Seems Like Old Times

It all seems so achingly familiar: the threats, the Sieg Heils, the hatreds, the guns, the militarism, the paranoia.

I hear the voice of Frank Collin merging with the voice of David Duke with overtones of Tom Metzger and hints of Bill Wilkinson.

They were American Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners, who spread their poison from one end of the country to the other.

Now the composite voice talks about government abuse and crime and illegal immigration . . . and a new tonal quality has been added.

I kept listening to the voice after the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, trying to figure out what the new quality was, and then one day it hit me: it was the voice of racism speaking through the mouth of militarism.

It’s happened as I knew it would about 20 years ago when I was writing about a new stirring of white supremacy, and guys like Collin were talking about the stockpiling of weapons for what Duke called “the coming storm.”

They also talked about merging their Nazi storm troopers and Klan Guardsmen with armed paramilitary groups, and were organizing meetings toward that end in Kansas City as far back as 1977.

No one dismissed them as a joke, but no one seemed overly concerned either. Incidents of violence were isolated, and their marches and cross-burnings came and went without any enduring threat to law and order.

But now I think they’ve completed the mating ritual of racist and militiaman, and the child that has emerged is armed and full of hatred.

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Hatred is rooted in terror, and in the dark night of paranoia the terror can range from “mongrelization” of the races to jobs lost through illegal immigration to an international takeover by the United Nations.

The guys who strut and posture at hidden encampments expect that at any moment, federal agents are going to swoop down on them, strip them of their guns and their freedom, and pack them off to concentration camps just for exercising their constitutional rights.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is uneasy over the explosive growth of the militias: 40,000 members in just two years. About 250 Klan and Nazi units only claim 25,000 members, and they’ve been around a lot longer.

Part of the reason for the militias’ success, Cooper says, is because their pitch is more sophisticated than that of the racist groups. “They use hot-button issues to attract, not bigot-speak. Their point of entry involves the same kinds of issues we all talk about, like crime, corruption and government abuse.”

Those seduced by fear into joining the militias are linked to the gunslingers by the common paranoia that someone, or something, is out to get them, whether it’s illegal immigrants or the U.S. government.

“They’re all the same kinds of people,” said David Lehrer, regional director of the Los Angeles-based Anti-Defamation League. “They’re frightened, and they’re looking around for someone to blame for their fears.”

They represent a long tradition of paranoia, he says, and now they’ve got access to millions through the Internet and talk shows. They can disseminate their ravings farther and faster than ever before.

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Lehrer sees a “significant overlap” of the racist and militia groups. Cooper fears that it may be a wave of the future. I say it’s here now.

You might not see guys in camouflage, wearing hoods, and you might not see them sporting swastikas, but Lehrer is right, they’re the same kinds of people, and maybe even the same people exactly.

Fear fosters blame, and blame kindles hatred. Whether the fear is real or not, it festers in the heads of people with low IQs and violent inclinations.

The climate is perfect for them. They see liberals as devils, minorities as leeches, immigrants as invaders and gun-control advocates as constitutional rapists.

They pack weapons, exchange bomb formulas, call themselves patriots and promise hell in a handbasket.

I hear the kinds of hatred expressed toward Bill Clinton’s government that I haven’t heard since John Kennedy was on his way to a date in Dallas, and it worries me. It should worry us all. It’s the Oklahoma City Syndrome times 10,000.

I suppose I could be paranoid, too, except that I’ve talked to a lot of these wackos and still get their hate mail and phone calls. They used to be racist crazies, but now, Cooper says, they’re probably just the guy next door.

That worries me most of all.