Atlanta Indymedia reports of National Alliance spam attacks

National Alliance tries, and fails, to hook anti-globalization movement
by Coyote 3:43am Tue Aug 6 '02 (Modified on 9:43am Tue Aug 6 '02)

Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
08.01.02

Neo-Nazis search for fertile ground

White supremacists try to sink hooks into anti-globalization
movement

While anti-globalization activists were preparing for the
recently completed Kananaskis G8 meetings in Calgary, white
supremacists were developing plans to crash the party.
According to the Center for New Community's Devin Burghart,
unbeknownst to most activists, the Anti-Globalism Action
Network (AGAN) was attempting to blend in with the
protesters by taking a seemingly sympathetic name, as well
as putting up a website with an address --
http://www.g8activist.com -- that could easily be mistaken
for the G8 Activist Network's official website at
http://www.g8activist.ca .

AGAN, said Burghart, was actually was "a front group for
William Pierce's neo-Nazi National Alliance." According to
Burghart, the group intended to incite violence while at the
same time recruit unsuspecting anti-globalization activists.

Burghart, Director of CNC's Building Democracy Initiative,
sent a pre-G8 meeting e-mail alert warning that AGAN's
website "was registered to the Canadian branch of the
National Alliance" and could be easily mistaken for the G8
Activist Network's website. AGAN's website features a
prominently placed link to the National Alliance website and
to radio broadcasts from the Alliance's founder, the late
William Pierce.

Why was the National Alliance setting its sites on the
anti-globalization movement?

"The group's anti-Semitic worldview posits that
organizations like the G8, IMF, and World Bank are tools the
Jewish elite use in their quest for world domination,"
Burghart told me in an email exchange. He said that the CNC
sent the alert because it was "vital that anti-globalization
activists and organizations understand, oppose and expose
their hateful message making it clear that the
anti-globalization movement will not tolerate organized
bigotry in its midst."

Burghart pointed out that the National Alliance's interest
in the G8 meetings is only one aspect of its multi-pronged
strategies "aimed at recruiting from and disrupting
progressive activists, especially youth." Other Alliance
actions, he said, have included "rogue postings to local
indymedia.com sites and an appearance at the Seattle
anti-globalization protests of 1999."

At its website, AGAN defended the link to the National
Alliance's website saying that the organization took the
"bold step of placing a link on its popular website to a
controversial White Nationalist organization, the National
Alliance.... as a public service."

"While most people in the anti-globalism movement
undoubtedly have strong ideological differences with the
National Alliance, their [the Alliance] anti-globalism
credentials are undeniable," says Anthony Phillips of AGAN.

National Alliance deputy membership coordinator Billy Roper
denied that there was any organizational link to AGAN. In an
interview with Scott Anderson, a reporter for the Toronto's
newspaper Now, Roper claimed that AGAN is "completely
independent" from the Alliance. Roper later admitted,
however, that while "there may be a member of the National
Alliance involved with the Web site of the AGAN, it's not an
official project."

Roper also told Anderson that when National Alliance members
attended the Seattle anti-globalization demonstrations they
found that "persons who are of the extreme left --
Communists and anti-globalists who do not share our racial
views -- are more likely, ironically, to make good
prospective recruits to the National Alliance than persons
who are not politically conscious at all."

Attracting youth by any means

Before his death last month, William Pierce headed up the
National Alliance, one of the U.S.'s premier neo-Nazi hate
groups. He had a keen feel for appealing to disaffected
young people. Over the past few years the Alliance had
developed a powerful one-two punch in the form of hate music
and racist video games. (While never a household name,
Pierce gained notoriety when it was reported that his novel,
The Turner Diaries, a primer for the militia crowd, was one
of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's favorite reads.)

This year, on Martin Luther King Day, the National Alliance
opened up a new line of neo-Nazi entertainment products,
inlcuding a video game called "Ethnic Cleansing," the first
of a series of video games he intends to produce and
distribute. According to an Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
report titled "Racist Groups Using Computer Gaming to
Promote Violence against Blacks, Latinos and Jews," the
object of the under-- $15 CD-ROM-based game "is to kill
'sub-humans' -- i.e. Blacks and Latinos -- and their
'masters,' the Jews, who are portrayed as the
personification of evil."

Pierce also ran Resistance Records, a white-supremacist
music distribution giant. Founded in 1993 by George Burdi, a
23-year-old neo-Nazi skinhead, the company labored in
relative obscurity in the neo-Nazi underground subculture
during its first few years. Eventually, Willis A. Carto,
better known as the anti-Semitic leader of Liberty Lobby,
and partner Todd Blodgett revived the company in 1998.

A year later with the Carto/Blodgett partnership faltering,
Pierce, a longtime Carto rival, took over and moved the
record company's operations to his National Alliance
headquarters outside Hillsboro, West Virginia. According to
an Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) report titled "Deafening
Hate: The Revival of Resistance Records," Pierce never did
care much for the music; he recognized, however, that it
attracted potential recruits.

Resistance Records also publishes the quarterly Resistance
magazine, sells a number of books (including Adolph Hitler's
Mein Kampf and Blood Ritual: Investigation into Jewish
Ritual Murder Cases), distributes music and Nazi military
videos, and carries a line of clothing, jewelry, pins and
bumper stickers.

Fertile or fallow ground?

Will the National Alliance and AGAN find converts within the
anti-globalization movement? Oren Siegle, the
Anti-Defamation League's senior research analyst, thinks
that it's possible. Siegle told the Wired News' Steve
Kettman: "It's an active effort to infiltrate the
anti-globalization movement. I wouldn't want to say that the
anti-globalization movement has become a breeding ground for
all these negative players. Just the nature of it -- you
have young people running around with a lot of energy who
have a lot of ideas. The right-wing groups want to
capitalize on that. I don't blame the anti-globalization
groups who don't know that these groups are trying to
infiltrate them."

Grant Neufeld, director of the Activist Network and host of
the g8activist.ca site, was angered by the
white-supremacists efforts. "They're trying to associate
themselves with the so-called anti-globalization movement,"
Neufeld told the Wired News. "Myself, I don't consider
myself part of an anti-globalization movement, but of an
anti-corporate movement... This movement is very vocally an
anti-racist movement, so for racists to claim they have a
role in this movement is utterly ridiculous."

Although AGAN did not show up in Calgary, Burghart said that
CNC's preemptive strike calling attention to their plans was
a good thing. "The emergence of AGAN forced
anti-globalization activists to challenge notions of racism
and bigotry that have circulated in and around the
anti-globalization movement for some time. In the end, a
multitude of voices from the anti-globalization movement
condemned the National Alliance for this stunt once they
heard about it. It is a credit to anti-globalization
activists that they took the threat seriously, and didn't
view the exposure of AGAN as an attack on them which," he
added, "it certainly was not."

Burghart believes that AGAN -- or another group like it,
associated with the National Alliance -- will try again to
"probe and test anti-globalization activists to see how they
will react to the presence of neo-Nazis. It allows the
Alliance to identify potential new recruits and to expand
possible fissures in the progressive movement using racism
and anti-Semitism as wedges. The National Alliance still
sees potential, and they're fairly clever at organizing
stunts like this. Next time they'll probably employ
different tactics or create a new facade."