The shooting rampage at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota puts American
neo-Nazism back on the front page and adds an awful top spin to yesterday’s e-mail debate about David Irving
and C-SPAN.
As you’ve doubtless read by
now, Jeff Weise — a self-described Ojibwe Native American teenager who killed 10 people,
wounded seven others, then committed suicide — wrote messages on a neo-Nazi web site saying
he had “a natural admiration for Hitler and his ideas”; his tribe needed “more pure bloods”; and his
high school teachers frowned on anyone who espoused “racial purity.”
Apparently taking the names “Todesengel” (Angel of Death) and NativeNazi in e-mails
posted in a chat room of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, Weise wrote:
When I was growing up, I was taught (like others) that Nazi’s were (are) evil
and that Hitler was a very evil man … Of course, not for a second did I believe this. Upon reading
up on his actions, the ideals and issues the German Third Reich adressed, I began to see how
much of a lie had been painted about them. They truly were doing it for the better.
The only one’s who oppose my views are the teachers at the high school, and a large portion
of the student body who think a Nazi is a Klansman, or a White Supremacist
thug.
The alienation that underpinned Weise’s anger and distorted his sense of reality is evident in
his writings. So is the peculiar irony of a Native American allying himself with neo-Nazi white
supremacists. He wrote:
Most of the Natives I know have been poisoned by what they were taught in
school. The basic “Nazi = Bad, Jew = Good. Defend Jew at all costs.” You get the idea, the
public school system has done more harm then good, and as a result it has left many on this
reservation misled and misinformed. …
What ways has the Jewish power affected us in General? Ever since the Jewish post-war
propaganda has been taught in our school systems (on reservations), a lot have been brainwashed
into thinking purity is wrong, at least that’s my take on it. …
The teachers at my school are all white (besides the Ojibwe language teacher), yet the times I
have brought up that Native Women and Black men, or White women and Native men shouldn’t
be together to keep their blood pure, I’ve been called a racist. When I bring up the point that our
tribe (the Ojibwe) is mixed a lot and is in need of more pure bloods, I get the same old argument
which seems to be so common around here. “We need to mix all the races, to combine all the
strengths …” ect ect. It gets old real quick when you hear the same argument over and over.
They (teachers) don’t openly say that racial purity is wrong, yet when you speak your mind
on the subject you get “silence” real quick by the teachers and likeminded school officials
…
Weise makes no mention of Irving, the racist Holocaust denier who argues an elaborately
specious case for the Nazis in his lectures to white supremacist groups and in his books. But it
wouldn’t be surprising if Weise had mentioned him. He says in one message that he has boned up
on the Third Reich and Nazism. His ideas have the ring of Irving’s themes. In fact, Irving’s
“scholarship” often serves as a “historical” framework for racists who justify their ideology with a
“respectable” rationale to “educate” angry kids like Weise. C-SPAN needn’t give Irving a forum.
He already has the Internet.
