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Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right. By Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. 238p. $52.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.
The April 1995 tragedy in Oklahoma City has spawned a number of books about the extreme Right, many of which may be accurately described as alarmist. This book is not one of those; the authors make an effort not to exaggerate either the danger from the far Right or the size of such groups. They do take some of the activists a bit too seriously and also indicate that these people and their followers have been or are more influential than appears to be the case. More on this later.
Kaplan and Weinberg attempt to describe and explain the emergence of a Euro-American radical Right. Their central argument is that more communication and cooperation exist among right-wing extremists in Europe and the United States than ever before. The extremists described are mainly neoNazis and followers of an arcane religious doctrine called Christian Identity. The latter involves the belief that the true Israelites are Nordic Caucasians ("Aryans") and that the Jews are the offspring of a sexual union between Eve and Satan in the Garden of Eden. Many who write about Christian Identity attribute to its followers more religious sophistication and understanding...