In Part I we concluded that the threat of renascent Nazism in Germany was more a figment of the American media that a reasonable expectation.
Gary Lauck, an American citizen, the self-styled Fuehrer and sole member of the Auslands und Aufgauorganiztion der NSDAP, (Foreign Development Organization of the National Socialist, NAzi, Party), is presently awaiting trial in Germany (7/95). The New York Times, among other U.S. media, did not consider that news fit to print, but about 25 neo-Nazis staged a demonstration in Germany demanding Lauck's release. Police said that the action was peaceful. All participants left with their skulls intact.
Lauck is from Lincoln, Nebraska, which is the source of virtually all printed German language pro-Nazi material circulated in Germany by the ultra-right. Printing and distribution and export of such scurrilous offal is legal in this country (and should be); in Germany it is considered subversive and illegal. The difference in attitudes is due to the fact that we didn't live under Hitler for 13 years.
Could there be another Holocaust in Germany? Could there be a Holocaust in the United States? Ask the untold numbers of so-called Americans, all heavily armed and eagerly awaiting Der Tag, The Day when theirs and other like-minded groups unite and take over the U.S.
Ridiculous? Of course -- to us. But to them? What the hell do you think they've been preparing for? For them the COnstitution is a scrap of paper to be discarded and replaced by their New Order.
There is a sliver of silver in the dark cloud of the Oklahoma City tragedy. For the IT-Can't-happen-here crowd there is now concrete evidence that there are millions with the mission to make IT happen.
Nuts, kooks, wildeyed radicals, wannabe dictators, social misfits and nonentities all, what makes them think they can become somebodies to be reckoned with? Is it the triumph of their ideology or simply the motivation, conscious or otherwise, to be important? (note the rooster style strutting when they appear on television.)
Case history:
As long as there is history he will be remembered, certainly by the would-be masters. He is their ideal, their cynosure.
He was the seventh to join a group so obscure its existence was known only to a few security officers who considered them crack-pots, incompetent comic figures with unfocused, ridiculous goals. Three has been confined to insane asylums and those familiar with the embryonics klavern thought all seven should be committed permanently; schizos, manic depressives who suffered from mental disorders not yet classified in the 1920s. Our subject took over the leadership of the strange group and awarded himself Party Card Number One. In a mere 12 years his nation and the world were compelled to take notice of Adolf Hitler.
Familiar with that part of history, every petty would-be dictator in this country and in Germany is convinced that if Hitler could do it, he, too, can could become the next Fuehrer. All attempts to unify the Nazi movements, there and here, have failed because every wretched nonentity thinks only he should be the legitimate heir to Hitler's legacy. And none will yield the prospect of leadership to any other contenders for the top spot.
We have had the Nativists, the Know Nothings, the Silver Grays (Millard Fillmore's street fighters on whom the Nazi Brown Shirts, the SA, the Sturm Abteilung, the Storm Troopers, was patterned -- surprise!), the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Aryan Nations, the Posse Comitatus, Gerald L.K. Smith's vicious anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic "Christian Crusade" (sound familiar) and so many others down through Joe McCarthy, the John Burch Society, and today's apprentice bigots -- David Duke and Pat Buchanan ... just you wait until the '96 presidential campaign really heats up -- they're out there.
Even during the height of McCarthyism membership of activity in a far right group was grounds for denial of a security clearance on the same basis as on the far left. It seemed that we security officers were the only Americans who had read the infamous Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations beyond the first chapter. THe media knew about it but chose to ignore it. For them "unconstitutional injustice" could be committed only against the left. Among otherwise knowledgeable people I have encountered, almost all were not aware that the far right was also considered subversive, dedicated to denying Americans their constitutional rights -- you know the drill. Among the unaware are the purported pundits, including academics, like professors. They are still with us.
How many racist/nazoid fanatics are there? We really don't know exactly, but those who should know tell us that there are at least -- a lot.
Ask...
Timothy McVeigh. Ask Terry Nichols. Ask Robert Millar. Ask Mark Koernke. Ask Robert Popovich. Ask "Colonel" Bo Gritz. Ask Bob Starr. Ask Jack McLamb. Ask John Trockmann, Robert Fletcher and their lawyer. Ask Wayne LaPierre. Ask John D. Baird. Ask Willie Ray Lampley. Ask Larry Wayne Crow. Ask Randy Weavers. Ask...
Who are they? You don't know? See what I mean.
Ask...
The FBI. Even they are not sure how many are meeting in dingy basements, forest cabins, remote farmhouses and even in public places; all armed and ready and certainly willing.
And their leaders, rabid brains polluted with visions of Hitler's rise from obscurity -- all those two-bit would-be Fuehrers mentally masturbating in their fantasies of becoming the supreme dictator of the United States. And the same for Germany.
"Hitler? Ummmmm. Wait, wait, don't tell me. I know! He was a disciple of Camus (pronounced 'Caymuss')!" And she was oh so proud that she knew who Hitler was.
IT can't happen here?
Maybe IT could.