As the going gets tough, the white haters get going
By David Neiwert Monday Jan 12, 2009 3:00pm
We've been reporting steadily on the drumbeat of post-election racial hate that's being stirred up by the far racist right, particularly revolving around the election of Barack Obama. The most recent incident was the post-election assaults in New York by three teens who went looking for blacks to beat up in revenge for Obama's victory.
It's important to understand that -- just as with most hate crimes -- there isn't necessarily a direct connection between the hate groups that promote such violence and the thuggery itself. (In fact, only about 8% of all bias crimes are committed by members of recognizable hate groups.) What these crimes indicate instead is the larger spread of their toxic beliefs into the mainstream, and thus how their influence is belied by their numbers.
There was a noteworthy piece on this yesterday in the Washington Post:
Now, as McIntyre prepares to retire from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he and other analysts are warning that the threat from hate groups and splinter organizations connected to the Klan should not be underestimated, especially at a time of economic unrest.
"In society, you have a very small number of people who are going to push the envelope and take it to the next step," said McIntyre, the resident ATF agent in charge in Roanoke.
Veteran investigators say they have advocated for increased attention to the problem since late September, when the nation's economic troubles widened, giving white supremacists a potent new source of discontent to exploit among potential recruits.
The number of U.S. hate groups has increased by 48 percent, to 888, since 2000, according to experts at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an independent organization that monitors racist movements.
Although questions persist about the ability of such groups to carry out violent plans, several recent national developments have combined to worry analysts, said Mark Potok, chief of the law center's Intelligence Project. In addition to the economic downturn, he cited rising immigration, demographic changes that predict whites will not be a majority within a few decades, and what some might see as "the final insult -- a black man in the White House."
These warnings are almost certainly going to prove prescient in the coming years, in part because of a component that's missing from this report: namely, the significant demographic shift that has occurred in the United States in the past decade, particularly in areas that tended previously to be predominantly white.
In fact, the focus on economic downturns is slightly misleading, because there's no real data to substantively connect hard financial times with an increase in racist activity, particularly as they are embodied by hate crimes.
What researchers have found instead is that bad economic conditions can amplify interethnic tensions when they have already been created by shifts in demographics -- particularly the influx of a readily identifiable ethnic subgroup into an area that has long been predominated by a single large ethnic bloc.
I explain this in more detail in Death on the Fourth of July:
These kinds of demographic shifts, as it happens, often become the primary breeding grounds for hate crimes -- even in decidedly non-rural settings. A study published by [Yale University political scientist] Donald Green in 1998 focused on New York City, and it found that demographic change in 140 community districts of the city between 1980 and 1990 predicted the incidence of hate crimes. The balance of whites and whatever the target group happened to be in a given community district was an important factor, but the rate at which that balance changed was perhaps even more significant. The most common statistical recipe was an area that was almost purely white in the past which experiences the sudden and noticeable immigration of some other group.
In the case of New York, what occurred was a rapid inmigration of three groups: Asians, Latinos and blacks, though in the latter case the migration was often a response to the other groups' arrival; blacks were in some ways moved around, or their neighborhood boundaries changed. A number of previously white areas—Bensonhurst being the classic case, or Howard Beach -- experienced a rapid inmigration of various nonwhite groups. What was particularly revealing about the hate-crime pattern was that the crimes reflected the targets who were actually moving in -- that is, they revealed that this was not a kind of generalized hatred. Where Asians moved in, the researchers found a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, and likewise with Latinos or blacks. Bias crime has more of a kind of reality-based component, at least in the aggregate, than is implicated by those psychological theories that suggest that there only exists a generalized sense of intolerance on the part of those who practice extreme forms of bigotry.
In a later study, Green found this trend replicated itself elsewhere -- namely, in Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. In that case, there was rapid inmigration of immigrants into formerly homogeneous eastern Germany, which replicated the conditions in New York as the perfect recipe for bias crime. And indeed, there was a huge surge in hate crimes, which only slowed when the flow of immigrants was halted in the summer of 1993.
In any event, those conditions certainly can be found across a broad swath of the American landscape, which has seen a significant influx of Latino immigrants into formerly all-white areas of the Midwest, the South, and the West.
In other words, hate groups are almost certainly going to be exploiting fresh opportunities for recruitment, both ideological and actual. The stage has been set by the past decade's demographic shift, but the Bush Recession will in any event give them a big jug of gasoline for their bonfire. Obama's election will give them a figure upon whom they can focus their hate, and the immigration debate will give them an issue to recruit and organize around.
How to deal with it? The first step entails realizing that hate speech is in fact protected free speech -- but that we don't have to take it quietly. Moreover, it will always be smoke for law enforcement to begin sniffing out the fires. As the WaPo piece observes at its conclusion:
The trick for investigators, the ATF's Cavanaugh said, is separating hateful words from impending violence. "They all hate, they all go to rallies, but for the most part, most of them will not go out and plant a bomb or shoot," he said. "Maybe four or five out of 100 will go out and do that. The hard part for us is to sort out the free speech and find the person who's really going to make a bomb or shoot someone."
Those, of course, are the limits for law enforcement. Citizens, however, are not constrained from doing their part when it comes to the eruption of hate speech: indeed, if they're serious about combating it, they will stand up to it. This entails holding the speakers and their words up for public repudiation, both in the press and among the general public.
Because ignoring it doesn't work. Haters always interpret silence as implicit support. And besides, standing up to haters can actually be fun.
In the coming weeks and months, we may find it even more necessary than we'd like to think.
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could have predicted...
7-Up just came out my nose.
Touch 'em all Trantorian. That one was still going up as it left the park.
I anticipate Republican pundits and Congressmen will increasingly refer to the White House as "The Executive Mansion" after 1-20-2009 as a passes-for-subtle-among-retards sop to their racist base.
(n/t)
Living in south St. Louis I go to Cherokee Ave. to get my authentic
Mexican. English is not spoken at these restaurants...and they ROCK.
A new place opened in my n eighborhood and I assumed it would be
Americanized crap, but it wasn't. I stopped in for a beer one night
after work and all the Mexicanos were gone and the two gringo
owners and their posse were in the bar. You would have thought it was
a Klan meeting. The racist hatred was thick. They are all around us.
...and I was pretty surprised by the people down here, too. I was raised maybe an hour north of here, but approaching the Mason Dixon line is like knocking points off of the collective local IQ.
support this kind of "free speech". It is like yelling FIRE in a crowded theater. If these fuckers with their Nazi salute with one hand in the air and their other hand on their pecker is what to expect from these retreads then all we should do is laugh at them. I will not live in fear. I am armed.
I've got my old field hockey stick under my bed!
Evil fucks.
But they're miniature compared to the major evil players over the last 45 years.
LBJ killed more innocent Vietnamese than the KKK ever killed.
Not to excuse the KKK in any fucking way.
Palin will be leading these people in 2012 !
it won't be pretty
Is that picture from a 2008 Sarah Palin rally?
Sounds like the beginning of another program to instill fear in us so we will be more than happy to accept more cameras, more snooping, more intrusions into our lives.
I am sure they will be asking for more money to protect us. Bye bye, to what little freedoms we have left.
One could easily imagine Bill O, Rush and Ann Coulter in that line up in full Nazi regalia.
would look good in a nazi uniform.
Short dress.
Whip.
Wow.
Who, Rush?
how many people complained to the 600 stations that put that guy's crap on every day
Well, there's always the doll version.
I actually made up that little armband. It has the World Church of the Creator logo on it, which just happens to be a "W".
.
It would look good in, is its coffin.
subject to any special threat b/c of race, and further, that right-wing broadcasters like O'Reilly and Limbaugh were just as likely to be harmed. She's a total fool.
Yep. The only talk-show host/pundit I know of who was harmed by an angry audience member was Alan Berg.
the killers came all the way from oregon or wash. there were plans for berg to go national. the coors bros were still big then into iran contra, heritage foundation etc, and since then KOA has been all RW all the time, dominating CO politics and reaching 38 states at night. handy for them, and limbaugh's backers.
..teeny, weeny moustache above that thin upper lip and, voila! >
>a born-again hate-monger.
The nationalist/isolationist wing of the Republican party has supported Nazi policy since the 1930s. I'm surprised conservatives don't have more Nazi leaders on their radio shows(where they preach to a minority of conservative nutjobs, not the public at large).
That said, I would imagine anyone but Coulter has the sense to know that wearing Nazi regalia would be asking for an asskicking.
from 600 stations but how many people complained about it though?
will increasingly become targets for the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, racist sentiment.
This was the sentiment that LaPen mobilized in France to scare the bejabbers out of the French 'establishment.'
If things get measurably worse, and folks start to really feel pinched, look for a full-on, 4x4 Fundie GOP ticket in '12. Palin? Huckabee? either or both...
"If things get measurably worse, and folks start to really feel pinched, look for a full-on, 4x4 Fundie GOP ticket in '12. Palin? Huckabee? either or both..."
Even though it was a fundie GOP ticket that brought it all on.
or so before the next Presidential election. If the economy somehow does get turned around, including sufficiently for lower-income whites, some sh*t may be avoided. If not, I predict a full-on blame the black man cry from these people. Sadly, it will fall on probably vacant, fertile minds.
as evidenced by the rhetoric of these groups is the true danger to this country. They are the very smegma of the rethug party and so-called conservatism.
definition of terrorism and who it applies to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IRbwpc2XV4
Every racist I know is a coward! It is their one common trait.
Eight years of a government controlled by an unelected white man and a Vietnam draft dodging white corpse who together invited 911, killed 4,500 kids and 1M Iraqi & Afghans, ruined the economy, destroyed education setting back the sciences 50 years, robbed the treasury, stole billions in energy dollars, allowed the nations infrastructure to fail, botched every natural disaster recovery effort and basically told America, yes, even YOU white America to 'go 'fuck yourselves' and the white Nazi Supremacists finally crawl from their ratholes...
WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU IN 2001 WHEN AN ANTI-AMERICAN USURPED POWER?
Now that a 'darkie be in charge' you pack of pukes show your lame asses...
NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF!
they travel in packs and when the numbers are in their favor...then you may have issues.
ought to be thankful that most of the WWII vets have left this mortal coil.
Otherwise, Major Winters or Audie Murphy might kick their sorry ass off the continent.
You guys wanna live in a fascist state, then move to..a...
aww shit.
These haters are THE Republican base who think Bush is God and Democrats are evil. They can't connect the dots that their financial woes are due to this corrupt administration. All they want to believe is that they are superior beings, a belief which Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Faux News and the other wingnuts stoke hoping to incite these people to violence.
All politics aside. All Republican stuff and Democratic stuff and liberal/conservative stuff aside ...
1) Why is a White majority in the US an undesirable thing?
2) Why is a Brown majority in the US desirable?
Why aren't these questions - minus the Nazi allusions - ever discussed?
Why are the parameters of this social and cultural question limited - no, SQUEEZED - into the tiny framework of "They're Nazis, they're wrong - and I'm right"?
3) Why is whiteness and, by extension, "white culture" (and I'm not referring to the South or the Confederacy) considered to be intrinsically flawed and deserving of revilement and dismantling?
4) Why is brownness (ie: Mexico, Central and South America) and, by extension, "brown culture" considered to be intrinsically "superior" and, therefore, preferable as "the future" of the US?
As I said uptop, don't shoot me - but I'm wondering why these hard questions and their critically important hard answers never seem to receive an open and honest airing either here or on any other non-conservative/left-ish/liberal/"open"/Republican blog without devolving into charges and accusations of rascism and Nazi-ism. It's real hard to gain any meaningful,new or rational insight when all we're allowed to be is either "us" or "them".
You've made a faulty assumption in questions 1) and 2). Demographic ratios aren't desirable or undesirable: they're simply changing and the people who get upset about them are racists. Sensible people accept the changes and understand that diverse societies are more likely to continue to grow.
As for question 3), again, this is a straw man. I have no idea what you're referring to as "white culture" but I'm almost certain that I(white) am not a part of it. Question 4) is more question begging. If you're referring to institutionalized racism as "white culture" then it should be obvious why it should be marginalized.
These questions(which all come from false premises) are not asked by non-conservatives/non-racists. When intelligent people think about the demographic shifts in our nation it's treated as simply another natural phenomenon. There is no "ideal" racial mix to strive for, because we're all just people.
I'm a better man now for having been shown the light! False assumptions? Straw men? Question begging? I would never have guessed that all my questions would come from false premises, either - and it's a mind-blower to find out that because I dared to even think these thoughts, let alone formulate them into questions, that I'm really a conservative racist! I mean, who knew? Especially since I've voted a straight, Democratic ticket since 1970 and am gay, to boot! But never mind, I've just been deluded for 38 years and its probably because I'm not intelligent; only intelligent people think the way you do. Right? Oh, and thanks for confirming my observation about how questions like mine usually devolve into accusations and name-calling that only serve to shut down any further discussion. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude, Scott Free! I'll look forward to following your posts from now on; despite my intellectual limitations, I'd like to try better myself by learning at the feet of a Master.
*click*
Left-wing Nazi? Right-wing Nazi?
Scott. Meet kettle.
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz1sBi0-130
"In fact, the focus on economic downturns is slightly misleading, because there's no real data to substantively connect hard financial times with an increase in racist activity, particularly as they are embodied by hate crimes."
1920's and 1930's saw an increase in KKK activity and the growth in popularity of both the American Nazi Party, and the American Communist Party, both of which were legal then. The problem with hate crimes as a result of such growth is it's only recently been defined as a legal doctrine.
The Klan's heyday was in the 1920-26 period, when it ran a number of states and was a force in electoral politics nationally. By 1929 and the Crash, in fact, it had largely dissolved as a political force.
Its would-be replacement in the 1930s was the Silver Shirts, which indeed did make some play for popular political power. William Dudley Pelley was on the 1936 presidential ballot in a number of states, but he garnered less than 6% of the national vote.
Out of power they can be even more dangerous. It's my understanding that lynchings were continuing well into the 1940's, when Congress finally passed a federal anti-lynching law.
Experts are generally agreed that the primary reason for the existence of ethnic groups within a society is competition for scarce social resources (jobs, housing, political power, etc.). The presence of racialized ethnic groups (African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. in our society) represents efforts by the dominant ethnic group (non-Hispanic whites here) to exclude them from access to those resources. When those resources become more scarce, as they are now, ethnic tensions rise and there is more effort by members of the dominant group to exclude others, thus monopolizing them. Violence, as represented by hate crimes, is only one manifestation of that tension.
by that picture those Neo-Nazi boys need to lighten up on the donut binges if they're hoping to take another shot at world domination. Those aren't belts so much as containment devices.
I have never seen any sort of Nazi who lived up to the "master race" bullshit they claim. Maybe I could understand a big 6'5" marathon-running body-building Nazi if he was handsome as hell, but these guys fall back on "superior congenital traits" because they haven't earned anything in life.
Also, I think they go skinhead as a way to hide their receding hairlines.
for your Orincus post about "White Flower" and "White Flour", at least, I think it was on your site. I remember giggling like a school girl when I first read it. I thought the "fun" link you referenced might've been it, but I couldn't find it.
Anyway, great post as always.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0...
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0...
Maybe they're just drying their nail polish.
bunch they are, but not one lick of sympathy from me.
Reminds me of the Hour (minute) Men on the border, what were they going to do? sit on someone if they caught them?
reading this article about the up-surge in Britain of this group...
http://maxblumenthal.com/2009/01/neo-nazis-fo...
Neo-Nazis For Israel?
Posted by Max in January 9th 2009
While much of the neo-Nazi fringe remains opposed to the existence of Israel, the whites-only British National Party recently declared its full-throated support for Israel’s attack on Gaza. The shelling of Gaza City by Israeli forces has brought joy to the heart of BNP head of legal affairs Lee Barnes: ”This sort of ‘disinfecting’ process whereby Israel is required to sterilise areas of radical Islamist support … is what all nations have to do in order to eradicate Islamist cells who have managed to take over territory either within or on the edges of their borders,” Barnes wrote on his blog on January 4. He continued, “Get used to the casualties - for without them any nation so infected with Islamism will surrender, rot away into liberal apathy and then dies as it is taken over.”
Nick Griffin, the BNP’s Cambridge-educated, media-friendly chairman, echoed Barnes’ comments in an essay called “Israel’s Gaza affair:” “The Israelis will NEVER get unbiased reporting on the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation, despite being the only civilised country in the region & fighting for their very existance [sic],” Griffin proclaimed. “It is NOT our place to get involved but you aren’t the only one to be 100% behind them, they are an example to us all because the only thing the Islamic Terrorists understand is FORCE.”
Griffin’s endorsement of Israel’s attack on Gaza marks the latest phase in his attempted transformation of the BNP from an anti-Semitic horde of football hooligans into a viable right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. Once an open denier of the Holocaust, Griffin published a pamphlet in 1997 called “Who Are The Mind Benders?” that claimed Jews had conspired to brainwash the British people by dominating the media. He immediately received a two year suspended sentence for inciting racial hatred.
After seizing control of the BNP’s chairmanship in 1999, Griffin realized his neo-Nazi tactics had failed. He shifted strategies, adopting a platform that closely mirrored that of Jean Marie Le Pen’s then-incipient Front National in France. Griffin savaged the government for its supposedly soft handling of pedophiles, bashed homosexuals (despite claims by former far-right activist Martin Webster to have engaged in a secret gay tryst with Griffin), and called for the dismantling of multiculturalism.
With Muslims immigrating to Britain in increasing numbers, Griffin assailed Islam in 2004 as a “vicious, wicked faith,” and claimed the “Islamification” of his country was a form of rape. Islamophobia thus became the foundation of Griffin’s new strategic thrust.
In a 2007 essay, Griffin revealed the cynical motives behind his replacement of the BNP’s anti-Semitism with Muslim bashing: “It stands to reason that adopting an ‘Islamophobic’ position that appeals to large numbers of ordinary people - including un-nudged journalists - is going to produce on average much better media coverage than siding with Iran and banging on about ‘Jewish power’, which is guaranteed to raise hackles of virtually every single journalist in the western world.”
During the spring of 2008, the BNP campaigned through Jewish areas in London, blanketing neighborhoods with leaflets juxtaposing fearsome images of radical Muslims with a smiling headshot of Pat Richardson, the BNP’s only Jewish councillor. ”I’m in the BNP because no one else speaks out against the Islamification of our country,” Richardson declared.
Ruth Smeed of the Board of Deputies of British Jews observed with astonishment, ”The BNP website is now one of the most Zionist on the web - it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel and at the same time demonises Islam and the Muslim world.” However, Smeed and an array of Jewish organizations in Britain were not fooled by Griffin’s new philosemitic patina. They rejected his play for their votes and urged their constituents to do the same.
But while Britain’s Jewish community has largely rebuked the BNP’s cynical machinations, it is unclear where Israel stands. Will the Israeli government publicly denounce the BNP’s support, or quietly accept it in the face of increasing pressure from European governments to accept a cease fire?
I used to live in the Hagerstown, MD area, and back in 2004, the Klan held a "rally" in Sharpsburg, near the Antietam battlefield. Here's a picture from the local paper of the "march".
Klan marches near Antietam
There were more police than Klanners, and even more spectators/protesters. Take a look at some of these guys...are they a bunch of losers, or what?
This event took place on August 29th, and was in planning since early April of the same year...and this is the sum totality of the support they could come up with.
as a white male, I'm not sure what I did to deserve all this hate.
but who will........ save us from the ....three hundread spartans?
show me a race that doesnt have its racists and biggots ........ and ill show you some one who just landed from ........outer space!
Ignorance must be bliss, eh David?
You know, I don't really care very much if there are black haters or white haters, but it's people like you and please take this with as much love as possible, is what keeps a big old | line between blacks and whties. That's right, fuel the fire, keep the hatred going.
Because I can guaran damn te you that blacks are as much to blame if not more so for their hatred of white people. It was white people that brought blacks voer here and you know what? Blacks are the ones who started slavery in the first place.
White people died to free blacks from slavery in the Civil War and some blacks even fought to keep slavery.
Such an abuse of the government system is EXACTLY why conservatives like ymself will know that if Obama's bill gets passed, then every single one of us is going to suffer for it. But you know, I say hey. When this stuff gets blown up and irreversable, LIBERALS will have no one to blame but themselves. I'm sick and tired of hearing Kanya West with his Bush hates blacks, the ever so lovely Reverend Wright and the ignorant comments that I don't like Obama because he's black. If he were white, I would dislike him just as much as I do Bill Clinton. I really don't give a damn of racisim, it's the freaking morals of your so called 'good intentions' that makes me fear for my country.
And what's with the racism any ways? Who freaking cares that my pigments different from you! The only thing we should be fighting for is for moral rights. If we could just fix that, this stupid fight blacks vs. whties wouldn't be so... ugly and stupid.
But I still say that blacks are not helping themselves at all. Acorn? Black Panthers infront of voter registrations? Does that look un-racist to you? Really?
~Can we please focus on the actual issues and not have this stupid double standard? PLEASE?~
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