Yout h Gr eens

Ant i - Raci st Bul i et i n

KKK Ge t s 4 2 % i n L o u i s i a n a
KANSAS CITY, MO.
David Duke may have lost the vote
count last week, but in all other respects his
Louisiana senate campaign was victorious. In
accordance with his long-term strategy, Mr.
Duke has taken another giant step toward
moving white supremacy off the margin and
into the mainstream of American politics.
Whi l e Loui si ana' s reputati on for
anything-goes politics is well deserved, Mr.
Duke has done more than appeal to ckle or
f r us t r at ed v ot er s . He has es t abl i s hed
campaign themes, an organization and political
base that can be duplicated in other areas.
Communities like Vineland, In southern New
Jersey, or even central Tennesse immediately
suggest themselves as future targets for
white supremists.
Mr. Duke carried almost 60 percent of
the white vote, extending his powerbase
beyond its existing blue collar ranks.
Duke's campaign themes echoed those
of George Wallace in his 1968 Presidential
bi d: r aci sm combi ned wi t h a r esent ment of
white elites. But David Duke is not George
Wa l l a c e .
Mr. Wallace was following voter
sentiment when he began his career as a
segregationist. Mr. Duke, on the other hand,
is creating a racist movement. He pioneered
the "new" mediagenic Klan of the 70's and
searched throughout the 80*s for a vehicle to
spark a white racist movement across the
count r y. He has f ound t hat vehi cl e i n
campaign politics.
Mr. Duke has successfully racialized
Louisiana politics. He may have used code
words about afrmative action and welfare.
But it was a code everyone understood and,
therefore, a code no longer. That is a
signicant victory for white supremists
seeking to change the political discourse.
In three short years, David Duke has
managed to place himself squarely in the
mainstream of Louisiana politics. He is no
longer seen as the kook In a Klan costume-
despite leading a white power march in
Forsyth County, Ga. in 1987, selling neo-Nazi
literature from his state legislative ofce in
1989 and continuing to espouse Nazi-type
eugenics theories.
He h a s ma r r i e d h i s o wn wh i t e
supremist ideology to the "southern strategy"
of the Republican Party. Already, to the
dismay of national G.O.P. ofcials, other
racists are seeking to imitate his success,
trying to claim the future of the Republican
Party. One of them Mr. Duke's campaign
manager i n 1988, a former l eader of the
American Nazi Party named Ralph Forbes-
received 46 percent of the vote in the
Arkansas Republican primary for lieutenant
H E ^
UJ..R. Leader's Trial Begins
PORTLAND, OR.
A white supremist leader went on
trial here last week in a $10 million civil
lawsuit charging that he incited the killing of a
black man two years ago.
The lawsuit brought by the Alabama-
based Southern Poverty Law Center and the
Anti-Defamation League, charges that Tom
Metzger, 52, founder of a group called the
White Aryan Resistance and a former Ku Klux
Klan grand dragon, and his son inuenced
three local skinheads who were convicted of
beating an Ethiopian man, Mulugeta Seraw, to
death with a baseball bat.
The suit cites the legal doctrine of
vicarious liability, which holds that one
person or organization can be legally liable for
t he act i ons of anot her. The sui t accuses
Metzger of sending agents to Portland to
advocate violence against blacks shortly
before the beating death of Seraw.
The suit was led by Seraw's uncle
who is represented by Morris Dees, a lawyer
from the Southern Poverty Law Center known
as "the man who broke the Klan." He picked up
that reputation as the result of a similar suit
in 1987 when he won a $7 million suit on
behalf of the family of a Mobile, Ala. black
man, Michael Donald, who was lynched in
1981 by two Klan members. The award broke
the United Klans of America, once the largest
Klan organization in the country.
Also charged in the suit against
Metzger and his son John, 22 (head of the
youth wing of the White Aryan Resistance),
are two of the three skinheads convicted of
the killing.
Because the third convicted killer is
not named as a defendant, there Is speculation
that he may testify for Dees on behalf of
Seraw's family.
Dees has used this startegy before. In
the successful 1987 Klan case, a Klan insider
delivered key testimony.
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Pol i ce are worri ed that duri ng the
trial, potentially violent clashes will go on
outside the courtroom between Metzger's
supporters and anti-racist skinheads known as
SHARPS- Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.
Metzger's most recent phone message
chides the presiding jugde In the case, Ancer
Haggerty, the most decorated black Marine In
Vietnam, as a "Negro Uncle Tom." The tape
goes on, "Tom and John" Metzger "will argue
their own case against the faggots and Jews
and renegade whites that wish to take my
family's home away and give It to an Ethiopian
national. Now won't that be cute?." The tape
ends with their traditional White Aryan
Resistance sign-off: "This is W.A.R."
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Youth Greens Antl-Raclst Bulletin
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Domestic Colonialism, Racism, and Prisons
As of 1980, by the governments own
stati sti cs, Afri can Ameri cans compri sed 11
percent of the overall U.S. population, while
the bl ack proporti on was 44 percent, and
rising. By 1990, the proportion is over 50
percent and still rising. At the present rate of
i n c a r c e r a t i o n - wh i c h i s s i x t i me s t h e r a t e
for whites- one in every four Afro-American
males will go to prison at least once during his
life. A black male in America is presently
twice as likely to go to prison as he would be
if he were living under aparthied in South
A f r i c a .
if the present upward trend holds, as
it has for 60 years {23 percent of the prison
population was black in 1930), half of all black
males in the U.S. will go to jail by the end of
the present decade. For American Indian men,
the rate Is already two in every seven, and
also rising. Latinos currently ll prison cells
at a rate double their proportion in society as
a whol e, and t hei r r at e of i nc ar c er at i on i s
increasing steadily.
Increasingly, the status quo has
maintained Itself at home primarily at the
expense of "internal colonies" of non-whites
i n pr eci sel y t he same f ashi on as i t has
mai nt ai ned i t sel f t hr ough neocol oni al
expl oi tati on of the Thi rd Wori d el sewhere.
Needless to say, the domestic "natives" grow
i ncreasi ngl y more restl ess at the burdens
placed on them; the pattern, however, is one
t h e U . S . e l i t e h a s l i t t l e a l t e r n a t i v e b u t t o
c o n t i n u e i f i t i s t o s u r v i v e a s a d o m i n a n t
w o r i d f o r c e .
The relationship between this imperial
dynamic and the projected demography of U.S.
prisons Is plain. It has long been axiomatic
that conditions of Impoverishment imposed by
the U.S. in the Third World naturally generates
attempts by the victimized non-white people
to engage i n such "cri mi nal " acti vi ti es as
at t empt i ng t o f eed t hemsel ves or t hei r
fami l i es wi th food they don' t "own." Such
behavi or among t he oppressed bei ng
understood as integral to any colonial system,
it is anticipated and planned for.
Sel f-evi dentl y, the i nfrastructure for
precisely this sort of social order has been
erected and is now being rapidly expanded
w i t h i n t h e U . S . i t s e l f . T h e c u r r e n t
government campaign known as the "war on
drugs" or the "war on crime" was created as
the political/ideological battering ram for
expansi on of thi s repressi ve aparatus.
Clearly, state planners expect things to get
alot worse in this country over the not-so-
long run.
The state is preparing for what it
perceives must lie ahead. For the most part,
the opposition Is not. To the contrary,
frighteningly large numbers of progressives
have lately taken to embracing police power
as a means of curbing "the drug epidemic in
our Inner cities," as if the allocations going
into amassing that very power weren't in
themselves sufcient to begin to offset the
vile conditions spawning the epidemic in the
rst place. Too many supposedly enlightened
people In this coluntry have joined the chorus
demanding more prison space to "rid our
streets of predators," as if the very dollars
to be sunk into concrete and steel couldn't be
used to quell the honest rage leading inevitably
t o v i o l e n c e .
This embrace of repression Is eerily
remi ni scent of the non-fasci st German
acquiescent to nazism as a solution to their
nation's problems In 1932. People who say
they want social progress have got to come to
grips with who and what the enemy is.
A L E R T !
GI MAN STREET CLUB An al t er nat i ve
mu s i c s c e n e a n d a n t l - r a c l s t c l u b f o r
y o u t h .
AMERICAN FRONT One of the many
wh i t e s u p r e ml s t g r o u p s t h a t b e a t
peopl e of col or, gays and l esbi ans,
Jewi sh peopl e, and whoever seems
e a s i l y v i c t i mi z e d .
M a y 2 6 , 1 9 9 0 B E R K E L E Y. O A
28 Amer i can Fr ont ( AF) t hugs
attacked two black security guards at Gilman
St. Club, shouting, "rm gonna kill you, nigger,
I'm gonna kill you!" One guard was stabbed in
the hand and hit on the head with a steering
wheel lock (a heavy metal pipe.)
Only four neo-Nazis were arrested;
only one, William Bennet, is being tried for
felony assault, not for a hate crime and not
for attempted murder.
August 21, 1990 SACRAMENTO. CA
Twent y AFer s at t ack t wo SHARP
(Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice)
members, both were hospitalized and one died.
Only one arrest was made of the 20 AFers.
n G H T
S k i n h e a d s S t a b , B e a t
H o m e l e s s M a n
NEWTON, MASS.
Patri ck Vertorano, a homel ess man
trying to get to a shelter, was stabbed four
times and severly beaten at a metro stop last
week by at least two skinheads.
The victim was white, however the
ski nheads ar e known t o pol i ce as whi t e
supremists who have tatoos of swastikas and
other anti-Semetic symbols on their arms,
a n d w h o w e a r s t e e l - t o e d c o m b a t b o o t s a n d
black leather jackets and tout Nazi ideologies.
"We can't gure out why they come
here. You'd usually nd this element in a
bigger city," said a cop.