Two conferences, same hate: Right-wingers and racists in D.C. I n the midst of racial tensions and hatemonger

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Wing raised from virtually all circles on the right, a conference of politically connected white-supremacist academics, politicians, and activists is about to be held in the Washington D.C. area. It will be just in time for a mainstream and well-attended conservative conference that also is coming to town.

American Renaissance (AmRen), the white-supremacist newsletter edited by Jared Taylor, will sponsor a conference on Feb 19-21, the same weekend that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

The AmRen conference was originally booked at the Dulles Airport Marriott but was disallowed by the hotel administration after receiving calls from people who were outraged it was to take place there. The conference then attempted to move to the nearby Dulles Airport Westin hotel, but lost its booking after the hotel management also received complaints.

The white supremacists have reportedly now obtained another location for their meeting, but this time the organizers will only tell attendees its location 48 hours in advance. Meanwhile, opposition is growing.

The progressive Mormon newspaper Mormon Worker made a public call to oppose the conference. And Workers Uniting (a merger of the United Steelworkers with the British trade union, Unite) put out a press release against the conference that calls attention to the scheduled appearance of Nick Griffin—head of the far-right, racist British National Party (BNP)—as keynote speaker.

Griffin’s attendance at the conference and in the U.S. is curious as he may be facing charges in Britain for violating a court order to open the membership of the BNP to non-whites. If Griffin indeed goes to jail for this (he has until this month to comply), it will not be the first time, having served a nine-month sentence in 1996 after being found guilty of “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred.”

Griffin even had a connection with James Von Brunn, the neo-Nazi terrorist who shot and killed a security guard at the D.C. Holocaust Museum in June 2009. Von Brunn, who died in January, was a member of the American Friends of the British National Party, and had been at events where Griffin spoke.

Recently, Griffin sparked controversy over his remarks regarding the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, saying that more attention should be paid to those that die during the winter in the United Kingdom. “While the Haiti earthquake is terrible, the winter death toll in Britain will be similar,” he said in a post to Twitter and Facebook. “No aid here though.”

Others scheduled to speak are Dan Roodt, the head of a South African white-supremacist group called the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, who argues that Blacks are genetically programmed to commit violent crime; lawyer Sam G. Dickson, who advocates white nationalism and fights against non-white immigration, affirmative action, interracial marriage, homosexuality, and school integration; University of Delaware Professor Raymond Wolter, who argues against school racial desegregation and believes that Blacks have more natural IQ limitations than whites; and longtime white-supremacist activist Wayne Lutton, who is the director of a group that publishes the racist Occidental Quarterly journal, and the of the dominant craft unions, symbolized by Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labour, with whom Debs frequently clashed.

The author portrays Debs in all his (Left) BNP leader Nick Griffin on BBC news show, “Question Time,” Oct. 22. Meanwhile, police attacked protesters outside the London television studio.

anti-Semitic Occidental Observer magazine. The more mainstream CPAC conference will be starting a day earlier, on Feb. 18. This conference annually brings out a “Who’s Who” of the right, but many of CPAC’s attendees, such as Frontpagemag’s David Horowitz and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, have associated themselves with Taylor and in many cases the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, a group of which Taylor is a board member.

The group Youth for Western Civilization, which sponsored the Tom Tancredo speaking engagement at the University of North Carolina that was disrupted by protests, held its inaugural event at last year’s CPAC. YWC associate Marcus Epstein, who along with Brimelow was at the inaugural, is a co-thinker of Jared Taylor, and all three are associated with Pat Buchanan, who had Jared Taylor on the stage with him as he announced his run for president in 2000. This year, the John Birch Society has been announced as a co-sponsor of CPAC, and that alone has prompted a number of circles to voice concern over the climate the right is trying to create.

The right seems more determined to force their agenda down the throats of people who have no desire for it, but progressives are just as determined not to allow that to happen. Activists are planning protests outside the AmRen conference. n Further reading from Socialist Action Books — • The Struggle Against Fascism: Yesterday, today, tomorrow. $2 • Fascism: What it is and how to fight it. (L. Trotsky) $3 • What’s at Stake in the Fight for Immigrant Rights? $4 Order from Socialist Action Books, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610. Please add $1 per pamphlet for shipping.

despite widespread racism and sexism, socialists should advance no special measures, no affirmative-action policies for any distinctly oppressed section of the working class: his answer to oppression under capitalism was socialism, full stop.

Debs’ dream of the SP as the voice of a united, triumphant working class, independent of the bosses’ parties, was publicly desecrated when the party backed the capitalist Progressive Party in the 1924 election. After the vote, the Progressives dissolved and the discredited SP shrivelled. The nascent Communist Party, champion of the Russian Revolution (which Debs ardently supported, in contrast to the ambivalent SP leadership), attracted the bulk of radicals.

Although Debs’ health was broken by the two and a half hard years he served in an Atlanta, Georgia, prison for opposing World War I, his militant spirit, his promotion of industrial unionism and mass action, and his faith in socialism as the antidote to capitalist exploitation and war continue to inspire generations of fighters for social justice and workers’ power.

The great socialist was a leading campaigner for civil liberties and defender of victims of capitalist repression, from the Haymarket Martyrs to Big Bill Haywood. He identified closely with the victims of capitalist injustice. No one expressed the thought more forcefully, more eloquently than he did in his own defense in 1918: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

This biography is worth reading, if only for the many fabulous quotes from some of the greatest speeches ever delivered by a working-class leader. Despite its superficiality in dealing with Marxist theory, competing tendencies on the left, and questions of political strategy, Ray Ginger’s book is artfully packaged with fascinating details, delivered in a heartwarming fashion, about a great man and a great time in U.S. labour history. n