The Heritage Front
One of the main thrusts of the
Heritage Front's recruitment campaign
is its focus on Canadian youth. It has been observed that skinheads
make up a large component of the Heritage Front's audience and
supporters at rallies and meetings.
Wolfgang Droege has claimed that
80% of those attending Heritage Front meetings are under 25. He is
not interested in recruiting older people, because, according to him,
"parents are the ones that gave this country away, their children's
future away." In another interview, he emphasizes that, "We're
focusing on mainly younger people because they are the ones most
affected by the problems in this country today. And we're having
quite a success rate." Recruitment of high school students is a tactic
that was developed by Droege's American mentor,
David Duke, and his
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
As a response to the Black community's demonstrations protesting the
Rodney King verdict in May 1992, the
Heritage Front held numerous
meetings targeting youth. On May 27th, a rally organized by
Droege and 30 high school students took place at Dunbarton High School, in
Pickering, Ontario, to protest against the punishment of a Dunbarton
student suspended for wearing White-supremacist symbols, and of
others who had called for a White Pride week. In mid-June, the Front
surrounded Jackman Public School with large posters. The Heritage Front
later boasted of the high school demonstrations on their hotline.
The targeting of high school students by White supremacist movements
is cause for serious concern. Youth have always been the fundamental
target of ambitious White supremacist groups, in part as a strategy
to ensure 'security' at gatherings, but more significantly, to build
up future leadership. The Heritage Front sees Dunbarton High in
Pickering as a stepping stone in its quest to organize in other
secondary schools in Southern Ontario. Reflecting this approach, a
number of the references on the Heritage Hotline and in Up Front
have made references to high-school issues and recruitment.
The
Heritage Front has also been active on university campuses in
the Toronto area. In the 1992 school year, both Ryerson
Polytechnic Institute and the University of Toronto were the
targets of a propaganda distribution campaign by the Heritage Front
and another White supremacist group known as
Church of the Creator.
In April of 1992, "White and Proud" leaflets were found both in
lockers and in library books at Ryerson. In an interview with a
Toronto weekly,
Wolfgang Droege said that the Ryerson recruitment
drive was part of a larger recruitment effort sta*ed in December
1992.
Droege also claimed that the Front has several members at Ryerson,
York University, and at the Umversity of Toronto. One of the
Heritage Front directors is purportedly a U of T student. In
1993, Heritage Front members were invited to address a political
science class at U of T taught by Joseph Fletcher, a respected
researcher on racism and prejudice. Although he had invited
them as a case study to expose the true nature of their ideology,
and he attempted to provide some balance by making the lecture
optional and by inviting anti-racists to a later class, many
students and community leaders were outraged that he had allowed
them to speak and thus augment their reputation in the name of
academic freedom. The year before the Fletcher incident, a student
radio host on CIUT, the U of T radio station, was forced off the
air after she invited HF leaders on to her show. These appearances
are all part of the Front's quest to gain mainstream credibility
and respectability.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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Youth Recruitment