Witnessing the Ron Paul Campaign Humanise the Face of White Supremacist Politics

I'll be brutally honest with you dear reader, I was totally prepared to sit quietly on the sidelines sipping lukewarm, milk-infused Assam calmly watching the mainstream press play moralistic footy with the Ron Paul Newsletter scandal without saying a word. Really, I was. Regular readers are aware that I just finished an in-depth editorial on the rapid rise of the far-right which became an eBook, 'Of Caucasians, Christians and Desperate White Men: Why Conservative Racialists in the US, UK and Israel Are Ultimately Responsible for the Tragedy in Norway' (available as a free download from Aboriginal Press Books) and frankly, I had grown tiresome with the entire subject. Believe me when I say that it takes a strong stomach to sit and objectively review neo-Nazi and other assorted right-wing literature and I decided that I had read enough insanely hateful bile to swear me away from the subject until long after the passage of the new year.

That was until I found out that someone I truly respect, veteran journalist Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of Truthdig.com, decided to appeal to the struggling 99% with an editorial that effectively and authoritatively whittles down the subject of Mr. Paul's observable neo-Nazi connections to a petty matter that 'is certainly worthy of criticism' but not nearly as important as his anti-corruption, isolationist, anti-war political platform. In other words, it is entirely o.k. for a 21st century American presidential candidate to harbour neo-Nazi sentiments and cognizant connections to fascism so long as he, or she, is verbally committed to doing away with war, economic decay and governmental over-reach.

I have a serious, serious problem with this. And so should you. Especially if you consider yourself to be a rational, fellow-traveller of the progressive 'Left'.

In his piece, 'Marginalizing Ron Paul', Mr. Scheer suggests, like numerous others, that the Texas candidate's radical US-style Poujadist politic is a matter wholly separate from his clearly unambiguous associations with known anti-American, anti-democratic and often violent White Supremacists. This is the popular nonsensical argument that says Ron Paul the presidential candidate is mutually exclusive from Ron Paul the publisher of far-right racist populism. An argument which is patently absurd. Yes it is true that the published racism we are discussing here is more than 20 years old, but it is also very true that Mr. Paul has never denied or refuted his dedicated support from the admittedly racist far-right. So we would be foolish to assume that Mr. Paul's personal ethnic and cultural biases are in any way separate from his demonstrated politic when weighed against the squalid company he proudly keeps.

Adding further insult to injury, Mr. Scheer's brazen indictment against those of us who have come to define Mr. Paul as a clear and present threat to an already tense multi-cultural social order is puzzling if not downright frightening in an age of Glenn Beck inspired domestic right-wing violence. His charge that we who oppose the Paul campaign are the real racial 'hypocrites' for worrying more about Paul's neo-Nazi connections than his quarrel with Wall Street's moneyed elite I must candidly admit gives me an intellectual case of the hives. It is both politically disturbing and morally repulsive on a variety of levels, especially since these are statements are coming from the son of a Russian Jew. I feel confident in saying that because I know full well that Mr. Scheer is not a fool. And it begs the question of why would, or how could, someone of his personal and professional background write such a passionate defence of an individual who literally spends his time shaking hands with anti-American neo-Nazi extremists.

This is a reasonable question, particularly for people-of-colour as well as for American Jewry. Zionist or not. I was previously aware of Mr. Scheer's support for Rand Paul's run for the Kentucky Senate, which was also distasteful, but his endorsement of Ron Paul's candidacy, given his ties to Hitler wannabes, is patently unforgivable. And further it is shocking to me that a journalist of Mr. Scheer's extensive experience would pen something that sounds so similar to the schlock churned out by the White Separatist rabble who flock to David Duke's EURO organisation.

I mention this only because I believe that it is important to take note of the outline of his argument. Just to be clear with the reader, I am not accusing Mr. Scheer of being a bigot, but what I am suggesting here that he is willing to ignore abject anti-African racism in order to fulfill his particular anti-war, anti-corruption political goals. As my late father explained to me as a young man, two White man may truly hate each other, but they will temporarily ignore their problems just long enough to join forces and lynch you from the nearest tree. This is true. And this is why I am concerned about what this editorial seems to represent to those who say they are progressive in their politic and liberal in their personal social character.

Just for the exercise, compare the two selections provided below, one from the Mr. Scheer's progressive journal and the other published in an admittedly racist, paleo-conservative online reader. Decide for yourself if Mr. Scheer is waltzing along with the passive rhythms of White racist North America:

First, I present for your review a brief snippet of Mr. Scheer's rather upsetting editorial:

'It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center'.

Now, compare that to this culled from the official website of Rep. David Duke, PhD:

'The ongoing sub-prime crisis was caused by watering down regulations for sub-prime loans so that more minorities would qualify. The federal government compelled banks to increase sub-prime loans to Blacks and Latinos. Any bank that refused would be punished. If a bank didn't make enough minority loans and they needed federal permission to do anything such as open a new bank, their request was promptly denied by the Feds in retaliation'.

I ask the reader to carefully examine the discreet language being used here. As far as I am concerned, when dispassionately balanced against the vast bulk of current and antiquated Christian fundamentalist and neo-Nazi literature, the only thing missing from both articles is a direct reference to Shakespeare's 'Shylock'. In all seriousness, if you are going to go so far as to defend a presidential candidate who proudly shares air with people who claim that a subversive cabal of Satanic Jewish bankers are secretly controlling the US political and economic system, why not just round it all out with the usual cliché allegations of a clandestine global Jewish conspiracy?

The emotional support the Paul presidential campaign has received after the voting public in the US learned from the republican party bad-jacketing machine that he is a friend of the neo-Nazi movement says more about modern America than it does about Ron Paul. His particular brand of 'intelligent racism' has been embraced by a large number of White Americans who simply do not have the courage to admit in plain language that they feel threatened by the rapid demographic and cultural changes taking place in the country. Judeophobic websites like JewWatch.com receive more than a million visitors a month.

And just to show the reader what I mean by 'a decided partiality' towards the extreme right, even after JewWatch was discovered by the Missouri state attorney general to be illegally and immorally defrauding US citizens attempting to donate funds to Hurricane Katrina, the site is still in business with tacit support from Google and the other people, not all White, who argue in favour of White Supremacist civil rights. The neo-Nazi social hub Stormfront also logs more regular visitors than many established news resources do within the same period. The one dynamic that can be looked at as a 'good' result of Mr. Paul's campaign is the fact that he has exposed the sympathetic undercurrent in the United States towards not just politically conservative politics, but extremist racial theories that in 2012 should have no bearing on contemporary society. When young Americans like Kelly Clarkson can not only support Mr. Paul's racism but profit handsomely from it, it is entirely misleading to claim that the US is not caught-up in a White supremacist paradigm.

But the problem is not merely limited to passive White Power perspectives in US society. We should all take pause when a veteran progressive journalist is not only willing, but eager to defend a rank, right-wing intellectual extremist solely on the basis of his pledge to end commercial malfeasance and intensive US military involvement and expansion. Mr. Scheer, and frankly, even the unrepentant bigots over at EURO, are factually correct in their argument that the financial commissars that caused the economic meltdown took unfair advantage of minority home buyers. But like most of White America, they want us ignore the underlying factors that made what happened in the sub-prime mortgage scandal possible in the first place.

Whether one is politically right, left or centre, we should all take pause when a left-wing journalist is not only willing, but eager, to defend a rank, right-wing intellectual zealot solely on the basis of his pledge to end commercial malfeasance and intensive US military and government expansion. I do not claim to know what lurks in the heart of Mr. Scheer, but in all sincerity, his piece honestly reminds me of the intellectual apologists of the paleo-conservative lobby who say exactly the very same thing in much the same way. Especially when attempting to address the mainstream US news reading public. The sainted conservative icon Ronald Reagan and his speech writers and advisors understood this dynamic very well. And so did Bush the Second's mainstream propagandists in 2000 and again in 2004.

By combining the pressing 'Main Street' issues of unnecessary wars of aggression, nationwide minority disenfranchisement and growing mainstream animosity towards the international financial community, the extreme right-wing has expertly managed to cloud their pro-fascist agenda within an air of genteel western civility. They take full and undue advantage of the preposterous short-sighted American attitude that distinguishes the Ku Klux Klan and uniformed Nazis as repugnant, while venerating 'respectable bigots' like Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter who are free to 'merely express their opinions' so long as they use polite verbalisation. This allows for one end of the spectrum to be regarded as an embarrassment while the other, more sophisticated schtick, is defended as the true voice of the authentic American ideal.

It is simply a matter of packaging for the sake of broad public acceptance. When the mainstream media has a choice between reporting on slobbering, under-educated and generally unemployed White people growling obscenities or interviewing someone articulate enough to explain their point without using harsh expletives, who do you think they are going to go to? Its not that the conservatives who populate the cesspool that is mainstream news media do not spew false, misleading and insulting rhetoric, they do. As Often as possible. The leading right-wing propaganda machine in the United States is the Australian/Saudi Arabian owned FOX News Network who by their own admission, present false material they concoct as real news information simply to rally their ditto-headed base.

This is allowed. The US press has rarely shown the negative face of White racism without excusing the negativity of it all by highlighting how 'bad' minorities are for not being able to 'rise to the same level' of the Euro-settlers who rule over them. In reality, the US corporate media does not 'expose' racist politicians like David Duke or Ron Paul, they actively promote them, and their causes, by presenting their arguments as 'balanced debate'. This is why more respect is paid today to the 'Lost Cause' of the seditious Confederate South than at any other time in this nation's history. American media has always shown a clear partisan preference for conservative political explanations that purport to dismiss racial injustice in the US as an issue that was settled once and for all at the conclusion of the US Civil War. This is the narrow xenophobic worldview that selectively ignores Jim Crow Apartheid, segregated housing, the racial terror of lynching, anti-miscegenation laws, 'Separate-but-Equal' education, employment discrimination and the violent rise of the Ku Klux Klan, President Woodrow Wilson's favourite Euro-American social organisation.

The US press has routinely failed year after year, decade after decade to seriously report on stories that investigate the roots of America's problem with both race and the far-right's institutional influence on US politics. Lavish attention is paid to the violence and suffering inflicted by minority-on-minority brutality in the ghettoes, but the violence, poverty and indignity minorities suffer as a result of historical US ethnic bias goes unmentioned as a contributing factor. Nor is the genocidal role of racial profiling policing policies, judicial prejudice in sentencing and the enormous problem of police brutality against brown people ever raised as a detrimental element of American social life.

Political playing upon the traditional fears and emotive prejudices White Americans have held about non-European minorities for centuries has been used by both US political parties since the very beginning of the republic. It is part and parcel of the American political tradition. And it does not take a rocket scientist to understand that the 'talking points' and 'code-words' utilised by the establishment can be just as effective as any overt ethnic slur. Moreover, such propaganda is extremely dangerous chiefly because it gives White xenophobia, Judeophobia and extreme nationalism a platform in which to to justify violence and discrimination towards non-Whites and the organised Left. And it is meaningless and insulting to the victim's of American racism to keep pointing to the skin colour of the current American president as if it really meant something important. It doesn't. Barack Obama has empirically proved that Black politicians in the US can be just as apathetic towards African and Native concerns as any Euro-settler representative could. And as people-of-colour, we are major fools, understanding our history under colonialism, for assuming that just because someone looks like us they are auto-magically our ally and deserve our loyalty and political support.

But hey, when did conservatives and their sycophantic House Negroes ever let facts, morality or common-sense get in the way of a good old fashioned minstrel show? As republican/conservative fear-mongers liberally flood the media terrain with loony conspiracy theories that purport to warn of an Obama-led anti-European, anti-Christian agenda to bring down the White world, Obama's behaviour as a US president, democrat party leader and defender of neoliberal capitalism has displayed no such threat to the White social order. In fact, he has done little more than help the 1% get everything they wanted and more they didn't ask for. His glaring inaction and steadfast refusal to challenge the issues that plague the US African and American Indian communities clearly proves that their nonsensical claims are indeed based on smoke.

The United States, try as hard as it may, cannot deny its own sordid history of racial marginalisation, violence and genocide without delving into David Irving-style historical revisionism to dismiss it all. White Americans are no different than Turks who deny the Armenian Genocide or Israelis who deny what is happening to Indigenous Arab Palestinians in the West Bank and The Gaza. when discussing these issues. The European presence in the Americas was founded squarely upon the concept of White, Anglo-European racial and cultural domination over both the land and the people they found there. This is beyond dispute and is no different than the European Holocaust. It is outrageous at this stage in the game that this generation of Americans still make a conscious choice to continue this egotistical White supremacist charade.

By their very insular nature, White Supremacist true believers only associate with other committed White Supremacists. This is a fact. So for Ron Paul and his legions of closeted, pro-Europocentric bigot supporters, his bid for the White House is a Godsend. They willingly accept the fact that he is solidly connected to the United States KKK and avowed neo-Nazis. And their active acceptance of the definitive statements found in his publication about minorities only serves to illustrate just how hatefully foul the soft white underbelly of the US radical right-wing really is. Especially in light of the fact that his fellow republican candidates have continued to childishly haul out previously disproven conspiracy theories from Karl Rove's backside as if they ever had any validity in the first place.

I fully expect Paul and Scheer aide-de-camps to aggressively counter my analysis with references to my stated respect for the Nation of Islam, the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence. But to my certain knowledge, not one of these groups has ever called for a 'race war'. These organisations, now defunct due to the clandestine and highly illegal efforts of COINTELPRO, were a direct and logical and defensive result of violent White racist terrorism and traditional minority disenfranchisement, not the promotion of bellicose racial strife.

White as well as non-White Americans live in denial. And I hate to be the one to tell you Virginia, but the United State of by-God America is a nation forcefully crafted upon the xenophobic concept of aggressive Anglo-Saxon bigotry and brigandage simply for the sake of conquest. From the genocidal invasion and occupation of Taino Territorio by Christofaro Columbo on October 12, 1492 to the modern day repression of American Indians as expressed by Leonard Peltier's confinement in a White man's prison for an offence even his prosecutors openly admitted may have been a miscarriage of American justice says much about the moral character of the nation.

The history of Africans in America, before and after the Colombian invasion, too tells us much about just how radically things changed once White folks came on the scene. The Olmec culture, strongly rumoured to be of African colonial origin, did not display archeological signs of strife or discord with the native population. This equanimity can also be seen in the physical evidence of early Chinese exploration and collaboration with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. There are tangible signs of contact, but not of conflict. This is in stark contradiction to what occurred when the first Europeans who attempted to colonise the Americas by force were finally compelled to do trade instead of warfare when faced with a dignified and sustained resistance to their occupation. The 'Skrælings', as First Nations Peoples were called by the Norrœnir Menn they encountered, were quite willing to chat and do business with Europeans, but they were not open to the suggestion that they were to be belligerently co-opted by a foreign entity. It took several long centuries before Europeans were finally able to effectively control the 'New World'. And were it not for the colonial hat-trick of European diseases, thuggish war technology and the limitless fanatical guile translated menacingly as White Christian religion, European mastery over the Americas could never have happened.

White Europeans are aggressors and always have been. Don't believe me, believe the American White man's hero C. Columbus when he wrote in his logs of the Taino People they met when they came ashore:

'They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will...they took great delight in pleasing us...They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal...Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people...They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing'.

Less than a week later the slaughter began and only ended when there were too few Taino left to butcher. They were later replaced by Africans as slaves who also lived and died under circumstances that can only be described as genocide. So it is totally disingenuous to claim that American White racism has nothing to do with the current political dilemma. It does. Big time.

In an embarrassingly seedy effort to unseat the Obama administration by stoking ethnic panic and suspicion amongst the White Euro-settler population, the republicans have been working hard to outdo each other in promoting extremist American Exceptionalism in an effort to rally their dim-witted base. From Newt Gingrich's 2008 thesis where he suggested that the US security services should 'allow' an occasional terrorist attack here and there just to prove that the world needs America's version of conservative White Power (Daily Kos: Gingrich: Bush should allow more terror attacks) to Michelle Bachmann's inexcusable Antebellum-era assertion that American Africans had it 'better under slavery', the writing in on the wall in regards to America's slide to full-blown, Joe Six-Pack style fascism.

The right-wing penchant for pumping fear and loathing about Barack Obama as an anti-White, Muslim-Communist-Nazi-atheist who was born in Kenya to a radical White hippie and a veteran of the Mau Mau uprising goes far beyond the pale of acceptable campaigning. It is at its base, a brazen and profane example of just how insecure the White population of the United States really is in spite of their actual overwhelming global and domestic power.

White Americans have always felt insecure about how they attained their hold on North America. Mostly because it was not a peaceful process by any means. And despite what the glossy travel brochures may tell you, Anglos were not the 'victims', they were the 'Victors'. And they were responsible for literally wiping out large swathes of Indigenous Peoples and enslaving millions of Africans on two continents while convincing themselves that they were doing all that killing in the name of 'God', the White man's parsimonious alter ego. According to this idea the land, all of it, belongs to the White man simply because he was able to take it. The actual death toll has never been fully tallied. Not for lack of data, but for the sake of European cowardice since the genocide has never actually stopped. Indigenous people in the Americas die every day at the hands of their respective 'Great White Fathers' from the crest of Nunavut to the very bottom of Tierra del Fuego and very few Euro-Americans have ever investigated or challenged this paradigm. And when they do, they pay a very heavy price for being human.

This is why when White Americans vociferously deny the concrete reality of US racism as they point to Barack Obama as if he were a prized wall trophy serious civil progressives and conscious Africans see this as highly hypocritical. Especially while Black men all across the country are being racially-profiled every single day. His being non-White, in politics and in the White House is incessantly waved like a flag as a means of quelling serious discussion about America's diligence in ignoring and vociferously denying its history of ethnic repression and exploitation. And it is exactly this sort of passive historical revisionism that makes Ron Paul and his closeted neo-Nazi followers a problem.

Remember this dear reader, Adolf Hitler and his merry band of right-wing ethnic cleansers spoke against wars of aggression, the anti-worker rules of the banking sector and non-German immigration too. And we saw what happened with that. Further, during their trial under the authority of the Allied Powers, who themselves were practicing the very same principles at home against their own Indigenous and ethnic/religious minorities, these hateful people actually claimed to really be 'Zionists at heart' who were sincerely trying to help Jews actualise their claim to (then) British-held Occupied Palestine.

Of course this is all nonsense, but so is Ron Paul's idiotic explanations for why he deserves to be allowed to dismiss charges against him for publishing White supremacist reading material. And frankly, Mr. Scheer's conscious stroll down Nazi Lane is equally senselessness in a world where all objective discussion of the State of Israel in terms of its questionable internal policies towards Indigenous ethnic Arabs Africans and non-Ashkenazim Jews is regularly portrayed as hateful anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist anti-Jewish hatred.

When a career journalist of Mr. Scheer's level of experience can support a person like Ron Paul an alarm sounds in my head and my heart. When even the most intelligent minds in established journalism, even Jews, are ready to lend their personal efforts to upholding the rights of neo-Nazis and others who do not believe in universal rights, we are all in a world of serious, serious trouble. But then again, most assimilated Jews living in 1930's Germany thought that they were 'German enough' to not hear the jack-boots either. I leave it to the reader to ponder that question in the privacy of one's own heart and soul. If the Nazis were bad news in the middle of the last century, why would anyone think that they have 'improved' since then?

If you still fail to see a problem with all of this I dare say that either you are a neo-Nazi admirer yourself or at best, an ignorant and hopelessly stupid American who can be easily swayed into accepting the unacceptable. Either way, why should I, and other minorities, have to pay for your insecurities with our well-being in this society? A vote for Ron Paul, or any of the republicans for that matter, is a vote for fascism. And that includes all of the nastiness that goes along with a closed society.

There are numerous people in the US doltish enough to believe that it is possible to have fascism without the 'excesses' of xenophobia. Really, there are. I know this because I have had enough conversations with Ron Paul supporters, in person and online, that make just that argument. And it is more than sad, it is frightening that even after electing a Black man as president, the rank and file of the American population has allowed itself to believe that being a Nazi is simply a political or lifestyle choice which is conspicuously 'allowed' by same US civil rights laws intended to protect the rights of ethnic minorities. I truly wonder what the Zionist lobby has to say about all this. But then again, the ADL's Abe Foxman has actually defended Glenn Beck's populist media blitzkrieg in writing, while at the very same time he worked to silence and bad-jacket US citizens who peacefully support Indigenous Palestinian human rights in their own ancestral territories. Hypocrisy? You decide.

Wake up and smell the coffee before it quietly morph into the stench of roasting human skin. Because really, who ever said that it was impossible for fascism or extreme nationalism to exist in the US?

-TheAngryindian

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* Readers interested in further research using this editorial's references may download a PDF copy containing the data here.