>Chip Berlot (sic) "reputable"? C'mon. He's an hysteric.
>
>jsc
>
>Charles Brown wrote:
>
>> Yes, I corroborate what Doug says. I still see a lot of
creeping-fascism in the militia groups. All the actuallly existing
,fascist armies have been populated by disillusioned, wacked out
workers, so their class status doesn't necessarily exempt them. The
liberation kernel of Good ole American rugged individualism dwindles
and rots more and more as time passes. I don't see any good practice
from the militias, and there is lots of bad practice. Outstate Michigan
is no different from Mississippi today, and we have a large militia
population. I hypothesize a correlation. Please show me something the
militias have done good. Reputable anti-fascist scholars and field
researchers (Russ Bellant, Chip Berlot, Center for Democratic Renewal)
report them as rightwing, and proto-fascist.
>>
>> I haven't read Cockburn lately, but the heresay about him sounds
like he has taken a turn for the worst since the days of his something
about "The Devil" syndicated column. He sounds like an LM postmod
Tory.
>>
>> CB
It's interesting that America's official genius Mike Davis (unlike Chip
Berlet, et al.) has not been labelled a "hysterical" scaremonder by
"tough-guy" leftists, although it is possible to see his _City of
Quartz_ and _Ecology of Fear_ as Marxist pulp non-fiction that sells
precisely because Davis exploits the very "ecology of fear" that he
criticizes as the subjective factor in the making of a dystopia "beyond
_Blade Runner_." Is it Davis's mystique as an ex-meat cutter and truck
driver -- that is, manhood credential in many a leftist's mind -- that
saves him from being called a "hysteric"? Ah, to be an urban cowboy,
the second coming of Dashiell Hammett!
Mike Davis's California is as ripe for Red Harvest as Hammett's
Poisonville, and, retrofitting the good/bad old _Noir_ tradition, Davis
milks the fear & excitement of class & race wars:
***** The first Latino gang to break into the lucrative rock cocaine
market otherwise dominated by black street gangs, the Eighteenth Street
"nation" controls a wide swath of crack-saturated turf in the Mid-City
area. Sixty other Latino and Asian gangs fight over the dregs of this
business, occasionally with local cliques of Eighteenth Street. As a
result, the LAPD's Ramparts Division (home to the hard cops celebrated
in several of Joseph Wambaugh's gritty police novels) frequently holds
the unenviable record of investigating more homicides than any other
neighborhood police jurisdiction in the country. Nearby MacArthur
Park, once the jewel in the crown of the city's park system, is now a
free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores
with shotguns and uzis. In a single bad year, 30 or more corpses were
found crumpled on the grass, stuffed in park trash cans, or half-buried
in the muck at the bottom of the lake. Indeed, when the lake was
drained a few years ago for subway construction, a local artist
constructed a huge collage out of the several dozen rusted handguns he
recovered from the lake bed.
By their own admission, the overwhelmed inner city detachments of the
LAPD have been unable to keep track of all the bodies on the street,
much less deal with common burglaries, car thefts, and gang-organized
protection rackets. Like Octavia Butler's Pasadena residents in 2024,
the present-day occupants of the transition zone are left to fend for
themselves. Lacking the resources or political clout of more affluent
neighborhoods, they have turned to Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, whose
names follow "protected by..." on handmade signs decorating humble
homes all over South Central and Mid-City Los Angeles.
Slumlords, meanwhile, are conducting their own private reign of terror
against drug dealers, petty criminals, and deadbeat tenants. Faced
with "zero tolerance" laws authorizing the seizure or destruction of
properties used for drug sales, they are hiring their own goon squads
and armed mercenaries to "exterminate" crime on their premises....
...[C]onfronted with virtually paleolithic conditions of life in
collapsing city neighborhoods, hundreds of thousands of blacks and
Latinos are finally finding it possible to move into the subdivisions
where Beaver Cleaver and Ricky Nelson used to live. The once
monochromatic San Fernando Valley now has a slight non-Anglo majority
of Latino, black, Middle Eastern, and Asian residents, including more
than 500,000 recent immigrants. There are more people of Mexican
descent in Ozzie-and-Harriet land than in East L.A.
But their experiences too often repeat the heartbreak and
disillusionment of the original migrations to the central cities. What
seemed from afar a promised land is, at closer sight, a low-rise
version of the same old ghetto or barrio. Like a maddening mirage,
good jobs and good schools are still a horizon away, in the new edge
cities. The "good old boy" regimes that hold power in the interregnum
between white flight and the slow accession of new black or Latino
electral majorities usually loot every last cent in the town treasury
before making their ungraceful exit. As a result, minorities typically
inherit municipal scorched earth -- crushing redevelopment debts,
demoralized workforces, neglected schools, and deserted business
districts -- as their principal legacy from the old order.
In the meantime, the stranded and forgotten white populations of these
transitional communities are too easily tempted to confuse structural
decay with the sudden presence of neighbors of color. The vampirish
role of the edge cities in sucking resources from older or poorer
suburbs is less evident than the desperate needs of growing populations
on the dole. Political discourse, moreover, constantly valorizes
resentments against the poor and people of color, while remaining
discreetly silent about the real structures of urban inequality. As a
consequence, in the older suburban fringe of Southern California, where
little else is flourishing, hate crime is booming.
8. LOW-INTENSITY RACE WAR
right,right,left,leftYou have been Judged
GUILTY by the Orange County chapter of WAR, White Aryan Resistance....
We look forward to meeting you in persons [sic].
Skinhead warning (1993)
Before the skinheads shot Mike Bunche Robinson, they pulverized his
face with karate kicks and punches. The beating was so sadistic that
his body had to be identified through fingerprints. The coroner warned
his girlfriend not to view the disfigured corpse. Robinson, a
well-liked VW mechanic from the blue-collar San Bernardino suburb of
Highland (60 miles from Los Angeles), was killed on 22 August 1995. He
was the fifth African-American to be murdered by skinheads in Southern
California in two years. In another era his death would have been
called a lynching. Now he was just part of the body count in a
low-intensity race war that the criminal justice establishment and the
mainstream press have largely ignored.
The current wave of racial killings began in September 1993, just two
months after the sensational FBI arrest of eight "Fourth Reich"
skinheads for plotting to blow up black churches in South Central Los
Angeles. A young African-American woman, Tina Roxanne Rodriguez, was
beaten to death in front of her young daughter by two skinhead women
screaming racial slurs in the parking lot of a La Habra (Orange County)
shopping center. An estimated 20 to 30 white bystanders made no effort
to rescue Rodriguez as her brains were literally pounded out on the
pavement.
Then, in August 1994, a black sophomore at Santa Margarita High in
southern Orange County was lured into an ambush in the Portola Hills.
Encircled by a mob of 30 young whites shouting "Get the nigger!"
15-year-old Ruben Vaughan, a stellar athlete and scholar, was viciously
beaten and stabbed with a screwdriver. He was hospitalized in critical
condition with a shattered jaw, broken nose, and seven stab wounds.
Two weeks later, another young black man from southern Orange County,
20-year-old Jody Robinson, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by
what sheriffs described as another skinhead gang.
In September, black longshoreman Vernon Flournoy, who had moved from
Hollywood after the 1992 riots "to get away from urban troubles," was
gunned down outside a McDonald's restaurant in Huntington Beach by two
skinheads. This popular beach town, the center of South Coast surfing
culture, was also the home of the Fourth Reich skins arrested the
previous year. For years the strip of cafes and shops along Main
Street had been terrorized by gangs of skinheads from the Long Beach
and Orange County areas. Thus police were not surprised that the older
of Flournoy's killers, 19-year-old Jonathan Kinsey, was carrying Hitler
quotations in his wallet when arrested. In addition to the slaying of
Flournoy, Kinsey was also charged with (and eventually convicted of)
the attempted murder of two Latinos a month earlier, also in Huntington
Beach....
...Skinheads were also on the rampage in Orange County through the
summer and fall of 1995. In the city of Orange, skins screaming Nazi
slogans attacked a local punk rock club, roughing up a black guitarist,
before turning on a young Asian-Indian customer whom they beat
unconscious with metal pipes. Six months later, on 28 January 1996,
Thien Minh Ly, the former president of the Vietnamese American Student
Association at UCLA, was practicing in-line skating at a high school in
Tustin when he was stabbed to death by two skinheads. The shock wave
that rocked Orange County's large Vietnamese community was intensified
when sheriffs revealed a letter that one of the murderers, 21-year-old
Gunner Lindberg, had written to a prison friend in New Mexico.
right,right,left,leftI stabbed him in the
side about 7 or 8 times he rolled over a little so I stabbed his back
out 18 or 19 times then he layed flat and I slit one side of his
throught on his jugular vain. Oh, the sounds the guy was making were
like Uhhh. Then Dominic said "do it again" and I said "I already Did.
Dude." "Ya, Do it again" so I cut his other juggular vain, and Dominic
said "Kill him do it again" and I said "he's already Dead" Dominic Said
"Stab him in the heart" So I stabbed him about 20 or 21 times in the
heart.
Then I wanted go back and look, so we Did and he was deing just then
taking in some bloody gasps of air so I nidged his face with my shoe a
few times, then I told Dominic to kick him, so he kicked the fuck out
of his face and he still has blood on his Shoes.
In February, more of the neonazis who infest Huntington Beach accosted
a 20-year-old native American near a lifeguard tower. Confronted with
the usual skinhead challenge ("Do you believe in white power?"), George
Mondragon attempted to run away but was tackled to the ground and
stabbed 27 times in the chest, liver, back, neck, colon, and hands.
Miraculously, he survived. A month later, 59-year-old native American
Jerry Jordan ended up on life support with multiple skul fractures and
several broken ribs after an encounter with local skinheads in the
Riverside County of Redlands. During the previous year, Redlands had
been terrorized by several cross burnings and a number of racist
assaults. Police claimed that the local skinheads "target people they
believe are a burden to society, such as homeless people and welfare
recipients."...
...According to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations,
attacks on blacks increased 50 percent from 1995 to 1996. With 995
hate crimes reported countywide in 1995, metropolitan Los Angeles
became the nation's capital of racial (539 crimes) and sexual
orientation (338 crimes) violence. (The remaining 118 attacks were
motivated by religious hatred.) The commission's annual report also
noted that racially motivated crimes had been clearly clustered in
older suburban areas like Long Beach, Westchester, Harbor Gateway, and
Van Nuys, as well as in the economically troubled Antelope Valley....
...Law enforcement agencies, by any measure, have been strangely
reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the racist violence or to probe
into the deeper recesses of Southern California's white supremacist
subcultures.... Indeed, official attitudes are a serious part of the
problem. In Orange County, where according to the father of one victim
"hate crime is becoming a popular sport," minority activists have
complained for years about an official double standard. Although
District Attorney Michael Capizzi has routinely fed anti-Latino and
anti-Vietnamese hysteria with high-profile mass arrests (often for
little more than parking tickets) in the Santa Ana barrio and Little
Saigon, he has refused to acknowledge the plague of white violence
sweeping his county, despite 105 skinhead attacks in 1995 alone (as
reported by the Orange County Human Relations Commission)....
...Joe Hicks, the outspoken director of the Los Angeles Multicultural
Collaborative, believes that such official complacency has contributed
to the relegitimation of public racism. "We are seeing the rebirth of
white supremacism as a material force, where racism of the word quickly
becomes racism of the deed." Hicks suggests the metaphor of Russian
dolls. "The largest doll, of course, is Pete Wilson, but inside is
Rush Limbaugh. Open a few dolls more and find Mark Fuhrman. And
inside him is a smirking Timothy McVeigh." The chilling McVeigh
reference may be apt. In late fall 1995 the LAPD busted four young
whites in the San Fernando Valley who were allegedly negotiating to
sell a staggering quantity of high explosives, which they had stolen
from a rock quarry, to a local skinhead group. Who knows what
terrifying recipes from the _Turner Diaries_ may yet be concocted in
Los Angeles's suburban badlands? (378-379; 404-411) *****
Compared to Mike Davis's Red Harvest, one might say Chip Berlet is as
sober as a sunday school teacher.
Yoshie