So after the attack by Wade Michael Page on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, I felt a need to leave a comment in my in my previous blog post about religious violence. I encountered a problem because when I did some research just to verify facts, I would, by shear accident, find plenty of information that was outright shocking. The number of right-wing extremist "militia groups" in the US has QUINTUPLED since 2009, according to Mark Pitcavage, PhD., of the the Anti-Defamation League. There are now 1018 hate groups in the US, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Page not only was a member of one such group, the Hammerskins, but also repeatedly professed involvement in the "Racial Holy War," which has an acronym, RAHOWA, that is well-recognized by major websites. I also became aware that the day before Page's attack, a mosque in Joplin, MO was burned to the ground in an arson attack - the second one his summer on the same mosque. this incident did not make the news because there are simply so many acts of racial/religious violence these days in the US. There are also plenty in Europe, by whites and non-whites, Christians and Muslims, and the recession has not been an opportunity to put aside their differences. Many people described the Tea Party as "fascist." It certainly is not, and although it's going strong, its membership has declined rapidly since 2010. However, genuine fascists are multiplying, as are other fringe movements. And if these movements are a wildfire, then religious zealotry is an unlimited supply of gasoline to be administered with unlimited supplies of hoses and helicopters.
Before getting started on hate groups per se, or fringe groups per se, I decided to briefly discuss gangs for two reasons: they have a lot in common with hate group, and they are a much bigger problem by a factor of maybe 5,000 to 1. Whereas a hate group will murder someone every one or two years (even Page's murder approved of by the Hammerskins or by the white supremacist bands he had belonged to). By contrast, American gangs kill about 3-5 thousand people every year. And what to they have in common with hate groups? Well, I think most significantly, their numbers are growing. We can see from the website of the National Gang Center that gang membership fell precipitously during the Clinton years, then reached a trench in 2003 and quickly rose again, but remained rather consistent since then. As of 2010, gang membership has slowly been rising, and I would guess it has continued to rise since then, since this is not a good time for youths who dropped out of high school. Also, of course, gangs membership is based of race, and the gangs define themselves based on race, and they usually choose their enemies on the basis of race. Although I would guess that black gangs fight each other, but I think they prefer to fight with Hispanic gangs, or in very the rare case when they can find them and get away with attacking them, to attack a contingent of a white gang. And we hear all the time that blacks and whites in the US discriminate against each other, but to discuss this without discussing racism between blacks and Hispanics is like looking upward and seeing Neil Armstrong the moon, without seeing the moon itself. That being said, these gangs are also like many hate groups because religion seems to have a significant one, although perhaps only an implicit one in most cases. I discussed this matter in my blog post about religious violence.
Next order of business, I had a dream last night about my involvement in a notorious quasi-hate group. This movement is the "youth movement" of Lyndon LaRouche, an old political troublemaker with his own Political Action Committee (PAC) whose movement began, perhaps, when he began rising through the ranks in the Socialist Workers Party in 1949. I have dreams about this subject every one or two years. Some of these dreams are creepy, and the rest are terrifying. These dreams have two prominent features: one is the way the senior members of the movement latched on and clung to me like leeches, and the other is the menacing facial expressions they use on their novices. I joined this group during my first semester at University of Southern California. I was only a member for about one month, and I only attended three or four meetings (although the word "meeting" is not quite accurate, as I will explain). At the time I was attracted by their claptrap - the booths they set up on campus with very wordy signs, carefully handwritten in intricate calligraphy, and with their cryptic slogans such a "It's the Physical Economy, Stupid!" followed by a long synopsis of this claim that I couldn't try to understand, their posters with images parodying the likes of Richard Cheney or Nancy Pelosi that were tantalizingly disturbing. I can see from their website that they now use email, but at this time (2004) they could only maintain contact with curious students if we gave them our phone number. The more experienced members of the movement knew how to test their limits without being incriminated, so they knew how many times they could call me. I received a call a blonde girl inviting me to a meeting at a YMCA about three miles from campus. The meeting began with long lecture by some fat guy about some political/sociological/scientific/philosophical/psychological concepts; expertly-composed twaddle with the subliminal message that I should stay. He never mentioned me in the discussion, but he clearly made me a subject when he gave a metaphor involving "running to the 711," which triggered an "oh, I get it" from the audience, since I had done so while waiting for the lecture. In the coming weeks I attended what I thought would be meetings, but they would be better described as hanging out with the group during their routines that occupy every waking moment for them: manning recruiting stations, listening to LaRouche's webcasts, discussing his ideology at coffee shops throughout town, singing Mozart, and drinking beer. I rarely heard anything nice from another member, I rarely saw a member smile, and when I did it was usually the head of the Los Angeles chapter, who made a very weird smile and spoke with a very weird voice. I quit after they repeatedly urged me to drop out of school. During the following few weeks they called me incessantly until I convinced them I wasn't coming back. Another thing I noticed about the other members is they were a lot older than me; I was eighteen, and so was a student in my class whom they had for a couple meetings, but everyone else looked at least thirty, except for one South Asian girl who looked about 25. Besides her, the members were about equally split between white, black and Hispanic. And this Indian girl proved to be an exception in another regard: I had a long talk with her, and although she was talking about the influence of Aristotle in Cheney's drug-funded efforts to build a global railroad monopoly, she spoke in a very warm, sincere, receptive manner, and she looked very bright and well put-together. In the case of all other members, everything about them speaks of being in a let's-be-creepy contest. And looking back, their mien implies something else to me, as does the fact that this group occupies all their time, and the fact that the senior members live together. These people are the wretched of the earth, and to them the LaRouche movement is a job. Those who are best suited for the job also get housing from it, while the less senior among them need to work on their creepy skills until they earn their wings. To the very serious members, this job is the best deal available that might come their way, and they probably thought they were doing me a favor, because back then, I showed plenty of non-potential.
I think the LaRouche movement is rather bizarre in ways that most other movements are not really. For one thing, although the movement is often described as "fascist," it isn't intended as a hoi polloi movement, or even as a conservative one. They love recruiting at universities, and their pamphlets, books, signs, etc give the impression of being "intellectual" in a way that revolves around a sort of snobbery, in which young people want to feel they have a rare understanding of things that are far above the heads of most people. Their ideology attacks liberals and conservatives, but it seem to be generally left-leaning, in which case he was left-leaning all along, except more so during the Cold War. The ideology didn't seem to be socially liberal or conservative. The group's chapters are generally located in the most liberal parts of the country, and they tend to hunt for college students, although I heard them criticizing some of the social norms of college students, and I've read that until recently they would question a new member's sexuality as one method (among others) of preventing this person from feeling too good for the group. It was explicitly racist until racism went out of fashion in the 1960s. Since then LaRouche has developed a reputation for being anti-Semitic, although unlike many of these groups, his attacks are not explicit, nor are they implicit; they are meaningless nonsense, so they do not say anything about Jews or any other ethnic group. However, as with the Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, we can easily see from his nonsense that Jews are not being portrayed favorably (except at some points as lip service). Also, as I mentioned earlier, the LaRouche movement is unlike many (perhaps most) other fringe movements, in being secular. And lastly, the movement seems to have a secure future. The founder of the movement is now ninety years old, and his movement will never be as successful as the 1970s, when he purchased a big swath of land in Massachusetts as a training ground for fighting with spears and staffs. However, from their website they seem to be thriving, and it seems to be updated very frequently about non-events. After the tragic loss of LaRouche, I think his successor can keep the group going just as strongly.
To be continued ...
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