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A HUNDRED LITTLE HITLERS: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the
Neo-Nazi Movement in America, by Elinor Langer. Metropolitan Books, 398 pp.
Fifteen years ago,
before she became genteel, Oprah Winfrey invited a group of Nazi skinheads onto her television show. To the surprise of no
one -- except, perhaps, Winfrey, to judge by her reaction -- they called her names, spewing hatred like an exposed sewerpipe,
and in general carried on like a bunch of thugs. Which, after all, is what they were there for.
The aura of violence
owed as much to the studio cameras as it did to the boneheads' ideology, such as it was. To be young, white, angry and stupid
is, in itself, great incentive to what social workers call "acting out." Inviting a national audience to watch doesn't benefit
anyone, except the advertisers. Yet, it can always be rationalized on the solemn grounds of covering a "growing menace"
a rhetorical ploy almost guaranteed to be self-fulfilling. Other programs soon rushed in to continue "exposing" the Nazi onslaught.
Geraldo's nose became a famous casualty.
One November evening in 1988, at the peak of all this grotesque play-acting,
a group of Nazi skinheads in Portland, Ore., used a baseball bat to beat to death an Ethiopian immigrant named Mulugeta Seraw.
It seemed, at the time, like a confirmation of the most sensational claims that the movement was a looming threat. But as
Elinor Langer, a writer from Portland, shows in A Hundred Little Hitlers, the relations between mass-media image
and street-level reality, between growing publicity and longstanding racism, were already hopelessly complicated even before
the murder. The skinheads, who used race as the quickest way to find scapegoats, themselves became scapegoats, of a different
kind -- as the sole embodiment of racism.
Portland was once labeled "the most prejudiced city in the West"; in the
late 1980s, it was "probably the whitest big city in the United States," as Langer writes. "The secret of Portland, which
continues to be well kept even from most of the people who live there, is that the racial politics and the smallness of the
black population are one and the same." But that reality faded from view in the aftermath of Seraw's killing, as politicians
and civic leaders suddenly proclaimed Oregon a hate-free zone into which the Nazis had somehow forced their way.
"The
black citizens could scarcely believe their ears," writes Langer. "A thick wall of righteousness simultaneously depressing
in its self-delusion and touching in its goodwill was now found to be separating 'Us' -- the good people -- from 'Them'
-- the bad skinheads. ... The only way to capture the spirit of Portland in the period after the death of Mulugeta Seraw is
to borrow the term of the British sociologist Stanley Cohen: 'moral panic.' I know because I shared it."
But Langer's
book comes long after the skinheads were convicted of murder -- and after the famous civil trial in which Morris Dees of the
Southern Poverty Law Center successfully prosecuted neo-Nazi Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance,
for contributing to the violent radicalization of the skins. The state of "moral panic" (the urgent sense that a distinct,
identifiable group of evildoers has threatened the core values of a society and must be dealt with immediately) no longer
has skinheads as its focus. It is probably a matter of time before the Nazi invasion of Portland is recounted on the History
Channel, mixed in with the usual cycle of documentaries about the Third Reich.
The most remarkable thing about A
Hundred Little Hitlers, setting it apart from other accounts of the case, is Langer's ability to reconstruct the events
in Portland in all their lived immediacy while also holding them at a distance. It is as artful and exacting a journalistic
narrative as the case requires, written in a prose that embodies the elegance of restraint -- the work of a cool intelligence,
one that neutralizes the element of sensationalism through a rigorous suspicion of our desire to see evil as simple.
That
does not mean Langer downplays the enormity of the crime. The account of how Seraw's family survived the civil war in Ethiopia
and settled into a comfortable enough life, even in inhospitable Portland, underscores the idiotic viciousness of his death.
(Her thumbnail picture of the refugee community is that much more poignant today, when the phobia regarding immigrants verges
on a new moral panic.)
But she also handles the daily lives of the skinheads -- the routines of work, drinking, girlfriends
and street-corner intimidation -- with a degree of empathy that is, at times, disconcerting. Her account of Metzger is not
simply one of the best-informed studies ever written of an extreme right-winger's political development. It's also the portrait
of a vaguely likable guy, hardworking and devoted to his family, with no sign of the social or mental instability often evident
with ideological fringe dwellers.
"I sometimes wondered during the course of this book what Tom made of me," she says.
"We had many good conversations and a few good meals over the years... and I often felt that he enjoyed our contacts, as I
did. Once, I thought he had forgotten I was a Jew." But one of Metzger's little jokes to a racist colleague (something Langer
had forgotten, no doubt from necessity) comes to mind while writing the book: "'She's not such a bad old kike,' I can hear
him saying to himself. 'Gas her last.'"
The fact that A Hundred Little Hitlers appears so long after the events
it chronicles no doubt reflects the difficulty of crafting a recognizable portrait of the humanity of those whose lives are
dedicated to dehumanizing others. This raises a troubling question: Why bother? Why extend that degree of sympathy to people
who would never ask for it, and would probably reject it? Doing so seems almost an effort to confirm the sarcastic definition
of a liberal as someone incapable of taking his own side in a fight.
As if to prove the point, though, I have to back
down from my own reservations about the book. With its nuanced handling of a story that lends itself to screeds and hysteria,
A Hundred Little Hitlers is a belated antidote to the symbiotic relationship between media exploitation and racist
thuggery. In the months before the killing of Seraw, as the TV reporters were sounding the alarm, their shocked tone gave
racist groups "a vital organizing tool," as Langer puts it. It takes a writer of Langer's intelligence and grace to put things
in due perspective.
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