USA: Neo-Nazis in high places

by David Lethbridge

The recent notoriety in the US of ultra-right Republicans Trent Lott (the 
powerful new Senate Majority Leader) and Robert L Barr (a member of the 
House Judiciary Committee) over the Clinton impeachment affair has focussed 
attention on their links to a reactionary Southern outfit, the Council of 
Conservative Citizens (CCC), a pro-segregationist, white racist 
organisation that supports a return to the practices and policies of the 
Civil War-era Confederate States of America.

Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall describes the CCC as "an 
organisation built by supporters of the now-defunct segregationist White 
Citizens Councils, a powerful force in Mississippi and other Deep South 
states in the 1950s and 1960s, the John Birch Society and activists in the 
presidential campaigns of then-Alabama Governor George Wallace".

Edsall says the CCC "has developed strong political ties to the Republican 
Party in the South as well as to the fading conservative wing of the 
southern Democratic Party".

Both Lott and Barr are from the South — Lott from Mississippi, Barr from 
Georgia. Lott has maintained continuous relations with the CCC during its 
10 years of existence.

Photos of Lott at the group's gatherings in Mississippi and of Lott meeting 
in Washington with its officials have appeared periodically in the 
Citizen's Informer, the organisation's quarterly publication.

For many years Lott wrote a regular column in the Citizen's 
Informer, and was the spokesperson for the Sons of Confederate 
Veterans. Lott is quoted as saying that "the spirit of Jefferson Davis [the 
president of the slave-holding Confederacy] lives in the Republican 
platform".

The CCC's senior field co-ordinator, William D Lord, a former regional 
director of the anti-integration Citizens' Council, has twice served as 
chairman of the Lott Senate campaign in Carroll County, Mississippi.

Barr was the keynote speaker at the CCC's national conference in June 1998, 
in Charleston, South Carolina. Exposed in the press, Barr has claimed that 
he was unaware of the CCC's policies. This is unlikely.

A report on the conference, carried on the CCC's website, shows the 
speakers standing beside confederate flags. Several speakers decried non-
white immigration; one said, "Northern Virginia, Florida and South Texas 
are now outside the Anglo-Celtic circle and are being lost to Dixie".

The CCC internet web site has a direct internet link to the Front National, 
the French neo-fascist party led by Le Pen. Indeed, in September 1998, CCC 
leaders attended a meeting of the Front National.

In a private meeting with Le Pen, they presented him with a Confederate 
flag. Future co-operation between the Front National, the CCC, and other 
"patriotic groups" was discussed.

Other CCC internet links take the reader to a variety of white supremacist 
and neo-fascist sites, such as CCC member Jared Taylor's American 
Renaissance (AR).

AR organises conferences of pseudo-scientific speakers, and publishes 
similar material, appealing to a highly literate, intellectual readership 
with white racist leanings.

Anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists are featured, all of whom 
present highly biased and deeply flawed material claiming the biological 
and cultural inferiority of people of colour.

Still other material directly available from the CCC, attacks Martin Luther 
King, supports the Ku Klux Klan, and denigrates the legacy of Abraham 
Lincoln.

The CCC has named Lestor Maddox, the vicious white racist Governor of 
Georgia during the Civil Rights struggle, as the "Patriot of the Century".

Edsall says: "the Council of Conservative Citizens promotes the views of 
its leaders and prominent members — a number of whom are strong believers 
in the preservation of the `white race', disagree with Supreme Court 
rulings ordering desegregation of public facilities and believe the United 
States is on the verge of losing its identity as a white, European nation.

The White Citizens Councils were instrumental in forming private white 
`academies' as alternatives to the integrated school systems."

The Council of Conservative Citizens is not only a white racist, pro-
segregationist, neo-Confederate organisation with links to the KKK and 
similar groups, it also has international ties.

That powerful members of the US state, including the Republican Senate 
Majority leader, are connected to and supportive of the CCC is a direct 
indication that fascist tendencies within the US state are increasing with 
alarming speed.

* * *

Adapted from an article in People's Voice, Canada's monthly 
Communist newspaper.

Footnote: The extreme-right and very anachronistic Confederate Party of 
Australia has reportedly dissolved itself into One Nation, presumably on 
the basis of a similarity of views.