Scholarship on post–World War II rightwing movements and ideologies has exploded in recent years, and a growing trend among US, European, South American, and South African researchers is to analyze far-right extremists within international networks and contexts. Historians have found that leaders of even the most nationalistic groups diligently monitored foreign affairs. Postwar decolonization and liberation movements and the waxing and waning of Cold War tensions powerfully shaped rightwing organizers, some of whom looked to their contemporaries abroad for models, allies, and even members. This was particularly true of white supremacists, who typically stood at or beyond the rightward edge of acceptable political discourse in their home countries after World War II. The United States was a major hub of international far-right networks, scholarship on which traditionally focuses on periods after 1970. Yet international white supremacist networks did not so much emerge, as evolve, during the late-twentieth century. Whether focusing on the late 1940s or late 1990s, scholars looking for links between US white supremacists and their contemporaries in Europe, Latin America, or southern Africa typically find those connections. Far-right organizers in the United States have long influenced—and been influenced by—white extremists overseas, and scholarly and popular interest in their entangled histories continues to grow.

This panel brings together scholars interrogating connections between US white supremacist ideologies and groups and their contemporaries in Europe, southern Africa, and South America. Together, the presenters assess international far-right organizing on four continents between the 1940s and the 1990s. They also highlight several approaches that provide distinct insights in the history of post–World War II white supremacist networks. Anna Duensing shows how anti-fascist and fascist commentators in the United States and US-occupied West Germany challenge the scholarly consensus that Nazi Germany’s 1945 defeat represented a new departure in the history of international far-right organizing. Robert Billups assesses Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activity in Chile and Argentina during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He argues that South American KKK chapters were largely a byproduct of the malleability of Cold War anticommunism, which allowed for several points of connection between far-right “anticommunists” in the US South and South America. Jack Young emphasizes that Christianity was another important linkage between US rightwing extremists and their contemporaries. White ministers, mercenaries, and lobbyists in the United States helped prop up the rogue Rhodesian state between 1965 and 1980, and this Rhodesian religious lobby leveraged Christianity to justify supporting a white supremacist government. Finally, as Michelle Lynn Kahn explains, some white supremacists in the late-twentieth-century United States and Germany, looking to the southern Confederacy and Nazi Germany as antecedents, bonded over shared notions of a “Lost Cause.” By offering these examples and approaches, panelists will demonstrate the numerous ways that post–World War II white supremacists forged overseas connections and suggest areas for further research on international far-right organizing.