The ugly fruit of racist roots

On Nov. 13, 1988, three white youths brutally murdered a 28-year-old Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw on a dark street in Portland, Ore. Seraw was returning home from a party with two companions, who also were beaten by his assailants. The attackers were affiliated with a local skinhead group, East Side White Pride. Kyle Brewster, 19, a heavily tattooed former high school homecoming king, pummeled Seraw while one or more skinhead girls screamed “Kill him, kill him!” from the sidelines. Kenneth Mieske, 23, the burly lead singer of a death-metal rock band, blindsided Seraw with a baseball bat. Steve Strasser, 20, drove his steel-toed boots into Seraw’s crumpled body as he tried to crawl away. Mieske then delivered the fatal blow, pulverizing Seraw’s skull, leaving him prostrate in a pool of blood and vomit.

Community leaders rallied swiftly to denounce racism, condemn the crime and mourn the death of the intelligent, good-natured Seraw. One thousand miles to the south, from his home in Fallbrook, Calif., Tom Metz ger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance, heard the news and rejoiced. “Sounds like the skinheads did a civic duty,” he announced over his telephone hotline. Seraw’s assailants had less to chortle about. Fingered by their fellow skinheads who gave ample -- albeit conflicting -- statements to the police, they were arrested, pleaded guilty without a trial and received stiff minimum sentences ranging from nine to 30 years. Two years after the murder, Metzger, his son John and two of the Portland skinheads were ordered to pay Seraw’s estate $12.5 million in damages following a civil suit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Seraw’s young son.

In “A Hundred Little Hitlers,” author Elinor Langer tries to build a case that Seraw’s death was neither intentional nor racially motivated but rather a violent confrontation in which both sides participated. Her version of events differs from that of the police, the media and the victims, but in the end, it is her interpretation of the evidence that most weakens her argument.

Langer draws revealing portraits of the skinheads and their girlfriends, as well as Seraw, although she treats his two Ethiopian companions as nearly anonymous black victims without lives and personalities. In her reconstruction, the skinheads came upon Seraw and his friends parked in a car with its headlights off, blocking the street, and were initially unaware they were black. Soon, however, the skinheads were shouting racial epithets that prompted angry rejoinders from Seraw’s friends. As the cars passed each other, the Ethiopians made crude gestures and a skinhead waved a gun. Both cars stopped, and their occupants piled out. Langer says the fight that ensued was “like every other street brawl going on across America at that hour.” But it wasn’t, not even for an instant. From the moment the skinheads noted the skin color and accents of their victims and shouted “Go back to your own country,” racial animus drove events.

Langer terms it a “confrontation” and a “brutal collision of white and black,” words implying equal responsibility and an equal measure of force on both sides. This reinforces the mistaken message of her central grievance: that Seraw’s death was wrongly “understood as a lynching from the start.” She contends the assault’s characterization by prosecutors and the press as “unprovoked” was tantamount to a miscarriage of justice.

Even relying on her rendering of the facts, Seraw’s murder actually had more in common with America’s sordid history of vindictive racial violence than not. Whatever angry words the Ethiopians may have shouted, Seraw’s death was less the result of a “street confrontation,” as Langer asserts, than a purposeful assault on a black man whose friends refused to submit to racist taunts and white authority.

Most troublesome perhaps is Langer’s effort to hold a mirror to Portland -- her home of many years -- to argue that the criminal prosecution of Mieske and his co-defendants, as well as the civil suit against the Metzgers that followed, were pursued as public exorcisms to expunge the stain of racism and community guilt through vengeful retribution. Her mirror is badly distorted. Yes, Portland is a city where racism thrived, but it was in denial. Nevertheless, Langer seems unwilling to entertain the possibility that Seraw’s murderers were pursued out of a desire for justice and to send the much-needed message to other would-be racist murderers that the city would track them down. Instead, she perceives the outpouring of community disgust at the brutality of Seraw’s death as a “moral panic.” She is angry that the skinheads pleaded guilty without a trial and overeager to find fault with how the police and prosecutors brought them to justice. She goes so far as to call the grand jury’s involvement a “political intrusion that would mark every aspect of the [case].” But this was not a prosecution of men wrongly accused. As Langer reports, when Mieske was taken in for questioning he snarled, “Whoever snitched us off is dead.”

Langer dismisses as “coerced” two videotaped witness statements that the bat-wielding Mieske purposefully set out to attack the Ethiopians because he saw earlier that they were black; she gives greater weight to self-serving declarations of two other skinheads -- one of whom failed a lie-detector test. And she would have us believe that a man who repeatedly swung a baseball bat full force into the head of another killed his victim only by accident.

Enter Tom Metzger, then 49 and the father of six children, a television repairman and former Klansman who pioneered the use of public access cable television to spread his racist message across America. He also was a key promoter of “Third Position” ideology, synthesizing a militant critique of capitalism with socialist ideas, class analysis and unadulterated racism. In the early 1980s, he and his teenage son John inaugurated the White Student Union, the Aryan Youth Movement and White Aryan Resistance. It was because of the Portland activities of Dave Mazzella, vice president of the Metzgers’ student group, that the Southern Poverty Law Center (as well as the Anti-Defamation League) were able to orchestrate the Metzgers’ downfall through the civil suit filed after Seraw’s death.

Mazzella was a young skinhead with a serious penchant for violence who arrived in Portland about six weeks before Seraw’s murder. “You’ll get a feel of how we work when you meet Dave Mazzella,” wrote John Metzger to Mieske in the days before Mazzella left for Portland. The night Mazzella arrived, he led members of East Side White Pride in a series of racial attacks that included forcing a Latino to kneel and kiss his boots, then kicking him in the teeth.

Despite these and other facts reported by local papers and presented in court, Langer is deeply troubled by the civil trial against the Metzgers. She chastises the law center for describing the Metzgers as “evil,” but her assessment is unnecessarily ambiguous. “Any moral accounting of Tom Metzger would be remiss if it did not also note that throughout his entire political evolution he would remain a good father and husband,” she writes, all but ignoring what she reports earlier: Metzger’s idea of “good, wholesome family fun” is to take his children to Klan cross burnings.

Langer believes the civil trial was skewed because Metzger acted as his own attorney, and she regrets that he didn’t mount a constitutional defense. But even the American Civil Liberties Union, which has rarely flinched at representing Klansmen and neo-Nazis, declined to provide Metzger with counsel, concluding he could be held liable for the actions of his agents without treading on his 1st Amendment rights.

Although Mazzella wasn’t a direct witness to Seraw’s murder, he heard the gory details from his roommate Strasser, one of the assailants he later identified to police. Mazzella again turned on fellow skinheads by testifying as the star witness for the law center in the civil suit. Mazzella’s continued involvement in racist and violent activities before, during and after his testimony in Portland makes him a particularly unsavory character and an easy target for Langer’s misgivings. Regardless of Mazzella’s many failings, Langer errs by refusing to unequivocally condemn the Metzgers for their steady stream of racist vitriol and incitement to violence.

Langer hyperbolically describes the trial as “one of the stranger proceedings in U.S. legal history,” but to anyone familiar with the many successful lawsuits that have held corporations, schools, religious groups and white supremacist organizations (among others) financially liable for the negligent or deliberately harmful actions of their agents, the case against the Metzgers made perfect sense, as did its outcome. Langer may disagree, but the facts even she presents effectively contradict her conclusions.

In contrast, “Gods of the Blood” by Mattias Gardell provides a broad, useful analysis of the white supremacist movement while offering a definitive overview of the role played by racist paganism. He is a religion professor at Sweden’s Stockholm University whose expertise on black nationalism and the Nation of Islam sparked deeper interest in those self-described white “heathens” who worship a plethora of Norse gods, nature spirits and other deities with varying degrees of racist motivation (though he is quick to point out that not all pagans are racist). Globalization and American multiculturalism, he says, have combined to raise questions about racial and national identity anew. This has made paganism increasingly attractive because it hearkens to an idealized past in which racial and spiritual purity, as well as local and tribal autonomy, stood as bulwarks against heterogeneity and outside authority.

Gardell adopts an ethnographic, anthropological approach to his subject, which makes the diverse -- and often bizarre -- beliefs of his subjects easily accessible. He is at his best dismantling the popular stereotype of the Aryan activist as “a barely literate young man from a poor working-class family with an absent or alcoholic father and traumatic childhood experiences.” Instead, he observes that there are millions of similarly situated young people who don’t gravitate toward neo-Nazism. Most leaders of the Aryan counterculture Gardell has studied come from unbroken middle-class families, thereby contradicting the “stereotypical white-trash thesis.”

Gardell reminds that millions of ordinary supporters of National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany were people who “loved their children, had pets, enjoyed nature, danced on Saturdays, liked sports, arts and cars.” Langer could have benefited from similar insight in weighing Metzger’s love of home and hearth.

Although he clearly rejects racism, Gardell’s heavy reliance on sources within the white supremacist movement precipitates errors of fact and perspective. He mistakenly asserts that “there are militiamen of all races,” embraces the self-serving dichotomy between “white separatists” and white supremacists, and gives the Branch Davidians of Waco a clean bill of health, calling them a “reclusive commune of religious dissidents reportedly liv[ing] a quiet life with bible studies, a warm atmosphere [and], harmonious children.” He also trivializes white supremacist groups as little more than “dysfunctional, ranting sects that accomplish few things of value.”

Gardell does provide a useful, alternative framework for analyzing neo-Nazis and their political brethren: They may not constitute a bona fide social movement, he argues, but they form a vibrant counterculture that is in dynamic opposition to the dominant perceptions of “reality, history, ethics, religion, society, nature and man.” Yet he maintains the “trajectory of the new pagan revival should be taken quite seriously.”

He warns against dismissing racist paganism as a fringe movement of hopeless dreamers, saying: “Romantic men armed with guns and determination have throughout history been a dangerous species.” He is right. *