Archive/File: people/p/prutschi.manuel/bigotrys-fellow-travellers Last-Modified: 1996/05/10 Source: Currents, Vol. 6, No. 2. October 1990, pg. 8. Published by the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, Toronto. Hate Groups and Bigotry's Fellow Travellers By Manuel Prutschi Last summer, on Canada Day, John Beattie held a "whites only" rally in Minden. The staging of such a rally should not have surprised us; rather than constituting a new phenomenon, it formed part of a continuum in the activity of organized hate groups in this country. John Beattie, in his own personal history, illustrates how the rally did not surface suddenly, in a vacuum; Beattie, after all, is not a newly emergent hate group leader. Though he has been quiescent for a number of years, he was prominent in the 1960's when Toronto was going through a noticeable phase of neo-nazi activism. Hate groups and what I have chosen to call "bigotry's fellow travellers" fall into one or another of five general categories: Nazi/Neo-Nazi Groups To those that fall under this category, Adolf Hitler was the archetypal leader and the Nazi Third Reich the ultimate utopia. John Beattie is of this type, but the person who perhaps epitomizes it is John Ross Taylor. Taylor began his career in association with Adrian Arcand who, in the 1920's, founded an out-and-out Nazi party in Quebec. He also tried to create a trans-Canadian Nazi party, and Taylor played an important organizational role in furthering such initiatives. Taylor subsequently broke with Arcand, switching to the Canadian Union of Fascists. More recently Taylor is best known for having operated a dial-a-racist-message telephone service for the white supremacist Western Guard. The recordings, which ran for years since 1973, attacked Jews, blacks, and other minorities. Also aptly belonging in this category is Ernst Zundel, who became notorious as a holocaust denial propagandist. Zundel denies that the holocaust ever took place, characterizing it as a Jewish politco-financial swindle. Zundel's purpose in denying the holocaust is to whitewash the Nazis, the Third Reich, and Hitler. It should therefore not surprise us to learn that Zundel is the co-author of a book called _The Hitler We Loved and Why_. Apart from being anti-Jewish, the book is anti-black in particular, and anti-non-white in general. In his praise of Hitler, Zundel is simply echoing the sentiment of Arcand at whose feet he learned. Arcand the Nazi leads right into Zundel the neo-Nazi. White Supremacists In the ideology of white supremacy the world revolves entirely around race. Race is the prism through which the world in its entirety is viewed. Society is to be ordered in accordance with the dictates and the needs of the white/Aryan race, and note that skin pigmentation does not in and of itself define white Aryans. Jews, whatever their colour, are seen as part of the racial enemy. The Ku Klux Klan is an organization which very much comes to mind when one speaks of white supremacy, but if one wants to look at white supremacy in more detail, especially as it has manifested itself in Toronto, no better example can be provided than the activity of Donald Clarke Andrews. Andrews first surfaced in the later 1960's as a member in the small "c" conservative Edmund Burke Society. Though it quickly degenerated into a racist organization, it was not sufficiently extremist for Andrews. Leading a secessionist group in the early 1970's Andrews organized the Western Guard. The Western Guard defaced synagogues and other Jewish and non-Jewish institutions, and distributed hate literature. A United church was smeared with graffiti because United Church headquarters had "collaborated" with communists. Bethune College, at York University, was defaced because it honoured Norman Bethune, whose politics the Guard did not like. Members of the Western Guard also set fire to the house of a librarian who was living with a black man. Subsequent to the Western Guard, Andrews founded the Nationalist party. Under his leadership the party pursued a white supremacist program as articulated in its on-going publication, _The Nationalist Report_. _The Nationalist Report_ contended that there was a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the white race through the imposition on Aryan society of persons of black, Indian, Pakistani, and Vietnamese origin. The way to counteract this anti-white conspiracy, Nationalist party materials suggested, was to keep non-whites separate from Aryans, to stop the immigration of all Asians and blacks, and to repatriate those already in Canada to their supposed areas of origin. Blacks were the object of particular vitriol, and the material was also anti-Semitic. Theologians of Hate Their ideology is thoroughly rooted in religion; they view modern society as atheistic, secular, materialistic, and immoral. In this they perhaps do not differ from certain more mainstream religious critiques except that, for the theologian of hate, the Jews (who are portrayed as synonymous with Satan) are held responsible for all social ills. The world is engaged in total war between good and evil, Christianity and Judaism; though invariably Christian, they have twisted Christian teaching to create their own perverted and perverse conceptualization. The two most notorious examples of Canadian theologians of hate are James Keegstra in Alberta, and Malcolm Ross in New Brunswick. It is valuable to know that Keegstra began his hatemongering career as an anti-Catholic and anti-black. As Professor Stanley R. Barrett has written in his book _Is God a Racist?_ "the nature of Keegstra's message changed over the years. Whereas anti-Catholicism originally informed his teaching, he eventually began to introduce negative views about blacks, and finally became an overt anti-Semite." Aryan Nations Originating in the United States, Aryan Nations is an umbrella organization for a number of groups of relatively recent vintage. Ideologically it is a synthesis of the theology of hate and white supremacy, decked out in the trappings of Nazism. Referring to itself as the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, it is part of what has become known as the Identity Movement. It holds that the British, German, Scandinavian, and American people, rather than the Jews, are the real Israel, hence the term "identity" because they are the ones truly identical with Israel. Contemporary Jews are seen as impostors, in no way connected with the people of Israel of Biblical times. The aim of Aryan nations is to establish an independent, all- white, all-Christian, Aryan-governed nation-state carved out of the northwestern United States and western Canada. A principle Ayran Nations connection in Canada is Terry Long, who operates out of Alberta as Canada's "High Aryan Warrior Priest." Terry Long, emulating John Ross Taylor, set up a dial-a- racist-message telephone service. The three-minute message promoted white supremacy, was abusive towards blacks, Pakistanis, Jews, and other minorities, and warned that an immigration policy allowing non-whites was tantamount to "national suicide." Ultra Conservative Tending Towards Racist These groups subscribe to an extreme chauvinism and xenophobia; they have an automatic dislike for foreigners. The nation which is the object of their patriotism is a rather exclusive club made up of individuals who are British, or northern European, preferably monarchist, Christian (essentially Protestant Christian), and white. Unlike the groups in the other categories, their racism is not advanced as overtly; racism is more-or-less masked, and promoted through their advocacy of issues which they put forward as of national concern. They are bigotry's fellow travellers. The Canadian League of Rights, led by Ron Gostick, provides the most durable, if not the primary example of an organization falling under this category. It is from headquarters (formerly in Flesherton, Ontario and now in High River, Alberta) that all the League's material, much of it offensive, is mailed to points across Canada. Jim Keegstra got most of his reading material through his membership in the League. The League also promotes the writings of Malcolm Ross.. One of the strategies of groups in this category is to plug themselves into issues which find a positive resonance in certain segments of the broader community. The opposition to bi-lingualism and the extension of French-language services is one example. In Ontario we find the Canadian League of Rights linking itself to such movements as the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada (or A.P.E.C.). Another individual who very much belongs in this category is Paul Fromm. Fromm was a co-founder of the Edmund Burke Society, and today he heads two institutes: the Canadian Association for Free Expression (C.A.F.E.) and Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform (C-FAR). Fromm has latched onto the freedom of speech issue, defending the rights of hatemongers to free expression, but not repudiating their views and portraying them as martyrs, victims of a witch hunt. C-FAR is opposed to most foreign aid and favours a restrictive immigration policy. A few months ago in Vancouver, as reported in a _Globe and Mail_ column, Fromm told an audience "that a foreign invasion would be preferable to the city's current influx of Asian immigrants." Another example of an organization which fits into this category is the Canadian Freedom of Speech League. It lists as general counsel none other than Doug Christie, the lawyer acting for Keegstra, Zundel, Taylor, and Ross. The editor and publisher of its newsletter _Friends of Freedom_ is a close Christie associate. Like Fromm's C.A.F.E., this organization promotes an agenda aimed at undermining our multicultural democracy under the cover of freedom of expression. Clearly the lines between the above categories are often blurred, and there is a great deal of cross-fertilization among individuals and groups. As well such groups rarely, if ever, exclusively target a single minority, rather they make victims of us all. Members of hate groups, or those I have labeled "bigotry's fellow travellers" are not merely content with carrying out their activities on the periphery. They very consciously involve themselves in our political process. Zundel ran for the leadership of the federal Liberal party in 1968 (Pierre Trudeau won that contest); Andrews has repeatedly vied for municipal office, and Keegstra ran for Social Credit in the 1984 federal election. Fromm, in this last federal election ran in Mississauga East for the Confederation of Regions party; and Christie, a vigorous advocate of western separatism, founded the Western Canada Concept party, and has run twice in federal election contests as an independent. Apart from pursuing a conscious political course, a number of those we have referred to have undertaken a program to recruit youth to their cause. Obviously they have made some inroads among certain skinhead youths. Andrews clearly has a retinue of such youths around him, as does Fromm, and both of them have publicly prided themselves in their role of politically educating these young people. Beattie also seems to have targeted such alienated youth for recruitment. A number of these skinheads out of Ottawa have even begun to put together a racist newsletter. In 1982, on a sunny mild Sunday afternoon in May, hundreds of people starting out of Greenwood Park paraded by the Toronto Ku Klux Klan headquarters on Dundas Street near Logan Avenue. The parade was part of the all-day Riverdale community festival against the Klan, organized by the Riverdale Action Committee Against Racism. The co-ordinator of the festival, in addressing participants, is reported as "noting that the Klan's targets included Jews, Catholics, blacks, Chinese, trade unionists, social reformers, homosexuals, and women fighting for their rights." Practically at the same time, some distance away, five hundred members of the Jewish community, many of them holocaust survivors, were protesting in front of the headquarters of Ernst Zundel on Carlton Street. Their protest was the culmination of a march that had started out at Allen Gardens. Sixteen years earlier, almost to the day, on May 30, 1965, Jewish activists successfully disrupted a John Beattie-led neo-nazi rally at the same location. What is surprising and startling is that two major anti- racism rallies were taking place on the very same day, at virtually the same time, not all that far from each other, and yet each carried on separately. For whatever reason the fight against racism in Toronto was not as sufficiently well integrated as it might have been. [Manuel Prutschi is National Director, Community Relations, Canadian Jewish Congress.]
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