[Bret L]

Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from
the Margins to the Mainstream, by Leonard Zeskind

Reviewed by Jonathan Pyle



"Blood and Politics, published this May, is a history of "White nationalist" political activity between 1974 and 2004 by Leonard Zeskind, an anti-racist writer and activist who has monitored White political groups since the 1970s. The book consists of a chronologically ordered series of chapters on phenomena including Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby, William Pierce's National Alliance, David Duke's campaigns, Klan groups, Holocaust deniers, survivalists, Christian Identity adherents, Aryan Nations, White separatist compounds, bank robberies and murders by White criminal conspiracies, the Populist Party, skinheads, Pat Buchanan's campaigns, Ruby Ridge, Waco, White power music, militias, common law courts, American Renaissance, The Bell Curve, the Oklahoma City bombing trials, the Council of Conservative Citizens, Sam Francis, and 9/11.

While it may be unfair of Zeskind to lump these diverse phenomena into
a unitary "White nationalist movement," one can avoid quibbling about
terminology by simply assuming, as I will in this review, that by
"white nationalist" Zeskind means a White who identifies in a positive
manner as White, or any Jewish or White proponent of the reality and
importance of IQ .

Zeskind places White nationalists along a spectrum between
"mainstreamers" and "vanguardists." Mainstreamers, exemplified by
Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby, believe that a majority of Whites
can be convinced to support their cause. They participate in the
political process and try to develop messages that resonate with a
wide audience. Vanguardists, exemplified by William Pierce and his
National Alliance, seek "a few good men," a small "vanguard" of
energetic revolutionaries who do not care if the public hates them.

Zeskind's account makes clear that not all White nationalists are of
one mind. Some are atheists, while others are Christian Identity
adherents; some question the Holocaust, while others do not; some
detest Neo-Nazis, while others idolize Hitler; some favor criminality
and revolutionary violence, while others advocate political solutions.

Despite these differences, Zeskind shows, there is also a great deal
of ideological overlap among the segments of the movement. White
nationalists who are otherwise political opponents will agree that
Jews have disproportionate control over the media, or that David
Duke's political campaigns were a positive development.

Zeskind also shows that individuals in one segment of the movement
often have connections to individuals in other segments of the
movement. For example, he points out that Jared Taylor, whose
American Renaissance conferences welcome Jews, is a close friend of
Mark Weber, who runs the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust
revisionist organization. Zeskind also describes how Willis Carto (a
mainstreamer), William Pierce (a vanguardist), and Tom Metzger (a Klan
leader) all tried to develop connections to the White power music
scene, despite having little in common with the fans of the music.
Within the network of connections among individuals in the White
nationalist movement Zeskind describes, Willis Carto and William
Pierce were major hubs, while other individuals, such as Sam Dickson,
Bo Gritz, and Louis Beam, appeared as recurring characters in a
variety of significant events.

Not surprisingly, Zeskind's point of view is firmly grounded in the
conventional wisdom of the political left. His commentary reveals
that he considers the following propositions to be firmly established:

1) The idea that the Jews "control the media" is plain nonsense.

2) The media is more than willing to give White nationalists a voice.
Therefore, it is not the media that marginalizes White nationalists;
rather, White nationalists marginalize themselves by saying crazy
things.

3) The history of the United States is a story of progress from
slavery to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement to an ideal
realization of the principle that all people are created equal.

4) The civil rights movement was a product of the genius of Black
people. (Zeskind knows this from first-hand experience; though he is
Jewish, he has been a “life time member of the NAACP”.)

5) The relative material and occupational advantages enjoyed by White
people are a product of historical inertia and the "prerogatives of
white skin."

6) Minorities who organize along racial lines are merely seeking equal
rights, while Whites who organize as Whites see politics as a "zero
sum game" in which minority progress toward equal rights harms Whites.

Nevertheless, Zeskind's book is interesting because it departs from
the conventional wisdom in a number of ways. When he began writing
the book in the 1990s, the working title was "Hate Mongers," but
around 1996, Zeskind says, he "abandoned the usual discourse with
which this topic is discussed. The so-called paranoid style,
scapegoating and other such ideas simply did not fit the facts as they
presented themselves."

For instance, Zeskind provides abundant evidence that White
nationalist activity is not the result of stupidity. He is clearly
impressed by the intelligence of individuals like William Pierce, who
was a physics professor before he was a vanguardist. He notes that
Sam Francis, who was formerly a Washington Times columnist,
"demonstrated a keen grasp" of Antonio Gramsci's idea of "ideological
hegemony."

Moreover, Zeskind does not beat up on White nationalists for lacking
credentials. He explains that Jared Taylor, founder of American
Renaissance, was raised in Japan and graduated from Yale. Zeskind
tells the story of Eveyln Rich, a woman who wrote her PhD dissertation
on the Klan while supplying information about Klan activities to anti-
racist watchdog organizations. Though she "grasped the subject of her
inquiry like few others" and was later active in opposing David Duke,
"[a]t some point Evelyn Rich must have dropped any scholarly distance
she had from white nationalists" because she married Jared Taylor.

In contrast to liberals who assume that occasional acts of violence
are the only threat posed by White nationalists, Zeskind argues that
White nationalism is a serious threat because the mainstreaming wing
of the movement, led by politicians, lawyers and PhDs, is capable of
having an effect on mainstream politics.

For example, he argues that David Duke's political campaigns, while
unsuccessful, awakened a constituency concerned with White
dispossession and thereby "opened the door" for Patrick Buchanan, a
relatively mainstream figure, to bring Duke's political issues into
the Republican party. Zeskind quotes Buchanan:

The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because
Duke, as a teenager, paraded around in a Nazi costume to protest
William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke
had the same phone number last year as the Ku Klux Klan. Everybody in
Metairie [Duke's district] knew that. The way to deal with Mr. Duke
is the way the GOP dealt with the more formidable challenge of George
Wallace. Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues; and
expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.

Buchanan went on to win the New Hampshire primary in 1996 and to take
over Ross Perot's Reform Party in 2000.

Zeskind also departs from conventional wisdom in explaining White
voter behavior. He rejects the idea that White voters voted for
Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative in California,
because they were opposed to illegal as opposed to legal immigration,
or because they used immigrants as a scapegoat for the bad economy.
He explains that statistical analysis of the polling data showed only
a slight correlation between voting for Proposition 187 and income
level, education level, or financial worries. There was a strong
correlation, however, between a person's likelihood of voting for
Proposition 187 and the percentage of immigrants in the person's
neighborhood. The distinction between legal and illegal immigrants
did not matter to White voters. What did matter was race and culture.

The David Duke campaigns demonstrated the same phenomenon. The
polling data showed that White voters were likely to vote against
David Duke if the percentage of Black people in the neighborhood was
small, but as the percentage of Black residents increased, the
likelihood of voting for David Duke increased. After carefully
analyzing why Duke received the support he did, Zeskind quotes with
approval a study that concluded, "Supporters in part saw Duke as a
voice for whites, in the same sense that minorities have
spokespersons." (Incidentally, that is exactly what David Duke says.)

Zeskind concludes that White nationalism is on the rise. He argues
that the end of the Cold War created a vacuum in American identity
that many White people filled with an ethnic identity. White
nationalists, he says, are "committed to overturning American society
rather than seeking to return it to some previous era." By possessing
"significant resources" and giving voice and coherence to "grievances
real and imagined," White nationalists over the past three decades
have succeeded in creating an "opposition to the status quo that will
not go away in the near future," Zeskind concludes.

Zeskind has condensed into narrative form a great deal of information
about different White nationalist political phenomena, the overlaps
among the segments, and the social connections among the individuals
involved. Reading Zeskind's history, it was hard for me to keep
straight in my head all of the meetings that took place in back woods
compounds and hotel conference rooms, the large cast of recurring
characters, the spiteful intra- and inter-organizational disputes, and
other details that Zeskind recounts in 542 pages and supports with 77
pages of endnotes.

I created the figure below to represent visually the complexity of
what Blood and Politics describes. The overlapping colored circles
constitute a Venn diagram of the White nationalist ideologies that
Zeskind describes. The dots represent individuals who hold particular
combinations of views, and the lines represent social connections
among the individuals. The dots and lines in my figure are random,
and the collection of ideologies is not complete, but the messy
network conveys a schematic image of the world Zeskind describes: a
complicated social network of individuals who inhabit different points
in ideological space -- what one reviewer on the dust-jacket called "a
sprawling and shadowy world of racist leaders and their communities."


Many of Zeskind's readers will think this type of evidence proves that
mainstreamers are just as dangerous as vanguardists. But does it
really show anything? So what if every individual in the Venn circle
of White nationalism, including Bell Curve author Richard Herrnstein,
is connected to Timothy McVeigh by only a few degrees of separation?
So what if every White nationalist ideology, even one as tame as Pat
Buchanan's paleoconservatism, is connected by a series of overlapping
ideologies to "RAHOWA" (Racial Holy War)?

Whenever there is some overlap between two ideologies, adherents of
each are likely to develop a connection (one-way or two-way) on the
basis of common understandings. For example, Vanguard News Network, a
web site that opposes Jews, immigration, and miscegenation (among many
other things), currently has a link to a blog post by Bradley Smith,
whose modus operandi is publishing advertisements in college
newspapers asking for proof of Auschwitz gas chambers. Given that
Smith, a White man from Los Angeles, is married to a Mexican woman and
lives south of the border, Vanguard News Network probably considers
him a "race traitor," but it promotes his work anyway. Connections
exist everywhere, but their significance is limited.

If I investigated, a la Zeskind, the social networks and political
phenomena of the political left, perhaps my findings could be reduced
to a diagram like the following:


Maybe George Soros plays the role of Willis Carto for the left.
Perhaps everyone on the left is only one or two degrees of separation
away from such undesirables as 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who like to
attend ACLU events, or leftist bomb-planters like Bill Ayers, who glom
on to Barack Obama. Liberals would think this kind of political
connection-mapping is unimportant to understanding the left as a
political movement. So why does Zeskind want the left to understand
White nationalists in this manner?

Zeskind actually does not want his readers to understand White
nationalism; he wants his readers to defeat White nationalists
politically. For that reason, he provides details about the sneaky
ways Willis Carto structured his non-profit corporations, but rarely
allows his subjects to speak a complete thought. Readers are left
with the impression that White nationalist ideas are mere
instrumentalities of a political movement motivated by "prerational
thoughts and feelings." Thus, the weapons to use against the White
nationalists must be political, not intellectual.

Collecting seemingly trivial details about the social networks of
White nationalists is necessary for building up ammunition for an
important political weapon: guilt by association. If an up-and-coming
politician makes the mistake of attending a dinner where one of the
speakers suggests that Jews control the media, his or her attendance
will be duly noted in the anti-racist watchdogs’ databases. Then,
some time in the future, the politician will be accused of anti-
Semitism, he will deny it, and the watchdogs will produce the factoid
as rebuttal evidence.

Such ‘gotcha moments’ might not win political battles, but the
aggregate effect of the politics of guilt by association is to
quarantine White nationalist ideas. Respectable conservative
politicians develop a fear of contracting a permanent case of
political cooties by coming within earshot of anyone who talks about
Jews having too much power or Blacks committing too many crimes. As a
result, White nationalist political organizations fail to attract the
cultural indicia of legitimacy, and the media treats them as
illegitimate.

Zeskind is concerned that White nationalist ideas will gain legitimacy
by piggybacking on the goodwill of legitimate political institutions.
This can happen when legitimate institutions co-opt White nationalist
political issues, as the Republican Party did by letting Pat Buchanan
deliver his "Culture War" speech at the 1992 convention. This can
also happen when White nationalists infiltrate a legitimate
institution, as when Pat Buchanan took over the Reform Party in 2000,
or, as Zeskind warned recently, when Stormfront members decide to
leaflet at libertarian Tea Parties. By ringing alarm bells about the
political activities of the mainstreaming end of the White nationalist
spectrum, Zeskind helps to ensure that the boundary of the quarantine
is drawn wide: not just around attention-getters like Kluxers and Neo-
Nazis, not just around Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, but
around Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster (and maybe even the Tea Parties).

There are risks to Zeskind's approach. By honestly admitting that the
rhetoric of White nationalists as "haters" and "extremists" does not
fit the facts, Zeskind undermines the popular stereotype, inculcated
as early as elementary school, that Whites who organize as Whites are
psychopaths seething with "hate." Zeskind does not need this silly
stereotype in order to believe that White nationalists are wrong; he
is immune to their ideas because he has an unshakeable faith in
egalitarianism and the falsity of all forms of "anti-Semitism." But
when ordinary, well-meaning White people realize the "hater"
stereotype is a sham and that mainstreaming White nationalists are
people just like themselves, will they stop and listen? If they do,
Zeskind can only hope that their faith is as strong as his. In the
course of trying to warn people not to underestimate the White
nationalist threat, Zeskind might be helping to destroy a useful
stereotype that, perhaps more than anything else, prevents ordinary
White people from becoming apostates like Evelyn Rich.

Do I recommend this book? Yes. It is long but highly readable. It
is full of facts and stories, with a minimum of commentary; only
rarely does Zeskind depart from a dispassionate perspective. The book
can be read in the intended fashion as a history of White nationalist
political phenomena, but it can also be read as an account of
experiments in creating a self-sustaining White culture in the midst
of a hostile majority culture. Occidental Observer readers may find
it interesting to think about which strategies worked, which failed,
and why.

Some of these experiments relate to Kevin MacDonald's question, "Can
the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?" The Christian Identity
religion, for example, considers Whites to be the real chosen people.
Some groups have promoted a White Zionism of sorts, arguing for the
creation of a White homeland in the northwest United States.

Many of the experiments will seem strange, but it is important to
remember that designing a successful political message is entirely
different from constructing a logical intellectual argument.
Consider, for example, what constitutes a successful political message
for the left: the 2008 "Yes We Can" Barack Obama promotional video,
which featured a multicultural cast of celebrities incanting selected
phrases of an otherwise uninspiring Obama campaign speech, punctuated
by "Yes we can" in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and American Sign
Language. In just three weeks, this dumb yet very poignant video was
downloaded 26 million times. Thus, if many of the unsuccessful
political stunts attempted by White nationalists in the past do not
seem to make sense, consider that they might not have made sense even
if they were successful.

There is no way to be certain about what kinds of White cultural
experiments will succeed in outcompeting the culture of Western
suicide. What is more certain, however, is that one or more of them
will succeed — or at least that is the impression I have after reading
Blood and Politics. Zeskind argues:

[W]hite nationalists consistently misunderstand the larger world
around them. A significant number of White people remain determined
to live and live happily in a multiracial, multicultural United
States. And they do not regard themselves as "race traitors."

Fair enough. But as Zeskind shows with his analysis of David Duke and
Proposition 187 voting patterns, these White people who are happy with
"a multiracial, multicultural United States" tend to live in
relatively homogeneous White communities. As Zeskind further shows,
as the percentage of non-Whites in the community increases, White
people become less happy with the "multiracial, multicultural"
community closing in around them, and start to vote for their race and
culture. What has happened to some neighborhoods in past decades is
happening to the entire United States this century. Thus, while the
term "race traitor" might never enter their vocabulary, Whites in the
future are likely find meaning in a culture and politics of Western
survival, especially if the mainstream media follows Zeskind in
admitting that the vocabulary of "haters" and "extremists" does not
describe the reality of White nationalism."

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...e-Zeskind.html