After the release of Braveheart, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, that tracks hate groups in the United States and prosecutes them, identified the film as being extremely popular among certain white supremacist groups and neoConfederates. One such fan of the film is Louis Beam, a former Ku Klux Klan leader from Texas.96 Beam predicted that the film “may well become a movement piece de resistance for Christian Patriots.”97 Euan Hague has noted that right-wing organizations in the southern United States have also attempted to link Gibson’s Wallace with the founder of the Klan: “In 1996, Clyde Wilson, a director of the right wing secessionist neo-Confederate organization the League of the South, told delegates at his political movement’s annual conference to ‘Imagine the film of our Braveheart: The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest.’”98 In an analysis of neo-Confederate behavior and attitudes in the South, the SPLC identifies certain Celtic traits that many white supremacists and neo-Confederates would like to appropriate. They see Gibson’s film as a perfect source:
Popular films like Braveheart have been interpreted by neo-Confederates as mirror images of their own struggles and proponents of the Celtic South thesis simplistically conflate Confederate with Celtic. Within this interpretation, Celtic culture is assumed to be genetic and evidence of supposedly Celtic behavior (fighting, drinking, emotional reactions, clannishness, disdain for authority, etc.) is taken as proof of Celtic ancestry. In turn, Celtic ancestry legitimates these supposedly Celtic behaviors, practices that are typically understood to be unchanged since the Bronze
Age. This Celtic culture and ethnicity is understood by neo-Confederates to be under attack from a mainstream U. S. policy that favors non-white ethnicities over others. Proponents maintain that malevolent actors are deliberately committing “cultural genocide” against the “Anglo-Celtic” white southern population. Invoking the language of multiculturalism and self-determination, neo-Confederates demand the right to pursue and preserve their own culture in their own communities. When coupled with neo-Confederate beliefs about the ideal unit of self-governance, the result is an intellectualized argument for racially homogeneous and ethnically segregated self-sufficient communities.
One of the most troubling aspects of neo-Confederacy is how proponents understand the relationship between culture and ethnicity. What is lauded in the “Anglo-Celtic” population (e. g. violent masculinity) is derided in other ethnic groups, particularly those of African descent. Neo-Confederacy proposes the antiquated position that cultures do not change over time. The behaviors of “Celtic” peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth century British Isles are understood to have been transmitted intact to the southern states of the U. S.A.99
Colin McArthur is quick to remind us that not all of those living within the southern United States share this hatred and that reports such as the one above “have a tendency to over-dramatize the American appropriation of Braveheart by concentrating on its being embraced by the most extreme of the Southern groups. . . . What tends to be elided is the diversity of the ‘real’ South.”100 However, Mark Potok, director of the SPLC, states that the Klan is not the only hate group in the United States that has used the film for nefarious means. Militia groups have also grown attached to the film: “That film is on the shelf of every white supremacist in America. . . . The Christian Identity and Klan groups have always believed the Celts are the most racially pure, but the neo-Nazis, by definition not Christian, really got into Scotland after Braveheart. Now it’s often a focal point for discussions.”101
World History
