White Supremacists: Who they are and how they got that way

[nolabear]

This is an article from Salon on White Supremacists. It's interesting, sad, and makes me ask myself how we can effect change so that the circumstances and feelings that lead these people down the path of despair, fear, rage, disenfranchisement and a legacy that has the potential to be terribly dangerous are changed. I understand the desire to just separate from them and hurl invective, but all that does is concretize the feelings and behaviors. How can this segment of American society be given some reason to feel their lives have meaning again?

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/

[Thinkingabout]

1. There are those who thinks it is okay to be cruel to anyone or anything. Anger is their life, they

Seem to thrive on their anger. It doesn't really enhance their lives, takes away many hours of their lives which if put to good use could result in happy days. I choose to try to make each and everyday the best of my life.

[nolabear]

6. Thinking globally and acting locally.

It's the best start.

[RKP5637]

2. I sympathize with their plight, but not with their methodology. I fault the government for

doing little to help in the transition. Often, governments seem to be the enemy of people, but bless corporations as the 'new' people as the corporate model becomes "we the people."

Also, I question for one example, in a nation with failing infrastructure all over the place, why this takes a backseat ... and why we can't transition individuals to help rebuild the country ... but this fails, because in the new model corporations and wall street come first, people last ... in a country preoccupied with disaster capitalism, the oligarchy, and the worship of $$$$$ above all, the most I've seen in my lifetime.

In short, nibbling at the edges will not fix the problems. Also, we have many disadvantaged youth, plagued with somewhat similar, but of a different nature, problems. In short, it is a mess, and I see little being done to address it in a big way, but rather business as usual.

[nolabear]

5. Amen. And it's just the opposite of what they believe would help.

American "individualism" in the way it's practiced there is a tool for dividing and conquering by the corporatists.

[DissidentVoice]

3. An actually somewhat sympathetic article

Nonetheless, it has some of the most venomous responses one could think of.

There are so many contradictions with these peoples' "thinking"...they are fervently pro-capitalism - the system that screwed them, their parents and grandparents.

They claim to be "Christian," but ignore essential teachings of Jesus.

What gets me is those who do not live in the South, have never lived in the South, have no relatives in the South and who have never been to the South buying into all the Confederate imagery.

[nolabear]

4. I agree with all you said.

It's one of the most frightened, contradictory frames of mind I have seen, and horrifyingly combines American Cowboy individualism and proto-Nazi denial and blame. The pro-Capitalist stance seems to wish for a paternal figure that will take care of them and give them purpose, and the Right has managed to convince them that they will save them through reinforcing their philosophical stance, which protects them from the reality of the fact that the Right is in fact the ones who have crippled them.

I think the Confederate imagery is the only reference they've got for having fought for a cause. And it drags up an old "other" to rally against instead of the one they can't do a whole lot about unless they admit they're following the wrong leaders. It's as convoluted, compartmentalized a way of thinking as I can imagine, and with guns.

[Katashi_itto]

7. Have you ever tried talking to one of these "people"?

There is no reasoning with them. Their whole mentality is a trhowback to the turn of the century. Everyone of them i've every chatted with is a "John Wayne" able to tame the wilderness with his bare hands (never mind the fact he/she is in a wheelchair or is suffering from a stroke, I'm serious).

They think they don't need the govt.

[nolabear]

8. Honey, I grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana.

They're not as prominent there as people often think but they're there. And yes, I've talked to them. The fear and defensiveness boils off of them like a force field. But there are things they love, and there's incredible loss, and sometimes we've managed to shake and part without hatred, if not respect. That doesn't mean I can stomach a single thing about the way they perceive the world outside their sphere, but it does leave me with the worry that, since they're real people and not a faceless ideology, they can't be helped without exactly what it is incredibly hard to give - compassion. Not agreement, not acquiescence, not any kind of enabling, but a door that stays open if any of them wants to cross the threshold, just to talk.

And I know it's dangerous.

[MisterP]

9. the far right's always been in strong circulation in the US--both Red Scares, the Lavender Scare

were just the beginning: the Dems criticizing McCarthy and Joseph P. Kamp for making the purge look foolish, Gary North and Ayn Rand, Heinlein, the NRA, whitecoats blasting anyone opposed to Our Friend the Atom as a creationist woo-sucking warming denier--these have all moved the debate and even opinion far, far to the right of where it was in 1972, 1980, or even 1988

[DissidentVoice]

10. I often wonder why

It could be that many of the earliest settlements in what became this country were started by the Puritans - who were notorious "no fun allowed" types.

[MisterP]

11. ah, but there's also a huge temporal gap--and most would blame the Latitudinarians (who settled in

the South): racism is a central factor in the far right, and it was quite deliberately cultivated in slaveholding colonies and states to keep the lower class split; Appalachia actually opposed such divisive planter nonsense, and was even fertile ground for the CPUSA and FDR in the 20s and 30s--increasing incorporation into the national culture let revivalism turn into fundamentalism after WWII there

the Boston Brahmins certainly lurved Anthony Comstock, so there's this strong Shirley-Jackson-level judgmentalism in the old Puritan lands, but Victorian morality was present all over the 19th-c. US (now "Aryan morals" or whatever), and eventually even the women out West could use it to their advantage to earn the vote

meanwhile, racism has devoured its own tail: white supremacism now freely admits that Jews and East Asians are smarter than whites--as long as whites get to be better than the Dusky Threat of the Week