Racial Hatred: Made in America
rick hellman

Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream By Leonard Zeskind Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009, $37.50, pp. 645

When, in April, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, issued a clumsily worded news release about the threat of right-wing extremism, it ignited a firestorm of indignation from talk radio and other Republican precincts. How dare she insinuate, they fumed, that flag-waving patriots, who might include military veterans or voters attracted to quixotic candidates and esoteric political theories, could pose a threat to civil tranquility?

Then, on May 31, Kansas state troopers arrested a man with prior involvement in the so-called “freeman” movement—which asserts the unique principle of individual sovereignty apart from any government—in connection with the assassination that morning of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller as he greeted people in the foyer of his Wichita church.

To anyone who had, by that point, read Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, the incident was eerily familiar. The vigilantism associated with the anti-abortion movement is just one of many threads Zeskind weaves into a detailed portrait of what he calls the white nationalist movement. As Zeskind defines it in this authoritative, readable overview, followers of white nationalism include everyone from the costumed creeps of the Ku Klux Klan and the National Socialist Movement to buttoned-down Holocaust deniers and “scientific racists” with academic tenure.

Zeskind, who has written for Rolling Stone, The Forward and other publications, received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1998, which allowed him to continue working on the book. The result is clearly the best, broadest and deepest historical study of the white nationalist movement yet. One only hopes that the government has as good a handle on the phenomenon.

Zeskind is a brilliant scholar whose unusual methodology, leavened with mordant humor, includes shoe leather investigation of the highest order. Time after time, in locations across the country, he and/or his associates attended survivalist expos, militia meetings and neo-Nazi marches (sometimes secretly, sometimes openly) to document what was said and done. At times, the reader feels like a fly on the wall. Zeskind has also collected a huge cache of newspapers, magazines, books and other “white-ist” publications, as he calls them. This trove of information became the basis for the insights he provided to many reporters (including this writer) over the years, as well as the documentary foundation for Blood and Politics.

By uncovering court records and through Freedom of Information Act requests, he brings to light new facts that illuminate the two figures whose opposing strategies dominate the book: Willis Carto, founder of the now-defunct far right Liberty Lobby think tank and its influential newspaper, The Spotlight, and William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries and founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Carto represents the “mainstreaming” tendency of the movement, while Pierce is the hero of the insurgent “vanguardists.” Notably, Zeskind pierces the maze of corporate fronts behind which Carto for years hid his control of that unholy pillar of Holocaust revisionism, the Institute for Historical Review. Founded in 1979 in Newport Beach, California, the IHR published works denying the Holocaust, asserting Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax and the like, giving a pseudo-scholarly gloss to anti-Semitism.

Pierce and Carto had worked together in 1968 to support the third-party presidential candidacy of segregationist George Wallace, but split when Pierce later took over the political organization they built, eventually transforming it into the National Alliance. In 1978, under the pseudonym of Andrew MacDonald, Pierce published the novel The Turner Diaries, about a band of Aryan vigilantes who violently oppose an oppressive, multiracial government. The book was said to have inspired the Oklahoma City federal building bomber, Timothy McVeigh, among others on the racist fringe.

In another groundbreaking investigation, Zeskind delineates the particularly cloudy “seedline” doctrine within the already peculiar Christian-Identity movement that undergirds much of the racist mayhem of recent years. Those who believe in the “one-seed” theory hold that today’s Jews are descendants of the biblical Esau, while Jacob/Israel became the genetic father of the white Anglo-Saxons. This makes “WASPs” the Chosen People and Jews accursed. On the other hand, adherents to the “two-seed” theory believe that both Adam and the serpent simultaneously impregnated Eve in the Garden of Eden, which thus makes Jews the descendants of the devil himself.

In later sections of the book, Zeskind widens the focus. For example, he traces the connections between American and European racists and neo-Nazis and details how the end of the cold war freed Pat Buchanan from conservative political orthodoxy, which allowed his isolationist, anti-Semitic true self to emerge with hateful vigor. Reading the book, one is reminded of how appalling it is that Buchanan keeps his favored seat at the high table of mainstream-media pundits.

If attention may wander as Zeskind piles on the facts, or if a reader wonders why anyone should care about the crazy beliefs of a handful of zealots, the author reminds us of the toll this small number of extremists has taken before and after McVeigh’s Oklahoma bloodbath and of the continuing threat they pose. Most recently, for instance, the aged but active neo-Nazi, James von Brunn, shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in June.

Blood and Politics is not perfect. It lacks a thorough assessment of the impact of the Internet on spreading the virus of anti-Semitism and racism. And we could have done without enlarging “white nationalism” to include Buchanan’s appointment of a black woman to join him at the top of the 2000 Reform Party national ticket.

And yet, while it has been in preparation for more than 15 years, the publication of Blood and Politics is timely. America has a black president, and demographers are predicting that whites will cease to be a majority in the U.S. by 2035. Those of us dedicated to a multicultural democracy ignore the seriousness of the white-nationalist threat to domestic peace at our peril. We’re fortunate to have Blood and Politics as a solemn reminder.

Rick Hellman is editor of the weekly Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.