Until late last year, Ireland seemed like an outlier among European nations in remaining relatively immune from anti-immigrant bigotry and far-right politics, despite waves of recent migration from Ukraine, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere — a startling cultural shift in a country better known for centuries of poverty, repression and large-scale emigration.
Well, not anymore. There is still no significant far-right party in Irish politics, but the illusion of social harmony was shattered last Nov. 23, when an anti-immigrant protest in Dublin erupted into a night of violent riots that made worldwide headlines. A mob of perhaps 500 people surged through the central city for hours, looting and vandalizing shops and setting fire to buses, a light-rail tram and police cars.
The inciting incident was understandably disturbing, especially in a society with relatively little violent crime: A homeless man, initially but incorrectly identified as an undocumented immigrant, seriously injured a five-year-old girl and an adult in a knife attack outside the girl’s school. But what accelerated the rioting was just as disturbing: widespread and perhaps deliberate misinformation on social media, including rumors that the attacker was a foreign national or an Islamic terrorist, that one or more children had been killed, and that the Irish army had been deployed on the streets.
None of that was true. Almost the only bright spot of this traumatic episode is that one of the three men who overpowered and subdued the attacker was himself a recent immigrant, a delivery driver from Brazil. He became the focus of a GoFundMe campaign called “Buy Caio Benicio a pint,” which raised more than $300,000.
But the underlying facts are less important than what the November carnage unleashed, which artist and activist Adam Doyle (aka “Spicebag”) has called “widespread, albeit currently ‘low-intensity,’ civil unrest,” language that deliberately echoes the officialese used to describe the 30-year guerrilla conflict in British-ruled Northern Ireland that ended in 1998. There have been a series of heated protests and confrontations at migrant facilities all over the country, recently culminating in pitched battles between demonstrators and police outside a former paint factory in Coolock, a bleak and impoverished district on the northern outskirts of Dublin.
The questions now tormenting Irish society will sound familiar to Americans, although the historical context is different: How much do these events represent ingrained racism and xenophobia, and how much do they reflect worsening economic inequality, the failures of neoliberal policy and the justifiable if misdirected anger of poor and working-class communities who feel abandoned or left behind? Beyond that, who is fueling the rise of the Irish far right, and how? Is it a “lunatic, hooligan faction,” in the words of Ireland’s police commissioner, or something more organized and more sinister?
The global right, including its overtly racist factions, has long been fascinated and puzzled by Ireland, which plays an exaggerated role in pseudo-Celtic white supremacist fantasy, although in actual 21st-century reality it remains a highly tolerant and progressive society despite its troubled history. Many right-wing spokespeople seized on the November violence and its aftermath as an opportunity; one could fill thousands of words with the idiotic, ill-informed social media posts from Elon Musk, Boris Johnson and many others.
Whenever far-right movements crop up around the world, everyone looks to America for seeds, roots and germs, understandably enough. It's almost surprising that the emerging Irish far right bears no visible fingerprints of Steve Bannon, MAGA-world's currently imprisoned Svengali, nor of the right-wing parties of mainland Europe. Irish Times reporter Conor Gallagher has succeeded in identifying one far-right American activist who seems to be involved in "mentoring" the Irish anti-immigrant movement — if only as a long-distance adviser, via Zoom — but even that description may be overly flattering.
How and why racist right-wing zealots in Ireland made contact with Frank Silva, a California man in his mid-60s who now goes by Frank L. DeSilva and is the author of numerous self-published, self-glorifying books for sale on Amazon, is anyone’s guess. His author bio reports "a lifetime of intense searching, challenging the great Ideas of politics, Philosophy, History, Social Science, and matters of race." (The third installment of his four-volume series “Poems of Love and Light” is subtitled “Of Magick, Masks, and Masquerades.” Do not recommend.) To coin a phrase, a bit of American hustle was likely involved.
Gallagher’s reporting is both admirable and highly accurate as far as it goes, but to describe Silva as “a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan” and “a prominent figure in the US white supremacist movement of the 1980s” may amount to falling for the hustle a little too hard. At most, Silva was a fringe figure in a series of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups in the early ‘80s, never an important player.
It’s true that Silva served more than a dozen years in federal prison for his involvement with The Order, a notorious neo-Nazi gang that murdered a Jewish talk-show host and supposedly plotted a violent "Aryan" revolution. But from this distance, he looks like a movement stooge who was swept up in the enthusiasm and big talk but never did anything more ambitious than running errands for the leadership. No evidence was ever presented that Silva personally engaged in any of The Order’s violent crimes or robberies. In a 1985 UPI article about the 10 defendants in the Seattle racketeering trial that brought down The Order, Silva is last on the list. His alleged offenses are not enumerated, and he’s described only as a 26-year-old “cement worker and tile installer” from Los Angeles.
Several archival sources identify Silva as a “former leader” or member of the Klan, but there too the paper trail is exceedingly thin. In early-’80s Southern California, the KKK was an insignificant, not-quite-underground protest movement unconnected to any national organization, and there’s no clear evidence that Silva ever held a leadership role. His one and only documented Klan action was his presence at a 1983 cross burning in a racially mixed suburban neighborhood — an odious hate crime, to be sure, but one clearly organized by more prominent white supremacists (and only a misdemeanor at the time).
Somehow or other, Silva wound up presenting himself as a senior statesman of fringe far-right activism in Zoom calls (according to Gallagher’s reporting), imparting wisdom with an even less impressive Irish activist named Stephen Butler, who has pronounced himself “a bit of a national socialist” and issued the usual kinds of screeds suggesting that, through some unexplained but devious mechanism, the Jews are to blame for Ireland’s immigration difficulties.
Perhaps this story is reassuring, to an admittedly limited extent. Ireland’s crisis is real, as is the rest of Europe’s, not to mention America’s. But Frank Silva and/or DeSilva, the author of “Song of Albion: Rise of the West: Volume II” (which has exactly two Amazon reviews, both for five stars) looks more like a guy trying to boost a fading personal brand than the instigator of a global race war that will reverse the tides of history.
Salon reached out to Silva via social media and received no response. We are relieved to report, however, that he is not the same Frank Silva, now deceased, who played “Killer Bob” in David Lynch’s legendary TV series “Twin Peaks.” That would have been truly alarming.
