Making a Fascist Family: Spearhead and the Attempt to Build a Nationalist Community Through Magazine Print Culture

Abstract

This article examines the role played by magazines in the sustaining, recruiting, defining, and defending of a nationalist community within the British far right. In particular, it focuses on John Tyndall’s Spearhead magazine during its period of support for the National Front, perhaps the most prominent and broad-based nationalist movement of the post-war period in Britain. By examining how Spearhead spoke about several key issues – women, homosexuality and faith – the article shows the way magazines bind together a disparate movement that is often small and spread over a geographical distance into a community. Further, the article contends that due to the ostracization from the mainstream that such extreme communities foster, that such communities move beyond surface connections and into para-familial bonds. In making this argument, the article considers the ways that the community is framed around threat and a conspiratorial world war to encourage prioritisation of the nationalist identity and its community, and how the bonds to the nationalist community are deepened through the development of a cultic milieu through the offer of a hidden or sacred truth.