Prof: Aryans Spin Same Racist Web As Nazis Bsu Sociologist Compares Butler’s Home Page With Hitler’s Speeches

Aryan Nation rhetoric echoes the Nazis of World War II, a sociologist says, but the Idaho-based white-supremacist group has gone one step further with a manifesto showcased in a colorful new Internet site.

Adolf Hitler galvanized Germans with “fighting words,” portraying the Jews as conspirators genetically incapable of redemption, said Michael Blain, a Boise State University sociology professor who has studied Hitler’s speeches.

Hitler then painted German gentiles as Aryans, members of a supposed superior race who were unsuspecting victims of Jews.

“The Nazis were playing to their audience,” Blain said. “They said ‘All we have to do is move all the Jews from Germany,’ become what I call ‘Nazi knights’ willing to engage in a crusade to build the Thousand-Year Reich.”

And that anti-Semitic pitch has not changed in two generations.

“We believe that the true, literal children of the Bible are the twelve tribes of Israel, now scattered throughout the world and now known as the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, Celtic peoples of the earth.

“We believe that the Canaanite Jew is the natural enemy of our Aryan (White) Race. The Jew is like a destroying virus that attacks our racial body to destroy our Aryan culture and the purity of our Race.”

That may sound straight out of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” but it is from the new Aryan Nation’s home page on the World Wide Web. It also features a multicolored symbol of a combination Christian cross and swastika, as well as a portrait of founder Richard Butler with arm raised in a Nazi salute.

Butler, 78, has announced he will step down. A board will pick his successor and decide whether the group remains in Idaho.

In a 1996 report titled The Web of Hate, the Anti-Defamation League said, “These efforts represent a well-thought-out campaign to reach more people than these groups could ever have previously contacted through traditional mailings, handouts and demonstrations.”

The league said it is too soon to tell if the recruitment strategy will be effective.

“What we do know is that the neo-Nazis and their fellow travelers have decided that the action is on the Internet. The haters realize they can leave their traditional hangouts and set up temporary recruiting posts anywhere on the Net, try to pick up new recruits and stir up even more hatred and distrust.”

Anti-Semitism has been evident in Europe for centuries, Blain said. A millennium ago, Christians were taught that Jewish authorities goaded Pontius Pilate into crucifying Jesus Christ.

But it was less than a century ago that the idea emerged, particularly in Britain, that being Jewish was biological or genetic and not just religious, Blain said.

He said Hitler capitalized on that evolving racial view of Jews to incite his followers.

“Political leaders - political actors, I call them - are always trying to portray their audiences as being innocent victims, with some kind of villainous or omnipotent power over them,” Blain said.

“On the other hand, (Hitler claimed) Aryans had certain inborn characteristics - their willingness to sacrifice for the community. It was in the blood that they were by inclination virtuous and capable of self-discipline,” he said.

The Aryan Nation’s creed sees its members driven by love, not hate.

“It is not hate,” the creed declares, “that makes the average White man look upon a mixed racial couple with a scowl on his face and a loathing in his heart. It is not hate that makes the White workingman curse over his beer about the latest boatload of mud-creatures dumped upon our shores to be given job preference over the White citizens who built this land.

“No, it is not hate. IT’S LOVE.”

Hitler was able to convert that kind of logic into the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and others, Blain said.

While Hitler occasionally brought up Christ, his appeal was nationalistic, Blain pointed out. But Butler’s Hayden Lake-based group calls itself the Church of Jesus Christ Christian (Aryan Nation) and bestows upon its leader the title of reverend.

Blain maintains that the susceptibility to such radical beliefs, no matter the guise, intensifies during times of dramatic change or conflict, and today’s buildup of far-right groups is unequaled since the period between the world wars.

And while unwilling to deny Butler and his followers the right to believe as they do, Blain feels the rest of the world needs to know about it even if that means giving the Aryan Nation and similar groups more attention.