The Threat of America's Nativist Far Right

    While Peter King holds hearings on homegrown
    jihadists, the growing menace of white
    supremacist terror goes unremarked

By James Ridgeway
Guardian (UK)
March 24, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/24/far-right-terrorism

As emerging reports would have it, Kevin William
Harpham, 36, who is accused of setting a bomb to go off
at the Martin Luther King Jr Day parade in Spokane,
Washington, was yet another "lone wolf" terrorist,
acting at his own behest and on his own behalf. Even
groups on the racist, radical far right that so clearly
inspired him are rushing to disown and denounce the
indicted man. Regardless of whether he was a "member"
of an organised group, there can yet be no doubt that
Harpham saw himself as part of a movement - one that
has an especially broad reach in the age of Obama, and
roots as deep as American culture itself.

The vision of a black president has given the racist
far right one of its biggest boosts since the civil
rights era of the 1960s. Figures toted up by the
Southern Poverty Law Centre suggest a dramatic rise in
the numbers of organized groups: their numbers grew by
40% from 2008 to 2009, and an additional 22% from 2009
to 2010, bringing the total to 2,145 groups. It's
difficult to know precisely what these numbers mean,
since these groups are constantly changing names,
dissolving, reforming or springing up, and few of them
maintain public membership rolls. What is nonetheless
clear is that a strong far right movement has re-
emerged, and what unites it is the age-old American
doctrine of nativism, born out of fear of some dark
outsider sneaking in to steal the white man's homeland
and his hegemony.

Nativist thinkers are spread all over the map, but the
strongest current comes in the form of the Sovereign
Citizen movement, or what used to be called the Posse
Comitatus and before the posse, the Silver Shirts. For
the old Posse adherents and their contemporary progeny,
the white Aryan man is the only true "sovereign" over
his land and his life. White women serve beneath him;
black and brown "mud people" are menials worthy only of
disdain; and Jews (who do not qualify as white) are
usually behind it all, running the economic and
financial systems through a worldwide Jewish
conspiracy. They do not admit to being subject to the
laws and dicates of the US government; they eschew
social security, cars and drivers' licences, and won't
pay taxes.

For the true sovereign, the sheriff is the highest
legitimate law enforcement official in the land, and a
jury of his (white male) peers the only legitimate
government body. These beliefs are underpinned by the
religion of Christian Identity, which claim white
sovereigns are the direct descendants of the lost
tribes of Israel, who on their long trek out of the
Middle East made their way up through Scotland and
Ireland over to the United States.

Different facets of the nativist movement have enjoyed
periodic heydeys in 20th-century America - first in the
1910s and 20s, when anti-immigrant sentiments were rife
and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached more than
2m. In the 1930s and 1940s, they penetrated the edges
of the political mainstream through figures like Father
Charles Coughlin, who was the Glenn Beck of his day. A
Catholic priest and radio personality, Coughlin was at
once enormously popular and virulently antisemitic and
anti-New Deal. His ally Gerald LK Smith, leader of the
Share Our Wealth campaign, was evocative of some of
today's more extreme Tea Party candidates.

The Klans and related groups had another resurgence in
response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In
the 1980s, groups like the Posse, which drew together
white supremacy and Christian Identity with anti-
government "patriot" sentiments, found particularly
fertile ground for recruitment among dispossessed
Midwestern farmers. While figures like David Duke ran
for political office, others, like the violent group
The Order, carried out bombings, bank robberies and
murders, and engaged in blazing shootouts with federal
agents, all in service of their plan to build a white
homeland.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, with its perpetrators'
ties to the militia movement (and, most likely, to
other far right groups as well), the movement tended to
dig in further underground. Just as Timothy McVeigh and
Terry Nichols were deemed to be acting alone, the
periodic bursts of far right violence - whether they be
an attempted bombing, the murder of an abortion doctor,
attacks on undocumented immigrants or on Muslims, or
the shooting of a congresswoman - are attributed to
"lone wolves" rather than to organised plots by any
particular group. Yet the distinction belies the
reality of a movement that has long encouraged its
adherents to act in "leaderless resistance" cells or
carry out one-man guerrilla attacks (and become
celebrated as "Phineas Priests", named for the Bible
story of a man who executed an interracial couple).

The alleged MLK Day parade bomber, Kevin William
Harpham, may or may not have consider himself a lone
wolf if, as he is accused, he put together a backpack
bomb laden with shrapnel dipped in rat poison to induce
bleeding and placed it on the route of the parade. But
there can be little doubt as to where his inspiration
came from. Bill Morlin, formerly a reporter for the
Spokane Spokesman-Review and now an independent
investigator, traced Harpham's background in a
comprehensive report for the publication Hatewatch. In
the military, Harpham was stationed at Fort Lewis in
Washington, home base for 320 far right wingers. He was
once a member of the racist far right National
Alliance, and had left various postings on extremist
websites suggesting he had had enough of the
"international Jewish conspiracy", which, among other
things, he held responsible for 9/11.

Leonard Zeskind, a leading expert on the radical far
right and author, says that today, "the main tendency
of organisations is mainstreaming . The movement
imperative is towards the Tea Parties, running for
office, anti-immigrant mongering - not roadside bombs."
None of this, of course, prevents people from being
"recruited" to their ideas and choosing to act on them.
One far right leader said much the same in an interview
following the attempted bombing in Spokane. "There are
many aspects to the white supremacist movement," Shaun
Winkler, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the
KKK in Idaho, told a local television station. "There
are those of us that are on the political side, and
there are those of us that are revolutionary. It sounds
as if this individual was on the revolutionary end
rather than the political. And there are a lot of lone
wolves out there. People that are sympathetic to us,
but people that we don't know."

Historically, federal law enforcement has given little
credence to the power of the nativist current in
American society, and has paid relatively little
attention to the activities of nativist groups. That
has perhaps changed since the election of Barack Obama,
whose presidency has so focused and emboldened the
racist far right. Yet, despite their obvious threat,
there are no competitors to Peter King, holding
congressional hearings on the recruitment of homegrown
jihadist terrorists.

___________________________________________

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