Blood and Politics (42 page)

Along the meeting’s sidelines, nasty Jew baiting remained customary, augmented by speakers who told thin routine jokes about such Jewish personalities as Elie Wiesel. Mark Weber exemplified the contradiction between the IHR’s thoroughly anti-Semitic roots and its attempts to grow more acceptable. He told the conference that of course “we all express our sympathy” for the Jews’ wartime suffering. The next moment he angrily promised to deride the United States Holocaust Museum, then under construction amid other Washington monuments, as soon as it opened to the public. It was a “monument to foreigners,” he scoffed. He promised to make it an object of public scorn. “We’re going to love pointing out the mistakes,” he crowed, “. . . we’re going to have great fun.”
³⁶
Weber’s sneering aside, when the Holocaust Museum did open, exhibits drew more Americans in one week than the deniers could distribute pamphlets to in fifty-two.

While the Historikerstreit and the collapse of the Berlin Wall changed the conditions under which the Institute for Historical Review tried to rewrite the Holocaust, German unification did not change this small band of anti-Semites into genuine historians. Other world changes, however, eventually did transform the entire American white supremacist movement. The disintegration of the German Democratic Republic in the East was soon followed by the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe. Like a string of dominoes falling from Berlin to Moscow to Washington, D.C., the communist collapse ended anticommunism as a glue unifying American conservatives and the far right. A split opened in the conservative establishment over war in the Persian Gulf. And in a completely counterintuitive development, the white supremacist movement was saved from its own internal weaknesses and marched back onto the stage of History, that fickle judge.

September 1, 1990.
Liberty Lobby held its convention at the very respectable Stouffer’s Concourse Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Approximately 250 supporters gathered, much like any other politically concerned middle-class Americans in their fifties and sixties. A dinner ship cruised down the Potomac with conventioneers on board. Longtime financial contributors received wristwatches in a ceremony designed to honor them. Willis Carto eulogized the Lobby’s recently deceased secretary, Lois Peterson.
The Spotlight
’s distribution was discussed, and policy statements were voted upon.

Plenary speakers hit Liberty Lobby’s usual targets: the Federal Reserve banking system, the American Medical Association, secret drug trafficking by the CIA, and the perfidy of American support for Israel. Robert Weems popped up again, and the Mississippi Klansman turned Populist Party chair gave an abridged edition of his standard stump speech. The events in Germany were not on the agenda. The coming war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq, by contrast, was the number one topic of discussion.
¹

One month before, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s military had occupied neighboring Kuwait. The invasion destabilized the world’s most important oil-producing region and provoked an immediate international response. As the United States posted hundreds of thousands of troops to the Persian Gulf, President George H. W. Bush constructed an unprecedented diplomatic and military coalition. In addition to longtime Western European allies, Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Syria signed on to United Nations resolutions opposing Iraq’s invasion. A United Nations resolution established January 15, 1991, as the deadline for Hussein to withdraw. For the first time since the outbreak
of the Cold War, an American-led international military expedition was not conducted under the banner of anticommunism. And it went unopposed by the Soviet Union and its surrogates. “This is an historic moment,” Bush said when the battle against Iraqi troops in Kuwait began. “We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order—a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful—and we will be—we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.”
²
Bush drew a line between the past era, dominated by conflict with the Soviet Union, and an (illusionary) future of international peace and cooperation.

Meanwhile, at Liberty Lobby’s convention, opposition to the impending war stood as a matter of principle. At a luncheon, the former Mississippi congressman David Bowen, then the director of the Council for the National Interest, a pro-Arab lobby, praised Liberty Lobby for “standing up for America for 35 years.”
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Comedian Dick Gregory told the same crowd that he was fasting in protest of the growing American military buildup aimed at Iraq. Mark Lane, an old friend of Gregory’s then serving as Liberty Lobby’s house attorney, introduced the black comedian. In a previous incarnation, Lane had been a liberal Democratic state representative in New York. And Gregory was known for his civil rights activism in the 1960s, just as Liberty Lobby was known for its segregationist platform. Nevertheless, Gregory told the assembled patriots, “[y]our group has the power to help change our foolish policy in the Persian Gulf,” and the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Across the months of the crisis,
The Spotlight
railed against Israel and blamed “international bankers” for the dire consequences of war. One early tabloid “exclusive” claimed that Israel would go to war against Iraq the week after the November 1990 election, thereby preempting any United States “offensive.”
⁴
When military hostilities actually began, Israel stayed out of the conflict, despite Iraqi missile attacks on its cities. Liberty Lobby republished articles from the 1970s and 1980s that criticized American military policy. Each article reiterated Liberty Lobby’s nationalism and its opposition to internationalism, and all aimed at proving the deleterious effects of foreign intervention.
⁵
One article, reprinted under Willis Carto’s byline, had been first published in 1981 as President Reagan prepared to invade Grenada. It argued that imperial adventures actually weakened the United States. “Involvement in all foreign wars beginning with the Spanish-American,” Carto had
written, “have resulted in varieties of disaster, culture distortion, economic over expansion resulting in depression or inflation, growth of government and a weakening of American nationality.”

By conflating “international intervention” with “culture distortion,” Carto reiterated ideas redolent of his old infatuation with Yockeyism. Remember that for Carto, culture had always been determined by the race of the people who created it. And culture distortion was caused by racial integration or “amalgamation.”
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Thus
The Spotlight
, by reprinting the 1981 piece, warned that U.S. involvement in a Persian Gulf War would negatively influence (white) American culture because of its future impact on race relations.

In addition to Liberty Lobby, every other white skin sect saw its own archenemies reflected in the developing conflict. Sometimes their language was crude and inflammatory. “WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST? Another Blood Sacrifice on the Alter of International Jewry,” ran a banner headline on one Klan’s bimonthly tabloid.
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The “sacrifice” lingo conjured up a specific type of false charge dating from medieval Europe, the blood libel. A second group had a more contemporary slant. It complained that parity for women and racial integration had crippled the military. “The American army is demographically unsound,” the group declaimed. “It is 10% female and 35% non-White. The non-Whites are over-represented in the combat forces, and they have little commitment to their country beyond their pay.”
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While some groups, like the Klan above, used the occasion to heap calumny upon Jews, and others insulted blacks and women in the military, the Populist Party did both and neither at the same time.

In West Palm Beach, Florida, a small band of Populists joined a local left-wing “peace and justice” antiwar protest. A few wore “Duke for Governor” buttons while distributing flyers and mingling with the crowd.
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“It is the children of the conservative, white, working class who will bear the bulk of the casualties,” the Populists claimed. In contrast with previous practices, these Populists lauded the left—without the usual insults directed against white liberals or black people. “The most conspicuous foes of war have been on the left and we in the Populist Party support their efforts,” the leaflet read.
¹⁰

In Pittsburgh, twenty-five pickets circled the sidewalk in front of the downtown federal building. The placards read
NO WAR FOR BIG OIL PROFITS
and
BRING THE TROOPS HOME
. Most of the pickets were middle- and working-class men and women in plaid flannel shirts, stocking caps, and pink-collar office wear; one well-dressed exception
carried a sign that said
JUST SAY NO TO NO-WIN FOREIGN WARS
. A young boy, about ten years old, held his own sign declaring
KUWAIT SHEIKS ARE GEAKS
as he walked in line.

Picketing was an unusual form of street action for this party. Its members had sat through innumerable meetings, nominated themselves for public office, and even filed suit against the Federal Reserve Board. But they had rarely marched with bullhorns and placards. Such immodest behavior was best reserved for Klansmen, skinheads, or uniformed neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, the pending war with Iraq forced a small attempt at changed tactics. Despite the earnestness of their signs and slogans, the whole affair had a katzenjammer atmosphere about it. The protesters tired easily, and the group never grew larger than the original twenty-five pickets—even with a half dozen area high schoolers and Populists imported from Ohio. Don Wassall, who made himself chief of the national party, had called all the area news bureaus. Yet only one local television camera showed. “The higher-ups want to stifle us” became the explanation for lack of media interest. At one point Wassall tried to rouse the others to a round of chanting, but nothing happened. One high school student started shouting, “Death to Israel,” but stopped after his girlfriend punched him in the arm.
¹¹

Another woman stood on the corner, handing out party leaflets. “If the Populist Party were in power,” the leaflets read, “we would have hundreds of thousands of troops on the Mexican border, not in desert sand dunes ten thousand miles away . . . There would be no ‘affirmative action,’ quotas and other anti-white racist schemes.” She soon gave up because only black people were walking past, and she was too embarrassed to hand them obviously offensive leaflets. Two young men left the demonstration briefly, bought a Confederate flag, and then returned, waving it for the duration. For these two, the battle banner was probably less a standard for America first nationalism than a simple symbol of rebellion.

The group left after an hour on the sidewalk and reconvened at a VFW hall for a “victory party.”
¹²
Van Loman, a Cincinnati Klansman turned party officer, avowed that the afternoon’s protest was bigger than anything he could organize in Ohio. Even though the event had been dispirited and poorly attended, Wassall also declared it a success.

At that point the Populist Party grabbed at the smallest shreds of good news. When a Populist candidate running for the Rhode Island state legislature received 700 votes, or 34 percent of those cast in that race, the party virtually declared victory. When another candidate, in New Jersey, received 19,957 votes (about 1 percent) in a statewide race, that too was considered a step up because their person had outpolled the
miserable showings of the other third parties. The party’s electioneering was “following a long-term strategy, and is right on track,” its newsletter assured any doubters.
¹³

Long march or short hike, this third party of known racists and anti-Semites would never muster the hundreds of thousands of votes necessary to win an election. Nevertheless, the Populist Party played a unique role. As the one white supremacist grouping closest to the conservative movement, it paid attention to developments on the Republican far right. A few key members commented favorably on an increasingly radical nationalist tendency within the broader conservative movement. The personification of that trend was Pat Buchanan. This small but significant group of conservatives broke ranks with President George H. W. Bush over his plans for a New World Order and his war in the Persian Gulf.

A brawl had started on television soon after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. At that moment President Bush was still out on the international hustings, drumming up support for his anti-Saddam coalition. Pat Buchanan sat with four other commentators around a horseshoe-shaped broadcast studio engaged in one of America’s best-known political pundit food fights, the
McLaughlin Report
. While arguing that little domestic or international support existed for a new war, Pat blurted out: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”
¹⁴

Later in the same program he repeated the charge, implying that Israel was pulling the United States’ foreign policy strings, urging Americans to spill blood in a proxy war Israelis were unwilling to fight. “The Israelis want this war desperately because they want the United States to destroy the Iraqi war machine. They want us to finish them off. They don’t care about our relations with the Arab world.”
¹⁵

Substitute “amen corner in the United States” for “Zionist Occupied Government,” and the verbal flourishes of Buchanan and white supremacists start to sound remarkably alike. On these points and others, differences between white supremacist rhetoric and Pat Buchanan talk disappear before the naked eye. Buchanan’s stature as a former Nixon and Reagan White House aide and his nationally syndicated column and television celebrity, however, gave him a bigger megaphone than any Aryan Nations believer screaming at the top of his lungs. Here was a biography moving from a hard-edged but nevertheless establishment conservatism, out to the unrespectable reaches of white nationalism.