Author: Devin Burghart   |   Date: September 2009

Book review: Blood and Politics

Stateside, it’s been another long, hot, violent summer. On 30 May, a trio of anti-immigrant vigilantes allegedly carried out the brutal, execution-style killing of Raul Flores and his nine-year-old daughter Brisenia to fund their activities on the Arizona border. The next day, a Kansas “Freeman” walked into a Wichita church and gunned down Dr George Tiller, simply because Tiller ran an abortion clinic. In early June, another white nationalist walked into the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, killing Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard.

Just in time to help us understand this latest round of violence comes Leonard Zeskind’s much-anticipated new book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. Nearly thirty years in the making, this 645-page book provides a trenchant and thoughtful history of American white nationalism.

Regular readers of Searchlight will undoubtedly recognise Zeskind’s name. His “Stateside” column has been a feature in the magazine since the early 1980s. For new readers, Zeskind is the president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. He is an internationally recognised expert on white nationalism and a longtime campaigner for civil and human rights. He has testified at a British parliamentary subcommittee hearing, crisscrossed Europe conducting research and speaking to anti-fascist activists, and received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.

Blood and Politics is a remarkable accomplishment in both breadth and scope. Exhaustively researched, this thoroughly documented history (complete with 1,629 footnotes) contains 60 chapters that chronologically capture the transformation of the white supremacist movement of the 1970s and 1980s into contemporary white nationalism.

There have been other books that investigate particular incidents, indiv-iduals, groups or segments of the movement, but this is the first major attempt to explore American white nationalism as a movement.

Zeskind’s book reads more like a taut political thriller than a dense history text, with Zeskind taking readers on a journey through every important movement twist, turn and conflict. Though the scholarship is quite remarkable, equally impressive is the story-telling. Zeskind takes readers inside backroom meetings, cow pasture Klan rallies, courtroom battles, para-military militia training sessions and many other locations.

All the different movement manifestations – white power skinheads, Holocaust deniers, neo-Confederates, nativists, scientific racists, national socialists, antisemites, Christian Patriots, Ku Klux Klan members, Christian Identity followers, Odinists and many other factions are there. Yet Blood and Politics deftly avoids the laundry list approach so common in books on the subject; instead it centres on the movement dynamics, highlighting the schism between the “vanguardists”, who advocate armed revolutionary struggle, and the “mainstreamers”, who favour the ballot over the bullet.

Narratively, Blood and Politics lets this tension unfold by interweaving the stories of the two men who have made some of the most substantial contributions to the development of the contemporary white nationalist movement. They started from nearly the same spot politically, as members of the arch-segregationist Youth for Wallace campaign, but took decidedly different paths. Willis Carto, the consummate salesman, desired the mainstream, while William Pierce, the physicist turned professional neo-Nazi, was in the vanguard.

Carto went on to form the Liberty Lobby, which at its peak employed dozens of staffers in its Washington DC offices, had a multimillion dollar budget and circulated its tabloid, The Spotlight, to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. He also founded the Institute for Historical Review, arguably the most important Holocaust denial outfit, and the Populist Party, which attempted to create a third political party capable of moving racism and antisemitism into the mainstream. Looking at the many machinations of Carto, Zeskind deftly unravels the tangled web of his legal, financial, and organisational dealings.

Where Carto sought to break into the ranks of mainstream conservatives, Pierce sought to recruit cadres of violent revolutionaries willing to die for the cause of Aryan brotherhood. Pierce, who died in 2002, is best known as the author of The Turner Diaries, the race war fantasy that inspired the Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.

Blood and Politics goes well beyond the biographies of Carto and Pierce; it comprehensively explores a broad cast of characters who occupy places of importance on either side of the line dividing mainstreamers from vanguardists.

The book goes beyond the headlines to deeply analyse the movement. He successfully integrates a sophis-ticated understanding of global events with unique insight into the American dynamics of nationalism and racial identity. Zeskind expounds, for instance, on how the end of the Cold War dichotomy gave way to a new struggle, that of nationalism versus internationalism, and the results of this “geopolitical earthquake” are still reverberating all around us.

While exploring the American aspects of the movement, Zeskind also exposes the movement’s international ties. British figures such as John Tyndall, Mark Cotterill, and David Irving make appearances, as do other international notables such as Jean-Marie Le Pen and Ernst Zündel.

The three members of the Minuteman American Defense (one an Aryan Nations member) arrested for the Arizona killings aren’t mentioned in Blood and Politics, but the Minutemen (both the current nativist vigilantes and the white supremacist vigilantes of the 1960s) are there. Zeskind also dissects a plethora of movement sources along with polling data and public opinion research to examine how nativism has become the engine driving white nationalism towards the mainstream.

Scott Roeder, the accused killer of Dr Tiller, didn’t make the pages of Blood and Politics either, but the book is essential to understanding him. In the mid-1990s, Roeder associated regularly with Kansas militiamen and declared himself a “sovereign” citizen, exempt from the responsibilities of paying taxes or driving with a registered licence plate. Zeskind takes us inside the militias and so-called common law courts of the 1990s to unpack their rage against the so-called New World Order. He also depicts where the white nationalist movement intersects, and diverges, from violent anti-abortion protestors and others in the Christian Right.

Flipping through the impressive index at the back of the book, readers won’t find the name of James von Brunn, the man under arrest for the killing at the Holocaust Museum. They will, however, gain insight into what motivated him. The 88-year-old von Brunn has been a Holocaust denier for nearly four decades, penning antisemitic screeds, going to jail for trying to arrest members of the Federal Reserve, and even serving as a staffer for the Institute for Historical Review in the 1980s. Willis Carto was actually von Brunn’s boss for a time. Blood and Politics helps to contextualise the role of Holocaust denial in the white nationalist movement, examining how groups such as IHR which claim to be dedicated to idea that the Holocaust was a hoax are actually more focused on the rehabilitation of National Socialism as an acceptable political doctrine.

Outpourings of violence such as those this summer are tragic reminders of one side of the threat posed by white nationalism, but as Blood and Politics shows, they are all-too-often occur-rences that vanish from the public’s memory almost as soon as they happen. This book should serve as a clarion call reminding anti-fascists that it’s what we do between the killings that really matters. As Zeskind notes in the preface, “For those of us who hope to protect and extend our multiracial democracy … we ignore this white nationalist movement at our own peril”. If you want to understand the white nationalist movement in the United States, you need to read this book.