Blood and Politics (89 page)

During the first half of 2001, Carto had used
The Spotlight
’s remaining pages to heap verbal abuse upon Mark Weber and anyone associated with him. The tabloid reasserted its claim that Weber et al. were agents of the Mossad or the FBI or the Anti-Defamation League or all of them at once. It also charged Weber with mistreating his wife and stealing from her grandmother. Moreover, the tabloid accused Weber of being Jared Taylor’s friend. Weber had met Taylor in Ghana in 1970, and
The Spotlight
informed its readers that the African country was then under the thumb of the Israeli Mossad. Plus Taylor had subsequently worked in international banking, which only heightened suspicions. If that was not proof enough of Weber’s treachery, well, there was that moment documented by
The Spotlight
when “Taylor and his future wife received a call from Irwin Suall.”
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Weber denied these claims.

The attempt to pillory Weber and drive the Institute for Historical Review out of business did not work. With little extra cost, the Internet allowed the IHR to match or exceed every published pronouncement in
The Spotlight
with a statement and documentation of its own. The IHR’s website kept constantly updating news of the court cases, including postings of relevant testimony and judgments.
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Mark Weber matched Willis Carto’s dogged tenaciousness with his own, and he kept the Institute for Historical Review operating for a decade on a much-reduced scale.

Rewriting the Holocaust was a decidedly different project in 2001 from twenty years earlier. It had become an article of faith within Klan, national socialist, and later white power skinhead circles that the Jews had invented the Holocaust. It was now common knowledge outside the movement that some people somewhere denied the worst of Hitler’s crimes, even if it was not common knowledge precisely who those people were. And a measurable stratum of American society tended to believe the IHR’s claims on that point. At the same time, forty-five years after
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
, much of the public debate had shifted, and now numbers of the white populace felt as if
they
were the victims of racial discrimination, not people of color. That change in white sentiment had occurred without anyone’s necessarily accepting the early argument made by Willis Carto and William Pierce that it was first necessary to break the link between knowledge of the Holocaust and support for racial egalitarianism.

In Germany, rewriting this history had become ensnarled in a debate on German national identity. Sectors of the Arab and Islamic world now promoted Holocaust denial as part of the conflict with the state of Israel.
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Holocaust denial had failed to establish itself as a scholarly pursuit in the Anglo-American world, however, and its best-known practictioner, David Irving, lost a libel case in British courts, after an American author described him as a “Holocaust denier.” He subsequently was sentenced to three years in jail by an Austrian court after pleading guilty to charges that he had in fact denied Hitler’s Nazis’ deliberate attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
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In this changed context, Weber did not change the IHR’s course entirely. When he convened the institute’s thirteenth conference about fifteen months before Liberty Lobby’s final dissolution, he had invited many of the same characters who had attended previous meetings. Definite changes in approach were evident, however. A professor known for
his genetic determinist views of race was borrowed from the
American Renaissance
stable of speakers, and race was explicitly part of the IHR conference agenda for the first time. And former California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey appeared in this scholarly confab, giving Weber and co. a glimpse of the respectability they had been seeking since the beginning. McCloskey told the gathering, “I don’t know if you are right or wrong about the Holocaust,” according to the IHR’s own account of the meeting, but he apparently wished everyone well.
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The most significant shift was not in the persons who spoke or the topics they covered but in the relative openness of the meeting. Gone were Carto’s furtiveness and the secretness within which the meeting place had been shrouded. At Weber’s IHR gathering, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter attended almost all the sessions, and various other media were given access; the speeches were broadcast live via the Internet. Here Weber borrowed heavily from Jared Taylor, who did not shrink from publicly advertising the location of his
American Renaissance
conferences or keep reporters and video cameras at bay.

Despite the changes in tone, the IHR still faced the same obstacles as before. Plus, as noted earlier,
American Renaissance
had replaced it as the premier think tank for the white nationalist movement as a whole. More, the market for publications rewriting the Holocaust was saturated in the United States, and the institute was looking farther and farther afield. In December 2000 the IHR had announced that it was supporting a conference on “Revisionism and Zionism,” set for Beirut the following spring. The principal organizer was a Swiss “revisionist” who had moved to Iran, and by March 2001 registrants from the United States and Europe were planning to meet with their counterparts from Japan as well as from Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt. Speeches were to be given in Arabic, French, and English. That particular conference was canceled, however, as the Lebanese government threatened to close the gathering down.
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Nevertheless, the direction was set for the first years of the twenty-first century. And a conference similar to the canceled Lebanese event was successfully held in Teheran in 2006.
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The principal growth areas for rewriting the Holocaust would be the former Soviet Union and the Middle East.

The events of September 11, 2001, brought together Americans in grief and determination. People celebrated the bravery of the citizens of New York City and those who had fought their captors in the skies over Pennsylvania. Everything did not change, however. The post–Cold War battles over race, culture, and national identity reemerged in an anti-immigrant movement spanning the distance between Republicans and Buchananites to vigilantes and white power skinheads. As the oldest generation of white nationalists leave the stage, a new cast of characters promises to fight well into the future.

September 11, 2001.
If you did not see it at 9:03 a.m., when television news cameras caught the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, you certainly watched the attack on the evening television news. And in the weeks and months that followed you may have watched it again (and again) until your retinal memory burned with smoke and fire and the shudder of fallen buildings and crushed lives. You knew many of the details long before the dead had been counted. A band of hijackers commandeered a passenger plane from Boston and crashed it into the north tower, instantly killing themselves and all aboard. A second gang simultaneously captured another plane from Boston and aimed it at the south tower. The burning jet fuel weakened the floor trusses until the top floors crashed down one upon the other. The entire structure collapsed, essentially vaporizing hundreds and spewing a poisoned fog across southern Manhattan.

Within the hour a third plane slammed like a ballistic missile into the Pentagon. This one had departed from Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., and changed course over West Virginia. The passengers, crew, and Defense Department employees were killed. Passengers on a fourth airplane, after learning via their cell phones of the other attacks and being hijacked themselves, decided they would die fighting rather than let their plane become another weapon in the hands of terrorists. In words that now haunt your memory one passenger bellowed, “Let’s roll,” as they rushed their captors, crashing the plane into a Pennsylvania meadow before it reached a target. All aboard died as heroes. You saw the ruins after the fact and read the reports but still had trouble believing the enormity of these attacks.

The heroism of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances remains one of the enduring memories of this day. Hundreds of New York City firefighters rushed into the World Trade Center in an attempt to save lives but were lost in the crush of concrete and steel. Stockbrokers shepherded their fellow employees down darkened and dangerous staircases. Many others unnamed and unheralded rallied a distinctive American pride. In New York City, police and firefighters became instant heroes in communities where conflict with overbearing law enforcement personnel had previously ruled. In the Midwest and South, decades of cultural distance from New York turned into an emotional bond with that most cosmopolitan and polyglot of urban centers. Thousands gave blood in their local communities, construction workers volunteered for rescue efforts, and American flags appeared on bumper stickers and car antennas, in cornfields and on windowpanes, and at every public gathering to mourn the dead. Art displays and music, literature, and cultural invention expressed grief and anger, pride and bravado. Among other indicators of popular sentiment, the playlist on country music stations became inflated with ballads recalling the heroism of firefighters and policemen. Even rocker Bruce Springsteen, whose anthem “Born in the USA” mourned the losses suffered by Vietnam vets, launched his next concert tour in the conscious shadow of September 11. A raw and edgy American nationalism and patriotism showed itself across the country.

As a new “us” stood up, we pointed our collective finger at “them.” Unlike Oklahoma City, when the first impulse proved wrong, now the enemies were in fact foreign terrorists. Within days, eighteen hijackers had been identified, an overwhelming majority Saudi Arabian nationals. President George W. Bush declared war. “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil,” he told the cabinet.
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Administration officials repeatedly told foreign leaders and the American public that there would be no middle ground in this war against terrorism.

President Bush counted “freedom and democracy” on his side of this battle. On the other side, the foe was more ambiguous. Various enemies were named: terrorists, states that supported terrorism, and a new axis of evil—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Unofficially, the list was longer and included Islamic fundamentalism in its several permutated forms. Unlike the Cold War, which pitted the United States and its Western European allies against the Soviet Union and communism, the enemy in this new war was not territorially specific and its ideological center not clearly defined. American allies also seemed less definite.

Further complicating this new war of “us” against “them,” the possibility existed that some of us might actually be some of them. Within
weeks of September 11, a number of anthrax attacks left five dead and paralyzed the postal service. Originally a cattle disease, anthrax had long before been “weaponized” as part of an American biological warfare program. Spores are cultivated in laboratories and then ground into a fine powder that can become a lethal airborne weapon. Letters containing anthrax were sent to the offices of two United States senators and to a Florida-based media business. As concern over these incidents of bioterrorism increased, threats of anthrax attacks overwhelmed the number of actual incidents. Planned Parenthood offices and clinics, for example, reported receiving more than five hundred threats during the period immediately after September 11. The FBI’s stated belief that the spores were domestic, rather than foreign, in origin heightened feelings of unease and fear. Yet no one was charged in these crimes.
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In this climate, Congress quickly passed and President Bush signed legislation granting federal and local authorities new police powers that raised significant constitutional and civil liberties complaints. One federal judge, a Reagan-era appointee, complained immediately of changes sought in the jury system: “This is the most profound shift in our legal institutions in my lifetime and—most remarkable of all—it has taken place without engaging any broad public interest whatsoever.”
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A plan floated by Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department called for a nationwide spy-on-your-neighbor program whereby postal carriers, meter readers, and others who casually gained access to an individual’s home would be encouraged to report “suspicious activities” to the authorities. That idea was dropped before it became legislation, but other measures were adopted as law.
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Further adding to the sense of siege within American borders, approximately 1,200 aliens and citizens were detained for questioning in the attacks, and 762 aliens were jailed. The Justice Department contended that those wanted as potential “material witnesses” could be held indefinitely in jail while waiting to testify before investigative grand juries. Many waited for months before being given legal representation. A later report by the Department of Justice’s inspector general found “significant problems” in the detainments, including a pattern of abuse.
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Some steps were taken later to curtail a few of the worst infringements. The message in the weeks after September 11, however, was unambiguous: trampling on a few civil liberties in the fight against terrorism was the price Americans would have to pay for feeling safe. One Republican congressman, in a fit of unapologetic chauvinism, told listeners on a radio talk show that racial profiling was needed to apprehend terrorists: “If I see someone comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.”
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For some, the September 11 bloodletting seemed to let loose stored-up demons. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, speaking on the Reverend Pat Robertson’s television program, was almost completely candid in his accusations: “I really believe the pagans and abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
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