http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/inde ... &story=311Author: Leonard Zeskind | Date: January 2010
Stateside: The far right in Obama’s first year The presidency of Barack Obama dominated political events in 2009. Whether it was discussion of the bank bailouts last winter or the continuing failure of the government to solve the problem of depression-era unemployment, the blame or success will be laid on the doorstep of Obama’s White House.
Whether or not Congress passes meaningful health care reform (it had not done so at the time of writing), it will be on this president’s watch. After announcing an American troop surge in Afghanistan, this administration now owns that war. And whether the fortunes of the far-right and white nationalist movements rose or fell during the past year, Barack Hussein Obama will be regarded – rightly or wrongly – as the cause.
A militia revival, as noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others, did start during last year. The militia movement was a ubiquitous feature of the white supremacist landscape throughout the mid-1990s, but faded after the Clinton administration cracked down hard in its last years. Many of the issues that spurred militia activity 15 years ago are absent today. No martyrs to the cause exist, like the Weaver family in 1992 and the Branch Davidians in 1993 did. Further, the Supreme Court ruled in June that the Second Amendment ensures an individual’s right to bear arms, and the Obama administration, unlike Clinton’s, has not made gun control a legislative priority. Support for Second Amendment rights and opposition to gun control are always in the sights of gunners, hence there appears to be a smaller political space for militias this time around. Whatever their limitations now, however, any time that white paramilitary groups gather strength, the potential for organised racist and bigoted violence increases exponentially.
The assassination of a doctor, the shooting death of a Holocaust museum guard and the point-blank murders of a Latino man and his nine-year old daughter, among other crimes, occurred during the first half of the year. Coupled with an exceedingly high number of death threats against the first black president, it began to look as if the United States might enter a new period of heightened racist and bigoted violence. According to the Secret Service, the death threats slowed down in the second half of the year, however, and the first year of the Obama administration ended mixed, with upticks for some racists and down-notes for others.
The stunning failure of David Irving’s multi-city American speaking tour to reach any new audiences in 2009 – and in several notable instances to find any audience at all – had nothing to do with Obama. The market for Holocaust denial material is virtually saturated in the United States. In fact, so few Americans have been buying the stuff that Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review gave up the game and decided just to sell unabashed and unvarnished antisemitic propaganda. (See
“Defiance, Valkyrie, Major Remer, Mark Weber and the Limits of Holocaust Denial”, 24 January 2009, on
http://www.LeonardZeskind.com).
National Socialist Movement engaged in set-piece street theatreThroughout the year, in the states of Missouri, Arizona, California and elsewhere, the National Socialist Movement engaged in set-piece street theatre. These were public rallies where uniformed swastika-emblazoned NSM members were protected by police from large and usually effective anti-racist protests. New members who have joined the NSM do so because of the organisational disarray in other sectors of the national socialist universe and Obama is at most a backdrop to those events.
Similarly, David Duke drew an audience of fewer than 75 people in a Washington DC hotel on 7 November, at a conference sponsored by Willis Carto’s American Free Press. The small size of the crowd was mostly due to the diminished attraction of events sponsored by Carto, not because Obama is president.
The Council of Conservative Citizens touted increased traffic on its website after Obama’s inauguration. Last June however, at a Council conference in the heart of the organisation’s territory, Jackson, Mississippi, attendance was lower than in previous years. While the white-ists claimed that 200 travelled to this Mississippi meet, a more realistic estimate, based on pictures of the event, is that about 100 showed up. By contrast, at a similar conference in Greenville, South Carolina in 2007, about 250 people attended.
In Jackson, the white nationalist attorney Sam Dickson said that it was a good thing Obama was in office, “so that we can see that the people who hate us are running this country”. In the same speech he averred, “We are no longer conservatives, we are revolutionaries”. In those two short sentences, he reiterated the longstanding presumption by white nationalists that the government of the United States is in the complete grasp of their “racial enemies” and nothing short of “revolution” will fulfil their quest for “white power”. Obama confirmed this notion and did not change it.
Obama’s election did coincide with new support for a strategy to carve a whites-only territory out of North America through racial partition. An organisation calling itself the Northwest Front opened up shop in Oregon and Washington. Operating under the tutelage of Harold Covington, who has recently written four race-war novels that argue for a white republic in the Pacific Northwest, this group has attracted a few young acolytes. Covington has a long and unhappy history in the national socialist netherworld, however, and this new Front’s connection with him almost guarantees that it will remain relatively small and ingrown.
Nevertheless, the idea of partition gained a new and slightly more coherent advocate during 2009. An essay sponsored by The Occidental Quarterly argues forcefully and coherently for a partition strategy. The Occidental Quarterly, with half a dozen PhDs on its advisory board, has emerged as the central address for the most advanced strategic thinking among intellectual antisemites, scientific racists and anti-immigrant white nationalists. And this essay, “Towards the White Republic” by Michael O’Meara, addresses itself to objections to the partition strategy raised by the late Sam Francis and others, who did not wish to abandon all hope of recapturing the United States government in its entirety. “Partition” rests on the premise that white nationalist forces are not strong enough to win the entire country back.
A second tendency, opposite in effect from the partition strategy, emerged with new vigour in 2009: the “Take Our Country Back” Tea Partiers. In contrast to the highly developed white nationalist consciousness of partition advocates, Tea Partiers are more ideologically diffuse and in many cases deny that they are racists. Denials aside, Tea Party protests are chock full of explicitly racist sloganeering and their emergence in 2009 is the largest and most direct response by white racists to the election of Obama. It is a developing phenomenon (see “Tea parties, race, Republicans and the opposition to Obama”, Searchlight, October 2009) and we can expect to see much more of it in 2010. If Obama manages to bring comprehensive immigration reform forward in Congress this year, anti-racists should expect to find the Tea Partiers standing with the anti-immigrant forces that have long been waiting in the rut, hoping to shoot down any legislation that contains any form of amnesty for undocumented workers.
It will be on that ground that the battle for the future will first be fought.
