Inside the violent movement that spawned James von Brunn and Scott Roeder. - By Joe Conason

[kpete]

The politics of assassination

Inside the violent movement that spawned James von Brunn and Scott Roeder.
By Joe Conason


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 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."

more:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2009/06/12/von_brunn/

[NJCher]

1. not necessarily mental cases

Zeskind says a possible remedy to people like Von Brunn might be "education, organizing and a good analysis, understanding the exact nature of their ideology."

He warns not to see them as nut cases. He says that Von Brunn himself is not unsophisticated or stupid.

I'll take his word for it but the few white supremacist types I've known definitely are unhinged and have mental issues. Again, I'm not disagreeing with Zeskind, but it's very hard for me to see how clear-headed people who are not unintelligent can go for this outlook.

On another topic, the article links the "Council of Conservative Citizens." It was surprising to me to see the blatant racism in their stories. If they're going to all the trouble to change their name from "White Citizen Councils" to Council of Conservative Citizens," wouldn't one write these stories a little differently than what is seen here?:

The so-called “diversity communal council” will see News Corp executives ritualistically grovel and scrape before militant black race hustlers at semi-annual meetings.


Cher

[juno jones]

2. Just read an interesting article going into some depth about McVeigh and the ARA.

Timothy McVeigh and the neo-Nazi Bankrobbers

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/140/timothy_mcveigh_and_the_neonazi_bankrobbers.html

Stumbled across that last nite when I went looking to be entertained for awhile and catch a break from this stuff. Oh well. The writer puts together a pretty good case that Timmy was probably linked to these guys, and sketches some of their links to others such as the Phineas Preisthood, etc. It filled in some gaps in my knowlege with information that I had missed the first time around back in the 90's.

[Doctor_J]

3. how do i read the article?

I got sent to an article on mexican immigrants