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The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Chip Berlet

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Various Ku Klux Klan units sporadically publish newspapers or other serials, with an example being The Klansman newspaper, published by the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s. George Lincoln Rockwell of the National Socialist White People's Party founded the White Power newspaper in 1967, shortly before his assassination. The paper outlived Rockwell, circulating at least into the mid-1970s. The Cross and the Flag, started by Wisconsin native Gerald L. K. Smith in 1942, became the official magazine of the Christian Nationalist Crusade. It continued to circulate after his death in 1976 with his wife as publisher. The April 1977 issue celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary with a "Literature List" including numerous antisemitic books and tracts available for purchase by mail order (pp. 18-21). In the mid-1960s, issues of The Councilor, a newspaper of the white segregationist Citizens Council of Louisiana, portrayed the civil rights struggle as just another chapter in the longstanding Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy (see, for example, the issues of July 16, 1964; September 14, 1964; April 9, 1965; April 30, 1965; October 6, 1965; August 15, 1966). Similar antisemitic material appears in contemporary serials such as The Truth at Last and Jew Watch. In the 1980s, David Duke tried to mask overt bigotry in the NAAWP News, published by his group, the National Association for the Advancement of White People. Louis Beam is a former KKK leader who allied with Christian Identity Pastor Richard Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the site of his Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Butler and Beam built a national white supremacist coalition and communications network in the 1980s (for background on this period, see Aho, 1990; Corcoran, 1995; on Christian identity, see Barkun, 1997). Beam first published the influential guerilla essay "Leaderless Resistance" in a 1983 issue of the Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert published from the Aryan Nations compound. Beam credits the idea to Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, editor of the serial 1S1 General Report, published by International Services of Information in the 1950s. Beam, in the early 1980s, was among the first extreme right leaders to see the benefit for the extreme right to use computerized online communications systems (Stern, 2000). Beam's essays--"Announcing Aryan Nations/Ku Klux Klan Computer Net" and "Computers and the American Patrio"--about this wave of the future appeared in two 1984 issues of the Alert. Tom Metzger founded the White Aryan Resistance organization in 1983, and published a newspaper based on their acronym WAR during the 1980s and 1990s. After legal troubles in the mid-1990s, a new serial emerged with a new editor, under the name The Insurgent, which proudly proclaims it is "the most racist newspaper in the world" (http://www.resist .com).

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The Seekers was a newsletter aimed at and sent free to prisoners, edited by the late Richard Snell. At first glance it appears to be a Christian right serial of the apocalyptic genre. It was actually a recruiting tool of white supremacist and antisemitic prison organizers, some of whom worked with the Aryan Brotherhood. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995, by the state of Arkansas for the 1984 murder of black state police trooper Louis Bryant. Snell's death (and several other events) was commemorated by Timothy McVeigh, who chose that day to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City (Hamm, 1997, pp. 1-33; Pankratz, 1997). Another prison serial, From the Mountain, was published by Pastor Robert E. Miles from his farm in Michigan. Miles, a former Klan leader, was an influential white supremacist who worked closely with Aryan Nations. Fenris Wolf, a newsletter for the White Order of Thule, is one of several small serials circulated within the pagan neo-Nazi sector. Issue seven of Fenris Wolf carries a graphic of a farmer with a scythe, and the quasi-Nietzschean headline: "To give death and to receive it ... that is the power of the Ubermensch!!! Hail Queen Hela! Hail Death!" Other extreme right pagan serials include White Sisters; Valkyrie (the "Journal of Tribal Socialism"); and Thule, aimed at Aryan prisoners.

The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Chip Berlet

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