Among
the Racists
By John Eskow
August
16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- I have walked among them since I first learned
to walk. They surrounded me in blue-collar
Utica, New York–an early capitol of Rust Belt
America, back in the 1950s, where “nigger” was
an all-purpose, white-on-white epithet on the
Little League diamonds and basketball
courts—though I never saw a black person in the
flesh until I was eleven years old. I still
remember how astonished I was by the sight of
him: somehow a “Negro” kid, roughly my age, had
strayed into our Italian/Irish/Polish
neighborhood, and he was sprinting desperately
to escape before he got caught and stomped. I
was riding down Genessee Street with my friend
Clark Battie in his dad’s pick-up truck. Old man
Battie slowed down as we passed the terrified,
wide-eyed kid and laughed quietly. “Look at
that, Johnny. The things ya see when ya don’t
have your gun, huh?”
At 18 I
stood on the Boston Common with my girlfriend
Connie and 20,000 other white people as George
Wallace conducted the biggest rally of his
presidential campaign.
Then,
in 1993, as research for a screenplay, I had the
monstrously foolish idea not only to go among
them, but to become one of them. I spent three
days as an undercover Klansman, ushered into the
racist underworld by a legendary Nazi/Klan felon
who served as my “rabbi.” Introducing me as one
of his bodyguards, he took me to a weekend
retreat in rural Pennsylvania, where rival Klan
factions hooked up with American Nazis, Aryan
Brothers, and members of The Posse Comitatus,
the Michigan Militia, and—my favorite name of
all—The Cross, the Sword, and the Covenant of
the Lord. Hair slicked back into a rockabilly
D.A. underneath an orange Florida Gators cap,
loudly proclaiming my hatred for the national
jews’-media, I drank the $3 champagne with them,
popped their No-Doz, and smoked their cut-rate
generic cigarettes. That adventure, which ended
in a near-fatal stabbing–and with both my rabbi
and me being held for three hours at (multiple)
gun-point(s)–is a story for another day. But
what I learned over that lost weekend has stuck
with me for nearly 25 years. And of course it
flared up over the weekend, a retrovirus coming
back to haunt me.
Many of
the Klan/Nazi leaders I met were much smarter
than we’d like to think—thoughtful students of
history and tactics. They had learned from the
fratricide of the 1960s left, and that was the
reason for the weekend convocation: they were
determined to rise above petty factional
differences. The footsoldiers, of course, are
stone losers–so unloved by their fathers that
they are forced to live out self-created images
of manhood that constantly flicker and blur—I’m
a killer! I’m a victim! I’m a defender!
I’m a martyr!–and so loathed by women that
they try to immunize themselves by loathing
women in return. When they talk—and the first
lesson I learned about hard-core racists,
travelling 120 miles with them in a beat-to-crap
station wagon daubed with Rust-O-Leum–is that
everybody talks; you don’t join a
racist group in order to keep silent—they keep
crashing into the contradictions of their
badly-cobbled-together world-view. The
Holocaust never happened—but it was great.
Black people are too stupid to do white people’s
jobs—but black people are doing white people’s
jobs.
The
prevailing sense you get—the “wisdom of the
(Klan/Nazi) crowd,” if you will–is that even
though black people are simian, lust-maddened
imbeciles, like other jungle creatures they are
relatively harmless as long as they’re confined
to their native habitat. Ah, but the Jew! Those
hook-nosed mosquitos feasting on the blood of
the goyim! (They say “good taste is timeless,”
but so are antisemitic cartoons—the stuff
floating around on the internet is
indistinguishable from what you’d see on a 1930s
German broadsheet.) The Hebrews are comic-book
evil geniuses—every Jew a Lex Luthor—who
mind-control black and white alike. Jews
invented hip-hop, for example. Jews ghost-write
all the raps, from Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur
straight through to Kendrick Lamar. (“Hymie!
Hurry up and finish that gangsta rap, ya big
schlemiel!”) And by seducing white teens with
its sinister beats, Jews infect them all with
irrestistable urges for inter-racial sex. These
super-Jews transcend time itself; the semites of
2017 are executing Talmudic plots dreamed up in
the Middle Ages.
It’s
enough to make Alan Dershowitz blush.
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But,
like those crude black-and-white mosquito-Jew
cartoons, the Final Solution never changes.
Hanging them from lamp-posts. Gassing them with
Zyklon B. (Arcane debates about the efficacy of
various gaseous poisons are common.) Rendering
them into lampshades. It’s a nonstop tape-loop
of race-hatred and genocide-dreams. And this is
where the outsider—no matter how well-versed in
the rhetoric, no matter how he steels himself
against it—begins to falter. I was an eager
infiltrator, but this is where I lost heart.
Because to live through that ongoing
conversation–and not just to endure it, but to
be a laughing participant in it–is something
that my nervous system was not wired for. The
synapses of any faintly decent human being are
wired to short out and shut down at this point.
You have to keep kick-starting your brain. And
in the end it’s too exhausting.
Hard-core genocide-talk is akin to hard-core
pornography: the author has to keep upping the
ante, super-charging every adjective,
mercilessly slicing away any word that doesn’t
make the reader hard. There is a dismal but
very real art to it. I can only imagine that
years of reading and speaking this porno-racist
lingo permanently alter the brain.
How
many of these fullblown psychos move among us?
Probably no more now than there were in the
Utica of my childhood. But no less—Bill Clinton
made sure of that with NAFA and GATT, thus
gutting whatever blue-collar jobs, and whatever
chances for self-respect, were left in all of
America’s many Uticas. What’s so strange about
this moment is that—whatever the number of
hard-core racists–now they have open
sympathizers in the White House.
I once
read an account of the Warsaw Ghetto in which a
survivor, an old woman, said that at first the
Nazis would kidnap Jews at night; you’d wake up
to find that two of your neighbors had
disappeared. But she could make a kind of
queasy compact with that reality, because it
happened in the night, when everyone was asleep.
Then one morning she woke up to see bodies
hanging from the lamp-posts, and her first
thought was: oh, God—now they’re doing it in
the daylight.
For
myself, I’m not sure which is worse.
This
article was first published by
Counterpunch
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
