(1) These people aren't going away. In fact, events of recent weeks (the George Tiller murder, the Holocaust Museum attack, the Minuteman murders in Arizona, the Muhs murder in Texas, etc.) leave me fearful that the right-wing lunatic fringe of all sorts is freaking out under an Obama administration, and, with ample "moral" and philosophical support from "mainstream media" wingnut types, are becoming emboldened and reckless in their actions.
(2) If you read that first bullet point to mean, in part, that I consider Rush, Sean, Bill, Glenn, Ann, and the rest to be spiritual accomplices of the sickest fascists out there -- you read me correctly. Indeed, that is a huge part of our dilemma right now. And the media love extreme opinions --they're entertaining! Unfortunately, they are also something more than that. Frank Rich has written eloquently on this subject of late ("The Obama Haters' Silent Enablers").
(3) Although not at all religious, I see no reason why I cannot "pray," which is to say, send out a hope to the universe -- and thus, every day now, I pray for the ongoing success of our extremely competent and dedicated U.S. Secret Service. Enough said.
(4) I just finished reading William H. Schmaltz's 1999 biography Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, which provides useful historical perspective on Neo-Nazis, the White Power movement, The New Order, Christian Identity, and related fringe movements. Schmaltz's research, especially in FBI files, seems impeccable, although it is unfortunate that his idea of composing a book is to put all his research on the page. We get very little insight into what made Rockwell tick -- which, admittedly, would be a tough assignment -- but we do get, say, exhaustive detail on every single one of his college speaking engagements. Thus the book is, as one Amazon reviewer puts it, "monotonous." Despite Rockwell being such an incendiary individual, there is limited drama or understanding to be had from The Collected Rants of anyone.
(5) Schmaltz's book does put into ample context one of the funniest pieces I have ever read in The Onion, "Today's Neo-Nazis Have No Respect for Tradition," which is so unexaggerated that it might have been written word for word by an old guard Neo-Nazi:
You can't just call yourself the Master Race—you have to act like it, and hold yourself to a higher standard than those you despise and wish to exterminate. Have you seen the way these [neo-Nazi] kids dress? Their idea of a "uniform" is a T-shirt and combat boots. The rural militias are even worse, with their filthy fatigues and long hair and beer guts. Excuse me, but I hardly think hillbilly rejects are what our great Führer had in mind when he dreamed of a world filled with Aryan supermen. I wouldn't even let them in my front door, let alone conspire with them to blow up a synagogue.
The entire piece falls in the "so funny it hurts" category.
(6) The Onion piece should not lead one to suppose, however, that Rockwell's minions actually acted much like a "Master Race," apart from consistently dressing in uniform (khakis, ties, combat boots, swastika armbands). (Hate makes very effective use of photographs of Rockwell and his gang.) The American Nazi Party was conspicuously a rotating bunch of total losers whose main talent seems to have been getting into fistfights -- with each other. Financial backing was always this close to non-existent, so the Neo-Nazi "life" was ascetic, boring, unfulfilling -- few stuck around for very long.
(7) Rockwell's attention-getting tactics were moderately effective agitprop consisting of bullyish low-level violence and puerile clownishness (his father had been in vaudeville). But the techniques were not effective in attracting volunteer support or sustained media coverage. Even when Rockwell shifted his focus from demonizing Jews (in keeping with his Nazi inspirations) to demonizing blacks (more in line with the anxieties of the Sixties), his "success" was extremely limited. There were other groups ahead of him in the racism game, and those groups weren't tarred by the "Nazi" association, which, only twenty years after the end of World War II, was still raw for most Americans.
(8) Both the text and the photographs in Hate tripped off my "gaydar" in a major way. The ANP was an entirely male movement, with recruits living in pathetic "barracks," sometimes without electricity when the bills couldn't be paid. The men, who included "self-hating Jews" (Dan Burros, Leonard Holstein) and other unstable types trying to escape from themselves, spent all their time together, and the record Schmaltz compiles is notably light on the subject of their seeking any sort of female companionship. They did, however, get off on dressing in uniform, playing with their guns (one stormtrooper killed himself accidentally that way), and so on. I don't necessarily get a gay reading off the twice-married, seven-times-a-father Rockwell, and he did sometimes have a girlfriend around. But the rest of them -- Matt Koehl, Alan Welch, Robert Lloyd, and others -- I'd bet you a whole stack of Judy Garland records that the majority were gay. Even Rockwell admitted that the movement attracted some "queers" (although he held that they reformed quickly), and FBI counter-intelligence agents tried to bait Rockwell with reports of Alan Welch's "unnatural" activities.
(9) The still surviving Matt Koehl, Rockwell's second-in-command who eventually took over the ANP after Rockwell's assassination, hails from Milwaukee, and eventually relocated the by-then re-named New Order to Milwaukee from increasingly expensive Northern Virginia, the ANP's long-time base of operations. According to Schmaltz, the greatest electoral success the ANP or affiliated groups ever had was in a Milwaukee school board race ("it managed to garner one in every five voters"). This does not surprise me; as I've mentioned before, the racism of a sizable minority of whites in the Milwaukee area is, even in 2009, shockingly open, among "professionals" as well as proletarians. Commentary just this side of out-and-out racist is common both in Milwaukee talk radio (Mark Belling, Charlie Sykes) and print commentary (Patrick McIlheran, Rick Esenberg). It's one ugly scene.
(10) The extreme right lacks a publicly identifiable Rockwell-like spokesman just now (not that I'm wishing for one). David Duke's time has passed, and Matthew Hale is incarcerated in the ADX Florence supermax. I do fully expect someone new along these lines to emerge during this administration; history suggests that likelihood.
(11) A book that I recommend on the subject of the Christian Identity movement is Michael Barkun's Religion and the Racist Right, which I read a few years ago.
Breakfast is being served
2 years ago
