FRONT-PAGE TOP SPIN

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.

March 23, 2005 11:36 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
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