC-131’s appearance at the St Patrick’s Day parade took several days to appear in Boston’s mainstream media outlets. This lack of coverage does not match the scale of the Nazi threat; in fact, it enables its growth.

So, why were these Nazis at the Boston St Patrick’s Day parade? The evident answer is that NSC-131 felt comfortable there. Its members appeared completely unbothered, even joking, “what are you, antifa?” to someone who walked by filming.

NSC-131 did not think its racism would be challenged by the parade’s other spectators, and it was largely right. As Lauren Pespisa, who closely follows the rise of far-right groups with her husband Rod Webber, and showed up to protest NSC-131, told Irish Central, “It’s an embarrassment to Boston that it took Rod and me to drive them out, not the hundreds of people at the parade who saw them.”

I have never heard of Nazis joining the Dot Day parade, the Dominican festival, or the Caribbean American Carnival, events that centre Boston’s communities of colour. Celebrating St Patrick’s Day is not inherently bad by any means, but one can see why Nazis would feel more inclined to attend an event centred around white people, which includes celebration of the Boston Police Department, in an Irish-American community with a history of violent racism towards Boston’s black communities.

The presence of Nazis at the St Patrick’s Day parade is a reminder of fascism’s upsurge. But it also shows the complex contradictions that exist between the Irish people and diaspora, underscoring the hypocrisy of Irish-Americans who embrace any form of fascism, racism or colonialism.

The Irish people’s revolutionary struggle for independence is completely antithetical to the diaspora’s reactionary tendencies. Irish socialist revolutionary, Bernadette Devlin, summed this up well in an interview after visiting Boston in 1979: “There is nothing sadder to people struggling against oppression in Ireland [than] to look towards Boston city and see our people . . . being used to oppress the black people of this city . . . If [Irish-Americans] really understood what was happening in Ireland, they would get themselves sorted out and stand on the right side here, because we identify very closely in our struggle for equality and our struggle for oppression.

Upon arrival to the US, Irish immigrants' relationship to colonialism shifted. They went from being colonised to partaking, directly or indirectly, in the colonisation of others

“In fact, the whole inspiration for our civil rights movement 10 years ago came from the black movement of America. And it looks to us where we stand at home that our people are being oppressed with the act of assistance from our people. We find that very sad.”

The conquest of Ireland set a paradigm for British colonisation and the plantation economy in the US colonies in particular. But upon arrival to the US, Irish immigrants’ relationship to colonialism shifted. They went from being colonised to partaking, directly or indirectly, in the colonisation of others. They escaped military occupation, feudal exploitation and police brutality only for them, or their descendants, to assimilate into the “new” colonial power structure and partake in those same oppressive systems within the US.

We do not know how many of the NSC-131 members at the St Patrick’s Day parade were of Irish descent. But if we can understand the symbiosis between American white supremacy and Nazi movements, and the history of Irish-American assimilation as a means of socioeconomic mobility, then we can understand why Nazism might appeal to an Irish-American, or why Nazis might want to “keep Boston Irish”.

And if we understand Irish history in its totality we can see the most glaring hypocrisy and betrayal in that appeal.

Calla Walsh is an Irish-American political organiser and activist from Cambridge, Massachusetts