The story behind the NZ book fanning hate around the world

A book cited by terrorists, beloved by Satanists and screamed about at KKK rallies was written in New Zealand. Joel MacManus reports.

The final hours of Santino Legan’s life were filled with anger and hatred. On July 28, 2019, the 19-year-old stormed the Gilroy Garlic Festival near San Jose, California, killing three people and injuring 19.

As he drove to the festival, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and six high-capacity magazines, he made a series of Instagram posts lashing out at the world around him.

The last thing he ever posted on the internet was a book recommendation: ‘‘Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.’’

He wasn’t alone. Those words have been uttered countless times in the darkest corners of the internet.

On 4chan, 8chan and Stormfront, angry young men push it onto other angry young men, claiming it will change their lives and open their eyes.

The book reads pretty much how you would expect, given its fanbase: furious rants about how white people are superior and women should be subservient, encouraging violence and rebellion.

Might is Right never had any mainstream publishing success, but for 130 years it has survived and thrived in the shadows. It has been cited by terrorists, screamed at Ku Klux Klan rallies, and become the bible for an entire religion.

The book’s author, Ragnar Redbeard, has always had an air of mystery around his identity. That’s just the way his biggest fans like it. The intrigue adds to his allure, helping to grow his legend.

But it’s not true. Historians know who Ragnar Redbeard was. His real name was Arthur Desmond, a failed politician from Napier, New Zealand. And until recently his book was still available to buy here.

This is the story of what may be New Zealand’s most notorious book.

Arthur Desmond lived his life on the run. He constantly got himself in legal trouble, forcing him to flee to new cities and countries and adopt new identities.

He had humble beginnings and first appears in the annals of history as a farm labourer in Hawke’s Bay.

‘‘He came from a very modest background,’’ says historian Mark Derby, who wrote Desmond’s biography. ‘‘He had no education, no personal assets, no skills at anything in particular, and yet he dreamed of becoming an all powerful leader.’’

Desmond ran for parliament twice in Hawke’s Bay, in 1884 and 1887. He got 190 votes on his first attempt, and three years later built that up into 562 – enough for a respectable third place. His rhetoric was extreme, but his politics were fairly normal. He was a democratic socialist who advocated for the poor and attacked rich and powerful land barons as corrupt and unfair.

Things went wrong for Desmond when he came out in support of Te Kooti, the Ma¯ ori rebel leader who had orchestrated an attack on Matawhero, on the outskirts of Gisborne, which killed 54 people.

Other Pa¯ keha¯ beat him in the streets for his views. It’s not clear exactly why Desmond admired Te Kooti so much. Derby thinks it was because of the fear he inspired.

‘‘Desmond wanted to be that person himself. He didn’t want to compromise, be beaten. He wanted to grab what he wanted and take it by force,’’ Derby says.

Despised and rejected in Hawke’s Bay, he ran away to Auckland, where he gained some prominence in the union movement, but got himself in legal trouble after forging letters by a local politician.

He then scuttled away to Sydney and became heavily involved in socialist circles and the Labor Party, for whom he was almost selected as a candidate for parliament.

But once again, he was forced to flee. He had been publishing a newspaper called Hard Cash, which spread false rumours about Sydney banks. Two of his co-publishers were jailed for their work, but Desmond apparently received an early tipoff that the police were after him. He left the country immediately.

Thousands of kilometres away, in Chicago, Desmond stepped ashore and set on once again rebuilding his life. He brought with him the manuscript for the first edition of Might is Right, published in 1896 by Auditorium Press.

An advertisement for the book called it ‘‘the only book of its kind ever printed’’. It’s not an inaccurate claim.

Might is Right doesn’t argue for a particular political ideology or morality. It argues against the entire concept of morality itself, claiming that morals don’t exist except in our own minds and that therefore there is no inherent benefit in being a good person or doing the right thing.

Because Desmond believed there was no such thing as ‘‘good’’, the only people he respected were those who were physically strong and powerful and could make everyone else do what they wanted.

His ideas got confusingly contradictory as he claimed that nonwhite people were inferior and women should be considered the property of men, but also that it shouldn’t matter what race or gender someone was, as long as they were powerful and strong.

‘‘To me, it’s a completely incoherent, completely irrational, completely contradictory world view and I cannot make head nor tail of it really,’’ Derby says.

‘‘A lot of it reads as if it were dictated at speed from the bottom of a whisky bottle. The fact is that he was a total loser, frankly. As far as I’m concerned he’s an embarrassment to this country.’’

The first audience to adopt Might is Right were egoist anarchists, a movement on the political fringe, which was growing in popularity at the time thanks to the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Desmond sent a copy of Might is Right to Leo Tolstoy, probably the most highlyregarded writer of the day.

‘‘He believed that he was one of the great writers of the age and he desperately wanted to be seen that way. He assumed that Tolstoy would regard him as an equal,’’ Derby says.

‘‘Tolstoy was horrified by it, he was disgusted by it, he didn’t speak well of him at all.’’

To Tolstoy, the book represented everything that was wrong with the selfcentred upper class of society. But that didn’t seem to matter to Desmond, just being mentioned by Tolstoy was enough to boost his stature.

He went around telling people he was a close friend of Tolstoy. He made the same claim about New Zealand Governor Sir George Grey. At one point, he claimed to have a Doctorate of Laws from the University of Chicago, a degree which wasn’t even offered at the time.

He spread enough rumours about himself for his book to go through at least seven print runs in his lifetime. The 1927 edition, produced by the Dil Pickle Club, seems to be the last edition published in Desmond’s lifetime, although the exact date, location or cause of his death is unknown.

The book lay dormant for several decades after that, old copies being passed around outsiders and radical thinkers, until it made its way into the hands of Anton LaVey, a popular musician and selfproclaimed psychic living in San Francisco.

LaVey first encountered the book in 1957, when he found an old copy in a secondhand bookstore. He was immediately obsessed.

In 1966, LaVey founded the Church of Satan, declaring himself high priest. He would became known as The Black Pope and The Satanic Bible, which he wrote in 1969, contained entire chapters plagiarised from the pages of Might is Right. Satanism took off quickly, thanks to LaVey’s talent for turning Satanic rituals into media stunts.

The Satanic Bible has gone through

‘‘Tolstoy was horrified by it, he was disgusted by it, he didn’t speak well of him at all.’’ Mark Derby, right