Category Archives: Nazis in South Carolina

Column on the Nazis and South Carolina

Nazis_111

Thanks to the flag,
we’ve got Nazis on our steps

By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
HERE IS HOW one decent, earnest, sensible South Carolinian responded when I asked what he thought should be done about the Confederate flag flying on the State House grounds:
    “On the flag, it’s such a tough issue. I do think there’s some wisdom in the old adage: ‘The best thing about a compromise is that nobody’s happy.’ …. I’d hate to have a renewed flag debate suck all the political oxygen out of the state. I’m afraid that could happen, and there are many issues that need/require attention. So… my instinct would be not to revisit the issue at this time.”
    To which I impatiently reply, What political oxygen?
    What exactly are we getting accomplished in South Carolina these days? What are we doing to catch up to the rest of the country? We compromise on compromises until we accomplish nothing — witness the DOT “reform” staggering its pitiful way through the General Assembly. If we can’t even reform that, what can we do in this state?
    I’m sick of compromises. You know what the compromise on the flag brought us? Nazis, who believe, because of that flag, that we’re their kind of people.
    I have video on my blog (the address is below; please go check it out) of American Nazis standing on our State House steps and congratulating white South Carolinians for having the “guts” to fly that flag and tell anybody who doesn’t like it, especially those whiny black people, to go to hell. They are very happy with the compromise. Before, the flag was a little hard to see up on the dome. Now, as one speaker says in the video, it’s “in your face,” and the Nazis are loving it.
    One thing you have to hand to those pathetic losers who paraded around in silly costumes “Sieg Heiling” to beat the band on our state’s front porch Saturday: They just go ahead and say things that most South Carolinians won’t say out loud.
    Personally — and I hope you won’t think less of me for saying this — I’ve always kind of hated Nazis. Until this past weekend, that seemed like a fairly pointless emotion, sort of like hating Phoenicians. But it was sincerely felt. Neo-Confederates have their way of living in the past; this was mine. I felt that I had been born too late to fight the one thing that got my blood boiling more than anything.
    And yet there I was Saturday, surrounded by marching, shouting, racist, Jew-hating, uniformed jackbooted Brownshirts — and I had not the slightest urge to shoot any of them, except with my little Canon digital camera. I had a new urge, a powerful need to share what I was seeing with the world — particularly with my fellow South Carolinians, whose insistence upon flying that flag is what brought these guys out of their sad little holes of rejection all over this vast nation. They thought they were finally at home.
    “Look at the flag, guys!” said one as they marched under it, thrilled at having his fantasy come true. He had never expected to see such a thing on public, government-mandated display. He was like a pimple-faced guy who’d never had a date, suddenly presented with the most gorgeous woman he’d every dreamed of, naked and willing. The situation was positively pornographic.
    He had evidently never felt so welcome before. This was obviously a place that loved and valued white people. Oh, springtime for Hitler!
    He was pathetic. They were all pathetic. Needy, too. Their messages of racial hatred and division were interspersed with plaintive entreaties to onlookers (the white gentiles, of course) to join them, accept them, see them as brave and praiseworthy.
    I guess Hitler was sort of pathetic, too, seen in isolation — all those silly, over-the-top gestures at the podium. It was when you saw the thousands of perfect, ordered rows of mad followers willing to do anything he said that he succeeded in terrifying beyond imagination.
    John Taylor Bowles, the Nazi “presidential candidate” who spoke at the rally Saturday, is no Hitler. No oratorical panache at all. He looked like what he was — a pudgy, middle-aged, mild-voiced notary public who just happened to have a few extreme ideas about people who didn’t look like the kind of Master Race that he wanted to see himself as part of. (His Web site describes him as “a devoted fun loving father of three daughters” and claims membership in the AARP.)
    Sure, he’s one little whacko surrounded by two or three dozen “re-enactors” who like to play dress-up. But is he really that alone, that aberrant? How unusual is it today to hear indignant native whites talk about illegal immigrants the way he did?
    Bowles was so ordinary, so banal, so nonthreatening. He had no army of storm troopers before him that I could see. But as far as he was concerned, he did have an army. He was there because he thought he could see two or three million white South Carolinians who were very receptive to a message like his. What else was he to gather from the presence of that flag?
    One of the speakers said they would be back next year, and the year after that. They liked it here. Maybe we could do something to make them feel a little less welcome. Can you think of anything? I can.

See and hear Nazis praise South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag at http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/2007/04/confederate_fla_1.html.

Nazis_005

The post that wasn’t

How do you write about Nazis?

That very question is so out there, so absurd, so
anachronistic, that’s it’s hard for me to write any other way than in
the facetious tone I used in previous posts on the subject.

But that doesn’t seem appropriate. And yet I can’t react with the urge to violence that the Nazis of old inspire. I can’t even work up the indignation that seemed to inform the protesters who were there to shout back at them. The spectacle was just so grotesquely ridiculous.

But irony isn’t the right response, still less amusement. Because behind their game of dress-up was the ugly fact that Columbia, South Carolina looked like a hospitable place to them. That presents us with a certain challenge.

For the last hour or so, I wrote about the implications of that. I had intended to post it here, but it ended up being as long as a column, yet pretty uneven. I decided to save it as a column, to look at it again on Monday, and if I can whip it into shape, run it on Tuesday or Wednesday. It I decide it’s just to lame for print in the light of day, I’ll come back and post it here.

In the end, though, what do you say about Nazis in front of you on a magnificent spring day right here in Columbia, SC, in the 21st century. Today. Springtime for Hitler — Mel Brooks was making fun of this stuff forty years ago.

But it’s not funny, is it?

Nazis praise white South Carolinians for having “guts” to fly Confederate flag at State House


OK
, here’s the video. We have two clips from the Nazi rally today.Ernst

The first is the National Socialist Movement presidential candidate, John Taylor Bowles, explaining why he
is "South Carolina’s only presidential candidate" — he defends our flying of the Confederate flag on our State House grounds.

The second speaker was a young rip-snorter, but I failed to catch his name. Anyway, he was really proud of us South Carolinians for the way we stick up for white power by flying that flag — and he taunted blacks and us whites who wanted it down by pointing out that thanks to the compromise of 2000 that Glenn McConnell is so proud of, it’s now "IN YOUR FACE!"

Which, of course, it is.

Nazis rally at the State House

Flagnazis

"Hey, look at the flag, guys!" said the cheerful young Nazi as he and his fellow Brownshirts march in rough order past the Confederate soldier monument on the State House lawn.

It seemed to make him feel at home. He sounded pleased, excited, childlike — in marked contrast to the determined effort of his uniformed cohorts to seem grim and scary.

Shortly thereafter, his comrades ranged themselves at the top of the first tier of steps of the South Carolina Capitol, right in front of George Washington’s statue. Various commands were barked to get the guys with the uniforms ranged all along the plateau looking out at the thin, curious crowd — commands, and casual insults cast off to the right at the exuberant knot of counterprotesters chanting, "Peace, love" and the like.

It was a beautiful spring day, one day after the Fuehrer’s 118th birthday, and no one seemed to be Happynazis
having a bad time. Everybody was doing what they had come to do. Yeah, the atmosphere was uglier than what you would normally expect on such a beautiful day — you can feel that in the video — but I was braced for worse, so it was a pleasant afternoon by comparison to expectations.

The crowd was more or less divided into fourths:

  1. The Nazis had come to stand looking determined, with their leaders screaming defiantly into aSternnazis
    microphone in a way that no doubt thrilled them — I gathered they don’t get out to do this sort of thing much, and they were making the most of it.
  2. The "peace, love" folks were really getting into it, obediently staying behind their barricade. There was no want of enthusiasm on their part; one could not reproach them with that. But one got the feeling of a routine. You know, this weekend the Nazis, next weekend the Iraq war (which the Nazis are also against — they want the troops brought home to defend the border from Mexicans) again. As a photographer from The State observed to me: "Oh, there’s that lady again. I see that lady everywhere."
  3. The cops were out in some force, in all sorts of riot gear — city cops, SLED, Highway Patrol, the Rules
    usual Protective Service folks. Mostly, they just stood on post waiting for trouble that didn’t come while I was there. (The rally was halfway over before they asserted themselves in any way — forming a file between the National Socialists and onlookers, making those of us with cameras move back. For the first couple of speakers, we were up there amongst ’em.)
  4. Then there were the gawkers. Professionals like me, and quite a few hobbyists, many with much better cameras than mine. Some were there to grumble and occasionally shout at the Nazis, but everybody just kind of stayed in their own spot.

Anyway, the speakers eventually got around to praising the Confederate flag — saying how brave andBrothers
wonderful South Carolinians were for flying it on behalf of white people everywhere — and slamming the Hillary Clintons and such who criticize it.

But once the speakers settled into their putative reason for being there — to speak against illegal immigration — I got bored (you can hear that kind of stuff any day), decided I’d been out in the sun enough, and headed back to share my video with you.

That’s coming up momentarily.

Banner

Why a rally? It’s the Führer’s birthday, Dumbkopf!

Well, now we know why the Brownshirts are having a party downtown on Saturday.

I usually avoid seeking out quotes from professional commenters who actually send out press releases offering their comments. But I did read this one, and as a result I know that the Nazi rally Saturday is apparently to celebrate the Führer’s birthday!

And I didn’t get him a thing… Anyway, since Hitler’s actual birthday is Friday, I guess these are sort of slacker Nazis, who can only be troubled to goose-step on weekends.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:  Bill Nigut
               SE Region Director

ADL EXPERTS AVAILABLE
FOR REACTION TO SCHEDULED
NEO-NAZI RALLY IN COLUMBIA, SC

Atlanta, GA, April 19, 2007
…The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) will have experts available for comment on the planned anti-immigrant march and concert by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement scheduled for Saturday, April 21 in Columbia, South Carolina.  The rally is part of a weekend of NSM events marking the birthday of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
    Based in Minneapolis, MN, the National Socialist Movement (NSM) is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic group and one of the most active neo-Nazi organizations in the United States. Members of the group attend rallies in full Nazi uniform and regalia and call for ridding the country of Hispanic and other non-white immigrants and minorities.
    The NSM is scheduled to hold its “national meeting” in Columbia on Friday, April 20, followed by an anti-immigrant rally and white power music concert on Saturday.  April 20 is Hitler’s birthday and is a date traditionally used by neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups to perpetuate Hitler’s legacy of hate and to promote their message of anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry.
    “White supremacists have long sought to use Hitler’s birthday as a means to spread anti-Semitism and racism and to draw attention to themselves and their message of hate,” said Bill Nigut, ADL Southeast Regional Director.  “While this group operates on the fringes of society, their dangerous and racist rhetoric about immigrants, Jews and other minority groups should be taken seriously.”
    The group claims that the rally will be attended by Klan members and other white supremacist groups from across the country.  Like other extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the NSM has seized on the national debate over immigration to recruit new members to their cause.

Additional background information on the NSM is available on the League’s Web site at National Socialist Movement. (http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/The_National_Socialist_Movement.asp)

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

                                    ###

Spurrier vs. the Nazis?

Just in case you didn’t suspect that this post and this one might be connected, I received an e-mail from a friendly correspondent saying the following:

I am planning on coming up to watch the silliness of the NAZI’s on Saturday.  I am waiting on a call from a close friend of mind (with) C-Span. They are thinking seriously about covering it in light of all that has happened with Spurrier.

I don’t know whether that’s true, but whether C-SPAN is interested or not, it might be interesting to see what kinds of flags appear at the rally Saturday. I mean, aside from the usual swastika sort.

Nazis to march in Columbia

You don’t get to post a headline like that every day. Of course, I’ve always thought that was a good thing.

Anyway, for those of you who think we don’t write enough about the terrible threat of illegal immigration, be cheered by this release from the Columbia Police Department:

Columbia — The
National Socialist Movement will be having a March & Rally in Columbia  on Saturday, April 21, 2007.  The Columbia Police
Department along with other State and local police agencies will be providing
traffic control and security for this event.  I have listed the approximate
times of street closings and event times.  Please forward this information to
the businesses that will be affected by this operation.  Please feel free to
contact me if you have any questions.

Sergeant B.G. Goff, Special Events
Coordinator

Columbia Police
Department

The National Socialist Movement is described as the largest neo-Nazi movement in the U.S.

The theme of the rally will be illegal immigration. The Nazis are against it, in case you wondered. Apparently, they don’t empathize with the Mexican yearning for Lebensraum.

I’m going to have to create a whole new category for this one.