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EUSTACE MULLINS: US FASCIST IN CANADA
"Anti-Fascist Resistance" column, by David Lethbridge
(This article is from the October 16-31/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
ON AUGUST 6 AND 7, US fascist Eustace Mullins, of Staunton, Virginia, spoke in Salmon Arm, BC, as the "surprise guest speaker" at a conference of the Preferred Network.
Mullins has a notorious history going back fifty years. In the early 1950s, he was a member of the New York-based National Renaissance Party, the successor of the Socialist Reich Party which campaigned to release Nazi war criminals, and maintained contacts with neo-fascist parties in the USA, Canada, and elsewhere.
Later in the 1950s, Mullins worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy in the campaign to demonize communists and other progressives and destroy their organizations.
In the 1980s and '90s, Mullins served as a contributing editor to the Christian Vanguard, a publication edited by the former information officer of the American Nazi Party, James K. Warner. The Vanguard is the periodical of the Christian Defense League, a Louisiana-based organization which combines elements of Nazi-fascism and the white racist Christian Identity religion. The neo-Nazi Aryan Nations has published Mullins' books, and Mullins has spoken at numerous Identity conferences, along with such notables as ex-KKK leader, David Duke. In the late 1990s, Mullins began to speak at meetings of the militia movement.
Last year, the Preferred Network's (PN) internet site was shut down when it was exposed that PN was selling numerous materials deemed to be hate propaganda by Customs and Excise Prohibited Importations Unit. Among these materials were works by Mullins. The Curse of Canaan, a Mullins title sold by PN, asserts that Jews and people of colour were forever cursed by God; in open advocacy of genocide, it states that "God's command" is that white people should "exterminate" them. Shortly after its closure, the PN website reappeared at a different location and continues to sell Mullins' books and videotapes.
Mullins' participation in the August PN conference was also exposed, with subsequent press coverage. A spokesperson for PN claimed in the local media that the theme of the conference was "truth and freedom," and that there had been no antisemitic content in the Mullins sessions.
However, when the spokesperson was later contacted, and it was put to her that Mullins had gone so far as to write that Jews drink human blood, she said, "What Mullins writes is damn well true!" When asked whether she believed the same thing, she said, quite forcefully, "I believe that. I know that it is a fact. I know that it is true!"
Pressed on what she thought about Mullins' denial of the Nazi Holocaust, she claimed, "The Nazis were not behind the killing of the Jews, they didn't do it. The Nazis were not responsible. It was the Jews who ran the camps and they killed their own people. But the ones who did the killing, they weren't really Jews, they were just hiding behind the name Jews. They were really Khazars." (It is a staple among many sectors of contemporary fascism that most Jews are descendants of the feudal Russo-Turkish kingdom of Khazaria, many of whose people converted to Judaism. On these spurious grounds, antisemities can then deny their antisemitism by claiming that the Jews are not Semites.)
Mullins is not new to the region. In 1989, and again in 1992, he spoke in the Okanagan. In 1991, he attended a conference in Calgary, along with neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel, antisemite James Keegstra, and militia advocate Bo Gritz. In his 1992 speech at Eileen Pressler's Council on Public Affairs conference, Mullins revealed the depths of his racial hatred when he said: "The US government has been breeding negroes since the Civil War. But they have know idea what to do with them. They don't realize you're supposed to sell them."
Mullins recent appearance in central BC raises important issues for the antifascist movement. It is frequently claimed today that fascist organizing and recruiting in North America has stalled, even that it is no longer of importance.
This is not true. Neo-fascism in the contemporary period is undergoing a variety of permutations, and is manifesting itself in new and different formations, often making it more difficult to combat. But it is worth considering that if such a major and important fascist as Eustace Mullins is appearing in one small town - and might easily have gone unnoticed - how many other communities, across the country, are being infected by these hatemongers, who so quickly appear and disappear, their presence all too often unreported and unknown?
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