IN 1972 I INTERVIEWED A WHITE SUPREMACIST AND WORRIED ABOUT GIVING HIM TOO MUCH OF A PLATFORM. THE UGLY MESSAGE OF RACIST MOBS HAS NOT CHANGED, WHAT HAS IS THEIR REACH.
We’ll see if neo-Nazis thrive or die in spotlight
As evidence that there really is nothing new under the sun, notwithstanding that grotesque neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday that ended in death for Heather Heyer and all the fallout since, I give you Exhibit A.
It’s an ancient microfilm clipping from Ryerson University’s student newspaper, The Eyeopener, dated Nov. 30, 1972, retrieved for me by the magical Rosalynn at the archives there via researcher Kirsten Smith, who used to work for Postmedia and is now a gun for hire.
The story is headlined “Young, White and Hates Blacks,” and it’s about a guy named Don Andrews, a white supremacist, back then in the news because he was running for the Toronto mayoralty under the banner of his then-new Western Guard party.
(Andrews is still around, by the way, still a white supremacist and in 2014 ran yet again for the mayoralty. In a brilliant interview at the time with Jackie Hong for Vice, Andrews proved he was as qualified in some regards as the late Rob Ford, cheerfully admitting he too had smoked crack, indeed liked it, but described it as akin to having “a date with yourself.”)
My own story was hardly as clever, rather the earnest work of a young woman who was clearly, as fledgling journalists so often are, shocked and appalled.
It appears from the article that I spent a few hours with Andrews and a young devotee, as they drove around an east-end Toronto neighbourhood, handing out campaign literature, with the two of them playing in the car what I called count-the-turbans, with the candidate periodically crying out with glee, “There’s one!”
His entire platform, I wrote, was based “on three things: his whiteness, his youth and his mocking dislike of all things black.”
Andrews finished fifth, with about two per cent of the vote, about 90,000 votes shy of winner David Crombie, who went on to become the tiny, perfect mayor.
I still remember the queasiness I felt writing about Andrews (he was the first person to be convicted under Canadian hate laws, and went to jail for two years) and briefly being in his presence.
It was like writing about suicide: Does shining a light do more good than harm, and how on earth can you ever know?
The danger, I feared in those days, was that publicity and attention might draw people to the cause, grow the group bigger.
Ignoring him, on the other hand, would be akin to closing your eyes to the fact that there were people even in the peaceable kingdom who shared his ideas.
Yet the Guard never did grow, and though the party has a Facebook page, well, who and what doesn’t? The group is all but defunct. And even in its violent heyday, as Andrews told Jackie Hong a few years back, “I had three or four dozen people…”
There are of course successors, individuals such as the two Quebecers who attended the Charlottesville rally and were quickly outed on social media, and groups.
They’re as repugnant as they always have been.
That now-famous clip, from Vice’s documentary shot on the ground in Charlottesville, showing scabrous young men with torches marching at the University of Virginia the night before the deadly rally, chanting “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” is chilling.
But those young men also chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!”, and it was no less unsettling than it was the countless times I’ve heard it at the countless protests I’ve covered before, virtually all of them in support of causes vastly more popular than white supremacy (against police shootings, against the old Mike Harris provincial government, against the G-8 or G-20, etc.).
My only point is that the mob is the mob. The mob, whether fascist or antifascist, is inherently ugly. There’s little to choose between aggressive clowns yelling “White lives matter!” and “Black lives matter!” The cause of the former ignoble, the latter noble, but such distinctions hard to remember in mid-mob.
Nothing much, in other words, new here. All that is is the web, with its awesome power and reach.
As the white supremacist Christopher Cantwell told Elle Reeve, the reporter in the Vice doc, several times, the broader goal of the rally was to bring the disparate fascists of the right off the lonely internet and into the world, so that others cut from the same cloth might recognize and join them.
Well, the documentary, and the vast amounts of other publicity that followed Heyer’s death — she was killed when a young white supremacist named James Field allegedly drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters — have certainly shone the light on the racist underbelly of America — and Canada.
We know what happened when, 45 years ago, the press — and I don’t just mean the Eyeopener — occasionally covered guys like Don Andrews and gave him a bit of ink. Nothing happened: He and his ideas appeared freakish; he remained firmly on the fringe.
Now we’ll see what will be wrought in the modern world with the web, all-news networks such as CNN with their constant replaying and analyzing of every iota of violence, social media and, in the White House, a president who can’t seem to draw the lines that most people can in their sleep.
I see by that old story that I went to an all-candidates meeting with Don Andrews. He was basically run out of the joint. Afterwards, he said it didn’t bother him. “It’s just that now, people aren’t ready for us yet.”