All In One Boat

It doesn’t get as much press as John Kerry’s gaffe but it’s real nonetheless.

THE TRUE BELIEVERS in an all-white America arrived Saturday morning. They came from Florida, Washington, Wisconsin, Idaho, Arkansas and most of the states in the Deep South. At least two crossed the Atlantic to attend. By 1 p.m., the old theater auditorium was packed with a crowd dressed largely in black T-shirts and with more tattoos per square inch of flesh than would be found at a skin artists’ convention.

In the theater’s balcony, arcing over the audience, was Howard’s “Klan Museum,” now officially closed but still displaying artifacts such as KKK emblems and photos of cross-burnings. Nazi flags were draped from two-story-high scaffolding inside the theater. The tower’s bottom bars served as a makeshift closet to hang Klan robes when not in use.

More banners were strung together across the back wall: Old Glory; Old Glory stripped of its stars with the Aryan Nations emblem in their place; the classic swastika flag of Nazi Germany we all know from movies; the rampant lion on the yellow-and-red Scottish flag; the white background, blue box and red cross of the Christian flag; and the absolutely essential Confederate battle flag. Behind the pennants, the light blue wall was adorned with a bigger-than-life-size drawing of Jesus and, discordantly for an Aryan Nations congress, “brotherhood of man” inscriptions of the International Order of Odd Fellows (which wasn’t part of the gathering).

John Suggs on White Supremacy

John Suggs on the Klan and the GOP.

Dave Neiwert on ordinary racists.

Dave Neiwert on Pat Buchanan’s white supremicism.

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The Holocaust Museum in D.C has mounted a major exhibition in Dresden, Germany about the “scientific” eugenecist interest throughout the West that provided the springboard for the Nazi exterminators.

By the beginning of World War II, a number of doctors were eager to further the study of eugenics. Although the story of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments at Auschwitz is well-known and poignantly evoked in the exhibit by interviews with twins who survived, thousands more doctors and geneticists participated in sterilization and euthanasia programs or benefited directly from the Holocaust. “During this period where power was abused, this profession — so respected today — allowed itself to be corrupted,” Bachrach says. The exhibit includes pictures of some of the thousands of congenitally ill infants who were secretly killed by their doctors beginning in 1939. During “Operation T-4,” a sort of test run for the death camps, tens of thousands of psychiatric patients were gassed in the cellars of mental institutions around Germany in the early years of the war.

Der Spiegel

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I’ve heard from various folks that their views of Pat Buchanan have changed for the better in the years since the invasion of Iraq. Buchanan forthrightly opposed it, and made arguments against US interference in others places around the world. So far, so good. Before this admiration slops outside that theme into glowing reviews of the man himself, his recent book, State of Emergency, should be considered.

White America is changing color, Buchanan argues — “one of the greatest tragedies in human history.” The Mexican government is involved in a plot to take over the Southwestern United States, and parts of this country already look like the “Third World.” The segregated South wasn’t all bad “culturally” — blacks and whites were united, after all. America, despite what its founders wrote, was a nation formed not on the basis of creed but rather a homogenous ethnic culture. To put it plainly, State of Emergency is a white nationalist tract. The thesis is that America must retain a white majority to survive as a nation. It is rooted in a blood-and-soil nationalism more blood than soil. The echoes of Nazi ideology are clear and chilling. As Buchanan helpfully explained to John King, who was interviewing him in one of his several CNN appearances: “We gotta get into race and ethnic questions.”

State of Emergency unapologetically reflects Buchanan’s insistence on the centrality of race to the United States and its culture. “This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by ‘blood or birth or soil’ but by ‘ideals’ that must be taught and learned … is demonstrably false,” Buchanan writes in the book.

Check out Orcinus for more.

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