The Racists Around Us

The Racists Around Us

White Nationalists in America

By Daniel Levitas
Published May 27, 2009, issue of June 05, 2009.

Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream
By Leonard Zeskind
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 672 pages, $37.50.

To most Americans, including seasoned political observers, the machinations of white supremacists and professional antisemites are regarded, if at all, as crude carnival theater. After more than three decades of close observation, Leonard Zeskind, recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship for his independent scholarship on far-right, racist and neo-Nazi groups, is not so dismissive. More important, his first book, “Blood and Politics,” analyzes the past 35 years to provide a trenchant and troubling assessment of the future of what Zeskind terms “the white nationalist movement.”

Since the mid-1980s a number of books have detailed homegrown paramilitaries and the bigoted zealots behind them, but “Blood and Politics” provides an entirely deeper level of analysis. Zeskind is the first to fully integrate a sophisticated understanding of global events — specifically the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union — with an equally forceful insight into the uniquely American dynamics of racial identity, Southern sectionalism and national politics. After the Soviet Union “cracked apart like a three-minute egg,” and anticommunism became almost instantly irrelevant to American national identity, white nationalists rushed in to fill the vacuum.

The end of the Cold War dichotomy gave way to a new struggle, that of nationalism vs. internationalism, and the results of this “geopolitical earthquake” are still reverberating all around us, Zeskind explains. While most of the civilized world ostensibly looked on with horror as the multicultural communities of Yugoslavia disintegrated under the demands of ethnic nationalism, white supremacists and antisemites in the United States saw increased promise in the prospect of recasting their domestic struggle as both an ethnic and religious war.

The subtitle of “Blood and Politics” offers a history of the white nationalist movement “from the margins to the mainstream,” and the description is certainly apt. In the hands of less-skilled authors, navigating the netherworld of white supremacist groups too often becomes an exercise in cataloging the alphabet soup of one seemingly hapless sect after another. But Zeskind concentrates not only on painting the picture of a movement — which allows the plethora of people and groups he describes to fall into place more readily — but also on highlighting the critical fault line between “vanguardists,” who advocate violent, revolutionary struggle, and “mainstreamers,” who favor the ballot box over the bullet.

http://forward.com/articles/106665/

If they don't have an enemy, they might start thinking about how crappy their own lives are.