Blood and Politics (90 page)

One
National Review
columnist took a different approach to Arab and Muslim countries and opined: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
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That journalist lost that particular roost, but the sentiment was widespread. A brutal violence sprang spontaneously forth, with no distinction between terrorists and Muslims or between Muslims and anyone else visibly dark-skinned and “foreign” in appearance. According to
Los Angeles Times
reporter Richard Serrano, federal investigators opened 350 investigations into hate crimes directed at those perceived to be Arab during this period. State and local authorities were looking at an additional 70 cases. A number of these were murders, including that of a Sikh cabby in San Francisco whose brother had been killed earlier in a hate crime in Mesa, Arizona.
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In one of the odd twists following the trade center’s destruction, a bat’s nest of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories flew up out of the ashes. A rumor that Jews had been warned in advance that the trade center would be destroyed and consequently stayed home from work on the fated day was repeated as truth at both ends of the political spectrum. Although the meaning of opinion survey data is contested, an estimated thirty-five million Americans—17 percent of those polled—held significantly anti-Semitic views in the period after September 11. Fully one out of five “blame[s] America’s support for Israel for the attacks.”
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Never mind the nature of Wahabi ideology motivating Al Qaeda or American troops in Saudi Arabia guarding the gates of oil.

In this hurricane of horrors, the response to September 11 by white nationalists might seem like a tablespoon of rain. Who needed the militia to supposedly defend American sovereignty after President Bush declared “war” on any number of enemies? How many foolish white nationalists would mix fuel oil and fertilizer when the entire law enforcement establishment was mobilized to fight “terror”? Somebody somewhere was sending envelopes of anthrax through the mail, but there was no material evidence that it involved any lone wolf Aryans. And where would the bruised and battered sympathies of Middle Americans lie now if a Randy Weaver type decided to shoot it out with the cops? Law enforcement officials were heroes now, not black-booted
thugs. For a brief period, the domestic atmospherics and international tensions more closely resembled the early years of the Cold War, rather than that of the postwar New World Order.

Facing this complex of nasty weather, white nationalists nevertheless ventured forth.

At the vanguardist end of the movement, a few voices cheered the deaths and destruction at the World Trade Center and lamented only that there were not enough white men willing to do the same.
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Their words served as a reminder that organized violence and mayhem might be temporarily put on hold but the potential to re-create a group like Bob Mathews’s Order remained. Instead of actually calling upon his own members to commit murder, however, William Pierce used the occasion to drill an ideological lesson into the young men and women in and around the National Alliance. In a radio broadcast just days after September 11, Pierce laid the blame for the attack squarely on Jews and Israel. “We were attacked,” he said, “because we have been letting ourselves be used to do all of Israel’s dirty work in the Middle East.” If the United States wasn’t pushing “Jewish fashions and our Jewish television and our Jewish attitudes” into the Middle East, then the United States would not be attacked, he argued. Otherwise, “patriots and religious fundamentalists” would leave this country alone.
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In pointing his finger at Jews rather than Falwell’s long list of secularists, Pierce outlined in sharpest detail the difference between his version of white nationalism and Falwell’s Christian right.

Just as noteworthy as Pierce’s emphasis on Jews was his failure to mention immigration, lax border controls, and the supposed anti-Americanism of Islamic fundamentalism—all issues targeted by other sectors of the white nationalist movement. In fact, as the National Alliance member bulletin proudly noted, the entirety of Pierce’s radio talk, entitled “Who Is Guilty?,” appeared in the October 5 edition of
Muslims
, which the bulletin described as “the largest English-language Islamic newspaper published in the United States.”
¹³

Pierce recognized the power of old-fashioned Stars and Stripes patriotism after September 11. Rather than operate under its umbrella, however, he wanted to harden his following against its pull and widen the gulf between white nationalists and middle-of-the-road white Americans. He described those following President Bush as “lemmings,” willing to rush off a cliff in a mass suicide. “Patriotism,” Pierce declared, “is a sentiment which will be in fashion again for a few months.”
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In that one sentence he laid the basis for a strategy during the period ahead. After a “few months,” a broader constituency would be willing to blame Israel and the Jews. He hammered the point in preparation.

By the end of 2001 William Pierce had decided that he saw a subtle shift of opinion among that slice of white people he regarded as his potential constituency. They had not previously agreed with his “blanket condemnation of Jewish influence,” he wrote. Now those same people finally agreed with him. Accordingly, he believed they finally understood that “we must act to end the overall Jewish influence, the collective Jewish influence . . .”
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It was “remarkable,” he wrote in the November 2001 members’ bulletin, how many white people “are facing at least part of the truth.” The Jews “have never been more exposed,” he claimed. This presented the National Alliance with a “new opportunity,” he said.
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Regardless of the actual status of the political environment at that moment, his organization had never been more prepared to act upon it.

The West Virginia headquarters complex had been built up and now included two office buildings and a warehouse for music and book distribution. The headquarters staff had grown over the decades from William Pierce and one secretary to almost twenty persons carrying out a variety of tasks.
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Every week it broadcast a shortwave radio program entitled
American Dissident Voices
, providing a growing audience across the globe with the alliance’s view of topical issues. Each month it published a members-only bulletin and a newsletter entitled
Free Speech
for wider distribution. Periodically
National Vanguard
magazine appeared with more in-depth treatments of ideological issues. In addition to selling music, Resistance Records continued publishing
Resistance
magazine, drawing young white power music fans into the National Alliance’s orbit. A couple of professionally managed websites glued the entire enterprise together in cyberspace.
¹⁸

The membership had grown close to two thousand and was now concentrated in forty-three units and proto units in twenty-six states, with another five units in Canada.
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While not large enough by themselves to constitute a mass movement, by the standards of tight-knit, highly disciplined Leninist-style vanguard organizations the National Alliance had become a formidable force.

The previous July it had held a protest at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C., opposing the criminal extradition of a German comrade who was wanted for murder in his homeland. About fifty pickets, many of them skinheads from the D.C. area, walked that day. One of the alliance leaders got bloodied in a scuffle with antiracists, but they counted the event a success nonetheless.
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Then on November 10, two months after 9/11, as American airpower struck Taliban forces in Afghanistan, the National Alliance led a group of seventy protesters outside the Israeli Embassy. Although many of the participants had recently
graduated from the white power music subculture, this was not a skinhead-style event. No one shouted “Sieg Heil,” as had been done at Klan and Aryan Nations rallies in Georgia and Tennessee. No swastika flags flew that day. This crowd dressed for success: dark suits for many; ties and long-sleeved dress shirts for those with tattoos peeking out from behind their collars. The few young women on the street dressed like secretaries, not flight-jacketed skin molls. Typifying the change in fashion, one middle-aged activist from Virginia, who had spent much of the mid-1980s marching around in camouflage fatigues, wore a dark suit and power tie and carried himself like a middle manager instead of a lieutenant in a white power army.
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The picket signs reflected the National Alliance’s approach to the post–September 11 world:
ISRAEL THE ORIGINAL TERRORIST STATE, FIGHT YOUR OWN WAR, NO JEWS NO WAR, AND ZIONISM IS RACISM
.
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In contrast with the National Alliance’s laserlike focus on Jews, after 9/11 the Council of Conservative Citizens continued its broader approach, which paired protecting the icons of the Old Confederacy with targeting new dark-skinned immigrants. On the same November day that the National Alliance picketed Israel’s embassy, the council rallied against immigrants in Conover, North Carolina, a small town of fifty-five hundred on Interstate Highway 40. They repeated the performance the following January in Yadkinville, a still-smaller town outside Winston-Salem. Several dozen middle-aged men in ordinary street clothes held signs reading
NORTH CAROLINA MEXICO’S NEWEST COLONY, MEXICANS NOT WELCOME, AND DEPORT ALL ILLEGALS
. A handful of speakers denounced immigrants and the companies that hired them. Among the speakers at both rallies was A. J. Barker, the onetime Populist chairman now ensconced as the council’s Southeast regional coordinator.
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The council confirmed its new place in the white nationalist heavens during these months. It had not suffered any loss of prestige
within
the movement after the Trent Lott affair, even if it was now avoided publicly by all but the most unreconstructed southern politicians. Most of the council’s activities were concentrated in the South and border states. With Liberty Lobby now gone as a trade name, and Willis Carto’s remaining publications declining in both circulation and significance, the council became the central address for a twenty-first-century mainstreaming strategy. Its leadership had become thoroughly intertwined with the intellectuals and Ph.D.’s connected with
American Renaissance
, a complementary pairing that enhanced the pull power of both organizations. And unlike Carto’s Institute for Historical Review and Liberty Lobby, both
American Renaissance
and the Council of Conservative
Citizens refrained from overt expressions of anti-Semitism. After September 11, however, several of the council’s officials did join the chorus blaming the terror attacks on American support for Israel.
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That small shift of organizational positioning proved William Pierce at least partially correct about a post-9/11 turn toward his direction. The council’s version of anti-Semitism was not the same as the Hitlerism promoted by the National Alliance. Instead, the council largely adhered to an America first model of white nationalism.

The preoccupations of the National Alliance and the Council of Conservative Citizens underscored the continuity between their worldviews before September 11 and after. By the white nationalist reckoning, nothing much had changed. Elsewhere in the American political universe, however, the mantra was the exact opposite: 9/11 had changed everything.

If September 11 had in fact “changed everything,” then the political alignments that had developed after the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War would shift once again, this time to reflect a new conflict, a war against terrorism.

As discussed earlier, the end of the post–World War Two era had changed white supremacy’s prospects. After the crackup of the anti-communist consensus, a slice of conservatives had effectively allied themselves with a newly realigned white nationalism. Pat Buchanan ran through doors opened up by David Duke. Dissent over the Persian Gulf War in 1991 had turned into an America first isolationism. The militia movement in the mid-1990s won a place for a nationalist resistance to both the multiracial American state and the globalized New World Order. Here opposition to foreign interventions was considered de rigueur.

If a second realignment had occurred after 9/11, then Buchanan’s paleoconservatives would be expected to fall back within a broader conservative movement, as they had during the Cold War. And they would support foreign interventions, for example. If a clash of civilizations did pit the West against Islam, then white nationalists would be forced to subsume their efforts under the rubric of the American (multiracial) state. Racism and discrimination would persist, but white nationalism as a distinctive opposition to the status quo would be driven out of the mainstream.

For a few years after 9/11, it looked as if the new war against terrorism might play during the first decades of the twenty-first century much the same role as anticommunism had after World War Two.

Americans felt vulnerable as never before. The oceans that had previously separated them from wars in Europe, Asia, and Africa now seemed to have evaporated faster than the blink of an airplane’s safety lights. For the moment at least, the swell of patriotic flag waving seemed to bring a new sense of national unity. “The events of September 11 have affected public opinion more dramatically than any event since World War II,” the Pew Research Center concluded after taking a poll. Pew cited a change in attitudes toward the federal government, which had sagged with disapproval during most of the 1990s. In October 2000 only 54 percent of the public viewed the government favorably. A year later, in November 2001, that number jumped to 82 percent.
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The overwhelming support for the fight against international terrorism seemed to squeeze out the space for any legitimate dissent.