Joe Conason, Salon, June 12, 2009
Acts of madness like the killing of George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns can be too easily dismissed as the work of disturbed individuals and then subsumed in the usual rumble of recrimination between left and right. But if we are to understand the deeper implications of those acts of murder, what must be examined is their origin in the shadow world of white nationalism.
Nobody knows more about the movements that spawned the alleged gunmen than Leonard Zeskind, who has spent most of a lifetime observing, analyzing and opposing racism and anti-Semitism in America and abroad. Now he has distilled those hard and dangerous decades of work into “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” a magisterial new book that explains how and why racial hatred became and remains a significant political force in American society.
To Zeskind, the most recent attacks only represent the latest stage in a long wave of extremist violence dating back to the early 1980s, marked by assassinations, bombings, bank robberies and other crimes that were largely ignored by the mainstream media because they often occurred in distant rural locations. “The reason we’re talking about this incident,” he said “is because it happened in Washington, D.C., at the Holocaust Museum, instead of somewhere in the backwoods of Montana.”
According to Zeskind, “the level of racist and anti-Semitic violence was much worse during the Reagan era, back in the ’80s, when we had the Order, which killed [Jewish radio host] Alan Berg, and certainly in the ’90s when Clinton was president, when we had Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, the Aryan Republican Army robbing banks, the Phineas Priesthood shooting people. Those years saw much more of these kind of attacks than what we are seeing right now.”
That distinction is no excuse for complacency, he emphasizes, because there may yet be worse to come in a period of economic privation and social change. “What we are seeing is the first spate of violence since the crackdown after Oklahoma City, when the government went after these criminals, rounded up all the shooters that they could and prosecuted a lot of them.” Effective prosecutions conducted by the Clinton Justice Department suppressed the most violent wing of the white nationalist movement, as did the national alert against terrorism that followed the 9/11 attacks.
“A bunch of the violence-prone people got arrested in the period between 1997 and 1998,” he recalls with satisfaction. “The government went after them like nobody’s business, and Clinton did a good job of isolating them. Then Bush’s rhetoric about terrorism put a damper on them, because they knew the Department of Homeland Security was looking at them.” Now it may well be time for the government to devote additional intelligence and investigative resources to domestic extremists.
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