Race & Murder

Steve Perry sperry at usinternet.com
Tue Apr 27 09:57:08 PDT 1999


With regard to the wearing of swastikas, etc., at least one news account indicated that Harris--some of the time, anyway--wore an *anti-*Nazi patch; that is, a swastika with a circle round it and a slash mark through it. Course, they may just have been tussling with some skinheads that week. The point is that, according to everything I've read, this was a confused and utterly hostile kid who hated something different practically every week. At one point his web site listed racists as one of his top hates, and said they ought to have their arms ripped out. (This, by the way, from material lifted off his web site in '98 by a parent of a threatened kid who was trying to get the sheriff to do something about Harris.)

What seems constant, as I said before, was the habit of singling out and obsessing about instance after instance of those *different* from him--just as he accused his jock tormentors of doing to him.

---------- From: Mark Rickling Sent: Monday, April 26, 1999 5:39 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Race & Murder

EmaChissit at cs.com wrote:


>Mark Rickling, indicating an astoundingly low comprehension level asks:

Thank you for the personal insult.

Those of you who equate fascism, nazism, or even neo-nazism with
>some sort of necessary connection to hatred of jews, black, etc are utterly
>ignorant of history. Firstly, history has demonstrated that Nazism wasn't
>just about targeting Jews, but also about Catholics, Communisits, gypsies.
>How ignorant for anyone here to assume that contemporary forms of Nazism
>*must* and only *must* be about racism which is then magically defined as
>hatred, oppression, slurs, bigotry against people of color and Jews. Very
>interesting how race is essentialized in this kind of talk. Utterly
>astounding. This is what I hear you say, because they wore Nazi symbols
and
>admired Hitler, then obviously they were racists and hated blacks and
>Hispanics and, I guess, Jews, though no mention has been made of that. Let
>me just remind you that Nazism or Neo-Nazism does rest on what can be called
>racism in so far as it's an attempt to cleanse the world of groups seen as
>threatening to the purity of the honored and valorized group. Your
reasoning
>here is dangerous. It demonstrates a complete ignorance of history. If
>we've learned anything, then we should have learned by now that racism
>operates in such a way as to socially construct certain groups as if they
>were a separate race that has identifiable physical and social
>characteristics. However, there is no necessary connection as Angela
>demonstrates when she speaks of "genticizing" white trash and rednecks in
the
>film Gummo. The truly scary thing is, some of you on this very list
>stereotype rednecks and yahoos and don't even see how you do it or see the
>problem with it.

I don't know what it means to say that there is not a "necessary" connection between fascism and racism (btw, hatred of Jews is usually referred to as "anti-semitism" and not "racism"). There is of course a strong historical connection between neo-naziism and white supremacy in the United States. I simply cannot fathom why someone would want to obscure this connection through talk about what is "necessary" and what is not.


>From the Denver Post.....More to suggest the horrible possibility that this
>act was motivated by a complex set of factors.

I never suggested that a complex set of factors did not "determine" this event. Of course it did. I'll leave as an exercise for you to explain why the simple assertion that racism was a factor contributing to the shootings evokes so much hostility and what seems to me to be willful misunderstanding.

mark

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