EXTREME POLITICS

As part of my ongoing search for the political soul of America, I’ve started reading up about fringe groups on both right and left. One that really interests me are the far-rightists who go unrecognized by the far right, and there seem to be quite a few of them. This suggests to me that the far right, like other human groups, may be experiencing a rise of groupthink unrelated to its politics.

But for today, here’s excerpts of one of the more interesting documents from the far-right — Interview with a Revolutionary Klansman:

I joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1984. It was one stop in my search for truth. I have always been a radical. In the late 1960’s I became associated, through a friend, with members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) . The SDS was a college campus-based Maoist sect that was heavily influenced by the communist Progressive Labor Party. I was not a member of SDS but I consumed most of their literature and immersed myself in their philosophy, particularly in opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Believing there was no solution to be found in the middle of the road, and not finding the answers I was looking for in the radical left, I began to migrate toward the right. As fate would have it, my interest in history was channeled into an organization called the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). This was about 1982. Through that association I met a race-conscious Christian minister who showed me the connection between political thought and the Bible. The SCV is a historical society and I soon became discouraged with their lack of political activism. I started attending my minister friend’s church and looking for a new outlet for my radical views. Many of the old- time SCV members talked favorably of the Reconstruction Era Klan and the seed was planted in my mind. I began looking for the Klan. It took me about a year to find it. After joining the Invisible Empire I gained access to a wealth of information about the enemies of our race and way of life.

I became immersed in the Klan, giving it all my time and energy. Soon I was placed in charge of the state of Florida and we began to grow. Always maintaining a revolutionary consciousness, I began to attract people of like mind. We became the most active Klan in the country. The Florida Klan was known for taking. unusual positions and addressing odd issues. We made it a point to never do what was expected of us.

{ snip }

I brought my revolutionary philosophy with me to the Klan and simply applied it to this struggle. It’s true that the Klan has been reactionary and some Klans continue to be, but the whole truth about the Klan is not widely known. The Klan in the 1920s was involved, in some parts of the country, with pro-union activities. For example, in Williamson County, Illinois back in 1922, a mixed-race crowd of union coal miners attacked strike-breakers killing 20 of them. This incident was called the Herrin Massacre. Within two years, Herrin and the rest of Williamson County backed one of the nation’s strongest local Klan organizations. Many in the 1920s and 30s shared joint Klan-union membership. The United Auto Workers, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and Akron rubber workers were all examples of unions with Klan support.

The Klan has historically tried to organize colored divisions. Klan leaders met with Marcus Mosiah Garvey and gave a monetary gift to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. The Socialist Party and the Klan formed a 1924 alliance in Milwaukee to elect John Kleist, a socialist and a klansman, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Klan has at times appealed to militant workers.

I believe to be reactionary is fatal to our goals and I constantly preach against it. I encourage the study of left-wing and right-wing movements. I say we should take what we can from every source.

{ snip }

Sometime in 1990 we began holding joint demonstrations–the Klan in their robes and the Africans in their dashikis. Needless to say it sparked quite a backlash. Many klansmen were angry at me for even considering such a thing. In my view it was a match inspired by God. Why should we have a problem with black men who are strict racial separatists and want to establish a homeland on the continent of Africa? I have even publicly endorsed the payment of reparations to blacks but only for the purpose of repatriation back to Africa.

I believe that all people have a right to self-determination, a right to choose their own government, and their own religion. Clearly, blacks in America have not had those opportunities. As Minister Louis Farrakhan said: “If we can’t get along together, then we need to separate.”

I’m a revolutionary white separatist, not a white supremacist. I don’t feel superior to any man because of the color of my skin but I understand that the Aryan people (making up only about eight percent of the world population) must have a separate land uninfluenced by other races or by the criminal government that occupies Washington D.C. I’m not naive enough to believe we can get it without a very bloody struggle.

More recently, I have established a working relationship with a faction of the Nation of Islam. We have held several meetings with representatives of the Nation and I am learning from them. They have a great deal of truth. Although I am a Christian and don’t agree with every teaching of Islam or the Nation, I do respect them and their faith.

{ snip }

Stetson Kennedy, the famous anti-klan activist, author, and historian has corresponded with me and we have talked on the phone. Although I don’t agree with everything he stands for I respect him as a fellow activist. I believe he feels the same about me. You see, I’m not threatened by other philosophies and movements that oppose me. I believe the better cause will win in the end and so I respect anyone who gives 100 percent to their cause. I don’t respect people who waiver on their beliefs or are frightened to stand up for anything. In that regard I have even met with homosexual activists.

I certainly don’t agree with the queer lifestyle but as it turns out, even queers have some common ground with the Klan. They hate the government as well. They approached me about it and requested a meeting. All I can say is when blacks and queers are willing to look past our differences, sit down with the Klan and acknowledge common ground against the government, then the government is in deep shit.

Folk and Faith

Fascinating.

He clearly comes from a leftist background, but has started leaning to the right because he believes its methodology is superior.

Although the idea of an independent candidate makes most laugh, Ron Paul has redefined the political spectrum with his candidacy. While Paul is running as a GOP candidate, that does not obscure the position that he takes, which is clearly beyond what either major party can accept. He is for all practical purposes an indepedent.

We laugh at independents because we know that most Americans have taken one side or the other, and use that idea set as common ground with others to drum up public support for their businesses, personalities, films and books. You can convince anyone you’re a friendly good guy by being liberal and permissive, or convince those experienced enough to be cynical that you’re a realist by drawing a clear line between what’s acceptable and not. It’s more than a political view; it’s a definition of your personality, and a reflection of the audience to which you want to appeal. In a more cynical statement, we want liberal neighbors and conservative bankers and lawyers, because those are the personalities who either leave us alone or work carefully with our money, respectively.

With this in mind, Paul’s success is nothing short of amazing. Candidates like Nader and Badnarik appeal to a small few who are already alienated, but scare off most voters because the single-minded single-solution approach they have taken does not address a range of problems. Paul took basic conservative values, and applied to them a traditionalist twist as interpreted through the mechanism of modern libertarianism. He is both recognizably part of something we would like, which is a solid and moral conservative leader, and a bridge to a new way of thinking about government.

This new method relies not on dividing the political spectrum into good and bad, and fighting the bad while promoting the image of the good, but on removing the easy breeding ground for behavior that leads to bad. While conventional Republican doctrine is that we must fight bad, and liberal doctrine is that bad is misunderstood and need more nurturing, Paul’s doctrine is that bad arises where the good give it space. He suggests we strengthen the good by eliminating their bureaucratic responsibility to support the breeding ground for bad. It’s more akin to natural selection than the Nanny State created by most Republicans.

While at first it seems relentlessly pro-capitalist, Paul’s theory reduces capitalism to a means to an end, with his outright attack on usury culture and the form of moral inattention that allows large corporations to strike from behind government as a shield in the name of civil rights. He suggests instead making the individual less obligated to those corporations, thus removing their shield, while cutting out the illusion that government is here to help. By doing so, he makes capitalism secondary to the question of individual survival and the ability for the smarter among us to escape the rest.

We could then construe Paul’s division of the world into smarter and less smart, and honest and parasitic, and see his basic statement as an unwillingness to support parasites — or the well-intentioned bureaucracy that comes about through our fight for good versus evil. He knows that the more territory a government commands, the broader the lowest common denominator gets, and because there is a single entity trying to provide for all this people, how rapidly government becomes a defender of the broadest rights to existence. In effect, this makes it support parasites and crusade against biologically more intelligent people who will naturally try to escape the masses of clueless television zombies.

In this sense, Paul is not only a defender of the oldest form of conservatism, which encourages not commerce but a strong positive leadership, but is also an endorser of indirect soft eugenics. Allow natural selection to work for us, Paul hints, and the endless stream of criminals both white collar and street level will slacken, because what they rely on is a society of chumps who will defend their right to do nothing of import and excuse their criminality in the name of fighting good and evil.

Garden variety libertarianism has never reached this level of clarity because it focuses too much on the good/evil split of personal and civil rights, insisting on increasing those to absurd degrees while ignoring the fact that giving good people rights equally gives those rights to bad people, who will then wreak havoc as best they can. Paul’s Libertarianism is focused less on rights than a single right: that of honest, intelligent people to use their income to support their own families instead of the breeding of proto-criminal idiots.

When we see this clearly, it becomes obvious that Ron Paul, like the best of politicians who unite opposing factions into a singularity, is an alternative to the left/right split of American politics. He is conservative but unwilling to moralize over individual behavior because he believes that nature will sort out what morality cannot. Let the individual do what he or she wants, Paul’s theory goes, because those who act according to conservative values will prosper and the others will fade away. Avoid worrying about both fighting evil, and defending the rights of those who want to behave like idiots; let the natural consequences of their actions judge them.

What right and left have been able to agree on, over the past thirty years, is that our present path is fraught with error because we are ruled by cynical, corrupt and avaricious corporations and bad government. Both sides agree that localization, or smaller local governments handling problems, is superior to a large federal bureaucracy trying to come up with one average solution for 300 million people of different regions, cultures, intelligences, values and goals. This is why natural selection localized libertarianism of a less-than-embracing attitude toward capitalism has infused the extremes of both left and right.

For example, when we look at the National Anarchist parties gaining precedence worldwide, we see people who are basically liberal in outlook but have come to believe that a localized, national state is the best way to defend their culture. The rise of nationalist Bolshevik parties in Russia also shows this “third way,” and more of these leftists are endorsing a Paul-style post-dogma doctrine: do not crusade against evils, but give them no subsidy at the expense of the rest of society through the mechanism of the bureaucratic state.

On the far right, the only interesting activity has been the rise of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, a pre-Paulite conservative libertarian outfit, and the change of the American National Socialist Worker’s Party toward a “traditionalist” outlook that emphasizes cutting ties with the parasitic and nurturing the best of an organic population toward a localized, ethnic-cultural state. In these changes, we see the far right drifting away from the idea of constant warfare against an enemy toward a doctrine of defending the best against the obligation to support the potentially parasitic.

Another way of looking at this is to divide society not between haves and have-nots, but between those with the personal organization and intelligence to be haves, and those who lack these probably biological traits. The former can rise given a chance to show their abilities, while the latter are not composed enough to ever rise, and so will always try to find ways to invent obligations of the former group to subsidize the latter. The potential haves know they are outnumbered, so instead of tackling the potential have-nots directly, they’re cutting them out of the benefits plan.

This allows those who are personally organized, intelligent and driven to build for themselves a nice life and to have happy, healthy families. They don’t want to wage war against the potential have-nots, but they also don’t want to spend their tax money on keeping these people alive to cause trouble. Let nature sort it out. If the potential have-nots are able to organize themselves into a society, and support themselves, they then become potential haves and eliminate their own threat potential. If not, well, who wants to pay for those who will then turn against us? Support the best and ignore the rest.

In running for president, Ron Paul acknowledges that he has a slight chance of winning. What matters more than winning the public show of the presidency, however, is in winning the hearts and minds of the smart people in our television-and-minivan-blighted nation, and convincing them that a politics of denying the support of idiots through Nanny State bureaucracy is more productive than another war against potential have-nots in the style of the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war on crime.

Instead of another misdirected war, Paul tells us, we should return to the roots of conservatism, which is a connection to nature and the natural process. That he has communicated this to so many, and united supporters from both left and right, is the real triumph of Ron Paul’s candidacy and surpasses anything that can be done in a single presidential election.

***

Chris Stevens is a writer for CORRUPT who specializes in the political clash between Platonic and individualistic politics in the modern time. He can be reached here.

William A. White, a.k.a. “Wild Bill White,” has been convicted of using threatening speech against a bill collector while White stood to gain from the transaction:

Angry with the way Citibank was handling his account, William A. White dug up a bank employee’s home address, her telephone number and the name of her husband.

He then sent the information to Jennifer Petsche in an e-mail, threatening to share it with other dissatisfied customers.

“Consider this,” White wrote. “As I’m sure, being in the collection business and having the attitude about it that you do, that you often make people upset. Lord knows that drawing too much publicity and making people upset is what did in Joan Lefkow.”

But because White sought personal gain from Petsche — he wanted to improve his credit score by getting her to clear up his disputed credit card debt — prosecutors have charged him with threatening her with the intent to extort.

[+|Roanoke Times]

While we’re not surprised that White’s provocative antics got such a response in the election year of Barack Obama, we find this a troubling precedent — people need to be able to fight back against bill collectors.