by David Lethbridge
The Bethune Institute, Nov./Dec. 1995
Republished with permission
Pamphlets and Leaflets
Among the primary methods of recruitment into most neo-fascist groups are small, simple, easy-to-read pamphlets and leaflets. These items can be conveniently left in public washrooms at shopping malls, outhouses in provincial or national parks and rest areas, under automobile windshield wiper blades, in school lockers, on bus seats, on door steps, between the pages of books in book stores, slipped into newspapers, or deposited in virtually any location. Many neo-nazi, white supremacist, and Christian Identity organizations have used leafleting. A typical example is an Aryan Nations leaflet distributed by Charles Scott in August, 1995. It outlines the basic claims of Aryan Nations and Identity: white supremacy, racial segregation, alleged Biblical commands that homosexuality and interracial marriage merit execution, that abortion is forbidden, and that Identity members should be armed.
Pamphlets and leaflets are employed for a number of reasons. They are inexpensive to print, particularly in large batches. Leaflets are easy to digest intellectually and if the leaflet strikes a sympathetic chord, the reader is likely to write or telephone the leafleting organization for more in-depth material. Even if the reader is not persuaded to make further contact, elements of the fascist message may be sympathetically absorbed, their false assertions taken to be facts, so that the reader may become - even unconsciously - moved towards the fascist position. Given the relative inexpensiveness of pamphlets and leaflets, they can be used to blanket large areas, so that even if only one or two percent of the recipients make contact with the publishers, this would constitute a successful recruitment, and at this purely statistical level resembles any conventional direct marketing scheme.
Furthermore, and again at least partly because of their inexpense, leaflets are provided to new recruits in order to measure their degree of commitment and conviction, and to engage them directly in the activity of the organization. Active work for an organization tends to build a strong psychological commitment to its values, and builds organizational unity.
Newspapers
Newspapers and periodicals serve a similar purpose, but often at a more advanced level. Newspapers are not as easy to secrete in as many locations as pamphlets, but may be easily left on lawns, door steps, and school yards. Newspapers, as opposed to periodicals, may be used to reach a general population, and to spread more in-depth propaganda. The typical use of newspapers for this purpose involves distribution in a neighborhood in the pre-dawn hours. Occasionally, there have been mass mailings through the postal service, particularly when the content of the newspaper falls just below the legal standard of hate propaganda. As with leaflets or pamphlets, newspapers may be produced within Canada, or imported from the USA or elsewhere. Typical examples of the use of newspapers are the distribution of Racial Loyalty, produced by the white supremacist Church of the Creator, out of Missoula, Montana; and The Thunderbolt, produced by the pro-fascist and anti-Semite Ed Fields, out of Marietta, Georgia. The former was distributed in Salmon Arm, British Columbia in 1993, the latter in Kelowna, B.C. in 1995, both in plastic bags left on lawns in the early morning hours. In each case, witnesses noted that the newspapers were left by individuals driving large, late model vehicles. The use of the postal service for newspaper distribution may be typified by the Michael Journal, an anti-Semitic publication produced in Quebec, which was mass mailed to tens of thousands of households across Canada in 1994 and 1995.
Periodicals
Periodicals, unlike newspapers, are produced primarily for already committed members of organizations. A typical example is Up Front, published out of Toronto, Ontario by the neo-Nazi Heritage Front. From the point of view of recruitment, periodicals tend not to reach a new, or naive, audience. On the other hand, it should be strongly emphasized that recruitment is not a single-level process. Readers who write away for materials advertised in the pages of periodicals may well find themselves in possession of books, videotapes, or other products that bring them into contact with a deeper level of fascist militancy or extremism, and become themselves committed to such views. Recruits tend to move from passive to active support of fascist organizations, and from active support to increasing levels of militancy. The Council on Public Affairs Digest, for example, within its pages offers for sale Vigilantes of Christendom, by Identity author Richard Kelly Hoskins, a book which glorifies Hitler, denies the Holocaust, and supports white supremacist terror groups from the Ku Klux Klan to Robert Mathews and the Order, among many other similar books and tapes.
Propaganda catalogs
Propaganda catalogs and listings of organizations are generally available through the pages of newspapers and periodicals. Many fascist organizations, such as National Alliance, or Scriptures for America, provide extensive catalogs of hate propaganda. Scriptures for America, an Identity church, publishes a catalog of over 600 audiotapes, 300 videotapes, and approximately 100 books. The Canadian League of Rights, the largest anti-Semitic organization in Canada, has a book catalog of over 200 titles. Sacred Truth Ministries, another Identity organization, has a book catalog of approximately 1000 titles and, for a small price, provides a listing of over 800 Identity and Christian Patriot groups. Listings of organizations permit recruits to discover fascist groups established in their region, and further allows them to make contact with hundreds more. The promotion of fascist ideology through these catalogs and listings should not be underestimated. Most of the titles sold through these methods are unavailable elsewhere, and constitute a vast propaganda machine through which individuals are recruited into deeper levels of ideological commitment, and that commitment maintained.
Books, videotapes, and audiotapes
Books, videotapes, and audiotapes can function as recruitment devices either for a naive audience, or to bring committed members of groups to a higher level. All three of these media have the capacity to present what appears to be reasoned argumentation based on what appears to be a factual foundation. Their persuasiveness relies on the ability of the author to render half-truths and outright falsifications in such a light that the conclusions appear to be irrefutable. Unlike pamphlets, newspapers, and periodicals, books require a deeper intellectual activity and can result in a deeper level of belief.
Videotapes and audiotapes bring the audience into closer and more emotional contact with the speaker, and if the speaker is a leader of a fascist organization, an emotional bond may be reliably produced between the leader and a sympathetic viewer. Words on a page are relatively cold, regardless of the passion with which they are written. To actually see, or to a lesser degree to hear, a fascist speaker, is to experience the personality directly. To the extent that the speaker appears warm and friendly, and smiles happily into the camera, the viewer may be led to believe that the individual they are watching could not possibly be dangerous or malicious. To the extent that the speaker is impassioned, the viewer or listener may become swayed by his or her emotional tone into accepting more easily the content of the speech. At the level of text, audiotape and especially videotape, depend, like books, on a selective editing of reality. Images torn out of context, or rearranged, or accompanied by a spurious narration, may be particularly effective in changing the opinions and attitudes of the audience at an emotional and, more importantly, an intellectual level, and thereby recruiting the audience to a deeper commitment. A further recruiting function of taped propaganda, is that it may be watched or listened to in intimate groups composed of several committed members and one or two naive or primary level recruits. The group affirmation of the taped message, and the camaraderie of the social occasion itself, has a positive effect on the bonding of the recruit to the group. Given that all fascist propaganda, regardless of the medium, is essentially irrational, the emotional bonding typical of all groups, takes on a central rather than a secondary role in fascist recruitment.
Television, AM, FM, short-wave radio
At a somewhat more technologically sophisticated level, television, AM, FM, and short-wave radio are being used effectively to reach a mass audience, and to throw a wide net for new recruits. National Alliance, for example, broadcasts its neo-Nazi message from 12 FM and AM stations and 2 shortwave stations, blanketed the whole of North America. It also broadcasts on television through at least one cable station in Florida. White Aryan Resistance broadcasts its television program, Race and Reason, through cable TV stations in a minimum of 50 cities in the USA; while Ernst Zundel, who also uses cable television, broadcasts on shortwave frequencies which allow him to reach audiences world-wide. Radio and television media have the advantage of not only reaching hundreds of thousands of potential recruits, but of selling a variety of hate propaganda over the airwaves, and of constantly changing and updating their racist and fascist messages.
Phone Message Services
Phone message services occupy a similar technological zone. At least 50 phone message services are operating today in Canada and the USA. Ku Klux Klan groups, neo-Nazis groups, militia groups, and Christian Identity organizations each promote phone message systems. Some are quite simple, and provide the listener with a recorded hate message, others include a contact address along with the message, still others require a touch-tone phone in order to listen to a categorized hierarchy of messages. Many systems allow the caller to leave a message and to listen to messages recorded by others.
Internet
There has been considerable recent concern that the Internet system, and the World Wide Web connected to it, may become fertile ground for fascist recruiting. Certainly it is the case that neo-fascists are using the Internet in increasing numbers. A single fascist web site, for example, connects the Internet user to over a hundred other sites, bulletin board services, and addresses, as well as allowing the user to automatically print the entire text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - one of the vilest pieces of anti-Jewish hatred ever written, and declared illegal hate propaganda in Canada.
There are several problems, however, with over concern with the Internet at this time, keeping in mind that situation in this area may change quickly. Firstly, relatively few people are connected to the net. A figure quoted in November of 1995, suggested that only 17% of Americans were so connected. Secondly, Internet recruiting is a relatively passive process. While it is true, as in the case of pamphlets, leaflets, and newspapers, exposure to fascist ideas may tend to lead to easier acceptance of fascist ideology in general, Internet recruiting has the built-in disadvantage of recruitment at a distance. It requires a degree of effort for the Internet reader to make the leap from passive "lurking" - to use a cyberspace phrase - to the activity of contacting and joining an organization. Thirdly, unless the passive Internet reader is prepared to download and print the Internet text, the specific piece of fascist propaganda disappears as soon as the computer is turned off, unlike written or taped fascist literature to which the potential recruit may return repeatedly, or which may be passed from hand to hand. Perhaps more to the point, fascist recruiting is today still largely taking place in the street, in gatherings at people's homes and farms, in hotel convention rooms, in Identity churches and compounds, and in fields and meadows and barns. In short, there is a tendency, especially among some circles, to imagine that as soon as a new technology becomes available, that it automatically becomes the primary or most important arena of recruitment.
While propaganda for every position within the neo-nazi, neo-fascist, Identity, white supremacist, militia, Ku Klux Klan, and Christian Patriot movements is widespread, Holocaust-denial propaganda requires a separate commentary. A statistical analysis performed by SACAR (the Salmon Arm Coalition Against Racism) indicates that importations of all hate propaganda into Canada have risen by 400% over the last five years, but that fascist material denying the Nazi Holocaust has alone risen by as much as 2000%. Virtually every fascist newspaper and periodical carries a wide variety of Holocaust-denial articles and advertisements for denial books and tapes. Holocaust-denial postings are pervasive on the Internet.
Holocaust Denial Propaganda
The major global outlets for Holocaust-denial material are Ernst Zundel's organization in Toronto, the NSDAP-AO in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. The Institute for Historical Review was set up by the long-time anti-Semite and millionaire, Willis Carto, and run by the British neo-fascist, David McCalden. The IHR strives to present itself as an academic and scholarly body, holds annual conferences, and publishes the Journal for Historical Review, which has every appearance of a standard academic journal. The IHR tends to recruit a well-educated membership, including university professors, and wealthy supporters. The Committee for the Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH), at one time associated to the IHR, specifically functions to recruit college and university students. Its main tactic is to hide behind a veil of "free speech" and liberal debate. Over the last five years it has been successful in placing ads in student newspapers suggesting the necessity of such a debate, and following up the ad with an actual visit to the university to carry out Holocaust-denial propaganda under the cover of a well-orchestrated debate. Unfortunately, many naive university professors acquiesce in this process by upholding the fraudulent "right" of fascists to organize on campus.
Holocaust Denial as Recruitment
Both the function and the centrality of Holocaust-denial as recruitment is not difficult to discover. Firstly, it sanitizes the personality and activity of Hitler, the Nazi High Command, the SS, and other Nazi institutions; secondly, it removes a formidable stumbling block to joining fascist groups; thirdly, it tends to make fascist ideas more acceptable; fourthly it tends to promote anti-Semitism and demonizes the Jews by making them appear as having engaged in an international plot of mammoth proportions, and by suggesting that out of a cultural or even genetic predisposition to avarice they have used the image of gas chambers to extract enormous and undeserved reparations from the German government. The necessity to deny the Holocaust makes it a central plank in neo-fascist ideology and recruitment. If the potential recruit can be encouraged to accept Holocaust-denial, they are generally in a position to accept the fascist or Christian Identity world view as a totality.
Recruitment of Children and Youth
Much concern has been expressed recently about the fascist recruitment of children and youth. It is, of course, obvious that no movement can survive indefinitely without consistently recruiting younger generations. Before moving to an examination of fascist youth recruitment, it needs to be said that the vast majority of members in fascist organizations are adults, and that the exponential rise in membership of fascist groups in the 1990s involves adults. Hotel conference rooms, individual living rooms, and farm meetings probably remain the usual locus of recruitment.
Leaving aside the intergenerational, within-family recruitment, there is no doubt that the young are being actively recruited in large numbers and through specific tactics. Many adolescents today find themselves alienated from their families. Occasionally this is because the family is brutal or alcoholic, but more often the alienation arises because the family is entirely wrapped up with the pursuit of the crassest form of materialism. Young fascists often come from a background where the parents possessed no other values than the pursuit of money; where the parents are psychologically absent; and where material gifts replace love and affection. The fascist youth group offers such alienated young people a substitute family, an environment of mutual concern, and a substitute set of values. Fascist ideology, no matter how fraudulent and perverse, offers a set of beliefs and values, something to live for and even to die for. For many young people, a fascist group may provide their first real exposure to commitment, to courage, to unity of thought and action, to the motivation of non-materialistic values.
Once recruited into the group, the young person may become bound to it through what is, in essence, a tactic of graduated blackmail. For the very young, they may be given alcohol or drugs, and then threatened with exposure to their parents or school principal if they do not carry out further activities. A series of minor robberies may be required, in order to fund the group, with the young person again threatened with exposure - this time to the police - if they do not carry out the next level of request. Cross-border hate propaganda importations, or the transportations of small amounts of arms, may then follow. Acts of harrassment, intimidation, or violence may be required at a still later date.
Of course, for the ideologically committed, the blackmail technique is unnecessary, as it is for the young psychopath who joins a fascist, or Nazi skinhead, group for the very purpose of engaging in racial violence. Furthermore, a number of products and events have been established for the young. Nazi rock music has a history of ten or fifteen years at this point, but the development of Resistance Records, by George Burdi of the Church of the Creator and the Heritage Front, has taken this recruitment tool to a whole new level. Resistance Records has a stable of a dozen high-quality fascist bands, and produces their music through the best sound equipment available, resulting in CDs and cassettes of professional quality. Resistance Records products can be ordered directly over the Internet. Full-color icons representing the newest releases need only be "clicked" by the computer mouse to listen to selected hate songs over the computer speakers. Directly beside these icons, are images of Visa and Mastercard, which when clicked, enable the listener to immediately purchase the CD or cassette, which is then mailed to the home. Resistance Records themselves, as well as such established organizations as Aryan Nations and the Christian Identity Posse Comitatus, hold Aryan concerts, Aryan Youth festivals, or annual Aryan Youth Congresses. Finally, on the subject of youth recruitment, some young people are encouraged to live within the confines of Christian Identity or neo-Nazi compounds and armed enclosures, and to marry and raise children within these compounds. It is too early yet to gauge the consequences of this situation.
Anti Government Sentiments and Recruitment
At a deeper level, recruitment into the neo-fascist movement is based on the on-going crisis of capitalism, especially in North America. For over a decade the industrial heartland of North America has been in serious decline. In the United States, industrial labor was driven out of the eastern seaboard and the midwest and forced south. Communities were torn apart, whole towns boarded up and closed. As industrial jobs are increasingly shifted overseas by capitalists in search of more opportunities for greater exploitation, lower wages, and higher profits, the working class, increasingly in competition for scarce employment, becomes divided against itself on ethnic and racial lines. Rural communities are disappearing, and their people moving to the big cities, under the pressure of aggressive agribusiness multinationals. New to the city, people from small towns find themselves unemployed and blame immigrants for their misfortune. Family farms are going under, foreclosed upon by the banks, leaving farmers in the psychologically vulnerable position of having lost the land their fathers gave them, and being unable to pass that land on to sons of their own.
Fascist organizations are quick to make use of the anti-government sentiments that are sweeping North America in the wake of the economic crisis. The militant antagonism to increased taxes, third-world immigration, Native land claims, abortion, and a dozen other issues, are symptomatic of increasing sectors of society who believe - often with just cause - that their livelihood and way of life are threatened. It is an open secret that the official unemployment figures released by the government vastly underrate the true extent of financial misery. Even full-time employment at minimum wages in the so-called "service" sector is unable to provide a reasonable standard of living. The gap between rich and poor, exploiter and exploited, continues to grow. In Canada, recent federal and provincial economic cuts to health care, welfare, unemployment insurance, and education, are virtually guaranteed to drive people into the arms of the right. In the absence of a strong, progressive, left, and under the weight of fifty years of anti-socialist propaganda and disinformation emanating from virtually every social institution in North America - from the State house to the school room - the beneficiaries of the economic crisis range from the reactionary stupidity of the Reform Party, to the outright fascism of neo-Nazis, militia organizations, and the Christian Identity movement.
Conclusion
Fascist movements are growing. Fascist violence is increasing. Fascist techniques of recruitment run the range from simple and inexpensive, to sophisticated and technologically advanced, and are aimed with specificity at every age-group and social class. Is there a solution? Yes. An anti-fascist movement must be built. It must have two thrusts, two lines of development. On the one hand, fascist organizations must be exposed, combated, and destroyed. On the other hand, in order to eliminate the soil in which fascism grows, state and capitalist exploitation must be reversed. The slogan of the day ought to be: more funds - not less - for health care, unemployment insurance, welfare, and education; more authentic and satisfying jobs, not more layoffs. What is required is not more soup kitchens, but more militancy. The new fascist offensive can be defeated. All we need is the courage, the skill, the unity, and most importantly, the organization, to carry it through.
David Lethbridge is the Research Director for The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies.
