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Increasingly since 9/11, American political discourse and popular culture has acknowledged, if not celebrated, the sacrifices of members of its armed forces. The often self serving praise of the service of others, which so few with privilege have ever seriously contemplated, has not resulted in heightened care for soldiers and veterans, nor deeper reflection among many on those who opt to serve, and what their service might mean for American democracy.
Unfortunately, Wade Michael Page likely will not foster the needed conversations about these issues, but instead prompt attention to the dispositions and drives that led to Page to commit what has repeatedly been described “as a senseless act.” Yet, as noted by Rinku Sen in Colorlines, these murders “are neither senseless nor random, and the vast majority of such incidents here involve white men. Racism holds a terrible logic, for a concept with no grounding whatsoever in science or morality, yet too many white people don’t see any pattern.” Equally powerful, Harsha Walia reminds readers to break down the walls between extreme and mainstream, between individual and societal, between civilian and military, to look at this violence not as yet another instance of a bad apple but yet another of the rotten tree(s):
The crimes of white supremacists are not exceptions and do not and cannot exist in isolation from more systemic forms of racism. People of colour face legislated racism from immigration laws to policies governing Indigenous reserves; are discriminated and excluded from equitable access to healthcare, housing, childcare, and education; are disproportionately victims of police killings and child apprehensions; fill the floors of sweatshops and factories; are over-represented in heads counts on poverty rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, and high school dropout rates. Colonialism has and continues to be shaped by the counters of white men’s civilizing missions.
To our minds, if this properly projects the arc of media coverage, until the next trauma or panic, we fear we will have lost real occasion to put into dialogue two key elements of Page’s biography: he was a veteran and he was a white supremacist. We do not know how these elements of his identity and experience interfaced with one another, though apparently his general discharge in 1998 was not related to bias. We do know, however, that thinking about the connections between white nationalist groups and the U.S. military, between the mainstream and the extreme, will help us better apprehend the shooting in Wisconsin, and more engage their implications more sensibly. “It would be a mistake to dismiss Page was an isolated actor from a lunatic fringe disconnected from the mainstream of U.S. society. In fact, the reality is that white supremacy is a persistent, tragic feature of the American cultural and political landscape,”writes Jessie Daniels. “The extreme expressions of white supremacy – like this shooting, or like some of the violent images and messages previously circulated in print and now online – are part of a larger problem. White supremacy is woven into the fabric of our society and it kills people.” We see this fact in the relationship between white supremacy and the U.S. military.
This is not a new issue, but it one that continues to resurface, often in association with tragic acts of violence. Nearly 25 years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) brought to the attention of the Reagan administration that “active-duty Marines at Camp Lejeune, NC, were participating in paramilitary Ku Klux Klan activities and even stealing military weaponry for Klan use.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger acted decisively, clarifying for members of the armed forces that involvement with “white supremacy, neo-Nazi and other such groups...[was] utterly incompatible with military service.”
A decade later, a group of Neo-Nazi skinheads, members of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, NC, killed a black couple. The Department of Defense again issued a directive reminding enlisted personnel that extremism had no place in the US military.
In the official report about the killing, the DOD highlighted the broader systemic threat. “The threats posed by extremism to the military are simultaneously blatant and subtle,” the Defense Department study continued, “On the one hand, high-profile terrorist acts and hate crimes committed by active and former military personnel can have seriously detrimental effects on the civil-military relationship as well as on the morale and security of military personnel. On the other hand, even the non-violent activities of military personnel with extremist tendencies (e.g., possessing literature and/or artifacts from the extremist 'movement'; dabbling in extremism through computerized telecommunications activities; proselytizing extremist ideologies, etc.) can have deleterious consequences for the good order, discipline, readiness, and cohesion of military units.”
White supremacist organizations have been known to target Special Force soldiers as they have been trained in everything from combat demolitions to urban warfare. “Hate groups send their guys into the U.S. military because the U.S. military has the best weapons and training," said T.J. Leyden, who while a member of the Marines recruited his white brethren to join the Hammerskins, a renowned and violent skinhead gang that has been linked to Wade.
According to Leyden the military was not just a perfect place to recruit but a perfect space to train fighters for the race war: “Right now, any white supremacist in Iraq is getting live fire, guerilla warfare experience,” he concluded. “But any white supremacist in Iraq who's a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or Marine Recon, he's doing covert stuff that's far above and beyond convoy protection and roadblocks. And if he comes back and decides at some point down the road that it's race war time, all that training and combat experience he's received could easily turn around and bite this country in the ass.” Leyden was not alone. Steven Barry, a former Special Forces officer, encouraged members of the National Alliance to enter the Army and request entry into light infantry units:
Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war. It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed. As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood.
Given the concerted effort to recruit white soldiers, given the decision of the military to ignore hate-related activities/signs, and given the ways that racism has operated within the history military, it should come as no surprise that people like Wade and McVeigh would be produced in this context.
Despite countless events and reports, the response has been minimal. In 2006,The New York Times reported how the acceptance of racism within the military ranks: “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.” On the one hand, we should ask ourselves how those individuals whose follow the ideology of white supremacist group, who profess allegiance to organizations committed to a racial war, who engage hate crimes and other forms of racial violence, are not seen as “gang members.” On the other hand, we have to wonder that had violence been perpetrated by “gang members,” and given the racial meaning conveyed within such a term, would the media and public be in such a rush to individualize this crime, to turn into a conversation about him rather than the broader social and political context. Would there be a push to look at links and connections, to rid the military of white supremacist.
The shooting in Wisconsin is tragic, even shocking, albeit not surprising given the history of white supremacy, given the look the other way approach from a military in search of bodies, given the violence that has been central to white supremacy throughout history. It marks another dark day for the country, reminding us once more how powerful intolerance and anger continue to be. It is perhaps predictable that a mass killing of South Asian immigrants would be at the hands of active advocate of white power.
While comforting to see his actions as that of an “extremist” the seeds of anger, the seeds of racism, and seeds of violence were sown within countless mainstream spaces. And, in light of this history, it perhaps less surprising that the shooter was a veteran. “Today's white supremacists in the military become tomorrow's domestic terrorists once they're out,” noted Scott Barfield, an investigator with the Department of Defense. “There needs to be a tighter focus on intercepting the next Timothy McVeigh before he becomes the next Timothy McVeigh.” Or the next Wade Michael Page. We fear that if the military fails after a quarter century of incidents and reports to root out neo-Nazis and white supremacists, this will not be the last such attack.
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He has written on sport, video games, film, and social movements, appearing in both popular and academic mediums. His work explores the political economy of popular culture, examining the interplay between racism, state violence, and popular representations through contextual, textual, and subtextual analysis. Leonard’s latest book After Artest: Race and the Assault on Blackness was just published by SUNY Press in May of 2012.
C. Richard King is Professor of Ethnic Studies at Washington State University at Pullman and the author/editor of several books, including Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy and Postcolonial America.
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