The Volk in the United States

The Volksfront

Dave Umhoefer and Gina Barton's piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (MJS) this morning is paired with a prominent shot of the white supremacists group, Volksfront with which Wade Michael Page made common cause in his mass murder at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek.

The MJS piece offers more insight into what brought this white power man to the most segregated metropolitan region in America, suggesting that it might be "a woman who may have shared his white power beliefs," pictured at left-front in the photo above.

White power and mass murder.

The combination ought to provoke discussion in any sane society asking 'why.' See for example, Judith G. McMullen's piece this morning, We Are All Sikhs.

More interesting than the geographical travels of Wade Michael Page are the societal forces preaching hate and fear, because in the words of Ralph McGill: "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."

A young black man, Darius Simmons, taking out the garbage is killed in Milwaukee, Treyvon Martin in Florida, a Muslim, a Sikh, killings of innocents across the country; whatever they're not real Americans so they can't be that innocent.

Hate and fear are aid and comfort for the likes of Wade Michael Page, self-proclaimed protector of the Volk, the German analogue of real Americans fighting off other "human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil," in the words of the late Norman Cohn in his Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (1993).

The wolves of hate and fear are loosed by the American White Party, the Republican-Tea Party, daily (as in today) dishing out coded and explicit appeals to the xenophobic racists in the American white working class.

Mitt Romney's campaign is mostly a collection of racial taunts, as Adele M. Stan recently noted.

Is it any wonder that this hate generates a harvest of hate-filled action?

Had only whites voted in 2008, President Obama would have been trounced at the polls, a fact of which the Republican Party strategists are well aware as The White Party seeks to keep away those annoying Americans of color from voting their preference, while speaking directly to whites' racial fears and delusions.

Writes Thomas B. Edsell:

In 2010, the Republican white strategy was boosted by the fact that minority turnout traditionally drops in non-presidential years, perhaps especially so without Obama on the ballot. But the scope of success went far beyond expectations. (NYT, November 21, 2011)

Sure, scum like Wade Michael Page and the Volksfront have been driven underground by the successes of the American civil rights movement.

Not so far as to be beyond reach of the daily rants of the Walker-Romney Republican-Tea Party providing succor to the Volk pathology of many white Americans holding that the human species is composed of distinct races marked by dissimilar character inclinations and behavior patterns.

A false and psychopathologcal racial conception, the volkisch-racist outlook has played a starring role in the crimes of NAZI Germany, the destruction of the Native Americans by the US, though this volkisch conception is "irrational, unscientific and demonstrably nonsensical," as Cohn writes in Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967).

Today, we have regular mass murders of the anti-volk like the Sikh, the American prison system that is a "leviathan unmatched in human history," and a major political party playing to the delusional, racist view held by Wade Michael Pages, Jared Loughner and other constituents of the American White Party.

While the generations of young Americans provide continuous hope, it is fair and prudent to ask what we will have tomorrow.

Another African-American Boy Shot by White Man

Darius Simmons's mother holding picture of
murdered son - Photo: Meg Kissinger

Update: Texas Man Kills Teacher Over Noise Complaint, Says He Was "Standing My Ground"

Darius Simmons, an unarmed 13-year-old African-American, was taking in the trash cans about a week ago when an angry white man killed him for being black in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—the most segregated metropolitan area in the country.

By Alyssa Figueroa

Milwaukee, Wisconsin—Segregation city

Troy Davis, Trayvon Martin, and now, Darius Simmons. Simmons, an unarmed 13-year-old African-American boy from Milwaukee, Wis., was shot and killed last Thursday by John Henry Spooner, his 75-year-old white neighbor.

Earlier in the week, Spooner had expressed frustration to a local alderman concerning how the police dealt with a recent break-in at his home, where $3,000-worth of shotguns were taken. Police had made no arrests, but Spooner suspected his neighbors.

Last Thursday, Simmons went outside to move his trash can back in from the street when Spooner approached him and began questioning him about his stolen guns. As Simmons told Spooner he didn’t steal them, his mother, who was also outside, advised Spooner to leaver her son alone. Spooner then pulled out his gun and fired. Simmons had begun to run away when Spooner fired again. Simmons was pronounced dead several hours later.

On Saturday morning, Spooner was brought to court, where he was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, use of a dangerous weapon and has a $300,000 bail. The same day, Simmons' family and friends gathered outside his house to remember him.

His family had just moved to the neighborhood less than a month ago because, according to Simmons’ aunt, his mother thought it would be safer than their prior neighborhood in north Milwaukee.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted Toni Clark, Simmons’ sixth-grade teacher, describing him as "a jokester, loving and funny.” Clark said he rode his bike more than seven miles to go to school. “He was determined to get a good education," she said.

The Journal also reported how his friends grieved: Some of Darius' sixth-grade friends decorated a wooden cross with stuffed animals and planted it on the front step, the precise spot where Darius stood as he was shot. They tied a balloon to the top with the word "LOVE" written on the front.

Yet, as the criminalization of black males continues to plague our society, love seems harder and harder to come by. Not only are black people especially victims of a racist justice system, they are now increasingly becoming victims of those who take it upon themselves to self-police their neighborhood. And loose gun laws aren’t helping.

In fact, AmmoLand.com, a website devoted to shooting sports news, thanked Wisconsin Governor Walker supporters yesterday for helping defeat “rabidly anti-gun Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.”