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March 23, 2005
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.
Posted by at March 23, 2005 11:36 AM
