http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/14/james-von-brunn-far-rightAn anti-liberal ideology is being created by groups who would once have been sworn enemies
Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday 14 June 2009
In his brutality and his obsessions, James W von Brunn was both a relic of the old far right and a sign of things to come. Before he murdered a security guard at the doors of the Washington Holocaust museum - murdered, that is, at a memorial to a mass murder he denied - he was tied into the old web of international neo-fascism. As might be predicted, he went to meetings of the American Friends of the British National party, where he could share his desire to drive the blacks and the Jews from the "white nations" with what friends he could find.
He did not seem to find many. Eighty-eight years old, living in a condo, with a broken marriage behind him, he even joined Mensa, the habitual rest home for failures with delusions of grandeur. Stephen Tyrone Johns, the security guard, who died for politely opening the door of his car, was in every respect the better man. After the killing, American newspapers decided that von Brunn was a typical white supremacist. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, had gloated that the first black president was a "visual aid" whose presence in the White House would recruit a new generation of racists and the press quoted civil rights groups who worried understandably about how many would sign up and how violent they would be.
Yet for all his roots in neo-Nazism, von Brunn was also a transitional figure who typified a wider range of forces than I can adequately squeeze into the "far right" label. He was an enthusiastic "truther", who went on the net to deny that the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington had surprised the conspirators in power who secretly controlled America. He hated Bill O'Reilly of Fox News and neocons as much as the New York Times and Obama. "It doesn't matter that you despise Jews-neocons-Bill O'Reilly," he declared in one of his incoherent internet postings. "You pay the kosher tax - or else you don't eat."
The last time I heard similar remarks was not in the back room of a Leeds pub but the elegant gardens of Christ Church College. The nice, middle-class organisers of the Oxford Literary Festival had invited Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon who is - and you are going to have bear with me on this - a former winner of the BBC's jazz album of the year award. He declared that "Jewish ideology is driving our planet into a catastrophe" and "the Jewish tribal mindset - left, centre and right - sets Jews aside of humanity".
As he sat in his condo, nursing his grievances and watching his Mel Gibson movies, James W von Brunn may have seemed a relic of the fascist movements of the 20th century. But in his grubby, instinctive way, he was groping towards the new authoritarian alliances of the 21st.....
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