Blood and Politics (67 page)

Lutton’s list of accomplishments as an anti-immigrant activist alone merit notice, as does his work with
American Renaissance
, which eventually included multiple conference presentations and a seat on the board of directors of its parent corporation, New Century Foundation.
⁵⁰
But Lutton’s attempt to cloud his association with the Institute for Historical Review may reveal more about his ultimate aims than he wanted to show. Perhaps this version of white nationalism hoped to include anti-Semites, while occluding anti-Semitic ideology as a motivating force. Unlike William Pierce’s wing of Aryan vanguardists, and different even from Willis Carto’s attempts to find a mainstream constituency, Jared Taylor, Wayne Lutton, and the
American Renaissance
crew already had a seat on the (far) edge of conservative respectability, and they were apparently loath to lose their perch in a controversy over Jews and Hitler.
Over the next several years,
American Renaissance
became the premier gathering place for intellectuals in the white nationalist movement, firmly supplanting the Institute for Historical Review and all other venues. The IHR still maintained a unique status in the movement, however, particularly in its role as an international transfer station.

September 3, 1994.
Now under Mark Weber’s control while continuing the battle with Willis Carto, the Institute for Historical Review gathered its congregation once again in a California hotel.
¹
Factional contention had come to dominate the internal life of Holocaust denial circles. Various pivotal figures chose the staff’s side, including those whose only interest was a long and abiding dislike of Carto. Carto mustered his own loyalists, of course. One major personality unexpectedly maintained a facade of disinterest in the feud: William Pierce. At least three of the central anti-Carto actors, including Weber, had once been inside National Alliance’s most trusted circles.
²
Yet Pierce refrained from publicly positioning himself, despite his own twenty-five-year feud with Carto.

Most of the IHR domestic regulars, as well as its European stable of writers and speakers, aligned themselves against Carto. And the staff proudly recounted a string of sturdy accomplishments over the previous twelve months: five issues of the
Journal
released; a bookstall sold seventy titles. In addition, the institute had received repeated mention in mainstream periodicals and made several appearances on network television. All were causes for self-congratulation. Carto’s hectoring, nevertheless, had a noticeable effect.
³

In a stern keynote address, Weber warned that “our financial situation is not good.”
⁴
At the conference’s end the staff held a special session on the dispute. Its report bordered on grim. Institute funds were being channeled into a never-ending series of lawsuits. The assistant editor had suffered an emotional breakdown and left town.
⁵
The remaining senior staffers all had worked without paychecks for several weeks. The Farrel estate funds were still under Carto’s lock and key. A lawsuit seeking recovery of the funds, staffers explained, was still winding its
way through the court system. Those knowledgeable about the IHR’s problems but not in attendance, such as Wayne Lutton, worried from a distance that Weber might not survive the battle with Willis Carto.
⁶

For his part, Carto used
The Spotlight
to regularly besmirch individual IHR staff members. He also launched a monthly magazine to compete directly with Weber’s
Journal
. Entitled
The Barnes Review
, the first issue was dated October 1994. The August 29 edition of the
The Spotlight
, published just prior to the IHR’s Labor Day meeting, carried a three-page spread announcing the magazine, including its first editorial. And Carto demonstrated that he had learned a lesson from this dispute. Rather than hide his control, he prominently posted his own name on the magazine’s title page. The first issue published twenty plus congratulatory “letters to the editor.” LaVonne Furr and Tom Kerr, the two Legion for the Survival of Freedom board members whose (temporary) perfidy had enabled Weber’s crew to seize control, re-signed up with Carto. Not surprisingly, five people closely associated with Liberty Lobby, including its counsel, Mark Lane, formally added their names. Two additional attorneys, Kirk Lyons and Sam Dickson, sent letters of support as well. Finally, Jeanne Degrelle, widow of Waffen SS General Leon Degrelle, wrote her special regards.
⁷
Each name provided a clue to Carto’s standing among his peers.

Although the IHR’s 1994 conference counted as a significant marker in the staff’s nine-year battle with its former boss, the most remarkable event that weekend was a speech by Ernst Zundel. Born in southeastern Germany in 1939, Ernst Christof Friedrich Zundel grew up under the occupying Allied forces before immigrating to Canada in 1958. By the mid-1970s he had become a fully fledged apologist for Hitler while eschewing the uniforms and buffoonery of Hollywood-style neo-Nazism, according to Stanley Barrett, a scholar whose 1987 book on Canada’s right wing,
Is God a Racist?
, chronicled much of Zundel’s early career.
⁸
Under a barely disguised pseudonym, Zundel authored a book entitled
The Hitler We Loved and Why
and contributed regularly to an unabashed national socialist monthly bulletin produced by another German émigré then living in West Virginia.
⁹
Despite this history, Zundel exhibited an almost endless capacity for self-promotion. From a house in Toronto, he did business using the name Samisdat Publications, evoking the image of an underground dissident press battling a totalitarian state. It was only one of Zundel’s many clever marketing gambits. One of the booklets on his distribution list was
Did Six Million Really Die?
, and it was this piece of propaganda that turned Zundel’s name into a Canadian newspaper headline.
¹⁰

In 1983, following a criminal complaint by a private citizen, Canadian
prosecutors charged him with willfully publishing false news that “is likely to cause mischief to a public interest.” They cited the
Six Million
pamphlet and one other publication. When the case finally went to court in 1985, Zundel was convicted. But not before he had wrung “one million dollars” of publicity out of the six-week trial. Dressed each day in a bulletproof vest and a hard hat inscribed with the slogan “Freedom of Speech,” he walked into the courthouse surrounded by a gaggle of supporters, also wearing hard hats. Television cameras could not resist the action.
¹¹

Zundel appealed the conviction, and an Ontario court overturned the verdict on technicalities in 1987. A few months later a second trial on the same charges began. During this second trial, defending Zundel became the business of the entire revisionist industry. Widespread financial support enabled him to mount a vigorous legal defense. David Irving traveled from England and testified on his behalf, as did Mark Weber and several other lesser-known figures. Zundel supporters even underwrote a thirty-five-thousand-dollar expense to send a team of “experts” to take rock brick samples from Auschwitz in an attempt to prove that gas chambers never existed. Despite the elaborate defense, Zundel was once again convicted on the facts and sentenced this time to nine months. On this occasion he showed up for prison in a concentration camp costume with television cameras in tow, once more squeezing every possible ounce of publicity from his legal travails. He served only one week before being bailed out while his case was appealed to the Canadian Supreme Court.
¹²

When Canadian justices rendered their final decision in 1992, they noted that the statute under which Zundel had been charged dated from the year 1275 in England, “a society dominated by extremely powerful landowners.” The justices noted that England had already abolished this old law and that the United States had never adopted it. They decided that the statute prohibiting “false news” abridged the freedom of expression guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the charges against Zundel were dismissed.
¹³

Fifteen years after attending the IHR’s first convention as a German émigré with a small personal footprint, Zundel returned to the 1994 conference after these battles as a veritable yeti. At the Saturday night banquet address he was formally introduced as the “leading distributor of revisionist” materials. The staff added an unusual disclaimer: the IHR’s goals were “fundamentally different” from Zundel’s, an apparent reference to his open advocacy of national socialism. Nevertheless, he was described to great applause as the “ring master” who had tamed the “huge media circus” attendant at his two trials.
¹⁴

The heart of Zundel’s talk that night was about his recent trip to Russia, not his victory in the Canadian courts. Still a German national traveling on a German passport, Zundel had made arrangements to visit Russia through contacts in Germany, who acted as an advance team and made the appropriate arrangements. With a group of five and a formal invitation from a member of the Duma, Vladimir Zhironovsky, Zundel had spent two weeks in Russia. At that point, ultranationalists of every stripe multiplied across the former Soviet Union. One bloc of Slavic nationalists joined with unreformed Stalinists and created a de facto red-brown alliance. Other Russians dallied with redesigned swastikas and created national socialist organizations. Paramilitary racists and skinheads, unrestrained by the conventions of civil society, filled a social niche of fear. Out of this mélange, Zhironovsky established himself at the juncture of anti-Semitism and Russian ethnic chauvinism. Zhironovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party received 6.2 million votes for president in June 1991, and in December 1993 the party fielded 210 candidates for elective office, received 24 percent of the national vote, and won 59 seats in the new parliament.
¹⁵

Zundel met with several of Zhironovsky’s top aides, took stock of the party apparatus, and met privately with Zhironovsky at his dacha outside Moscow. He also met with national socialists critical of Zhironovsky’s media-driven approach to electioneering. Zundel came home convinced that Zhironovsky was “intelligent” and a “clever tactician.” Russians would “take revenge” because of what they had suffered from “Jewish Bolsheviks,” he told the Holocaust-didn’t-happen crowd. “I predict massive anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia.” Zundel further decided that both “white Slavic Russians” and “white American nationalists” felt similarly about “minority racial and ethnic” groups in their midst. By contrast, Zundel spoke in glowing terms of the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed Slavic population. “Every Russian I met with was, racially speaking, a beautiful specimen.”
¹⁶

Russia may now be weak, he argued in his concluding remarks. But it was still a “racially homogeneous nation” and would find a new form of government. Like journalist John Reed after his trip to revolutionary Russia in 1917, Zundel claimed to have seen the future. “It won’t be an economic system like we have in the United States, dog eat dog capitalism. You know what it will be?” And then Zundel paused for dramatic effect. “National Socialism. Mark my words.”
¹⁷

No ambiguity blurred the meaning of Zundel’s speech that evening. Russians hated the more darkly colored nationalities among them. They would soon kill lots of Jews and establish a national socialist regime. And
at the end of his speech, Zundel received a warm and sustained round of applause, as if he had promised an early and bountiful Christmas.
¹⁸

The conference ended. Mark Weber returned to the legal battle with Willis Carto and ultimately rebuilt the IHR as a smaller enterprise with significant connections to Holocaust deniers in the Middle East. Zundel returned to Canada, where he subsequently filed for citizenship. After that application was denied, he tried to establish legal residence in the United States. After all that failed, he was deported to his native Germany, where he faced charges related to his Holocaust denial activities.
¹⁹
But his trip to Russia had broken new ground. The establishment of permanent lines of direct communication between white nationalists in North America and their Russian counterparts would have been impossible before the end of the Cold War. As Russia and the former Soviet republics became an open market for the international trade in anti-Semitica, a string of publishers and activists from the United States, including David Duke, made money on the same ground where anti-Jewish pogroms had once been a fact of life. Meanwhile, in the United States the stratum of the electorate that Duke had aroused in Louisiana and that had then voted for Pat Buchanan showed itself again in the 1994 congressional elections.

November 8, 1994.
After a nasty election season, in which Republicans campaigned against Bill Clinton as if the sitting president were the second coming of Satan, Democratic incumbents were pushed out of Congress like the fallen angels in
Paradise Lost
. The Democratic Party lost fifty-one seats in the House of Representatives and ceded control of that institution for the first time in forty years. It also turned over eight seats in the Senate and became the minority party there as well. The rout extended into state legislatures, and at the end of the day Republicans also controlled thirty governorships.
¹
This was not an anti-incumbent “throw the bums out” election, however. Not one sitting Republican congressman, senator, or governor lost his or her seat.
²

The big-print analysis argued that the Republican Party, by creating a compact known as the Contract with America, had successfully turned local and state races into a national referendum on the Clinton presidency. The small type showed an electorate divided by race and religion: Republican candidates for Congress drew 62 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women. (While a “gender gap” showed, a clear majority of white women voted alongside the men.) Democrats, by contrast, took 90 percent of black women. Further, of those who described themselves as “White born-again Christians,” three out of four, 76 percent, voted Republican. Conversely, 78 percent of Jews voted Democratic. A clear sectional line was also evident: in the Midwest and South, 56 percent and 55 percent of voters polled Republican.
³