The public face of the anti-immigrant movement tries to distance itself from some of the slightly more violent wings of White Supremacy. Why? Because this anti-immigration movement is trying to get married to the state and it doesn’t want the state to know that its been sleeping around. But when you do all you can to get yourself in the public eye, eventually the paparazzi is going to find that love letter that you keep hidden in shed.
The love letter[PDF] came in the form of an email from Laine Lawless, founder of the Border Guardians, to Mark Martin, “SS commander” of the Western Ohio unit of the National Socialist Movement. For those not familiar with National Socialism, you may be more familiar with its shortened name, Nazi. The NSM is a 30-year-old direct decendent of the American Nazi Party. Until recently, the NSM was small in comparison to other neo-Nazi groups in the US, but has quickly found its numbers rising across the country. And with the fervor of the anti-immigrant movement, a surge in activity has begun.
The Southern Poverty Law Center highlights some of the recent disturbing activity among extremist White Supremacists:
- On May 6, the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan held an anti-immigration rally in Russellville, Alabama, that drew more than 300 Klansmen and Klan supporters, including members of the neo-Nazi hate group Aryan Nations. At the rally, robed Klansmen burned a 22-foot-high cross and yelled, “Let’s get rid of the Mexicans!”
- Also on May 6, when Hispanic families in Tucson gathered in a park to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, anti-immigration extremist Roy Warden arrived, strapped with a pistol, and led a demonstration. “Listen up, Mexican invaders,” Warden said. “We will not permit you, the ignorant, the savage, the unwashed, to overrun us, as happened in Rome…Land must be paid for in blood. If any invader tries to take this land from us we will wash this land and nurture our soil with oceans of their blood!”
Warden later e-mailed a death threat to Isabel Garcia, a Tucson public defender who co-chairs the human rights group Derechos Humanos. The e-mail was titled, “Warden to Isabel Garcia: I will blow your freaking head off!”- On April 29 a neo-Nazi in East Hampton, New York, was arrested for threatening two Hispanic teenagers with a machete and chainsaw, holding the blade to the throat of one while threatening to kill them.
- On April 22, a 17-year-old Hispanic high school football player was dragged from a suburban house party in Texas and savagely attacked by two white assailants, one of them a neo-Nazi skinhead, according to Harris County law enforcement officials.
Police said the attackers, Keith Robert Turner, 17, and David Henry Tuck, 18, apparently were enraged because the victim tried to kiss a young Hispanic girl they believed to be Caucasian. After forcing the Hispanic youth into a backyard, Turner and Tuck burned his neck with cigarettes, stomped his head with steel-toed boots, slashed his chest with a knife, all while shouting racial slurs. They then stripped him naked and sodomized him with a patio umbrella pole.
Tuck, the skinhead, kicked the pole repeatedly.
“I don’t mean just a little bit,” said Harris County prosecutor Mike Trent. “He kicked it in and shoved it so far in that he has caused major organ damage. It looks like they were really trying to kill him and torture him anyway they could.”
The victim remains in critical condition.- On March 27, New Jersey-based neo-Nazi radio host Hal Turner called for the mass murder of Hispanics and the assassination of U.S. senators who support guest worker programs. “All of you who think there’s a peaceful solution to these invaders are wrong. We’re going to have to start killing these people,” Turner said. “I advocate using extreme violence against illegal aliens. Clean your guns. Have plenty of ammunition. Find out where the largest gathering of illegal aliens will be near you. Go to the area well in advance, scope out several places to position yourself and then do what has to be done.” Turner directed his listeners to a website that provides detailed instructions on constructing pipe bombs, ammonium nitrate “fertilizer bombs,” car bombs, chlorine gas bombs, and other homemade explosive devices.
Among the list was the letter from Lawless to Martin. Lawless was one of the original members of what is now known as the Minuteman Project. About a year ago, she formed her own “border patrol militia” but has remained on good terms with others in the anti-immigrant movement. On April 3rd, she sent an email to Martin highlighting some of her ideas about how the Nazis could effectively get more involved behind the scenes of the anti-immigrant movement. The email was title “How to GET RID OF THEM!” In it, Lawless shares that the movement has done well in helping to close the borders but that they need to do more to get Latin@s to leave the US. She list eleven suggestions to make this happen. They are as follows:
- As has been discussed, once the economic incentives are removed, they will self-deport. In order to do this, we need to intimidate employers into NOT hiring them, as it seems the fedgov is doing a lousy job of this.
- Police departments need to be held accountable for just giving a “get out of jail free” card to unlicensed, uninsured drivers of unlicensed cars when they are caught. No more sanctuary or Special Order 40. Citizens need to get together and pressure mayors, city councils, and the police departments to turn these people over to the CBP and ICE EVERY TIME they are caught.
- Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a fugitive and a person without proper status. I’m sure there are many creative ways to do this. I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination…
- Sabotage the things that they like: entertainment, food, beer, overpopulation, wife-beating, drunk driving, treating American women with disrespect, etc. Put them in their place. BRAVO to the person who cut down the Spanish language radio station towers just North of Phoenix! Now that sends a message!
- Do the best you can to scare the bejeezuz out of them if you encounter them crossing the border. This doesn’t have to be harmful; some good psy-ops would do.
- Send native agents provocateurs and disinfo specialists into Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala (the largest emigration nations) to discourage and sabotage immigrants and their smugglers from coming to the US.
- Deprive illegals of the smuggling money they pay. Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place. Steal the money from the smugglers. Expose slavery and prostitution rings run by smugglers.
- Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants coming here will be shot, maimed, or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as “racists & vigilantes.” I say, if it bleeds, it leads, and why not work on their fears? Create a totally false news story and circulate it on the internet about how some illegals were killed by vigilantes after crossing the border.
- Discourage Spanish-speaking school children from going to public school. Be creative.
- Stand in front of public voting places and ask everyone who comes to vote if they speak English.
- Lobby Congress or your local state legislature to drop all ESL and classes conducted only in Spanish.
Wow. Voting booth actions remeniscent of the days of Jim Crow. Direct threats against children. Advocating physical violence and murder. Calling for more police violence. Stereotyping any latin@ with money to be a smuggler and advocating robbing them. Psy-ops and more! Hitler must be smiling in Hell.
For many of us, we didn’t need an email to know the intimate relationship between neo-nazis and the “respectable” anti-immigration movement. But what about those who believe the rhetoric of the anti-immigrant movement? There are plenty of people in this country who have fallen into the trap of the anti-immigrant hate speech, but how far will they fall? The Southern Poverty Law Center recently released a report stating that the anti-immigrant movement has caused a 33% increase in neo-nazi group membership in recent years. In her email, Lawless calls upon the NSM’s “warriors for the race” to wipe Latin@ people off the face of the US map. If we do not become warriors in combating groups like Border Guardians, Minuteman Project, National Socialist Movement, and others invovled in this call for the ethnic-cleansing of the US, then we will all find ourselves in the midst of a real war. Don’t believe me? Ask that 17-year-old football player in Texas if he thinks we can sit back and do nothing. The disease of White Supremacy lies within all White people. It is not a disease that we can cure with a pill or with a few choice words. It can only be beaten into remission with constant action. If we do not become actively involved in combating White Supremacy, then it will consume us. So please, take action today to stop the anti-immigrant movement.
If you are intersted in emailing Laine Lawless to let her know how you feel, you can reach her at lainelawless@yahoo.com. If you don’t want the haters getting a hold of your email address, you can send an anonymous email from http://anonymouse.org/anonemail.html
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thanks for the contact email address-however, it makes me so, so sad to see how full of hate people are. what is up with the world…
i have no idea. Its disgusting to see how easily manipulated we are. Pitted against one another. Why? So that someone else can reep the benefits. And the benefits are a-plenty. Implement Plan Puebla-Pana, NAFTA, and the FTAA. Then make is so that no one can leave. Viola! A guaranteed, expendable labor pool that can undermine the growing Asian market and reep billions in financial rewards for those sitting high. But rather than look at who is really threatening me, i’d rather get angry and kill anyone who comes and tries to invade my land and take my jobs and make-out with my wimmin. Puppets. Fucking puppets.
you know i have to admit to some fear sending her an email and another part of me thinks, “oh are you kidding me?! you and the NSM are going to out and pick fruit under heinous conditions so John Kerry et. al. can have 98 cent apples in the summer????”
why has the so-called radical left/progressives etc. been so ineffective in organizing around extreme hate groups? oh. wait. maybe we want those 98 cent apples too. we just don’t want our hate that obvious……
>”We will not permit you, the ignorant, the savage, the unwashed, to overrun us, as happened in Rome…Land must be paid for in blood. If any invader tries to take this land from us we will wash this land and nurture our soil with oceans of their blood!”
jesus christ. drama queen much?
it’d be funny if it weren’t scary.
…it is educational to see harassment/terrorizing methods laid out so bluntly.
thank fuck for the war on terror, eh?
How can you believe those lies? The “research” of SPLC is very lacking; they needed to smear me to satisfy their own desire to get back at me for appropriating their word, “Nativist,” among other things. And the email I allegedly wrote came from a nazi? Wow, that’s a reliable source! Give me a break, and stop believing every thing you read. I didn’t write that email, and even the NSM has said it was FAKED.
welcome, laine. how can i believe those words? because the mentality of the anti-immigrant movement and the neo-nazi movement are the same: that this nation is being dirtied by non-White people and that we must put a stop to it in order to ensure that White people remain #1 (both in population and in social power). I would say if you didn’t write that email, then prove it, but 1)i’m not sure how you would prove it, and 2)i don’t really care. Even if you didn’t write the email, how can you justify some of the stuff that has come out of the anti-immigrant movement?
Like the Minutemen’s goal to “protect America” from the “tens of millions of invading illegal aliens who are devouring and plundering our nation.” Seriously, devouring and plundering? The only devouring and plundering i’ve seen is on behalf of the corporations and developers that are taking over all our family farms, shutting down local businesses, and moving jobs overseas so that they can exploit workers somewhere else a little more than they could get away with here all so they can make a few billion extra dollars. What devouring and plundering have immigrants from Mexico done? Or how about this quote from one of the Minutemen on patrol back in April, “It should be legal to kill illegals. Just shoot ‘em on sight. That’s my immigration policy recommendation. You break into my country, you die.” That doesn’t seem to be an uncommon sentiment among your friends. And what kind of ‘anti-racist’ screening policy do yall have that let’s folks like this into the ranks of your militia-style patrols?
Yes, i’m aware that the NSM said the email was fake. But they also said that the Minutemen are “radical anti-racists and anti-facists who have systematically expelled from their ranks every white activist they have come into contact with.” So concidering i have seen absolutely no anti-racist or anti-fascist work (fascists tend to prefer stronger borders, after all) nor have i seen anything but White faces representing the Minutemen, i find it hard to believe anything the the NSM says to be credible. Besides, they also said that the proof that it was fake was that the full headers appeared in the email and that Mr. Martin doesn’t have the technical know-how to do such a thing. I don’t know about your email client, but mine attaches the full header in every forwarded email. So their evidence is flimsy at best. However, i’ll be honest with you, the SPLC isn’t my favorite group, either. According to them, i’m also a terrorist. So we have something else in common. And for that i’m willing to give you a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.
But even if you didn’t write the letter, i’m less interested in your intentions than i am in your actions and the results of those actions. It is undeniable that the recent upsurge in anti-immigrant fervor has caused an increase in the number of violent attacks against immigrants. I don’t have to read a press release by the SPLC to see that. Living in the state with the most per capita immigrants, all i have to do is talk to an immigrant laborer or pick up the newspaper to hear about the most recent attacks. Are you and your friends willing to accept accountability for creating the atmosphere that gets people killed? Or is that what you really want?
And have you ever stopped for a moment to even think about why anyone would want to cross the border illegally - risking death and imprisonment? Have you ever stopped to think that your efforts might be better spent on stopping corporate globalization, which not only exports factories and farms to less accountable job markets but also creates such a repressive environment in other countries that people in those countries feel they are better off being treated like shit in the US and making a few bucks than they are to die starving or scrape by in their homelands. Can you imagine what it would take for you to leave the place you love? how much pain and suffering? would you have to be at rock bottom to travel somewhere knowing that you might be killed on the way or that you would be hated once you got there? If you don’t want people moving here, fine. But why focus on the reactionary and fascist routes of building walls and militaries? Why not focus on creating systems of global justice and creating a world where no one has the need to immigrate illegally. Cuz when that world exists, you won’t need borders. You won’t need border guardians. And you can go back to burning your Mexican flags in the peace and quite of your own backyard.
To digress briefly on Jay’s comment about why radicals have not organized effectively against extreme hate groups…I guess I disagree completely that the radical left consciously or un-consciously supports these groups. (By which I DON’T mean that the radical white left has good racial politics). I’ve seen several things happen on the radical left about extreme hate groups. Usually it goes like this: white people organize to attack the hate groups, but quickly split into “liberal” (peace marches, pressure campaigns, letters to the editor) and “radical” (let’s go beat them up!). The liberal end of the spectrum gets co-opted into being bland and boring and attracts a lot of platitudes but no action. The radicals devolve into a group of macho people (usually mostly straight men) who really like fighting. Here in Minneapolis, I can think of two big culture shifts in the radical left that occurred when groups based around fighting were in the ascendent. Both were VERY destructive to radical groupings generally and particularly hard on women. (I’d be glad to detail this if anyone needs details) Another issue is that mainstream left discourse usually goes something like this: “Extremists aren’t the problem–the problem is structural racism. Too often, the left attacks extremists because it’s sexy, while being all too comfortable with the structures of white priviledge”. Which is not entirely a dumb statement. However, I think the underlying problem, at least in MPLS, is that the white left is so segregated. There are plenty of white activists (myself included) who can talk an awfully good game about “ending white priviledge” and “white people fighting racism” but who still never actually talk to anyone who isn’t white (and/or middle class). Now, I know that it’s not the job of people of color to EDUCATE white people, but surely this doesn’t mean that white people should avoid taking political action together with people of color? I think that a more effective campaign against hate groups, a campaign that could also tackle anti-immigrant bias generally, could work much better if white radicals could desegregate. (And I don’t think we segregate because we like being segregated…I think we segregate out of fear, habit, shame, discomfort, and a desire to take the easier path. These aren’t good reasons, or justifiable feelings, but they are not the same as liking segregation (and I do mean that we have to desegregate, not wait for a person of color to come along and integrate the room)