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David Duke’s preoccupation with racist ideology dates back to his youth. At 17, he became active in right-wing extremist groups. While attending Louisiana State University in the early 1970s, he founded the White Youth Alliance, a group affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Socialist White People’s Party in Arlington, Virginia. To protest a speech by attorney William Kunstler at Tulane University, Duke picketed wearing a Nazi brown shirt and a swastika armband and carried a placard that said “Kunstler is a Communist-Jew” and “Gas the Chicago 7” (referring to the well-known leftist activists). Duke now describes the event as a folly of youth.

Shortly after graduating in 1974, Duke covered his swastika with a Klan robe and founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He first came to broad public attention during this time: the young Imperial Wizard successfully marketed himself in the mid-1970s as a new brand of Klansman – well-groomed, engaged, professional: the Klan leader as a corporate manager. And as a progressive: for the first time in the group’s history, women were accepted as equal members and Catholics were encouraged to apply for membership.

Duke’s efforts not only boosted membership, they also, to a significant degree, made traditional Klan ritual obsolete. He urged an overhaul of the organization at the grass-roots level, encouraging his colleagues to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” In media appearances and political venues, he skillfully exploited issues like illegal immigration, affirmative action and court-ordered busing, and sanitized Klan vocabulary, titling himself “national director” and referring to cross burnings as “illuminations.” He also professed nonviolence and encouraged members to become politically active; following his own advice, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Louisiana State Senate in 1975, receiving one-third of the votes cast. His already evident skill at sublimating his bigotry led journalists to describe his style as “rhinestone racism” and “button-down terror.”

Meanwhile, the Klan enjoyed a resurgence under his leadership. In 1976, he organized the largest Klan rally the nation had witnessed since the 1960s in Walker, Louisiana, with an estimated attendance of 2,700. In addition, he built up local organizations in other states, including California, Florida and Texas. Although he publicly shunned violence, he was convicted in 1979 of inciting a riot in connection with a Klan rally in suburban New Orleans.




La 2008-12-11 11:14:58, samizdat a scris: