Joseph Tommasi

Joseph Charles Tommasi (April 15, 1951 – August 15, 1975) was an American neo-Nazi who led the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), an openly terroristic neo-Nazi group. A former member of the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), he was removed from that group for unclear reasons in 1973. He was known for his radical views and explicit advocacy of violent action, which put him at odds with most other neo-Nazis of the time. Tommasi was murdered by a member of the NSWPP in 1975, at the age of 24. He continues to ideologically influence neo-Nazis.

Tommasi officially joined the National Socialist White People's Party at the age of 17, becoming the leader of their Californian branch. In 1971, Tommasi was offered several thousand dollars from the Committee to Re-elect the President as part of a plan to help Richard Nixon win the 1972 presidential election by getting George Wallace removed from the California ballot. When Tommasi was paid less than he was initially offered, he spoke out about the deal to the press, contributing to a media scandal. Tommasi's behavior was sometimes controversial among his associates, and he was known to flout the behavioral norms of neo-Nazis.

When the NSWPP's leader Matt Koehl suspended Tommasi from the organization in 1973, Tommasi proceeded to found the NSLF as an independent organization with a far more militant ideology. Members of the NSLF committed or took credit for several bombings, shootings, and arsons. The NSLF also distributed propaganda, including the periodical Siege. On August 15, 1975, Tommasi was fatally shot by NSWPP member Jerry Jones after a dispute at the NSWPP's local headquarters. Jones was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 300 days in jail. The NSLF continued for a few years under different leaders, with Tommasi immediately succeeded as leader by David Rust, before it disbanded in 1986.

Tommasi rejected conservatism and the social norms of most contemporary neo-Nazis, declaring himself a revolutionary and embracing elements of the counterculture. He advocated armed guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government, and was in favor of anarchy and lawlessness so that the "system" could be attacked without protection. Tommasi was an early proponent of neo-Nazi accelerationism and lone wolf terrorism, and he also influenced the development of the neo-Nazi conception of the leaderless resistance tactic. Many neo-Nazis saw Tommasi as a martyr after his death. Based on a revival of Tommasi's Siege periodical, his associate James Mason wrote the influential neo-Nazi book Siege, which celebrates Tommasi and includes many of his writings.

Early life

Joseph Charles Tommasi was born April 15, 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. (Some sources say he was born in Virginia.) According to both the FBI, and an article that contained an interview with Tommasi, He described his parents as middle class and conservative. His interest in Nazism began after a research project on Nazi Germany in the eighth grade. He stated his ideology was "self-afflicted" and that he believed he was born a Nazi.

Tommasi was raised in El Monte, California, and attended El Monte High School. He did not join any clubs at the school, but was in the school band as a trumpet player. In December 1966, when Tommasi was 15, he was recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as attending a meeting of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP). His parents greatly disapproved of his beliefs. When he was a sophomore, his parents learned that he was a neo-Nazi when they saw him on television attending a Nazi demonstration. In response, they moved cities to Walnut, California, to keep him away from the party. This failed to dissuade him. Charges were later dropped due to a lack of evidence.

Committee to Re-elect the President involvement In November 1971, Tommasi was offered from Richard Nixon's election fundraising group, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), to help them get George Wallace's American Independent Party (AIP) removed from the Californian ballot in the 1972 presidential election. The CRP feared that Wallace would split the vote in a 3-way race, and believed that if he was not an option his prospective voters would go for Nixon. The goal was to get the AIP's numbers either below 11,000 or less than 1/15th of 1% of all registered voters in the state. This initially resulted in only local news reports, but after the reveal of the Watergate scandal and CRP's involvement in it, the story made national news, including in The New York Times. Hugh W. Sloan Jr. testified about the plan to the United States Senate Watergate Committee,

The NSLF took credit for several bombings, arsons, and shootings. There was a surface NSLF which numbered about forty, and a core group of members committed to lone wolf violence (about four people), who committed illegal acts. In February 1975, they teargassed a rally to re-open the Rosenberg case and bombed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) headquarters two days later. The NSLF targeted the SWP on several times. Interviewed about the bombing of the SWP, Tommasi said that he could not deny involvement, though he also refused to say they were certainly involved. He admitted to the teargassing, which he called a success. They continued to target the SWP, and in response, the SWP criticized the police for failing to take action against the NSLF. As a result of the bombings, Tommasi came under heavy police surveillance. He was sentenced to 300 days in the county jail and placed on probation. He was released on time served. Bingham was initially charged with assault with a deadly weapon, but the charges were dropped.

Martin Kerr was quoted in the aftermath as saying that though the NSWPP "regret[ted] the incident", Tommasi had "got[ten] exactly what he deserved". Kerr blamed him for a campaign of attacks against the NSWPP, including a firebombing and a shooting, and called Tommasi's death "the result of two years of effort by Tommasi to destroy [the NSWPP]". In 1971, he called Adolf Hitler "the greatest man ever to set foot on this earth"; in an interview with a local journalist, he denied the Holocaust, but also said that if it had happened he would not care.

Tommasi rejected conservatism and embraced elements of the counterculture, describing himself as a revolutionary rather than a conservative. He believed conservatism was paralyzing the neo-Nazi movement, and rejected the "mass-action" strategy that had previously been practiced (the idea that they could ever win the public over to their side), as he believed this did not allow for genuine anti-state acts. He viewed the idea of creating a Nazi party in the United States with mass appeal to be "absurd", concluding in "Building the Revolutionary Party" that "National Socialist activities have never produced one significant political result in the U.S.A." In "Building the Revolutionary Party," Tommasi incorporated many of the New Left's theories on violent action and tactics; he wrote that "we will not make our most eloquent statement in courtrooms and at press conferences, but in the streets of Jew-Capitalist America".

In "Strategy for Revolution", Tommasi wrote that "The White Man has lost!" and that, as an "occupied people", they must "develop a totally different outlook". Hence, he rejected the mass strategy and instead advocated underground guerrilla warfare; if they could not obtain political power through elections, he said that they should focus on "hurting the Enemy through force and violence". An early proponent of the concept of accelerationism, he advocated the use of violence and chaos to heighten the tensions in society to bring about a revolution. He argued that neo-Nazis should "pray for victory and not an end to slaughter" and promoted anarchy and lawlessness so that white racist activists could "plunge the entire System to its death".

In either 1973 or 1974, Tommasi created the "Political Terror" flyer. It featured a .38 pistol and a swastika, and read:

This poster became famous among neo-Nazis and the NSLF's signature flyer. This poster was left at the scene of some of the NSLF's terrorist acts, and was reused by other white supremacists for decades after Tommasi's death. It was adopted by James Mason, as well as a variety of other white supremacist groups, including the American Front and the Abraxas Foundation. The flyer also made an appearance in the 1999 film Arlington Road.

Legacy Despite his early death, Tommasi left a substantial impact on the neo-Nazi movement. Spencer Sunshine argued that Tommasi's NSLF "played an important role in prying open neo-Nazism from the approach that had been in place for the 15 years since the founding of the American Nazi Party." Tommasi played a significant role in the development of the neo-Nazi conception of the leaderless resistance tactic, and he was an early advocate of far-right lone wolf terrorism. Scholars Bethan Johnson and Matthew Feldman noted the NSLF as "perhaps the first openly terroristic neo-Nazi cell in the US". The academic Jeffrey Kaplan argued that, had he not been murdered, Tommasi "may well be recognized as one of the three most important American National Socialists of the postwar era, in the company of George Lincoln Rockwell and William Pierce".

Kaplan said that Tommasi was one of the few neo-Nazis with leadership abilities since Rockwell, and one of the first to recognize that the "mass action" idea was, "short of an apocalyptic social collapse, simply not going to happen". Kaplan argued that Tommasi "marked the first attempt to adapt the stereotypical Nazi subculture of the 1950s to the youth culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s". He also described Tommasi and his ideology as living on in the "spirit" of Pierce's 1989 novel Hunter, the successor to Pierce's earlier novel The Turner Diaries. White supremacist Tom Metzger retrospectively praised Tommasi in the 1980s, writing that he had been "light years ahead of most of us at that time". Tommasi was treated as a martyr by other neo-Nazis, who revered him after his passing. The NSLF sold lithographs of him and the units of several Nazi movements took his name.

The California NSWPP moved their headquarters out of El Monte after Tommasi's death. Tommasi was succeeded as leader of the NSLF by David Rust. Rust continued the militant practices, aiming to make the group more militant than Tommasi, engaging in more attacks. In 1977, Rust was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly plotting to kill Jerry Jones; he was ultimately sentenced to two years in prison for possessing an unlicensed silencer. In August 1977, as required by his probation, Rust ordered the group be disbanded. Tommasi's associate James Mason attempted to convince Rust to merge the NSLF with the National Socialist Movement (NSM). Rust refused but ordered all remaining NSLF units to coordinate with Mason. The NSM held a memorial rally for Tommasi in 1976. Despite ordering the group be disbanded, by this time, Rust had already been replaced as NSLF leader by John Harry Duffy, who led the group from 1977 to early 1981.

Mason revived the Siege periodical as his own effort in 1980, which he used to call for violent acts. Mason was dissatisfied with the direction Duffy's successor, Karl Hand, took the party: a more standard, non-militant direction, with uniformed political demonstrations and legality. In 1982, Hand and Mason agreed to split the group, and Mason took a splinter group to form the Universal Order, a group that promoted the ideas of Charles Manson as a continuation of Nazism, and took with him the periodical Siege. The NSLF finally came to an end in 1986 when Hand was convicted of attempted murder (stemming not from neo-Nazism, but rather a personal dispute with his neighbor). Hand then wrote a letter declaring his intention to merge the remainders of the NSLF with Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance. The NSLF became defunct.

Tommasi was a significant political influence on Mason, who reprinted his materials and used him as the cover of several periodicals he wrote for over the ensuing years. According to Sunshine, Mason "built a cult" around Tommasi, following his death. Mason's revival periodical was later collected into the influential neo-Nazi book Siege. Tommasi was celebrated in the resurrected Siege, and it included many of Tommasi's writings and NSLF documents. The originally planned cover of Siege featured Tommasi, though this was changed before its publication. Much of Siege is devoted to Tommasi; 40 pages of the book reference Tommasi, and many of the book's images involve him. In the 2010s, Tommasi was an ideological influence on the neo-Nazi terrorist group the Atomwaffen Division, who took influence from Mason, and Tommasi frequently appears in "Siege Culture" propaganda inspired by Mason's book.