Glenn Miller, the former North Carolina Ku Klux Klan leader, arrested in the Kansas City Jewish Community Center shootings that killed three people on Sunday, has been identified previously as an FBI informant. The FBI is known to have infiltrated the Klan time and time again since the civil rights days, during a period when J. Edgar Hoover had set his sights on flushing out supposed commies and ending the career of Martin Luther King. Miller testified for the government in a major trial where the Feds sought to convict leaders of the Far Right. In his book, A White Man Speaks Out, he claims to have been an FBI informant.
Miller is a former Vietnam vet who was a member of the American Nazi Party before turning to the North Carolina Klan. He was in the Klan caravan involved in the Greensboro massacre in 1979, where the Klan opened fire on civil rights marchers. He then formed the White Patriot Party, claiming by 1985 to have a membership of 2500 and offices in six southern states. He ran for governor of North Carolina in 1984 and got 5,000 votes.
A year later he made a try for North Carolina senator John East’s senate seat. The rally where he announced his senate campaign turned into a small arms training session. Miller was a big fan of camouflage clothing and supposedly recruited Marines at Fort Le Jeune. His group sponsored telephone messages, including one of a faked black man supposedly being lynched. He supported South Africa’s apartheid government, attacked Jerry Falwell as “Judas Goat.” And along with other far right outfits by the late 1980s, the White Patriot Party phone messages was linking the farm depression to the international Jewish bankers. The main platform of his party, Miller said, was southern independence.
Miller was subpoenaed before the Seattle grand jury that handed down indictments against the white supremacist outfit the Order in 1984. In his statement to the FBI after his arrest, Bruce Carroll Pierce, a member of the Order, had said the Order gave Miller $300,000 from robbery booty. Miller denied ever getting money from the Order. Miller said at the time,“We expect that they’re [FBI] going to frame us, plant drugs and illegal weapons on our property, pull all minds of dirty tricks on us.’’
Miller was a federal government witness in the government’s seditious conspiracy trial against the main leaders of the movement, including Bob Miles, the most important leader at the time, and Louis Beam, the most radical and aggressive, at Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1988.This was a big deal for the federal government and heavy duty prosecutors from the Justice Department in Washington and FBI agents, including one who had tracked the far right for a decade or more, were involved in the case. Miller turned out to be a wimp, whining and claiming he was a newly converted Christian. His performance was so lousy the government pulled him as a witness. The government lost the trial.
According to Leonard Zeskind, the historian of the far right, the Council of Concerned Citizens, a white nationalist group with roots going back to the fight against desegregation, ran a web piece following after Miller’s arrest:
“In the 1980′s Glenn Miller was a self-styled KKK leader in North Carolina. He made contact with The Order, which was famous for armored car heists. Apparently he convinced The Order to make him part of an “above ground/legal” wing of the group. He then provided information to the FBI and testified against other members of the “legal” wing that were receiving money obtained from the armored car heists.
“Then Glenn Miller was a star witness at the infamous 1988 sedition trials in Ft. Smith, Ark. The government tried to use The Order to get “sedition” charges against leaders of the Christian Identity movement.
“At least one member of The Order claimed later that Glenn Miller was instrumental in his conviction. He also claimed that Miller falsely claimed there was a plot against Morris Dees, which boosted sympathy for the Montgomery based hustler.’’
James Ridgeway, the author of Blood in the Face, a book that chronicles the far right during the ladt quarter of the 20th century. He also is producer of the documentary by the name along with Anne Bohlen and Kevin Rafferty.
The musician Glenn Miller seems to have been working for the OSS while on tour and may have been killed by the Nazis. One of the members of his band was the notorious spook Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland- the drummer for The Police.
The musician Glenn Miller seems to have been working for the OSS while on tour and may have been killed by the Nazis. One of the members of his band was the notorious spook Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland- the drummer for The Police.
Oookay.
But seriously, thanks!
-I don't like hoodlums. -That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
As far as peculiar news cycle shit goes there is in fact this:
Flight MH370: Here are 7 other planes that have never been found
3. Glenn Miller’s plane
In case you didn’t know (we didn’t) Glenn Miller was a big name in the Forties. He was a big band musician from the swing era and was travelling to entertain U.S. troops in France during WW2 when the plane he was travelling on went missing over the English Channel.
There’s several theories about what happened to him, including that his plane was accidentally bombed by friendly fire when military planes flying back from Germany offloaded their remaining artillery into a designated space that then clashed with Miller’s flight route.
Although, we much prefer the theory that he did make it to France but his death was covered up the next day after he suffered a heart attack during a liaison with a prostitute.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
Overland Park, a city of fewer than 200,000 in the heartland of the U.S. just south of Kansas City, is an unlikely setting for a terrorist attack. But on April 13, Frazier Glenn Cross, aka Frazier Glenn Miller, brought terror to Overland Park. With the intention to “kill him some Jews,” Miller, former Grand Dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and FBI informant showed up with weapons in hand at a Jewish community center and a retirement home and murdered three Christians whom he mistook as Jewish.
While the authorities needed “more investigation” regarding Miller’s motive, the national media made the obvious connection characterizing the attack as a hate crime. But neither the media nor the authorities dared to call it what it was – a terrorist attack.
For Miller, there was no ambiguity. Shouting “Heil Hitler” from the back of a police car, his intentions, and motivations were made clear. His was a political act with a political meaning that at its core was meant to not just intimidate, but terrorize a whole community. Strangely, however, when it comes to acts carried out by the racist, radical right, the media and state authorities seem loath to characterize them as acts of terror. The reluctance to identify the domestic terrorist threat from the radical right is also seen in the U.S. Congress.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a report on the growing threat of white supremacist extremist groups and their close connections with military personnel. The DHS report was based on data and analysis from an FBI report prepared under the Bush Administration in July of 2008 titled “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel since 9/11.” In that report, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division found that white supremacist organizations were pushing their followers to join the military and enter either the Special Forces or the infantry, in order to gain the necessary skills to prepare them for the “coming race war.” As a result, the report found that:
“…military experience is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement as the result of recruitment campaigns by extremist groups and self-recruitment by veterans sympathetic to white supremacist causes.”
And what was the response from Congress? Incredibly, the right wing in Congress alleged that the report was a partisan attack on them and as a consequence were able to have the report rescinded and wiped away from the DHS website – and out of the public’s awareness.
Burying the DHS report did not result in the elimination of the very real threat posed by the more violent wing of the radical right, a threat being played out by extremist forces throughout Europe, as well as the U.S.
The attack launched by F. Glen Miller should not have been unexpected. This individual has been around, and on law enforcement radar, for quite some time. He was at the infamous Klan attack in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979 that resulted in the deaths of five anti-racist activists and has a long history with some of the most dangerous right-wing elements in the U.S.
The real question that a reasonable person might ask and that the media and certainly state authorities would want to answer is, how many more of these individuals might be out there? And there are other questions – why is it that national state authorities fail to characterize acts like the Kansas shootings as domestic terrorism, and does that failure represent a conceptual inability to “see” the threat of radicalized white supremacists or a cynical political decision to downplay the existence of domestic terrorists?
The rise of the racist, radical right is not a figment of the imagination, or a partisan political attack. When they show up at anti-Obama rallies with guns in hand or when they attack Jewish schools or gun down African Americans while wearing the uniforms of the police, all of us must recognize the very real threat that we face today in this period of intense anger, scapegoating, confusion and manipulation.
We all have a stake in the defeat of white supremacy in all of its expressions. If we fail to engage in the hard struggle to strip away the pretenses of whiteness and its distorted worldview, and prepare people for the ultimate reality that they are going to have to give up most of the privileges of being white and living at the center of the empire, the crazed terror attack carried out by the neo-Nazi in Kansas will be only a harbinger of what is to come.
Ajamu Baraka serves as Public Intervenor for Human Rights on the Democracy Branch of the Green Shadow Cabinet.
Who knows? It seems as though that Glenn Miller (the orchestra guy) had fairly deep DISNEY ties. Which would be somewhat fun to read what he had to say concerning all the shit he did. I would certainly consider what he had to say in this case.
Obviously, I have no idea. I'm just semi-curious about the "news cycle".
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
Marionville, Missouri Mayor Dan Clevenger said he "kind of agreed" with some of the beliefs of Frazier Glenn Cross, the 73-year-old accused of killing three people outside of a Jewish community center and retirement complex near Kansas City on Sunday.
In an interview with KSPR, Clevenger said Cross -- who also goes by the name Frazier Glenn Miller -- was "[v]ery fair and honest and never had a bit of problems out of him."
"He was always nice and friendly and respectful of elder people, you know, he respected his elders greatly. As long as they were the same color as him," Clevenger said.
"Kind of agreed with him on some things but, I don't like to express that too much," Clevenger told KSPR, which noted the mayor had expressed his views before:
That hasn't always been the case. Nearly a decade ago, Clevenger wrote a letter to the editor of the Aurora Advertiser. "I am a friend of Frazier Miller helping to spread his warnings," wrote Clevenger. "The Jew-run medical industry has succeeded in destroying the United State's workforce." The letter continued. "Made a few Jews rich by killin' us off." He also spoke of the "Jew-run government backed banking industry turned the U.S into the world's largest debtor nation." Clevenger tried to distance himself from Cross, saying he doesn't believe what Cross would talk about.
"He had a lot of hate built up inside of him," Clevenger told CNN. "And every time he'd come down here, he'd go on about different races -- mainly Jews. He claims they're all bad, but I don't believe that."
Clevenger also told CNN he doesn't "think Marionville citizens really gave a lot of attention to that stuff."
After the shooting, Clevenger told the AP how Cross often distributed racist pamphlets in his town.
Read more at KSPR.
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
FRAZIER GLENN MILLER & THE ONGOING TREND OF FORMER-MILITARY NEO-NAZI MURDERS By Spencer Sunshine, on April 17, 2014
Military Veterans and the White Separatist Underground’s Cult of Violence
The recent murders at two Jewish institutions in Kansas City—apparently committed by former Nazi and Klansman Frazier Glenn Miller—unfortunately come as little surprise, as it was at least the third such incident in the United States in the last five years alone. In 2012, Nazi skinhead Michael Wade Page murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and in 2009 Holocaust denier James Von Brunn murdered a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
All three perpetrators fit a very specific pattern: military veterans; involved in White nationalist politics for years; felt (apparently) their lives were at an end; decided to go out and murder unsuspecting civilians at the very public institutions which their politics had always targeted.
Miller is 73 and has emphysema. Von Brunn was 88 and died soon after the shooting. Wade was only 40, but committed suicide rather than surrender at the murder scene.
Unfortunately, this trend looks like it will continue into the future. Each of these men were products of a political environment that praised violence and glorified death. And so it seems safe to assume that as long as the violence-driven White separatist and White supremacist political underground remains, at least some of their activists can be expected to end their lives in such a manner in the future.
FRAZIER GLENN MILLER The ideology of White supremacy that Miller embraced has historically been intertwined with the use of institutional violence, from the genocide of Native Americans and American slavery to the lynchings of African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan, often aided by local police, resisted the Civil Rights Movement with intimidation and murder. But even after the battle to defend segregation was lost and most Southern police agencies distanced themselves from the Klan, White separatist and supremacist groups have continued the open use of violence—only now without institutional backing—against religious, racial, and sexual minorities.
In recent decades, White nationalists moved from being pro-government, patriotic Americans—in the 1940s, one could support Jim Crow segregation at home and still fight the Nazis abroad—to being anti-system, right-wing revolutionaries. Bolstered by the Nazi skinhead subculture that exploded in the 1980s, this change from pro- to anti-system helped foster an ongoing culture of extreme violence. For such a small political movement, its members commit a fantastic number of violent criminal acts, which have included political assassinations, murders in public and domestic settings, and bombings which seek to inflict mass casualties. All of this is a microcosm of the violence praised by the historic fascist movement and its philosophical valorization of the “act”—as well as its practice of “total war” and racial genocide.
Miller played a central role in this shift towards revolutionary Far Right militancy. Originally a member of the White nationalist National States Rights Party, he later joined the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of America, with whom he took part in the Greensboro Massacre of five left-wing, anti-racist protestors. He then formed the Carolina Ku Klux Klan, which morphed into the White Patriot Party (WPP), described by Leonard Zeskind as a “hybrid organization [which] grafted uniformed paramilitarism and Naziesque ideology onto its roots as a white-robed Klan group.”* This was part of what is called the “Nazification of the Klan,” when Nazi and Klan groups overcame historical divisions and grew closer in ideology and collaboration.
Miller has described himself as “ultra Right plus a million miles.” His party’s platform was “Southern independence. The creation of an all-White nation within the one million square miles of mother Dixie. We have no hope for Jew York City or San Fran-cissy-co and other areas that are dominated by Jews, perverts, and communists and non-White-minorities and rectum-loving queens.” The group’s prerecorded phone messages included “the simulated voice of a black man being lynched.” This approach proved quite popular: by 1985, Miller claimed the WPP had 2,500 members, and they held public marches with hundreds of members dressed in camouflage uniforms and black berets. In 1984, Miller ran for North Carolina governor and received 5,000 votes.**
A member of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, Miller retired from the military in 1979, but used his military background to recruit soldiers and accumulate an arsenal that included anti-tank rockets. He received $200,000 from the underground White nationalist terror group The Order (Brüder Schweigen), and was involved in a plot to kill Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center. (Meanwhile, former members of the WPP were arrested in a triple murder in a gay bookstore in 1987.)
That same year, Miller was arrested, fled underground, and issued a “Declaration of War” against the federal government. Caught shortly thereafter with a cache of weapons, he flipped, testifying against his fellow White nationalists in the Fort Smith sedition trial. Released after serving three years in prison, he kept a relatively low profile until recently, as he had been shunned by his former colleagues as a snitch. But apparently his political views had not changed. After his arrest in Kansas City, Miller yelled “Heil Hitler!” at a television crew from the back of a police car. Although we don’t know his motives yet, he seems to have surrendered peacefully and knows he’ll probably serve the rest of his life in prison.
JAMES VON BRUNN A Navy veteran, Von Brunn had links to antisemitic groups going back to the 1970s, and was connected to various figures in the White nationalist movement. In 1981, he brought a shotgun into a Federal Reserve meeting, hoping to kidnap board members and read a televised speech; he served eight years in jail for the crime, though he blamed the “negro jury” and “Jew judge” for the sentence. Telling his ex-wife he was planning to go out “with his boots on,” in June of 2009 Von Brunn went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and murdered a guard. Wounded at the scene, Von Brunn died of natural causes six months later.
MICHAEL WADE PAGE Page served in the Army in the 1990s before being discharged for “patterns of misconduct” (alcoholism). He was somewhat unusual in that he apparently became involved in Nazi skinhead activities not as a teenager, but rather when he was almost 30. A “patched-in” member of the Hammerskins—an international racist skinhead organization whose reputation for violence is notable even among skinheads—he played in racist bands before life turned sour as the 40 year old as he lost his job, his girlfriend left him, and his house was foreclosed on.
In 2012, he opened fire at a Sikh temple and murdered six unarmed worshippers before he was killed by a police officer during a gun battle.
And there are many others who fit the profile a little less precisely. For example, former Marine J.T. Ready was an anti-immigrant activist who formed two armed vigilante border patrol groups in Arizona. A recent member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, in 2012 he murdered four people in what was apparently a domestic dispute and then killed himself.
The military background of each of these men is unsettling, as it provides weapons training and sometimes combat experience. Veterans are known to suffer from high rates of domestic violence, suicide, and mental health problems. But veterans come in all political stripes, and it’s the simmering violence in the White separatist and supremacist milieu that’s clearly the spark.
ACTION OVER THOUGHT – MORE TO COME The Nazi and Klan political environments cultivate a cult of the warrior, often draped in Viking imagery which praises soldiers who go to Valhalla. It promotes action over thought, and a deeply patriarchal mindset that attacks Jews and non-Europeans and accuses them of weakness, disease, and of diluting a strong White identity.
Having spent years immersed in these narratives, and facing the end of their lives, some longtime militant Far Right activists are choosing violent ends—even if their supposed warrior deaths turn out to be cowardly assassinations. They seek soft targets and murder unsuspecting—and usually unarmed—civilians.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of Millers, Von Brunns, and Pages. In recent years, the White separatist violence of past decades has simmered down. Klan groups are declining, as the less-explicitly-bigoted Patriot movement is in ascendance. The skinhead culture has lost its youthful cache, and most of the prominent Nazi skinhead groups have collapsed. But the ultra-violent culture these men thrived in during their prime still retains its mental hold on thousands of aging, troubled men. We should brace ourselves for more of them to take the same path out when they decide their lives are at an end.
However, one thing that could be done to lessen these scenarios would be to support the work of “transitioning out” programs, which help neo-Nazi and similar activists escape the political scene they often are trapped in. Those wishing to exit are often threatened by their colleagues, and need help removing White supremacist tattoos, finding jobs, moving themselves and their families to safe locations, and establishing new social networks. The lack of availability of these programs often leads disenchanted militant Far Rightists back into their established social and political networks, which—in the cases looked at here—can have tragic results for both themselves, their families, and their victims. Groups like One People’s Project (onepeoplesproject.com) and Life After Hate (lifeafterhate.org) are open to help those wishing to exit these politics and start new lives.
* Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics (New York : Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009), 131. ** Cited in James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face, second edition (NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), 118–19.
The Kansas City killer and his mentor: A tale of two Nazis
By Joseph Cotto, Communities Digital News
April 17, 2014
OCALA, Fla., April 17, 2014 — Ever since a gunman claimed the lives of three people at a Kansas City-area Jewish center last Sunday, the question has been repeatedly asked, “Why?”
The answer seems simple enough: The assailant is an anti-Semite among anti-Semites. The man hates Jews with a virulent passion that he’s never concealed.
The shooter, who is 73-years-old, made a home for himself at Vanguard News Network under the screen-name “Rounder.” Most people have never heard of VNN. It is a discussion forum for neo-Nazis, one of the most rabid such forums on the internet. The ringleader is Alex Linder, one of America’s most active neo-Nazi agitators. Despite being almost three decades Miller’s junior, he has built an extensive resumé as an anti-Semitic rhetorician.
VNN’s influence on Rounder would be hard to overestimate. He logged over 12,000 posts in its various discussion rooms.
League of the South activist Hunter Wallace posted a VNN screen capture on his blog. It revealed that Rounder voted in support of Linder’s aim “to attack Christianity and … advocate exterminating all Jews.”
In a separate posts, Wallace, a strong opponent of white nationalism and neo-Nazism, noted that “Vanguardists” and “Vantards” often commit acts of extreme violence. He also wrote of their movement’s dead-end nature.
Patheos contributor Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor and counselor at Grove City College, revealed more of Miller’s VNN activities. Throckmorton published a screen capture of a December 2012 forum message from Rounder, who wrote that “(t)he word ‘advocate’ has always seemed a bit ambiguous” so he would “clarify [his] position to protect” himself.
The clarification revealed his “desire to press a button that’d make all kikes disappear from the earth” as well as “cheer and do cartwheels when Islamic victory over the jews comes, and muslim freedom fighters stuff all jews, unceremoniously, into red hot ovens.”
Rounder finished his rant by remarking that “(o)nly a fool or JOG” — likely an abbreviation of “Jewish Occupied Government” — “agent would encourage anyone on the internet to kill another person, even kike parasites. And I’ve never heard or read where Alex made any such encouragement.”
In a recent interview with documentary filmmaker Martin Himel, Linder claimed that Jews are “not just a problem in the U.S., they’re a problem across the entire West and they’re a problem because they dominate the country by controlling the money supply and also controlling the mass media.”
Linder claimed that, “the solution to the problem is ultimately to exterminate them … their behavior over 2000 years has shown that when you kick them out, they always wind up being let back in, basically by the Christians, and they cause the same problems. Well, call me a ‘racist’, ‘evil’, ‘Nazi’, ‘hater’, whatever, I want my kind of people to survive and prosper; people German-descended, blue eyes, good, solid people who built, you know, nice towns … I want them to prosper. I don’t want the Jews to prosper. They’re attacking me. I’m fighting back.”
Linder was not being facetious or hypothetical; his statements in a 2012 interview with hard-right Jim Giles of Radio Free Mississippi leave no wiggle room.
Linder first said that the Holocaust is “a big lie and … you don’t have to be an expert or even dig into it that far to see that it’s a big lie.” A few minutes later, he said “my view is that we’ve kicked [Jews] out of our countries 110 times, they continue to cause exactly the same problems … They intend our genocide, if I had the power, you better damn well believe I would exterminate all of them, and if you think I would joke about something like that, that would … make me a pretty silly person, I think. So, it’s not rhetorical at all”.
The reaction from Giles was intensely negative. After “Rounder’s” Kansas City rampage — which took only Christian lives — Giles made a statement on Wallace’s blog.
“Alex Linder murdered Reat Griffin Underwood, William Corporon and Terri LeManno,” he wrote. “The blood of the little boy, the grandfather and the mother is on Alex Linder and the ‘White Nationalist Movement,’ an anonymous group of Internet cowards and now accomplices to murder. If Linder doesn’t kill himself it’s a good sign he is in point of fact a police informant.”
In a Monday blog entry, Wallace theorized that Rounder’s “hero Alex Linder has consistently advocated his ‘principled solution’ of exterminating the Jews for 10 years now, so Glenn assumed that by acting to exterminate the Jews he would win the admiration of his peers at VNN Forum.”
Despite all of this evidence, many media figures chose to blame a completely unrelated figure for Rounder’s madness.
The patsy is progressive journalist and bestselling author Max Blumenthal. He entered the spotlight because it was alleged that Rounder wrote favorably about Blumenthal’s Israel skepticism over 300 times. A Mondoweiss investigation revealed this to be untrue.
“Out of 12,683 forum posts attributed to [Rounder], one single post was found to have mentioned ‘Jew journalist Max Blumenthal.’ That single post contains a broken link to a page that once linked to a YouTube clip of a brief interview with Blumenthal,” reporters Alex Kane and Phan Nguyen stated. “In that interview, Blumenthal explained how neoconservative supporters of Netanyahu in D.C. were hoping to sway the 2012 presidential election in their favor.”
Why Linder has not received more press attention is a mystery. We can be certain, though, that even in the face of sheer savagery, some will try to score political points.
The Kansas City tragedy is a morbid reminder of anti-Semitism’s potency, even in twenty-first century America. Beyond this, though, few if any have recognized that it is also a gruesome example of how online chatter can lead to real-world carnage.
Let’s hope that the national mainstream will come to realize that the keyboard warriors of today may move past their computers tomorrow. While such a thing cannot be prevented in all cases, surely solutions can be found to stop an untold number from destroying the lives of others, along with their own.
A country of genuine social consciousness — where celebrity fundraisers don’t determine who lends a helping hand — would have been working on something to this effect long ago.
Frazier Glenn Miller, the former Ku Klux Klan "grand dragon" and proud anti-Semite accused of killing three people outside Kansas Jewish centers earlier this month, was not always so strict about his discrimination, at least in private. Before becoming an FBI informant, Miller, who had founded North Carolina's White Patriot Party, was caught in a compromising position — in the backseat of a car — with a black man, doing things a federal prosecutor is not comfortable saying out loud.
ABC News reports, via Gawker:
In the course of their investigation, authorities also learned the stunning details of Miller’s arrest a year earlier. Raleigh police officers had caught Miller in the back seat of a vehicle, in mid-act with a black male prostitute masquerading as a woman.
“It was pretty shocking,” says [then-federal prosecutor J. Douglas McCullough], “because of his personal stances that he had taken and what he was now accused on engaging in.”
McCullough says he has read the police report of the incident but declined to comment on the specifics. “I would rather not go into the details,” he said. “They’re rather salacious. I think the facts speak for themselves and people can draw their own conclusions about how incongruous that is.”
-I don't like hoodlums. -That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
Frazier Glenn Miller, Nazi violence, and the state
In the 1980s, Frazier Glenn Miller was one of the most prominent white supremacist leaders in the United States. Lately he's been in the news again -- sometimes identified as Miller, sometimes as Frazier Glenn Cross -- charged with shooting dead three people at two Jewish centers in the Kansas City metro area on April 13.
Miller’s story -- even the fact that he goes by two different last names -- dramatizes the profound shift in government security forces' relationship with the the U.S. far right over the past few decades. This issue has received little or no attention since Miller's April 13th arrest.
Miller is a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret who was kicked out of the Army in 1979 for distributing racist propaganda. As a member of the National Socialist Party of America, Miller helped to organize a coalition of Klansmen and Nazis in North Carolina called the United Racist Front, which carried out the Greensboro massacre on November 3, 1979. That day, a caravan of URF men drove to an anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers Party, unloaded their guns, and shot five people to death. URF members were twice acquitted for the massacre by all-white juries. Miller was present at the scene and later declared, "I am more proud of the 88 seconds I spent in Greensboro on November 3, 1979, than I am of the twenty years I spent in the U.S. Army" (Martin Durham, White Rage, p. 44). He was never indicted for his role in the killings.
The Greensboro massacre was a pivotal event for the U.S. far right in two ways. On one hand, it was a high water mark of far right violence carried out with the involvement or sponsorship of government security services. An agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was part of the URF and in later court testimony about the massacre "characterized his role as an undercover agent as one that gave people with a known propensity for illegal activity the ‘opportunity to violate the law.'" (This was under a Democratic administration, by the way.)
The URF also included a man who was an informant for both the FBI and the local police. As Joanne Wypijewski reported in a 2005 article for Mother Jones, "At the time of the killings, the police special agent in charge of the Klan informant was at the back of the [URF] caravan, having trailed it to the site. He did not intervene, or radio for help, or trip a siren, or pursue the killers as nine of their vehicles got away. Arrests occurred only because two police officers broke ranks and apprehended a van."
I've seen several news reports since Miller's recent arrest that note his involvement in the Greensboro killings, but none that mention the role of federal agencies. (For more on the federal security services' history of involvement with the paramilitary far right, see my 2012 post, "Liberal counterinsurgency versus the paramilitary right."
The Greensboro massacre was also pivotal because it broke the suspicion and animosity that for decades had kept Klansmen and Nazis at odds with each other. After this event, collaboration, cross-over, and interchange between the two branches of the far right became much more common. As a result, the movement's ideological center of gravity shifted from segregationism to fascism -- away from restoring the old racial order, to new dreams of creating a new whites-only homeland or overthrowing the U.S. government entirely.
Glenn Miller was in the thick of this change. A few months after Greensboro, he formed the Carolina (later Confederate) Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1985 changed its name to the White Patriot Party. The WPP advocated an independent Southern White Republic. Leonard Zeskind reports that its activists "typically wore camouflage uniforms, regularly engaged in paramilitary-style training, and some illegally acquired weapons from nearby military bases…. [B]y 1986 Miller's White Patriot Party had over 1,000 members in North Carolina alone. Some reports indicated that 150 members had once been Special Forces soldiers."
The WPP formed a relationship with the underground paramilitary group called The Order, which declared war on the U.S. government, robbed banks and armored cars, assassinated a Jewish talk show host, and engaged in shootouts with the police. The Order gave $200,000 or more of the money it stole to Miller's organization. In 1986, Miller himself went underground and issued his own declaration of war against blacks, gays, Jews, judges, and "despicable informants" (Mab Segrest, "Deadly New Breed," Southern Exposure, Spring 1989, p. 60).
But in 1987 Miller was caught and turned state's witness. He fingered two of his former WPP assistants for the murders of three men in a Shelby, North Carolina gay bookstore. The next year, he testified for the prosecution in the Ft. Smith, Arkansas trial of fourteen white supremacist leaders for seditious conspiracy -- all of whom were acquitted. In exchange for his testimony, Miller spent only three years in prison, instead of the twenty-plus years he was originally facing, and entered the witness protection program. He got the name Frazier Glenn Cross and a new Social Security number when he was released in 1990.
Zeskind argues that the plea bargain deal with Miller was a bad choice for the federal government. "I believe that Miller was essentially playing a game with the feds. And I don’t think he had any intention of becoming a good witness. The guy was a stone-to-the-bone Nazi… He never gave that up. I am on the record as saying the man should have died in prison."
I certainly agree that Miller deserved worse than he got. But even if his court testimony was useless, that doesn't necessarily mean the federal government got nothing out of the deal. He may well have provided information that the feds used in other ways -- we simply don't know. In any case, by turning him the feds hurt morale and fueled dissension among white supremacists. Thirty years ago, Miller was one of the most admired people in the movement. Now, his former comrades loathe and despise him as an FBI informant: "human garbage," "a RAT," "a man who deserves the time honored penalty for treason."
And at this point, we also have to remember the Greensboro massacre. Because it's absurd to ask whether the federal government prosecutes Nazi violence "effectively" unless we recognize that this same government has also aided and abetted Nazis in killing people.
![\<]](./images/smilies/confused0044.gif "confused")
