white power skinheads - book - 2002 - A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America

A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America
Elinor Langer
Metropolitan Books
2003
398 pages

In the fall of 1988, in Portland Oregon, an Ethiopian student and taxi driver named Mulugeta Seraw was murdered by a group of White Power skinheads who called themselves East Side White Pride. Portland has been, since the mid-1980s, one of the centres of youth-driven radical white suprematism, as groups like the Northwest Hammerskins and other skinhead groups have emerged out of Portland’s eclectic underground culture.

The Pacific Northwest has been designated as a Homeland for White Americans by various segments of the White Power scene since The Order  (also known as “The Silent Brotherhood) emerged as a Neo Nazi paramilitary vanguard, operating out of rural Washington, in the early 1980s.  More recently, the former American Nazi Party leader and current founder of the secessionist Northwest Front, Harold Covington, has been pushing this idea of the Northwest as a locale for white settlement which he calls the Northwest American Republic. I’m not sure where this vision leaves the various Indigenous groups who, at the very least, have given the Northwest so many of its place names.  

A seal of the Northwest Front which covers Oregon, Washington, and Idaho states. The now largely inactive Aryan Nations (thanks to a crushing multi-million dollar lawsuit launched by the Southern Poverty Law Center) was based in rural Idaho.

In the 1980s the Neo-Nazi Skins were seen as a new vanguard for the White Power movement.  In the American context, the skinhead emerged from the hardcore punk subculture, and while the skinhead look was adopted by a variety of different ideologies, it became very popular among young white fascists (who would declare that their skin is their uniform) and thus this connection between the skinhead look and contemporary Nazism, also took hold in the popular imagination.  Other kinds of skins, like the SHARPs (an acronym standing for “Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice”) were rarely represented in popular media, which reduced a complex subculture to a single malignant manifestation. Jack Moore’s 1993 text Skinheads Shaved For Battle, for example, acknowledged Anti-Racist skins but merely as street-fighting opponents to his primary topic, the Nazi skins.

At the heart of the over-representation of Skinheads of the Nazi variety were two media forces, the rise of daytime talk shows like Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo, and others, which, according to Joshua Gamson’s 1998 book Freaks Talk Back, were significant because provided a forum for voices often marginalized by most other forms of media.  The other force in media was Tom Metzger, a former Grand Dragon of the California KKK and electronics technician and entrepreneur who hosted a monthly public access television program called Race and Reason which was distributed to various audiences via VHS tape.  It should be noted that an appearance of Metzger and his son on Geraldo, where a violent melee resulted in the host’s broken nose in 1989, remains one of the most referenced moments in both studies of White Power subcultures and histories of Talk television.  During the 1980s Metzger was also the figurehead of a white power organization called WAR (or White Aryan Resistance) that recruited Skinheads and encouraged violent confrontation with non-whites as a matter of duty.  

A Hundred Little Hitlers is The Nation journalist Elinor Langer’s account of the story of Seraw’s murder and its aftermath. Her primary achievement with this text is to take the material for what could be an especially lurid true crime book and humanize all of the agents involved. Langer, of course, creates a powerfully sympathetic portrait of the victim of this particular episode of xenophobic rage, but she also adds colour to her renderings of the perpetrators as well.  She does not invite the reader to feel for the members of East Side White Pride, but she does strive to represent them as not strictly hammer-fisted thugs, rather as people who have struggled through fractured lives towards the situation that led them to their doom (Seraw murderer Ken Mieske, or ‘Ken Death’ - a name relating to his status as frontman for a death metal band rather than his willingness to kill - died in prison last summer).  She notes that many of the skinhead neo-nazis were street kids who admired Hitler’s virulent racism and his impoverished adolescence. When Langer discusses the (ultimately successful) civil suit launched by Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Centre against Tom Metzger, she is critical of Metzger’s racist venom AND some of Dees more underhanded legal tactics.

 

Langer is a Portland resident (at the time of her book’s publication) and her text reflects that. The author frequently inserts references to her own situation into her narrative of these events, noting, for example, the proximity of her home to that of the family of one of the Neo-Nazi murderers. Langer’s book is an examination of all of the lines of social force an event such as a hate-murder produces, from the impact upon Seraw’s family at home in Ethiopia, to the multitude of effects at its Portland epicentre including upon the author, a neighbor to the crime.

Mulugeta Seraw

unorganized militias - book - 1996 - A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate

A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate
Kenneth S. Stern
Simon & Schuster
1996
303 pages

A Force Upon the Plain is an alarm call about the far right Militia movement in America that garnered widespread attention after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995.  That attack on a federal building, by Timothy McVey, an American terrorist and veteran of the 1991 US/Iraq conflict, put the spotlight on a national anti-government “patriot” movement of armed paramilitaries, due to McVey’s alleged (and eventually disproven) connections to the Michigan Militia.  Kenneth S. Stern’s text was one of the first in-depth responses to the attack, and its publication cemented the author’s expert status on topics concerning the radical right-wing.  Stern has also become a popular TV pundit for discussions about such topics on 24 hour news channels and an assortment of other media outlets.  

 
April 2010: Stern discussing the Huttaree Militia on CBS News 

Stern, a lawyer, approaches the subject of unorganized Militias in the United States as an emerging form of criminal organization.  He treats them as wholly devoted to white supremacism and the violent overthrow of the government.  While it is clear that racism is present, if not widespread, among the militias, and they have a clear dedication to gun ownership, it is not actually clear how pervasive racism is in the militias.  Many unorganized state militias, for example, have charters which contain clauses that denounce racism within its ranks.  While this may not mean racism is absent from these groups of armed men and women, it certainly means that racial hatred is a more nuanced issue with the state militia’s than it is with the Ku Klux Klan or the Northern Hammerskins.  Stern thus asks all of the wrong questions about the Militia’s and treats them as folk devils rather than actual and complex social entities.

One of the main reasons why Stern’s book veers towards the absurd is that he refuses to acknowledge any semblance of legitimacy or rational grounding for any of the anti-government positions held by militia members.  Presumably his attitude extends from his professional life as a defense attorney where he argues a case as though it only has one true side.  Stern simply wants to identify militia adherents as racist for a readership who presumably already hates racism.  The blunt rhetoric of his text, then, is a missed opportunity to investigate the complexities of the militia phenomenon: for example an actual militia member may state that they refuse racism, and may even state that racial tension is some form of social control exercised by a ruling elite, and at the same time give the name of Zionism, or ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), to that conspiratorial elite.  What is going on there?  I don’t quite know, the anti-Semitism is obvious, and I suspect Stern’s analysis wouldn’t go beyond denouncing such a statement as such. Instead of investigating the subtleties of meaning in such rhetoric, Stern denounces every single form Militia activity in a straightforward fashion, even while defending forms of federal misconduct, such as the fiasco perpetrated by the FBI at the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.  Stern does not investigate why militias formed at the moment and places they did but rather leads the reader to think these groups are simply an irrational mix of race-hate and anti-government sentiments. In militia's racial hatred appears to be a fairly common feature of the subculture (although it is not consistently distributed) and anti-government sentiments are a dominant feature of the militia movement, but how these groups have come to be constituted and continue to express these themes is a much more complicated matter that no one has really investigated.  Because Stern is playing attorney-as-author, he does not, for example, consider how militias, a largely rural phenomenon, may feel alienated by a political system that they perceive to privilege big business and urban centres, and instead flattens a complicated social formation into a one-dimensional courtroom defendant.

Stern’s shrill and hysterical rhetoric calls for new and harsh legislation against militias, mostly on the grounds of an event that had limited connections to this movement.  Stern’s text appears to portray the Militias as conspiratorial units, hellbent on subverting the social order and political system.  His own portrayal of the militia’s are ensconced in an edifice of paranoia that sounds quite similar to the Militia leader’s discussions regarding the ‘New World Order’ that threatens what they see as traditional ways of living in the United States.  The Militia obsession with Zionism is something Stern, as a crusader against Anti-Semetic currents in American society, should have investigated in greater detail (instead of making basic and dismissive arguments), because the repeated use of that term by Militia members is something different and more nuanced than the more traditional anti-semitism practiced by full-on hate groups.  I suspect Stern’s writing on Holocaust denialism is much better than this paranoid book-length rant.