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CORRECTION: SEE CORRECTION APPENDED; "Blood and Politics": In a review of Leonard Zeskind's book "Blood and Politics" in last Sunday's Arts & Books section, the Southern Poverty Law Center was misidentified as the Southern Poverty Law Council.
Blood and Politics
The History of the White
Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream
Leonard Zeskind
Farrar, Straus & Giroux:
622 pp., $35
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This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true.
"Rightwing extremists," the report maintained, "have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda."
Citing the economic downturn, it drew parallels to the 1990s, a fertile time in the development of militia-style factions. In a footnote, "rightwing extremism" is defined broadly as applying to groups, movements and adherents that are "primarily hate-oriented" toward particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, or "are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority," or may be dedicated to single issues such as opposition to abortion.
What favorable timing, then, for Leonard Zeskind's "Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream," which addresses all of these issues, provides a context in which to assess them and offers an extended look inside a little-understood cultural zone that is really a panoply of small groups.
Unless you too resent ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government), Zeskind's decades-long perspective will help explain why, according to the Southern Poverty Law Council, there were 926 hate groups active in the United States last year -- a 4% increase from the previous year but representing a 50% increase since 2000. Demographically speaking, this involves a...