Blood and Politics (44 page)

Outside of white supremacist circles, scholars, politicians, and journalists all attempted to make sense of the geopolitical earthquake under their feet. British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it best in his magisterial history of the twentieth century
The Age of Extremes
. “There are historic
moments which may be recognized, even by contemporaries, as marking the end of an age,” Hobsbawm wrote. “The years around 1990 clearly were such a secular turning-point. But, while everyone could see that the old had ended, there was utter uncertainty about the nature and prospects of the new.”
⁸
Several commentators noted the emergence of new nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, and one carried that same analysis over to France and Quebec.
⁹
As Hobsbawm noted, the sudden disintegration of alignments between nation-states would create unknown future changes in the “structures of the world’s domestic political systems.”
¹⁰
And the United States was not exempt.

Scholarly opinions about these changes ranged from blind triumphalism at the end of Soviet communism to the bleakest pessimism at the flesh-eating horrors unleashed in places such as Yugoslavia. Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department policy director and well-regarded scholar, contended that after Soviet communism collapsed, only the ideology of “liberal democracy” remained on the stage of History (with a capital
H
). Conflict itself had not ended, he argued. But other major ideological alternatives, such as monarchism, fascism, and now communism, were no longer viable. Theocratic regimes, such as those in Afghanistan and Iran, may continue to linger on, he wrote, but theocracy itself had no future. The Communist Party may still rule in China, but one-party dictatorships and state-run economies were now universally proven failures. Nationalism need now serve only the liberal democratic ideal in this schema.
¹¹

An opposing, less exultant set of ideas was articulated by Samuel Huntington, a former National Security Council policy director. Like Fukuyama, Huntington argued that the eclipse of communism had ushered in a new era in international relations. But Huntington posited a future world of conflict between “civilizations,” rather than an end to ideology and History. By his argument, “Western Civilization” in Europe and North America was at loggerheads with an “Islamic Civilization,” headquartered in the Middle East. In addition to conflicts between regions, fault lines ran through areas such as the Balkans, where an Orthodox Civilization (Serbs) clashed with a Western Civilization (Croatians) and a Muslim Civilization (Albanians, for example). By this account, another mode of conflict also occurred within civilizations, such as that in Europe between immigrant children of the Saracens and the resident grandchildren of the Crusaders.

Huntington extended his argument to the United States and Hispanics. “If assimilation fails in this case, the United States will become a cleft country, with all the potentials for internal strife and disunion that entails.”
¹²
He warned against both multiculturalism at home and globalism
abroad. Instead of the universal liberal democracy that Fukuyama had envisioned, Huntington saw a world at war along religious and ethnic lines.
¹³

Other views of the post–Cold War world stressed a transition to a “global” economy, organized horizontally across countries. Accordingly, they emphasized the formation of a transnational juridical structure of free trade compacts, environmental treaties, and world courts. By this account, the nation-state no longer controlled its own economic borders. A free market in capital was matched by the increasing transience of labor. The European Union became the example par excellence of this view of the future: increasingly integrated economies, unchecked transportation across borders, and the development of an overarching set of political institutions.
¹⁴

While each of these theories differed with the others, they held one element in common: a new era had been born. Like the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, many of the same planets and stars were still in the sky, only they meant something new and different. A paradigm shift had occurred. Categories associated with the old order changed. And just as the defeat of the Axis powers in World War Two had given birth to new political alignments and the post–World War Two period, the collapse of communism brought new political forces into the fray and, among other things, transformed the character of the white supremacist movement.

Two decades before, at the height of the Cold War, Aryan Nations had declared that its race was its nation. The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord camp in Missouri and the Nehemiah Township charter had tried to create an enclave for this nation on a small swatch of land and with a set of rules to guide its conduct. Pete Peters had made his race the basis of his religious beliefs and attached a notion of white (national) redemption to his salvation. David Duke had gone to the border and told reporters that he thought of America as a white nation. A gang of Order bandits had tried to finance a revolution, not a return to Jim Crow segregation; they wanted a territory established free of everything they regarded as “nonwhite.” And Willis Carto and William Pierce had helped birth these various strands and had articulated a complete worldview in the process. Theirs was a zero-sum equation, in which white people had it all or they had nothing. And in the post–Cold War era, this white nationalism fitted neatly into the ethnic and religious nationalism that was breaking out in fits of barbarism across the globe.

.   .   .

One of the most important new developments was the end of anticommunism as a politically unifying theme. Anticommunism had been the one agreed-upon tenet of the entire right wing. Now no such agreement existed, noted Louis Beam. His hot-blooded rhetoric had inspired skinheads and brought the Fort Smith jury to tears. Now he coolly parsed the meaning of the Soviet bloc’s collapse. “Anti-communism as a political tenet and bedrock of faith has been second only to belief in freedom by those in America to the political right of Karl Marx,” he wrote. “It has been the
one single issue
[italics in original] that all who love liberty have agreed upon. Now that the threat of a communist take-over in the United States is non-existent, who will be the enemy we all agree to hate?”
¹⁵

Beam’s analysis twisted to a conclusion. Like the anticommunism of all white supremacists in the postwar period, Beam’s had been a derivative concern, following his primordial fear of racial equality (and the Jews he believed promoted it). Nevertheless, when Beam and his comrades looked up, they saw the anti-communist umbrella covering their heads also. Remember, he had been proud of his “12 kills” as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam and included them in his Klan biography.

As Hobsbawm had noted, anticommunism was at the core of the American national biography as well. As an ideology it enshrined values, such as free enterprise and individualism, which were older and more deeply embedded than the principle of individual liberty without regard to race.
¹⁶
In addition, anticommunism was broadly popular as a glue binding the American people together. As such, anticommunism during the Cold War period both dictated foreign policy and constituted the cornerstone of national identity.
¹⁷

With the end of communism, and thus of anticommunism, the question was asked: What would become of the American national identity? Beam and other Aryans had a ready answer. “People occupying the North American continent today now define themselves more by race than by any other criterion,” Beam wrote. “Where one lives, works and plays in America is all a product of race . . . There are in fact, no more ‘Americans,’ only competing racial groups.”
¹⁸

“What will be the issue of main concern for conservatives, rightwingers and nationalists in the United States?” he asked in his small-circulation newsletter
The Seditionist
. For Beam, the answer was self-evident. The enemy would become the federal government in Washington, D.C., headquarters of the New World Order. “The evil empire in Moscow is no more. The evil empire in Washington D.C. must meet the same fate.”
¹⁹
Beam saw in the ashes of Yugoslavia a renaissance for his Aryan-only state.

.   .   .

Like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had once been a multinational state. For hundreds of years the Balkans had been the point at which empires and civilizations had clashed. “Roman popes, Byzantine emperors, Hungarian and Hapsburg kings, and Ottoman sultans” each had taken a turn ruling over all or a part of the southern Slavs, according to Jasminka Udovicki, a Belgrade-born sociologist. Each regime left behind its own religious following: Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims. In addition, a small Jewish population lived scattered across the region.

In the nineteenth century these religious differences became the badges of ethnic nationalism, and the crazy quilt of population concentrations alternated between peaceful amalgamation and separatist warfare. Then, in 1912 and 1913, two Balkan wars pitted Serbs and other Eastern Orthodox Christians against both one another and the Muslims of Ottoman Turkey. In 1914, World War One began in Sarajevo, after a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian archduke. After that war, a kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was governed by a Serbian monarch. World War Two again cleaved the region’s peoples by religion and ethnicity. The most Catholic territory, Croatia, became a nominally independent modern state for the first time, ruled by a fascist puppet party known as the Ustache. A Catholic Croat and Bosnian Muslim federation was also established under the Axis powers. Ustache Croatians aligned with Hitler and Mussolini forced hundreds of thousands of Serbs into concentration camps. The dispute over whether forty thousand or four hundred thousand or more Serbs died in the process remains a point of ethnic contention.
²⁰

After World War Two, communists under the direction of the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito attempted to knit together a federation of six republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Instead of perpetuating centuries of ethnic conflict, Titoists tried to establish a common Yugo culture. To promote homogenization, Serbs and Croats spoke a single language known as Serbo-Croatian. Ethnic populations were dispersed rather than concentrated, to encourage integration. At the same time, Tito’s police dealt harshly with any dissent, jailing opponents much like any other authoritarian regime. Nevertheless, the postwar period was largely a time of ethnic peace, as a cosmopolitan and secular civil society developed outside the strictures of the socialist state. “Before May 1991,” the author Misha Glenny noted in
The Fall of Yugoslavia
, “Croats and Serbs lived together in relative contentment throughout the region.”
²¹

As the Soviet Union whirled apart, nationalist and ethnic pressures grew inside all the Yugo republics. Serbian nationalists, led by a strong set of leaders, held sway in a republic that had been at the core of the federation. Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Slovene sovereignty established itself easily. But tens of thousands of ethnic Serbs living inside Croatia, egged on by the regime in Belgrade, feared the newly established independent government, and fighting began. Croatia’s leaders only exacerbated the problem. They raised the same flag that Ustache fascists had flown over their puppet regime during World War Two. They adopted the Ustache monetary unit. And to compound the crisis, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman continued to circulate a book he authored in 1988,
Wastelands—Historical Truth
. “The declared estimated loss of up to six million dead is based too much on emotionally biased testimonies as well as one-sided and exaggerated data,”
²²
Tudjman had written as if he were auditioning for a spot next to Mark Weber at a “historical revisionism” conference. During this stage of the civil war, neo-Nazis from across Europe (and a few from the United States) joined a kind of international brigade fighting on behalf of the Croatians, whom they regarded as the second coming of the Ustache regime. Although their impact on the actual battlefields was minimal, much was made of the military unit by Aryan propagandists in the United States.
²³

As the battles between Serbs and Croatians quieted, a second round of fighting began in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In these territories, the Serb, Croat, and Bosnian populations were more tightly interlaced than in Croatia, and the bloodshed more horrible. The fate of two cities—Mostar and Sarajevo—was emblematic of this stage of the civil war. In Mostar, Bosnian and Croatian paramilitaries combined forces to drive out the Serb-dominated Yugoslavian Army. After they succeeded, however, Croatian (Catholic) militias opened fire on the Bosnian (Muslim) part of the city and destroyed the historic bridge that had once linked the two communities. In Sarajevo, perhaps the most cosmopolitan place in southern Europe, ethnic Serbs concentrated in the suburbs around the city laid siege to the populace, indiscriminately firing mortar rounds into breadlines and schoolyards. This stage of the civil war ended only after the Serb territorial enclaves were recognized as their own autonomous republic inside an independent country smaller than the state of West Virginia.
²⁴

A third round of fighting pitched Albanian-supported Kosovar militias against the Serbian republic itself, and these battles quieted only after President Clinton’s bombing campaign against the Serbs. In the end,
the former Yugoslavia completely dissolved, as the last remaining republics—Macedonia and Montenegro—became independent.
²⁵

The Yugoslav civil war became an object lesson in the dangers inherent in the new ethnic nationalism. When President Clinton went to Paris in 1994 to participate in the commemoration of D-day, he delivered a statement on this new threat: “Militant nationalism is on the rise, transforming the healthy pride of nations, tribes, religious and ethnic groups into cancerous prejudice, eating away at states and leaving their people addicted to the political painkillers of violence and demagoguery.”
²⁶