Blood and Politics (94 page)

At the time of the raid, Duke was in Russia—for his fourth visit since 1995.
⁸
Rather than come home and defend himself, he spent the next two years traveling across Europe (east and west) and the Arab countries of the Middle East. In France, Duke had his picture taken with Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Russia he turned his 1995 meeting with Zhironovsky into a spot at a 2002 “anti-Zionist” conference in Moscow. In Kiev in August 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from the National Academy of Management. That same month he attended a convention of a white nationalist party in Germany. The following November he spoke at a meeting in Bahrain.
⁹
During these years abroad, Duke sold racism and anti-Semitism the way any other American businessman might sell hamburgers and Mickey Mouse.

Less than six weeks later, on December 18, 2002, Duke reappeared in Louisiana and signed documents pleading guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion. He admitted bilking his supporters and lying about his income to the feds. He was sentenced to fifteen months in prison and paid a ten-thousand-dollar fine, before going to prison in April 2003.
¹⁰
He served his sentence at the federal prison in Big Spring, Texas, the same jail that had once held his buddy Don Black after the Dominica fiasco.

When Duke was released a year later, he picked up where he had last left off. At the unity conference, his charisma and gift for public oratory set him apart from the other speakers. He cast adherence to the white nationalist cause as the most selfless devotion to humanity, and he captured the gut anxieties of average racists like no other person of his generation. And when Duke introduced fifty-seven-year-old Sam Dickson, the acerbic attorney from Atlanta, it became obvious that both men felt they were preparing for the next generation.
¹¹

Dickson revisited the white nationalist movement’s underlying assumptions. “Our race needs a homeland where we can be by ourselves,” he said, unpopulated by Muslims, Jews, those he called “Negroes,” and other unspecified people of color. Liberals, specifically white liberals, stood in the way now. Then Dickson changed course and began listing reasons for hope in the future.

One was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They had lifted
the lid on the “Jewish issue,” he said. For the first time anti-Semites could talk openly. Racial liberalism among whites, he argued, with its “Camelot” and “hootenannies” and Peace Corps, was a thing of the past. Those people thought they were going to turn “Ghana into Norway,” he said in a quick turn of phrase, but “nobody believes it anymore.” Public opinion polls may show white support for “diversity” and desegregation, he told the crowd, but polling is about “public opinion,” what you are willing to tell a stranger over the phone. Actual, privately held beliefs are more evident in the way people live. And white people will “pay $300,000 for a $75,000 home, just so they can live with other white people.” Deep down, he claimed with a certain glee in his voice, they all realize “black people are hopeless.”
¹²

Racial egalitarianism, according to his analysis, had rested on the prospect of seemingly unlimited economic expansion during the decades following World War Two. But the good times were over. Now he argued, “The worse the better, let the bad times roll.” Other factors were also changing. Television had once given liberalism a “media monopoly.” Now the Internet provided open access to ideas of every kind. The liberal monopoly had ended, he proclaimed.
¹³

The most important change he noted that day was generational. The war against Hitler had once led white people to associate what he called “normal racial values” with Nazis, and they had been America’s enemy. “The World War Two generation is being gathered unto their fathers,” he declared in triumph. With their deaths, he believed, remembrance of the fight against Hitlerism would fade. The postwar period would finally and completely end. And after stating the case for a brighter whiter future, the attorney sat down to deep and grateful applause.
¹⁴

In his talk that day, Dickson succinctly summarized the white nationalists’ case (as they understood it) for the twenty-first century. After thirty years of grassroots organizing, they had learned several of the more unsavory facts in American life. A significant number of white people, for whatever set of reasons, continue to buy overpriced houses just so they can live in all-white neighborhoods. Survey respondents
are
often less than forthright, particularly when responding to sensitive questions about race-related matters.
¹⁵
Some white people
will
use racial slurs and tell jokes when talking with other white people but
will not
use them when talking within earshot of black people. The terms of public discussion changed sharply after World War Two and the civil rights revolution, and overt racism and anti-Semitism were no longer considered socially acceptable. Throughout the events described in this book, white nationalists aimed at transforming this social (and racial) discourse. And to the degree already discussed, they partially succeeded. In sum, a
number of white nationalist leaders had a fairly accurate sense of the future direction of a sector of the white populace. And from this group the mainstreamers of the twenty-first century will continue to develop.

At the same time, white nationalists consistently misunderstand the larger world around them. A significant number of white people remain determined to live and live happily in a multiracial, multicultural United States. And they do not regard themselves as “race traitors.” Perhaps even more significant, black people and other people of color are not passive objects of history. They are historical subjects in their own right. African Americans in particular had changed American life at every one of its critical junctures since the advent of New World slavery. Ideological thinkers on the white-ist side of politics remain completely blind to this aspect of the twenty-first century. And from this failure, vanguardists and Aryan killers will continue to pop up, at odds with the direction of American life.

The generations after the postwar boomers have yet to fully take the stage. From this juncture, those now twenty plus years old will determine the future direction of the white nationalist movement. They are tech-savvy and well educated. Having not lived through World War Two, they will not be chastened by the horrors of Hitlerism. Having never experienced Jim Crow and the struggles against it, they will be unburdened by its memory. Their only uniform will be their white skins in a country where white people are increasingly a demographic minority among minorities. The prerogatives now accruing to majority status will be challenged, as black, brown, and yellow faces increasingly populate the halls of economic and political power. The presidency of Barack Obama only confirms their notions of white dispossession. And in the decades to come, the next generations of activists will seek to establish a white nation-state, with definable economic, political, and racial borders, out of the wreckage they hope to create of the United States. Some will kill and bomb and shoot their supposed racial enemies. Some will run for elected office and win. They will fight for local (white) control. Failing a complete victory, they will continue the cultural battle over symbols from the past and the history of the future. And they will draw on the legacy of those who resurrected white supremacy as an autonomous movement in the 1970s and brought it into the twenty-first century.

Preface

  
1.
Erich Fromm, “Foreword,” in Edward Bellamy,
Looking Backward
(originally published 1888; Signet Classics New American Library, 1960), p. v (46 utopian novels between 1889 and 1900).

  
2.
John L. Peak, “‘Yellow Peril’ Threatens World With Disaster”; “A Preacher’s Gloomy View, Dr. Combs Sees Many Perils Facing the Republic”; Rev. Stephen Northrop, “Universal Rivalry to Lift One Another Up”;
The Kansas City Times
, January 1, 1901.

  
3.
Allan Chase,
The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Illini Books Edition, 1980), pp. 138–75, 274–301.

  
4.
Leonard Zeskind, “Saving Grace or Human Race,”
Kansas City Star
, December 26, 1999.

  
5.
Leonard Zeskind,
It’s Not Populism: America’s New Populist Party a Fraud by Racists and Anti-Semites
, writing and research assistance by Ken Lawrence, published by the National Anti-Klan Network and Southern Poverty Law Center, 1984.

  
6.
Counting white supremacists is not a precise science. I count the number of distinct organizations, Identity churches, publications, etc., and then extrapolate. Exact numbers can be derived from court documents, postal circulation numbers, or website memberships. Klan members are gathered by closely monitoring rallies and other semipublic activity. The best numbers on white power skinhead groups often come from antiracist skinheads or punk groups. Militia membership separates into hard-core individuals who train with weapons and go to private meetings, and the much larger numbers who go to public affairs. By aggregating these totals and then subtracting overlaps, the best estimate is made.

  
7.
Robert S. Griffin,
The Man of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce
, first published on the Internet in 2000, also published in paper, 1st Books Library, 2001 (an extremely sympathetic portrait of Pierce’s ideas and person, this book fails to locate Pierce in a movement environment or make a critical assessment of his ideas); George Michael,
Willis Carto and the American Far Right
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008); Frank P. Mintz,
The Liberty Lobby and the American Right: Race, Conspiracy and Culture
(Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1985). Both Michael’s and Mintz’s accounts are narrowly constructed and suffer from failing to fully access the long track record Carto left in the courts.

  
8.
Darko Zubrinic, “The Sarajevo Haggadah,” 1995,
www.croatianhistory.net/etf/hagg.html
.

1. The Apprenticeship of Willis Carto

  
1.
David Duke, “Introduction of Willis Carto,” International European American Unity and Leadership Conference, May 30, 2004, Airport Plaza Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana, transcript of
www.davidduke.com/conference/audio
/.

  
2.
Willis Carto, “Supplementary Answers to Interrogatories,” filed June 10, 1963,
Willis Carto v. Giant Food, Inc.
, United States Court for the District of Maryland, Civil Action 14419.

  
3.
Willis Carto, “Plaintiff’s Answers to Interrogatories,” filed October 25, 1963,
Carto v. Giant Food
.

  
4.
Elisabeth Carto, “Judgment Debtor Examination of Elizabeth W. Carto,” June 13, 2001, pp. 3–12,
Legion for the Survival of Freedom, Inc. v. Willis Carto
, California State Court San Diego, M 64584.

  
5.
Willis Carto, letter to Norris Holt, January 19, 1955, “You are looking at the first letter ever sent on a letterhead of the JCR.”

  
6.
E. L. Anderson, Ph.D. [Willis Carto], “Cultural Dynamics I, II and III,”
Right
, November 1959, March 1969, and June 1960. Reprinted by Noontide Press and by
Western Destiny
.

  
7.
“Liberty Lobby Being Formed,”
Right
23 (August 1957): 1. He projected an initial budget of $119,500.

  
8.
Willis Carto, “Introduction,” in Ulick Varange [Francis Parker Yockey],
Imperium
(Noontide Press, April 1983), p. xix.

  
9.
Willis A. Carto, “A Liberty Lobby Is Needed,”
Right
, September 1957. At a September 1957 meeting of a Chicago-based organization known as “We The People,” one thousand conventioneers unanimously endorsed a resolution supporting the creation of a “Liberty Lobby.”

  
10.
Willis Carto, “Supplemental Answers to Interrogatories,” filed June 10, 1963,
Carto v. Giant Food
. “From June to September 1960 I was in Boston helping to organize the John Birch Society, an American anti-communist organization.” In a September 25, 1979, deposition in
Liberty Lobby, Inc. v. Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith
, Carto said he worked for the Birch Society in 1959 and gave several conflicting accounts of events during this period.

11.
Right
, March 1960.

12.
Curtis Dall, “Statement of Curtis Dall, Chairman, Board of Policy, Liberty Lobby, Washington, D.C. Given before the Senate Finance Committee on August 10, 1962, in opposition to H.R. 11970”; Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson reported on Dall’s statement in “The Reappearance of Curtis Dall,”
The Washington Post
, June 1, 1963. The article became the subject of a libel suit,
Curtis B. Dall v. Drew Pearson et al.
; in case no. 921, October 1964, the Supreme Court published Dall’s testimony as part of its decision on a writ of certiorari. Dall did not prevail in his libel suit; Drew Pearson, “To Washington Merry-Go-Round Editors,” April 28, 1965, syndicated column.

13.
Willis Carto, “Deposition of ‘Willie’ Allison Carto,” April 25, 1963,
Carto v. Giant Food
.

14.
Ibid.

15.
“Deposition of Joseph E. Roberts,” December 21, 1963, p. 7,
Carto v. Giant Food.

16.
Giant Food “Answers to Interrogatories,” filed October 25, 1963, p. 9,
Carto v. Giant Food
.

17.
“California Man Fined for Cursing in Market,”
The Washington Post
, November 21, 1962.

18.
“Complaint,” filed February 10, 1963,
Willis A. Carto v. Giant Food
.