Blood and Politics (45 page)

During the Cold War, nationalist sentiment was discouraged inside the Soviet bloc, while communist internationalism was favored. After the Cold War, within the countries once dominated by the Soviet Union, nationalism came to the fore. As often as not, this new nationalism possessed an ethnic or a religious character, rather than the liberal civic type of nationalism dominant in Western Europe and North America. Within Western Europe and Canada, civic nationalism based on a system of shared rights and responsibilities had held sway during the Cold War. Movements imbued with sentiments of racial and national chauvinism, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, existed, but both the movements themselves and the ideas they supported were regarded as threats to the mainstream consensus. During the post–Cold War era, however, resurgent nationalist sentiment emerged on two fronts: one, as an opposition to economic and political global integration and two, as an opposition to the language, religion, and culture (and skin color) of non-European immigrants. Immigrants were also regarded as an economic threat to wage rates and social welfare costs. While still minority movements, on the whole, white nationalists affected both government policy and the political discourse.
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Within the United States during most of the Cold War, the situation was only slightly different. Both liberals and conservatives had supported a foreign policy based on containment of any communist advance. Although a noninterventionist form of anticommunist liberalism developed during the Vietnam War, conservatives remained united around the belief that opposition to communism entailed both direct foreign military intervention and support for anticommunist insurgencies. At that point, the dominant form of nationalist sentiment had expressed itself as a form of opposition to communism and the Soviet Union. Americans saw themselves as freedom-loving non-communists, democrats (with a small
d
).

After the Cold War, a vacuum developed where the definition of
American national identity had once firmly existed. White nationalists rushed in to fill the void. It took about ten years for a new form of white nationalism to take shape in the United States. But its outlines had been prefigured in the Yugoslavian civil war, as multicultural communities were torn apart by the demands of ethnic nationalism.

March 23, 1991.
Munich, Germany. The Kuwaiti oil fields still burned, and the Soviet Union had not yet teetered off its last leg, but white nationalists from the United States were already traveling across the newly unified Germany, helping plant the flag of historical revisionism and Holocaust denial in the land of Ernst Nolte and marauding skinheads. The Institute for Historical Review editor Mark Weber joined a bevy of propagandists from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.

The Germans had planned for an elaborate public
Kongress
in a palatial hall at one of the city’s most prestigious museums. They claimed that two thousand nationalists would attend, enabling their Holocaust theories to “break through” into the realm of relevant public debate. They intended to make an august presentation of “scientific evidence,” (illegally) collected at an Auschwitz concentration camp memorial, which supposedly proved that no mass gassings had occurred there. But any hint of respectability eluded the participants. The museum canceled its rental contract and the Kongress ended up on the street outside. Instead of two thousand inquiring minds, only three hundred fanatics rallied, and eight of them managed to get themselves carted off to jail. Despite the setting, speaker after speaker droned on for hours from the back of a truck.
¹

In addition to Weber, there was a widow of a World War Two–era Nazi, a movement attorney from Hamburg, the IHR’s German advisory board members, and the British historical writer David Irving. All attacked the Federal Republic’s suppression of their views. At that point Irving served as the dean of the so-called revisionist movement. His early books on World War Two had received a few good reviews. But after he claimed in a two-volume tome entitled
Hitler’s War
that the
Führer had not known about the deliberate genocide of European Jews, it became evident that the British writer was also a propagandist. He had became a regular at Holocaust denial events in North America and Europe, including a Munich beer hall meet the year before on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday. By the time of this Kongress, Irving had little prestige left to lend and contributed only his flawless German. Mark Weber also gave his speech in perfect German and translated Robert Faurisson’s French talk into German as well. Despite the Munich event’s obvious failings, Weber gave it good grades. “It was the most public challenge in Germany to the crumbling Holocaust edifice,” he wrote in a newsletter account of the event.
²
And because it was on European soil, a greater number of activists from across Europe and the United States quietly got to know one another.
³

Also on the platform that day in Munich, Kirk Lyons introduced himself to the German scene, which he described in terms very similar to those he had used in the United States. In the three years since the Fort Smith seditious conspiracy trial, Lyons’s biography had changed considerably. He had married Brenna Tate, the sister of convicted Order killer David Tate and the daughter of Richard Butler’s second-in-command, Charles Tate. Butler performed the nuptials at his camp in northern Idaho. Lyons wore a Scottish kilt, and an Arizona Aryan played the bagpipes for the occasion.
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Louis Beam was the best man and got so drunk that he tried to climb a ladder while it lay horizontally on the ground. The guest list read like a page from the movement’s
Who’s Who
. Among the luminaries was Robert Millar, the guru atop the Elohim City camp in Oklahoma.

Lyons also spoke regularly at Populist Party events and participated in Aryan Nations events, including the skinhead march in Tennessee. He quietly joined William Pierce’s National Alliance and after Lyons opened an office in Houston and incorporated a nonprofit organization, Patriots Defense Foundation, the National Alliance’s members-only bulletin applauded the effort.
⁵
He publicized the foundation with a newsletter, compiled lists of potential donors, and solicited contributions so the foundation could underwrite the defense of major criminal cases. To the newspapers he billed it as a “conservative American Civil Liberties Union” that defended constitutional rights.
⁶
To his comrades, however, he stressed the foundation’s origin in discussions at Aryan Nations camps.
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His first big case was in North Carolina, where he successfully defended a white patriot accused of killing three men because they were gay.

While he was in Germany to speak at the Munich event, Lyons used the opportunity to express his solidarity with the German racists and
anti-Semites. “Europe is the land of my forefathers,” he told a German skinhead zine,
Volkstreue
. “White Americans are nothing else than Europeans planted somewhere else . . . We share common origins, Volkstum [nationality] and culture.” His was more than a statement of Eurocentricity, however. “We are in a common fight against a common enemy,” Lyons added.

Here Lyons expressed a view shared by William Pierce, Tom Metzger, and other vanguardist leaders. Who or what was this enemy? he was asked. Was it liberals and the left? No, he told the skinhead magazine. “The Left is no problem in the USA.” Instead, “the police are the big problem.” What about democracy? “Democracy is a farce and a failure. I don’t believe in democracy,” he told his interviewer in German. And what was his wish for the future? Short term, he answered, “to smash internationalism.” For Lyons and other speakers that day in Munich, the future burned bright for a resurgence of nationalism, including American white nationalism.

Despite this oft-repeated opposition to “internationalism,” an active transatlantic traffic in racism and anti-Semitism reached virtually every corner of the American movement, particularly during this period. That May the scene shifted to Atlanta, where John Tyndall landed for a two-week, six-state speaking tour. Playing the role of a proper fifty-six-year-old British gentleman, Tyndall stepped off the long plane ride from London into the Atlanta airport wearing a white shirt and sports coat. A plaid tie several inches short of the belt buckle and a long, wary horse-face seemed to give him away. A photographer snapped his picture, and it appeared the following month on the cover of
Searchlight
magazine, a British investigative monthly that had been dogging his steps for years.
Searchlight
periodically republished photos of a younger Tyndall in a brownshirt uniform, stiff with respect before a swastika flag and a portrait of Hitler. With Tyndall that day in Atlanta was Sam Dickson, the sharp-tongued attorney who had been with the southern contingent to the Institute for Historical Review conference in 1986.
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Among British white supremacists, Tyndall combined both the mainstreaming role of Willis Carto and the vanguardist strategy of William Pierce. He had started his career in the 1950s and graduated in the 1960s to the National Socialist Movement, a group much like the National Socialist White People’s Party to which Pierce had once belonged. (It was during that time Tyndall wore homemade uniforms and saluted a swastika flag.) During these early years he was convicted of threatening Jews, controlling a paramilitary outfit, and a gun offense. By the
mid-1970s he had switched tacks, left the uniforms in the closet, and attempted to find a broader following. He helped organize the British National Front, a more successful coat-and-tie group similar to Willis Carto’s own Liberty Lobby and Populist Party confections.

For a brief moment in the mid-1970s the National Front became Britain’s “fourth party” by campaigning against Afro-Caribbean and Asian immigrants. It also brokered the marriage of white supremacy to a subset of the skinhead scene. Tyndall’s front ran into problems, however, after the national socialist undergarments beneath its electioneering cloak became public information. And when Tory candidate Margaret Thatcher opposed immigrants in the 1979 election, she stole that issue away from Tyndall’s front. In the aftermath of that election, internal factionalism gripped the National Front, virtually destroying it as an electoral force. Tyndall later formed a new group called the British National Party. The new party enshrined his leadership as a matter of principle, the so-called
Führerprinzip
, and started to grow.
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By the time Tyndall got to Atlanta, however, his party had stagnated at around fourteen hundred members.
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Despite, or perhaps because of this history, the relationship between Tyndall and Dickson ran deep. Soon after Tyndall had gotten out of jail in 1987 for violating the Race Relations Act, Dickson rushed to England to videotape an interview with him for distribution in the United States. And in 1988, when Tyndall published a six-hundred-page tome entitled
The Eleventh Hour
, Dickson arranged to distribute it from his Georgia post office box.
¹¹
Now Dickson and leaders from a half dozen outfits welcomed Tyndall to the United States as if he were an angel sent to redeem a poor melanin-deprived race from suffering at the hands of Jewish demons and black witchery.
¹²

For this effort he traveled over six states in two weeks and spent thousands of dollars in expenses. This tour turned into one of the movement’s largest cross-organization collaborative efforts. It demonstrated the similarities in ideological outlook among white nationalists in the United Kingdom and the United States. The trip also encapsulated the paradox underlying the movement at that time. The mainstreaming wing had become the dominant trend at the moment. Its leaders included an educated set of middle-class professionals who now eschewed survivalist boot camps and cow pasture cross burnings. They campaigned for public office instead, rewrote history from computer workstations, waged war from hotel lecterns, and searched for personalities to bridge the gap between them and Middle Americans. While they hoped to hold court in the palaces of public opinion, these mainstreamers were more often left on the street outside. They were also repeatedly
undercut by the vanguardist urge to smash and kill. Riven by a split personality, the movement, driven to change society from within, was at odds with itself. With a self-contradictory ideology and competing strategies, organizational factionalism was sure to follow as John Tyndall trekked across the United States.

His first stop was a relatively sober and respectful visit with the reclusive Wilmot Robertson, the author of
The Dispossessed Majority
. The two had established a friendship back in 1979, during an earlier tour by Tyndall across the South. Now tucked away in North Carolina’s Nantahala Mountains, less than four hours north of Atlanta, Robertson had remained a reclusive figure during the two decades since he published his magnum opus. In fact, his actual identity, Humphrey Ireland, had been a closely kept secret.
¹³
However, his publishing house, Howard Allen Enterprises, was a matter of record with the state of Florida, where it was registered. Humphrey Ireland and his wife, Mary, were the only two officers of the corporation, which was named after their sons, Howard and Allen. During the last productive years of their lives, the couple settled in a substantial middle-class log house with a two-bedroom guesthouse deep in the southern Appalachian Mountains near Whittier, North Carolina. Mary conducted the couple’s affairs with the outside world, and their political identities remained unknown to their neighbors, several of whom were Jewish. Gray-haired, blue-eyed, wrinkled, and slightly stooped on a six-foot plus frame in old age, Robertson occasionally held court for visiting white nationalist dignitaries, and Tyndall enjoyed several days of pleasant hospitality during this visit.
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Dickson played a loyal Sancho Panza to Tyndall’s delusional Don Quixote. In addition to organizing the national speaking tour, Dickson issued the invitations to the event in Atlanta.
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“Mr. Tyndall deserves a hearty American welcome by virtue of his life long devotion to our cause,” Dickson wrote in an invitation letter.
¹⁶
Using the name Anglo-American Forum, Dickson booked an area Marriott Hotel.
¹⁷
(The previous year he had used the name of his Atlanta Committee for Historical Review for invitations to an event that was canceled after Tyndall was denied entry to the United States.)
¹⁸
At the hotel, a few area Klan chiefs mixed with clumps of skinhead youths. But the majority of attendees appeared to be educated and domesticated middle-class citizens. About two hundred paid a five-dollar fee at the door. Dickson, clever as always, opened the meeting. He complained about coverage in the local press, denied the charge that he personally was an “extremist,” and then gave a glowing introduction to Tyndall. Although Tyndall had been convicted of crimes at home, Dickson argued, American courts would have treated
the same matters differently. In any case, Tyndall’s record proved his leadership mettle.