Over lunch one day, Lynx told me how, though forbidden to have a Game Boy, she was allowed to play Ethnic Cleansing, a shoot-’em-up computer game put out by the National Alliance in which a skinhead goes through a ghetto shooting blacks and Mexicans. “They hide in bushes and they’re perched on basketball hoops and they make gorilla sounds,” Lynx said. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”
Once or twice, I heard them using racial slurs—muttering “jungle bunnies” as we passed some black people in the car. Introduced to a man from New Mexico, Lynx said, “You don’t look like a spic.”
But I also sensed a wistfulness in the twins, a desire to be like other girls—to be normal.
In August 2004, a month before the conversation about Folk the System and the sack races, and despairing of ever seeing April or the twins for my “follow-up,” I made arrangements to visit the headquarters of the National Alliance in West Virginia.
Antiracism watchdog groups say the National Alliance is now the largest neo-Nazi group in America. They put its dues-paying membership at between 800 and 1,500. Unlike the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance is secular. It doesn’t field candidates for elections, it considers its function to “educate the public.” Its website speaks about its goal of achieving “White Living Space.” “We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved,” it says, going on to describe the racial utopia it envisions, a place where young women will waltz, reel, and jig but never “undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms.” Marc Chagall is singled out for special opprobrium as a Jewish artist, along with Barry Manilow—the surreality of this pairing rather serving to undermine the supposed value of racial categories.
Oddly enough, given its stand on “rock rhythms,” the National Alliance raises most of its money selling Nazi skinhead music on its label, Resistance. It also puts out a quarterly skinhead music magazine of the same name. But in its broader character, the National Alliance is at the intellectual, elitist end of the White Power spectrum. It is the Gray Poupon of hate groups. It publishes a bimonthly current affairs magazine, National Vanguard, and a monthly newsletter, Free Speech. Both contain articles on supposed Jewish world domination that are largely free of racial slurs but no less hateful for it. In a recent issue of Free Speech, a review of a book called Blood Ritual contained the line: “Naturally, the Jews aren’t the only group who have practiced (and might still practice) ritual murder,” going on to mention the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. This combination of a seemingly reasonable tone with a flat-out bizarre racial message, tossed in casually in parentheses, is typical of the National Alliance.
I drove up from Mississippi, where I’d been chasing gangsta rappers, through Tennessee, into West Virginia. The poorest state in the Union, poorer even than Mississippi, West Virginia is shaped like a stain on the map. Landlocked, bounded by rivers and mountains, it felt a little like the land that time forgot. I passed rickety old barns; elegant white shuttered houses with porches; a general store that stocked “lye soap” and “Amish cheese.” The countryside reminded me of England. Rolling hills and leafy trees looked down on fields and white wooden fences.
The headquarters themselves were a few miles outside the tiny town of Hillsboro, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, which run like a spine up the border between Virginia and West Virginia and flow into the Appalachians. I drove up a rutted dirt road, past farm buildings and a mobile home, into the woods. There was a sign saying “No Hunting or Trespassing—Keep Out” and a small “life rune,” the logo of the NA, which looked like a capital Y with three forks. But no swastikas, no signs saying “Whites Only” as there were at Aryan Nations.
I was met by Shaun Walker. An ex-Marine and ex-skinhead and now the chief operating officer of the National Alliance, Shaun was a beefy man. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, and had a punctilious military manner—his hair was clipped at the sides and he was wearing a white button-down shirt and a tie with a tie clip. He also had the endearing habit of mispronouncing certain words. President Putin was “Pootnin.” He said “amalgation” for “amalgamation” and coined the word “sheerly,” a synonym of “purely.” Shaun took me on a tour of the headquarters, crunching up a gravel road to a Quonset hut—a hangar-like auditorium with 200 or more seats where they hold their biannual “leadership conferences.” The road was overhung with trees and crowded with bushes. Shaun cut an incongruous figure, deep in the wilderness, in his shirt and tie, as insects chirped loudly. He looked like some minister of a government in exile, biding his time, dreaming of the downfall of the occupying power.
“We want a white, sovereign homeland,” he said. “We’d like to use the existing borders. If we can expand the borders, that would be okay. If it’s a portion of the existing United States, that would be okay. There would be no permanent residence of nonwhites. You’d have to keep interracial mating away. If they want to come as tourists, okay, that’s not a problem. There’s only a problem if they want to move permanently or mix racially.”
When the National Alliance founder, William Pierce, bought the acreage in West Virginia in 1984, he’d envisioned it as a kind of proto-homeland, a first step on the road to an American Reich. “There was a prevalent idea of buying an area and selling parcels and starting a little whites-only community,” Shaun said. “That was the original intent. But communes don’t work. They never have.” By 1990, they had abandoned that idea.
We crunched up another gravel road to the warehouse for Resistance Records. Its shelves were stacked with boxes of racist CDs. Angry Aryans. Celtic Warrior. Blue-Eyed Devils.
“1993 is when the first American White Power CD was pressed,” Shaun said. “And eleven years later, we have around seven hundred, eight hundred, so the whole thing is geometrically expanding . . . We believe we’re the largest distributor.”
In a strip-lit back office was a store of other merchandise. Stickers saying “Earth’s Most Endangered Species—The White Race—Help Preserve It”; copies of The Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther and White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell (the late American Nazi Party leader) alongside editions of Dickens, the Hornblower series by C. S. Forester and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Two or three young men were stuffing envelopes, answering phones, and filling orders. Shaun said they have eight full-time staff at the headquarters and another eight around the country.
“When are you going to put Lamb and Lynx on the cover of the magazine?” I asked.
“This month!” Shaun said. “We’re actually making their CD right now. Oh, the little kids love it. In fact, there are little kids around the country that write’em letters and stuff.”
Shaun handed me the latest issue of Resistance, which showed a severe-looking Lamb and Lynx, in short tartan skirts and white shirts, leaning against a brick wall, hugging their instruments. Indeed, Lamb’s skirt looked hiked up—most of her thigh was exposed— and she was almost scowling. It was hard to judge, but the overall effect was somehow a little off-key. But it was a delicate point and I wasn’t sure how to broach it.
“Why aren’t they smiling?”
“I don’t know. April showed the twins a bunch of photos they had taken and that’s the one they picked!”
“Because they’re being, ah, how do you read that?”
“Uh, I read that as that’s the picture April sent us! Ha ha!”
“Hmmm.”
On the way out of the warehouse, walking back toward the main office, Shaun shared his opinion of the Aryan Nations. Butler, then still alive, was a good person, he said. “But the organization is just slap full of crackpots. And it has been infiltrated by the federal government since time”—as Shaun put it—“immortal.”
“They did seem like they were marching, uh, goose-stepping to the beat of a different drum,” I said.
“When you go and you meet people, and their media spokespeople that come to you, and if they strike you as weird or oddballs, that’s bad. People aren’t supposed to be oddballs.”
&
nbsp; I felt Shaun and I were getting on quite well at this point, so I lowered my voice and confided: “But being a Nazi is pretty weird.” “Well, maybe. George Lincoln Rockwell was quite charming!”
“I’m speaking as someone who likes weird people,” I said, backpedaling.
“Adolf Hitler had so much personality and charisma.”
“I’m talking about nowadays. To be a Nazi sympathizer in this day and age. It’s odd, because it goes against what so many people feel, and what I feel, which is just that we should get along with people.”
“Yeah, but the problem is, Mother Nature says otherwise. Why does ‘white flight’ exist? Why in America has 50 percent of the white population moved in the last forty years? Why do areas like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey, exist? Why did all the white people leave? Biology is the reason! You can’t change it! They could buy a house for 10 percent of what they paid in the white area.”
“That’s what I did.”
“But most whites will not. You, I guess, get along better with them.”
Later, back at my motel, I read the interview with Lamb and Lynx in the new issue of Resistance. Maybe because they were speaking to a white racist publication the tone was different to the one they’d taken with me:
Res: What do you say to those people who think the only reason you are playing and singing prowhite music is because your mom pushes it on you?
Lamb: Our mom introduced us to racial music and she asked us if we wanted to learn an instrument . . . I don’t think she pushes it on us . . .
Lynx: We are hooked on playing WP [White Power] music and even if our mom all of a sudden stopped being racial, we would follow through with racial music.
Res: What kind of music do you like? Do you have a favorite artist?
Lamb: I like everything except nigger music. I don’t like rap, jazz, blues, or hip hop. Final War is a good example of the type of music I like best. I also like Youngland and Max Resist. I also like the Saga version of Skrewdriver songs.
Res: Being so young, aware, and proud of your heritage, is it hard to relate to other kids your age?
Lynx: Yes, it is sometimes, because they don’t understand what is going on and even if their parents are closet racists, they don’t teach their kids the facts . . .
Lamb: It is hard to relate to some kids who are mainstream, like my friend who lives down the street. She has black dolls. She makes them kiss with the white dolls. Yuck! We told her that doll was ugly and that it was wrong. Her parents are closet racists but they are afraid to teach her to be racist, too. I guess they just think she will figure it out. But there could be a time when she might come home with a black boyfriend and think that is okay. Then what will they do?
The use of a racial epithet surprised me. Likewise, the description of the nonwhite doll as ugly. There’s a kind of decorum practiced among certain white racists that dictates they don’t put down other races. Their beliefs, they maintain, have to do with pride in one’s own race. Hence, they style themselves “white separatists” rather than “white supremacists.” This was how they talked when their guard was down. And was Final War really Lamb’s favorite kind of music?
The photo of Lamb and Lynx in short skirts on the cover of Resistance spawned a lively discussion on White Power message forums on the Internet.
“Breaking News: National Alliance using kiddie porn now,” ran one post, with a copy of the cover pasted into the message.
“Who is running Resistance?” asked another. “Aryans? Or filthy kike pimps in Tel Aviv?”
“Do you think Hitler would have allowed his little girl out dressed like that?” asked a third.
Using her online name SheWolfoftheNA, April responded: “I would like you to understand exactly the aim of the cover of Resistance magazine this time. We are hoping to get the attention of young girls who are being bombarded with images like Britney Spears and the like. We are competing against the Hilary Duff/Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen phenomenon, and girls dressed like Little House on the Prairie won’t cut it. We need to be able to attract young women to our way of thinking in a way that will be timely as well as maintain our cultural and racial identification. The one thing that we lack more than anything are women in our white nationalist community. I believe that we need to attract them as young as possible and to do it in any way that works.”
It was true, I reflected, that teen idols on the Disney Channel dressed in a grown-up way and wore make-up; but as a rule, they also smiled in their photographs. The girls hadn’t smiled, I think probably because they wanted to look tough. But the combined effect of the short skirts and the not smiling gave them a kind of come-hither look that on twelve-year-old girls was, to say the least, disquieting.
When I saw them again the following year, on the way to the Halloween theme park, I asked April about the Resistance cover. I put it to April that she’d dressed the twins provocatively on purpose.
“But there’s no flesh showing!” she said. “I mean, they’re wearing leotards . . . At the very most, you could have said okay, maybe their skirts were a little short. But for them to claim it was kiddie porn? Did you see that? Isn’t that bizarre?”
“Well, I think they were trying to make a point by exaggerating.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s stupid. That’s like what the Jews do. That’s what we accuse the Jews of doing all the time, exaggerating figures and stuff to make a point.” “They said you were acting like a Jew,” I pointed out.
The Halloween theme park, when we got there, turned out to be a kind of epic version of the haunted houses they have at funfairs. There were walks through dark woods, a large spooky house, and a “hayride,” all of them staffed with people dressed up as ghouls and ghosts, looming out of the shadows, cackling, howling, and hooting.
I’m unusually sensitive to sudden loud noises, and I found the only way I could make it through the haunted zones without completely jangling my nerves was if I put my fingers in my ears and squinted. The idea of the outing, of course, had been to give me a chance to chat to Lamb and Lynx about the changes in their lives and about their beliefs. We’d done a little of that in the car. Lynx talked about the need for “real” diversity. What if lions and tigers interbred until there were none left, just a mixed-up species of half-and-halfs? Listening back to the tape of my conversation with the girls, I was surprised to hear myself say to Lynx, “Good answer.” Then I mentioned that “lygers” were real animals but that they, apparently, suffer from weight problems, as I’d learned on a TV documentary. I said this in the spirit of making a concession to her argument.
The truth was I felt odd soliciting incendiary remarks from Lamb and Lynx. Their comments about White Power had a rehearsed quality—they didn’t seem quite real. I had a feeling they would rather be listening to their Sony Discmans.
I was looking out for changes in them. They had both grown a couple of inches while I was away. They were a little more ladylike, wearing tiny amounts of make-up. Lamb had earrings. They had braces on their teeth.
“We have tickets to go to a Green Day concert on November 20,” Lynx said. “We know they’re not racial. They’re probably a communist band. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still good music and stuff. And it’s kind of upbeat and they’re talented musicians.” April’s mother had been waiting for us at the park. Her name was Dianne. She wore glasses and had short white hair. She grew up in England and came to America when she was fourteen. She babysat Dresden while we explored the park. After we’d done the walks and the hayride, we sat round in the concourse eating hot dogs while a rock band played and people dressed as zombies and ghouls mingled with the paying public.
“Are there still gaps where the buildings were bombed out in the Blitz?” Dianne asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“I was in Bristol. It was bad. So many derelict buildings. You’d see a bathtub two storeys up, just sticking out of the wall. They bombed Bristol pretty badly.”
“April likes him,�
�� I said, meaning Hitler. It seemed rather an important point—destruction of Europe by April’s dear leader—but Dianne didn’t hear. “What do you think of April’s views?”
“I think the races should be separate. I’m not a fighter the way my husband is. You don’t want a khaki nation do you? I had a friend over in England. He said everyone was khaki!” She squeezed Lamb’s cheeks. “Look at that face. Isn’t it beautiful? Blonde hair. Peachy complexion. Why would you want to go and ruin it?
The following morning, dandling baby Dresden on her lap, April played me a song from the new CD that Lamb and April had written together called “Sacrifice,” about martyrs to the cause of white nationalism. “Sacrifice, they gave their lives, all those ones who died.” It mentioned Rudolf Hess and William Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance. There was also another cover of a song by Ian Stuart, called “The Snow Fell.”
“I can’t wait to do the video on this,” April said.
“You’re doing a video?”
“Yeah! And a DVD!”
There were microphone stands in the front room. The girls sang “Green Fields of France,” a song about the First World War, which had also been covered by Ian Stuart. It had been drizzling, and when they finished Lynx went to the window and said, “I like the smell after it rains.”
“Do you think you might be a stage mom?” I said to April.
“Do you think I’m a stage mom?” April said, with sudden intensity. “What is a stage mom? Is a stage mom someone who buys their kids musical instruments and hauls them off to lessons every goddamn week when she has laundry and a thousand other things to do? And gets them to an open mike night so they can perform and books them into a recording studio? Isn’t it someone that’s overwhelmingly controlling and overbearing? I don’t think you could accuse me of that.”
The Call of the Weird Page 22
