AMY GOODMAN: You spend a lot of time, actually, in the book talking about Pat Buchanan, running through the Republican presidential primaries and then on from there. Talk more about his role over these decades.

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, Pat Buchanan, if you will remember, was a Nixon speechwriter. He was the Reagan communications director. There was no foreign intervention during those years that he wasn’t willing to support. He was an anti—saw himself as an anti-communist, and he was willing to invade every country to prove it.

But after the collapse of the Soviet bloc—and I discuss this quite a bit in the book—after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, Buchanan changes, because the problem for him is no longer external, it’s domestic. It’s the problem of white hegemony. It’s the problem of immigration. It’s the problem, for him, that he believes this country should be a European country. And he weds that to a long history of support for people charged as war criminals in the United States. So he’s the perfect person to represent the white nationalists in the mainstream.

What he does do, during both the ’92 and ’96 campaign, is bring hardcore white nationalists into his campaign operation. It was in the year 2000, they were actually the rank-and-file troops for a lot of his operation. So, he ran in ’92, after David Duke won the majority of white votes in Louisiana and pointed to a constituency that Pat Buchanan thought should have a voice.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Liberty Lobby support for him, and again back to what the Liberty Lobby is, going back to the issues that we’re dealing with today?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Yes. Liberty Lobby, which no longer exists, it got into a fight with another organization and bankrupted itself. But at the time, Liberty Lobby supported Pat Buchanan’s run through the Republican primaries in ’92. They thought, in ’96, that he should run as an independent. And in the year 2000, when he ran as a Reform candidate and he picked Ezola Foster, they were unhappy, although they supported him. But other white nationalists withdrew their support. Even if Ezola Foster was a former John Birch Society member or a anti-immigrant activist, they weren’t going to support Pat Buchanan, because they saw a black running mate.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you also talk in your book about the relationship between the white nationalist movement and the election of Ronald Reagan and their involvement in the Reagan candidacy. Could you talk about that?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, in the Reagan—what he did by going to Philadelphia, Mississippi—and others have said the same thing—he signaled that the states’ rights crowd had a home within his campaign. It’s my argument, though, in this book that the election of Ronald Reagan was a breaking point for people like Liberty Lobby. Liberty Lobby looked at Reagan after his election, and they said, “Look, this guy is going to be just a regular, quote, ‘Zionist conservative,’” that he was going to support Israel, which they hated, and that they were going to—the Reagan era was going to continue the control of the Federal Reserve Bank and all these issues that the Liberty Lobby was campaigning against. So, actually, the election of Reagan was a breaking point for many white supremacists.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have James von Brunn, who allegedly walks into the Holocaust Memorial yesterday and opened fire—opens fire, and he kills a security guard, and he is critically wounded himself. Von Brunn, a longtime history of white supremacy, of racism, of anti-Semitism, author of the 1999 book Kill the Best Gentiles, a racist and anti-Semitic tome that argues whites are seeing “today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race.” In 1981, he attempted to put the whole Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve under legal nonviolent citizen’s arrest, brought in guns.

Leonard Zeskind, explain what his philosophy about Federal Reserve has to do with the white supremacy ideology. Put this all together for us, and then go back in time, both to the Pittsburgh killing as well as to the killing of Dr. Tiller.

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, the Federal Reserve has been a target of white nationalists, but also varieties of far-right ultra-constitutionalists who don’t have race at the center of their belief system. But for the far-right ultra-constitutionalists, they believe that the Constitution reads that a private agency like the Federal Reserve should not be coining money and regulating the value thereof, that it’s the federal government that does it.

For the white supremacists, they believe that the moment that the Federal Reserve Bank was created in 1913 was the moment that the international bankers—and they have a whole list in all their propaganda of who they believe the international Jewish bankers are, a list that, by the way, includes, you know, the Rockefellers, who weren’t Jewish by any means—and they believe that it was the moment that Jews took control. So, when these people are opposed to the Federal Reserve, they’re not opposed to a government, per se; they’re opposed to Jewish—what they believe is Jewish control of the government. When they target and tell people that the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional, it’s based on a specious reading of the Constitution.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what about the whole role of the attitude toward Israel, in general? Clearly, among many conservative white Christians, they strongly support the state of Israel. And yet, you have this group of white nationalists who see Israel and a worldwide Jewish community as a threat to their lifestyle.

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, in the book, I describe a moment in 1988 when Pat Robertson, the Reverend Pat Robertson, runs through the Republican primaries and excites the white Christian constituency into the Republican Party. And the Liberty Lobby, at that point, says, “Look, we disagree with the Reverend Robertson on the issue of the Federal Reserve, but mostly with his support for the state of Israel.”

So they use that as a line of demarcation between themselves and what we think of as the Christian right. These people have a thorough anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which separates them, to some degree, from the Christian right. On other issues, like opposition to abortion, trying to force women back into seventeenth century, quote, “traditional” roles, those kinds of issues, opposition to gay marriage, they support those issues. But on the issue of Israel, they think that the Christian right is wrong. So that’s the core of the difference between the Christian right and the white nationalists. And I try and explore that in the book a little bit.

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Zeskind, the issue of Holocaust denial, how this fits in, and then the link between the white supremacy, the racism of von Brunn, his connection to Noontide Press, leading Holocaust denial press, with the anti-abortion movement—the connection between the white nationalist movement and the anti-abortion movement?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, in the case of Holocaust denial, this is a rewriting of history that, for some, is simply, you know, a way to poke a stick into Jews’ eyes. They see this as a way to aggravate Jews. For others, like William Pierce, he says specifically, “We cannot do what we want to do in the United States as long as people believe that these Hitler crimes occurred.” And so, he says it destroys the white ethic of survival. So, for Pierce, Holocaust denial is a strategy to repeat the Holocaust in the United States by denying it in the past. And for some in the movement, that’s clearly part of their idea structure.

AMY GOODMAN: And the connection to anti-abortion movement?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, the anti-abortion movement, as we all know, is dominated by organizations in the Christian right, is dominated by a wing of the Catholic Church, and is not, in the main, associated with the white nationalist movement. But a number of the killers have had some relationship to the white nationalists.

I go back in the book to describe the murder of Dr. Gunn in Pensacola, which was the first of these murders. And the man who incited the shooter—now, the shooter is just a regular Joe that’s an anti-abortion nut case. But in the case of the incitement, the person who was leading him, it was a man, John Burt, who had been part of the Klan in Florida in the ’60s and talked about the fact that he had committed acts of violence in the battles for civil rights in Saint Augustine.

In the case of Scott Roeder, we know that he put on a, quote, “sovereign citizen” license plate on his car in the 1996. That was a sign that he was a part of the Freemen. And the sovereign citizen movement was part of a clearly defined racial theory of the Constitution. These people believed—the Freemen, the Posse Comitatus before it—these people believed that there were two classes of citizens in the United States. One were organic sovereigns, or sovereigns, who drew their rights from God, and the rest were Fourteenth Amendment citizens with lesser rights, and this was everybody who wasn’t white and Christian. And they were—the so-called Fourteenth Amendment citizens got their rights from the government, where the sovereigns got their rights from God. And so, they believed that they could adhere to a set of what they called Christian common laws, rather than what they called statutory law in the United States.

Roeder was part of that. That indicates to me that when he shot—when he allegedly shot Dr. Tiller, he was acting out of a complete theology, if you will, a theology that tells him that his citizenship is superior, that abortion is wrong, that women have to obey men, and so forth.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you about the impact of the Oklahoma City bombing on the white nationalist movement. Clearly, that was the major wake-up call in our lifetime about the dangers of the white nationalist movement within the United States. What impact did the—in the aftermath of the conviction and execution of Timothy McVeigh, did it have on the rest of the white nationalist movement?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, the conviction of Timothy McVeigh was part of a general crackdown by federal government on the shooters and the bombers and the bank robbers in the movement. And as I pointed out earlier, there were several groups. The Aryan Republican Army was active at the same time that Timothy McVeigh was. The so-called Phineas Priesthood was. They shot people, too. So it was a general round of violence.

What happened is, the government came in and made major arrests all across the board and, for at least a little while, tamped down the most violent wing of the movement. Then came 9/11 and the war against terror. So shooting people was no longer considered by the white-ists, if you will, a useful strategy.

I think now that we’re eight years away from the 9/11 events, what we’re going to see is an increase, but it’s related to the fact that the war on terror is ebbing, in their mind, and they’ve got room to do what they want to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Zeskind, how much of a threat, do you see, is the white nationalist movement today? I mean, von Brunn was writing this stuff. He was writing books. He was keeping a website. He could be watched. Do you think this was preventable? How do you think the government should be monitoring these groups?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, I’m not sure that I’m ready to set government policy on this issue. What I can say is that the people that are residents of this country can stand up and say to the white nationalists and the anti-immigrant movement that they support human rights for all people. I think we can go out and do peer organizing among young people that—and middle-aged people now, that are joining the skinhead white power music scene. I think we can stand up and say this stuff is wrong. And I think that, in the long run, is a more important way of curbing this problem than simply relying on police powers from the government.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people would you say are involved in this movement?

LEONARD ZESKIND: I’d say there’s about 30,000 hardcore members. I don’t tend to—some people measure this movement by the number of organizations. Since many of the people have cross-organizational memberships and skip from one organization to the other, or one organization falls apart and three organizations take its place, I tend to look at the aggregate number of folks. It’s about 30,000 in the hardcore center of this.

I’d say there’s somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 what I call active supporters. These are people that read the publications, go to the meetings, read the websites, donate money.

And then there’s a third layer, which was tapped by Pat Buchanan and David Duke in the Louisiana, and this is people that will support it in a voting booth but won’t get out on the streets with the national socialist movement and march around in swastikas.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the connection between our white nationalists here in the United States and groups in other parts of the world? Clearly, in Europe there is a resurgence of neo-Nazi organizations and groups.

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, I think what we can say is that there have been longstanding ties between white nationalists in the US and those in Europe. Francis Parker Yockey, one of the people cited by von Brunn, Francis Parker Yockey was an American. He was in the American Army right after World War II, and he became part of the neo-Nazi resurgence in Europe in the immediate postwar era.

What we know today is that numbers of organizations have direct organizational links to the French National Front, to the British National Party, to the German Democratic National Party in Germany/ And they look at, for example, the last European elections to see how their people did. They pay more attention to the events in Europe than some of the people that are in the media today.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Leonard Zeskin, can you talk about how you got involved with researching the white nationalist movement, going back thirty years ago?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, I’m—older than thirty years ago, I’ve been an adult, and I began as a generic anti-racist activist. I came of the opinion in the mid-’60s that white people needed to organize other white people to oppose racism. It was an idea promoted in the mid-’60s. And I took that on as part of what I wanted to do. In about 1978, we started to see an upsurge in white supremacist violence again. And then, in 1979, there were a number of events and shootings. At the time, I wasn’t a professional in the business at all. I was just an average rank-and-file community activist type.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of the Greensboro massacre in November. What was your relationship with the protest around that?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, on February 2nd, 1980, a number of civil rights and religious groups, as well as some of the organizations on the left, came together for a big march in Greensboro. And I was one of several people in Kansas City that drove all night into Greensboro so that we could march in solidarity and in opposition to the shootings in Greensboro.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened there. Explain what the Greensboro massacre is.

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, what happened—what happened was there was a group of anti-Klan activists in North Carolina that were busy physically confronting the Klan whenever possible. And the Klan decided to shoot back, as it often does. And the Klan came in with a caravan of—I think it was fourteen cars, but I might be wrong about that. People slowly got out of their car, popped the trunks, pulled out their weapons and started shooting people in the crowd. It was an awful massacre. The people did not get convicted in state courts, one of the many cases of racist violence where state murder charges were not successfully prosecuted. And it opened up, if you will, a whole stream of violence in North Carolina.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, the killing yesterday, von Brunn opening fire in the Holocaust museum. Last night, there was supposed to be a big opening of a play by Janet Langhart Cohen, who’s a journalist and a playwright, the wife of William Cohen, the former Defense Secretary. In fact, he, William Cohen, was there in the museum right near the shooter. Her play was about Emmett Till and Anne Frank, putting them together in conversation. The eightieth anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth is tomorrow, June 12th. She was born June 12th, 1929. And Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, went down to Money, Mississippi in 1955. His mom sent him down to be with family, and he was lynched by a white mob. Do you think that could have anything to do with—among those who were going to be attending was Eric Holder, the Attorney General. Final words, Leonard Zeskind?

LEONARD ZESKIND: Well, I’m not sure that we know the last word about the von Brunn incident in Washington. I think it’s a mistake for the Washington police to say they’re going to do an overnight investigation to determine what the motives were and whether or not other people were involved. I think that it’s an indication that we’ve got a problem, that we need to learn about it, we need to pay attention, and we need to stand up and say no to this white nationalist movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Leonard Zeskind, I want to thank you for being with us. Your new book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Source:http://www.democracynow.org/  

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