Some Hate Groups Now Working Through the Pro-Life Movement

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

When I first thought about writing a book, it was after reading several on Canada's hate groups.

At the same time, the Religious Right in Canada was gaining prominence and what I found was that the language used by both was almost identical, especially when it came to immigrants, abortion and homosexuality.

I thought I might find some links that would suggest that many of the old hate groups are now hiding behind religion, which gives them far more freedom to say what they want.

But what I found interesting, when researching both, was that they had so many links to the Reform movement, whether they were operating as the Reform Party, the Alliance, the Conservatives or even their original Social Credit identity.

And I am still convinced that many of the old extreme right have found safe haven in both the Religious Right and the Conservative Party of Canada, in part through groups like the Civitas Society and REAL Women of Canada.

The group Stop Racism and Hate Collective have also found some alarming links and posted them under their Myths About Hate Groups. And using the abortion issue as an example:

.... hate groups do not just target people of colour, or Jews, but actively support the most extreme elements of anti-choice groups. A number of former members of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, have direct ties to anti-choice groups. The leader of the Northern Foundation, Anne Hartmann, plays an important role in Realwomen. Barry Wray and Ernie Britskie have picketed the Everywoman's Health Centre in Vancouver. Wray's brother, Dan, was the Grand Titan of the BC KKK in the 1980s and he now is associated with the Pro-Life Association based in Melville, Saskatchewan. Dan also contributes to The Interim - the Campaign Life Coalition's newsletter. Barry Wray, Al Hooper (another long time member of the BC KKK) and Tony McAleer, a former skinhead recruiter, proprietor of the racist Canadian Liberty Net and manager of the racist rock band, Odin's Law, were charged with assault in 1990 an incident in which a passerby objected to them handing out Aryan Nations propaganda. Realwoman BC President Peggy Steachy has also spoken at events with Dan Wray. One meeting was held at the Croatian Cultural Centre and sponsored by the La Rouche organization and Life Gazette. Steachy is the editor of a pro-life newsletter based in Surrey, BC. (1)

1. Anne Hartmann

Rita Anne Hartmann headed up the Ottawa branch of the Northern Foundation and was a founding member, along with Stephen Harper. Many others in the Northern Foundation now belong to the Civitas Society (the non-Neo-Nazi members, only far-right). Anne's husband Paul, who died mysteriously in 1986, was the leader of the Toronto KKK and a confirmed Odonist.

2. Dan and Barry Wray

There is no evidence that Barry Wray was ever involved in the KKK but his brother Dan most definitely was. When Ann Farmer was named leader, not wanting to work under a woman, he created his own group:

Another smaller splinter group was created in B.C., when a provincial organizer named Dan Wray set up a survivalist-oriented Imperial Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, based in rural Aldergrove. (2)

3. Ernie Britskie

In November 1992, Ernie Britskie, long-time associate the Aryan Nations, Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Resistance Movement and Lyndon LaRouche, allegedly told Kinsella he had given Mr [David] Irving support in Vancouver. (3)

4. Al Hooper

Was prominent in the KKK when Ann Farmer was running the show. He was involved in an attempt to join forces with the Nationalist Party of Canada created and still being led by Don Andrews.

The Stone Mountain unity rally also inspired the Canadian Klan to seek its own alliances with other white supremacist forces. Five days after the Georgia meeting, Farmer and Hooper met with Don Andrews, leader of the Nationalist Party of Canada, to discuss ways of working together. Andrews still scorned the Klan's composition and tactics: "The future belongs to white nationalists of a more intellectual order. We're not interested in flash-in-the-pan media publicity stuff," he said. Still, he was prepared to work with Farmer and Hooper, suggesting "joint statements, tactical alliances, but no union." Farmer talked about "co-operation and dialogue amongst white nationalists ... not an amalgamation of the various groups into a single unit."

From his Toronto jail cell, former Klan leader McQuirter also promoted common action. "I've been writing a lot of letters, proposing and pushing unity," said McQuirter. He still clung to his plans to enter the mainstream political arena: "I'm looking for a political party as a vehicle." * He said a federal political party of the extreme right could find protection under the law. "We can be exempt from the hate law if we're proposing certain political positions. No one could stop a formal political party." Wolfgang Droege shared McQuirter's desire for unity and political action. Before he returned to British Columbia, Droege wrote from prison that there was "a cohesive bond and a potential unity" on the extreme right in Canada and pledged "to co-operate with both the Klan and the Nationalist Party." Droege also talked of building "an effective political force through the normal, legal political process." (4)

5. Tony McAleer

McAleer belonged to the Aryan Resistance Movement, whose logo was a sword-bearing eagle superimposed on a large swastika.

Inside the crudely typed bulletin,Graham and his members ranted about "non-white vermin," the"Jewsmedia," and a well-known Canadian doctor who performs abortions ... The Aryan Resistance Movement was formed by Scott Graham and Tony McAleer, or, as he then called himself, Tony McLean, in 1987. Back then, it had about a dozen skinhead members in and around Mission, with about an equal number in Vancouver. (5)

Now I'm not suggesting that all pro-lifers once belonged to a hate group. The majority did not. However, we can't ignore the evidence that there are a number of hate group members who have found a safe haven within the Religious Right movement. REAL Women of Canada are now directing Harper's policy on the status of women, which pretty much means that Canadian women no longer have any status, and Jason Kenney's assault on the gay community has resulted in an increase in violent attacks on gays.

This government has legitimized hatred and we have to start paying attention.

Sources:

1. MYTHS ABOUT HATE GROUPS, Stop Racism and Hate Collective

2. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 183

3. Statement in libel case against Deborah Lipstadt by David Irving, for mentioning him in her book Denying the Holocaust

4. Sher, 1983, Pg. 187

5. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 54

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: Ann Farmer and Going Legit

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

After Don Andrews arrest, Wolfgang Droege and Alex McQuirter decided to focus their attention on promoting the KKK in Canada. With the assistance of David Duke, then Klan leader in the U.S., they attempted to bring the group into the mainstream. To appeal to a broader cross-section, Duke had for the first time in Klan history, allowed women and Catholics to become members, and this practice was also followed in Canada.

With Paul Hartmann leading the Toronto group, Droege and McQuirter headed West. According to Droege:

"We decided it would be a good time to go out west. McQuirter's father was in the car business, you see, and he was going to give us dealer's licences to sell cars. So we went out to Vancouver and got into the car business." The two Klansmen rented an apartment in North Vancouver and started to visit some of the men and women named on David Duke's Canadian mailing list. Whereas the used car trade did not appeal to Droege and McQuirter, white supremacist agitation clearly did. "We were selling cars here and there, but we didn't really do too well at it," says Droege. "So McQuirter and myself started visiting some of these people. That's how we got started. We eventually had meetings. For the first time ever in the post–World War Two era. there was a racialist organization in western Canada. We did much better out there [than in Toronto]. Here in Toronto is the toughest recruiting ground there is in Canada." (1)

When Don Andrews had served his jail time he threw his efforts into the Nationalist Party of Canada, and for a time Droege and McQuirter helped out. McQuirter returned to Toronto to serve on the Party's executive council, while Droege remained in British Columbia, working at a printing plant called Capital Business Forms.

But the two men soon grew weary of the NPC and resumed their Klan activities.

In April of 1979, Droege organized a publicity-grabbing B.C. tour by David Duke, during which he conducted more than 30 newspaper, television and radio interviews. "[The tour] was quite successful. We got massive publicity," Droege recalls now. "A Conservative member of Parliament told Duke I should be his advance man, his promoter." Interest in the B.C. branch of the Klan boomed as a result ... By October 1980, Droege says he had been forced out of his printing job. "The provincial government was putting pressure on the owner, and he was getting problems getting government work because of my organizing on behalf of the Klan." (1)

So Droege left the firm and devoted himself to working full time on Ku Klux Klan recruitment; often flying back to Toronto to confer with McQuirter. Then they caught a break. After listing their telephone number in the Metro Toronto phone book, the mainstream media picked up the story, and they became media darlings.

The phone line was installed at McQuirter's east end rowhouse. McQuirter later told Julian Sher, author of White Hoods, a look at Canada's KKK: "It was nothing planned, really. We had the phone installed so we could print up some literature. The news media really blew it up and did all our work for us."

In one fawning profile in The Ottawa Citizen in July 1980, a staff reporter, evidently expecting the Klan leader to burn a cross or shoot a non-white in her presence, describes McQuirter as "shy" and "better suited to a milk commercial." The Citizen writer declares, "Alexander McQuirter doesn't look like a racist." A December 1980 Canadian Press story that ran in a number of newspapers across the country struck a similarly artless tone, describing McQuirter as the "youthful, unlikely-looking leader of the Canadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," a leader who "speaks with the lofty ideals of a boy scout counsellor." (1)

As a result they attracted hundreds of inquiries from potential members.

Stanley Barrett, in his seminal work on the Canadian far right, Is God a Racist?, estimates that there were approximately 2,500 committed Klan members and activists at this time. Many of these new members were, by Ku Klux Klan standards, very young. Droege oversaw a massive recruitment campaign in urban B.C. schools. A number of Vancouver high schools as well as the University of British Columbia and the B.C. Institute of Technology were targeted. Those who responded received information packages mailed from Louisiana and application forms for the Klan Youth Corps. In Ontario, meanwhile, McQuirter was leading an effort to distribute Klan propaganda in Durham-area high schools. On cards handed out to children at junior high schools in and around Toronto, the slogan "RACIAL PURITY IS CANADA'S SECURITY" was prominently featured. Says Droege: "We seemed to have a good rapport with young people.(1)

　
Ian Verner Macdonald

But they also grabbed the attention of other less likely Canadians.

Though members of white supremacist organizations tend to be marginal individuals who achieve little, if anything, in some cities, the Klan's supporters were hardly stereotypical. According to McQuirter, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan attracted members of the news media, Armed Forces and various police agencies. (1)

And even higher up the food chain, they won the support of a senior member of the Canadian diplomatic corps, Ian Verner MacDonald.

Macdonald, a wealthy land-owner in Ottawa with a penchant for writing letters to the editor, admits he acted as an "adviser" to McQuirter. Says Macdonald: "When Alex would visit Ottawa, generally if I had a spare room, I would let him use it. We would talk about social problems and develop ploys to publicize his point of view. We weren't plotting any revolutions or insurrections .... In some ways, some of the Klan's comments ring very true. Any sensible Canadian who has the interests of the country at heart would want the borders controlled, for example. The potential for the white population to be completely overwhelmed is too real and too great to be ignored."

Ann Farmer

While in Vancouver, Wolfgang Droege recruited a bright young UBC student named Ann Farmer (not her real name) (2). She would become the Klan's provincial spokesperson and later Droege's live-in girlfriend.

The above picture shows Farmer with James R. Venable, a Georgia lawyer and white supremacist who organized a major Ku Klux Klan faction in 1963 and headed it for nearly 25 years; and Don Black* who would take over the leadership of the KKK in the U.S. after David Duke left to form the National Association for the Advancement of White People, to counter the National Association for the Advancement of Black People.

The third, smallest category of Klan members consisted of those who came to the KKK not as frustrated losers or longtime Nazis, but as middle class Canadians intellectually attracted to the Klan's racism. McQuirter fit into this category. So did Ann Farmer, a student at the University of B.C. who became a provincial KKK leader. Proud of her Christian upbringing, she said she was "concerned about the increasing number of non-whites in Canadian society" and decided to join the Klan "because I am impressed by the Klan's spectacular history of fighting for white rights." These young, articulate leaders provided the public image for the Klan, the sanitized facade behind which the confused "losers" and the committed Nazis could hide. (3)

But then key members of the Klan, including Droege and McQuirter became involved in a failed plot to launch a coup in Dominica and take over the island for profitable gambling and drug operations. This landed Droege in jail and Farmer was given a higher profile in B.C. McQuirter joined her and together they kept the PR going.

"Cross-burning B.C. Klan holds rally behind armed guards," read the headline in the Vancouver Sun when the first public cross lighting in the province took place in late May. Forty Klansmen burned an eight-metre cross at Stave Lake near Mission. At least two of the KKK members carried rifles and shots were fired into the air. "Let us offer a prayer of thanks to God for creating us in his image, for giving us white skin and superior intellect," said KKK leader Ann Farmer as she opened the ceremony with a prayer. The Klan crowd gave Nazi-style salutes and chanted "white power!"' Three months later, the same scene was repeated at the side of the Fraser River in Surrey, as 45 Klansmen — several of them carrying weapons — held a cross burning. The proceedings were seen on television, thanks to a BCTV film crew which had been invited to the event. (4)

The B.C. Legislature discussed this growing problem, describing a newspaper account of the Slave Lake rally.

"Let us offer a prayer of thanks to God for creating us in his image, for giving us white skin and superior intelligent." That's how the invocation begins at the famous Stave Lake cross-burning. "With that invocation, delivered by a blonde woman in her early twenties, the Ku Klux Klan's first public cross-burning in B.C. in years was underway Sunday. Before long, 40 white supremacists, a dozen of them wearing white robes, were brandishing flaming torches, making Nazi-style salutes and chanting 'White Power, ' as an eight-metre-high, rough-hewn wooden cross sent flames into the darkening sky."

"The woman speaking identified herself as Anne Farmer. She said she was the National Grand Chaplain of the Canadian Klan and the girlfriend of Wolfgang Droege, the ex-B.C. Klan leader, now in a New Orleans jail .... "Canadian Klan leader Alexander McQuirter, who attended the ceremony, was asked about the Klan's claim to have attracted a 'new breed' of recruit - businessmen instead of workers. He said 'the (people who wear) ties type' are the new Klan majority, but they want to protect their jobs, so they just provide money and other backroom assistance . . . . .. (5)

They were definitely getting money from somewhere. McQuirter himself would later be arrested for his part in the failed coup, and Ann Farmer would be made leader. This didn't sit right with many who felt that a woman should not lead, and the organization began to fracture.

Ann Farmer insisted her group was "very much larger" than her miniscule" rivals. Certainly Farmer's group was in the best position to assert itself as the dominant force on the extreme right in Canada. (6)

Though only 26, Ann had all the connections. When she was handling communications, she kept up a steady correspondence which American Klan leader David Duke, and would do the same when Don Black took over.

Farmer's Klan also benefited from having been given the official franchise for Canada by a revitalized and united American Klan. Six independent Klan organizations in the U.S. had banded together to form a Confederation of the Klans in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in September, 1982. Don Black, the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with which the Canadian Klan had been affiliated, was elected to a four-year term as Grand Wizard of the confederation. Black was still out on appeal of his three-year sentence for his role in the Dominica plot.

James Venable, a 76-year-old leader of another Klan group who traced his family heritage back to founding members of the post-Civil War Klan, was given the honorary title of Imperial Emperor. David Duke, who had handed his Klan organization over to Don Black in order to set up his National Association for the Advancement of White People, addressed the Stone Mountain rally, and it was expected that the NAAWP might affiliate with the confederation. Black called the confederation "the biggest step toward Klan unity in 50 years." The American media estimated that 6,000 people belonged to the new body.

Ann Farmer represented the Canadian Klan at the Georgia rally. Getting the stamp of approval from a large American Klan organization gave Farmer the same organizational, political and financial backing that McQuirter had received from Duke's Klan when the former was trying to establish his Canadian Klan four years earlier. In addition to her Stone Mountain visit, Farmer had spent several weeks in the U.S. as part of a "Leadership Training Program" with Don Black. She toured various Klan regional headquarters and took part in local Klan events across the U.S., visiting New Orleans, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Birmingham, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Washington, Arlington and Philadelphia. She also visited the headquarters of Duke's NAAWP. "During my stay in the United States, I learnt how to organize the Klan on a larger scale than presently exists in Canada," said Farmer. "I gained from the knowledge of Klan leaders who have many years of experience in Klan administration."

Farmer wasted little time in applying her training. Plans were made to resume publication of The Spokesman. Its operations were moved to New Westminster, and a promotional letter which carefully described the newspaper as "not primarily a Klan publication," urged KKK supporters "to subscribe to the fastest growing White Nationalist newspaper in the country."

Farmer's Klan also began to put out a newsletter, Canadian KKK Action, similar to the bulletin McQuirter had produced in 1981. Aside from ads for Klan paraphernalia, a glowing tribute to the imprisoned McQuirter and news of Klan activities, the newsletter presented a new, twenty-point program of the Canadian Knights. This was the first time the Klan had officially formulated a program.

Many of the points were the standard calls of the KKK: a return to the traditional white values on which Canadian society was built;" "a selective immigration policy, which includes the end of non-white immigration;" and the "repatriation" of non-whites "to their country of ethnic origin." The Klan also appealed to a larger conservative constituency by espousing such goals as the restriction of abortion and the expansion of the armed forces. The KKK even threw in some left-sounding positions, pledging "to end the exploitation of Canadian resources by multinationals corporations" and to provide "political and economic autonomy to the native Indian and Inuit nations."

Farmer claimed the Klan was growing steadily while maintaining a low profile. "Our activities include meetings, the education of members, the dissemination of our ideology to non-members, weapons training and a youth corps," she said. "I am very optimistic about the Klan's future in Canada. I have observed a positive correlation between growth in Klan popularity with an increase in non-white population. Today in B.C., people are becoming more overtly racist because there is a local influx of non-white immigration." (6)

And yet with all this publicity, Preston Manning claimed not to know of Wolfgang Droege's participation in the Klan. He would have been the only person in the country. And according to Dr. Debra Chin, it was Stephen Harper himself who arranged to have Droege's Heritage Front handle security when Manning was speaking in Ontario.

Stephen Harper was Reform Party Policy chief, at a time when it had numerous members of the white supremacist group Heritage Front as members. Trevor Harrison, further documents that Mr. Harper even had Heritage Front members doing security for Preston Manning at Reform Party events in Ontario. (7)

I guess it's possible.

Footnotes:

*Don Black also now runs the controversial Stormfront website.

Sources:

1. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, Harper Collins, 1994, Pg. 214-217

2. Culture meets power, By Stanley R. Barrett, Praeger, 2002, ISBN: 13: 978-0275978075, Pg. 93

3. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 117

4. Sher, 1993, Pg. 141

5. Official Report of DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY, (Hansard), JUNE 23, 1981

6. Sher, 1993, Pg. 184-185

7. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrates continued ultra right wing affiliations by blocking pro social justice Toronto candidate, by Dr. Debra Chin, The Canadian

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: Happy Shoppers and True Nazis

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

In July of 1941, Latvia became a part of Nazi Germany as German troops moved in to occupy the country. (Photo above captures scene at Riga)

Anyone who opposed the German occupation , as well as those who had cooperated with the previous Soviet Union, were killed or sent to concentration camps.

But the Jewish and Gypsy population was also exterminated by Latvian Nazi collaborators.

The Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS, between 1941 and 1943, murdered most of Latvia’s 70'000 Jews and thousands more who had been deported from other parts of Europe. (1)

The most predominant group the Arājs Commando, alone killed about 26,000 Jews.

According to Wikipedia, the extermination included:

About 66,000 Latvian Jews, 19,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews, unknown numbers of Lithuanian and Hungarian Jews; unknown but substantial number of Gypsies, Communists, and mentally-disabled persons; unknown number of non-Jewish Latvians shot or imprisoned in reprisals and so-called "anti-partisan" activities. (2)

Into this atmosphere, Armand Siksna was born.

Born in 1944 in Riga, Latvia, Siksna was raised by parents he described as "anti-communist conservatives". His father owned two turpentine refineries and supplied the Germans during the war; Siksna's uncle had a stake in two banks and belonged "to a right-wing fascist-inclined organization"... (3)

Was this organization the Arājs Commando?

A True Nazi

In the year of Armand's birth, the Soviets would once again occupy Latvia, after driving out the Germans, and most resistance groups were forced underground. After the war a massive influx of labourers, administrators, military personnel and their dependents from Russia and other Soviet republics began. The ethnic Latvian population felt threatened as a programme to impose bilingualism was initiated.

Many fled the country, including Armand's family, who arrived in Canada in 1957. To a thirteen-year-old boy, whose opinions were already formed, not even Canada was safe from Soviet expansion.

When an adult, calling himself a "true Nazi", he joined the Edmund Burke Society and later the Western Guard, where he would influence, and be influenced by people like Alex McQuirter, Wolfgang Droege and Don Andrews.

A confirmed anti-communist, he joined the Progressive Conservative party but soon found it "was not really right-wing enough for me." He eventually joined the Edmund Burke Society and then the Guard when he "started to realize the importance of racism — the preservation of our race." Siksna recalls: "I had come to the conclusion that I am a true Nazi — and that is the most beautiful and the most noble philosophy of all the political philosophies that have ever existed on this earth."- Siksna was on the executive of the Western Guard and he ran in several municipal and provincial elections. His main contribution seemed to be constant run-ins with the law. As a Guard member, he faced charges for the defacement of property by affixing hate posters. He was accused of the theft of a typewriter when he worked as a security guard at a warehouse, and when police raided his apartment for evidence he was charged with violating the propaganda law because Nazi and Klan material was found there. (3)

The cache included: "swastika flags, boxes of KKK propaganda and several copies of Mein Kampf." (4)

Siksna would spend a great deal of time behind bars for a variety of crimes, including the plot to kill a fellow Klansman, but his most comical, if we can find anything humorous about his activities, took place in 1980, when he was convicted of the fraudulent misuse of a credit card. Apparently he found the credit card on the floor of a store and attempted to use it. Unfortunately for him the card was a demo made out to "Mrs. Happy Shopper". (3)

On February 22, the Toronto Sun reported that Armand Siksna had joined the Reform Party. As always, Preston Manning revoked the membership, but only after media exposure. However, though not following the violence of the Klan and other hate groups, Manning's Reform Party ideology was not unlike theirs. Pro-Anglo, anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-feminism, the list goes on. The only difference was that they were legitimate.

Aftermath

According to Michael Faulkner in Letters from the UK, the British Tory Party, is becoming friendly with the old Latvian anti-Communist movement, now headed by Roberts Zile.

More alarming is the alliance the Tories have struck in the EU with some of Europe’s most unsavory people – Polish and Latvian ultra-nationalist parties with strong anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations. And perhaps most alarming of all is the fact that the Tories and many others seem to find this quite acceptable. Where one might have expected outrage, instead there have been indignant attacks on critics of the ultra-nationalists, who are accused of maligning honorable men and repeating “Soviet era” slanders against them. At the centre of this controversy are two parties belonging to the new right-wing grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists, with which the Tories have chosen to ally themselves. They are The Polish Law and Justice Party and the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom party. (1)

And in Canada there is some concern with Jason Kenney's plan to build a monument to the victims of communism:

According to an Oct. 14 commentary by Efraim Zuroff in The Guardian newspaper, "if anyone needed additional proof of the unsuitability of the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom party as a partner for the British Conservatives, their response to a ceremony held yesterday in Riga to honour the Soviet soldiers who liberated the city in 1944 should be a stark reminder of the lack of shared values between the two parties." For Fatherland and Freedom condemned Riga mayor Nils Usakovs for placing a wreath at the Victory Monument which commemorates the liberation of Riga from Nazi occupation, and for taking part in a rally to mark the event. The party called Usakovs' presence at these events "an insult to the victims of Communist terror and a glorification of the Soviet troops." However, For Fatherland and Freedom is well known for honouring Latvia's Waffen-SS veterans who fought for Third Reich and Nazi domination of Europe. As Usakovs stated, "had Riga not been liberated from the Nazis in 1944, there would be no independent Latvia today [and therefore] it is our duty to thank those who fought against the Nazis." In Zuroff's view, the positions taken by the Fatherland and Freedom leader Roberts Zile and other ultra-right politicians "are hardly exceptional in their home countries...

... By joining forces with Fatherland and Freedom and Poland's Law and Justice, says Zuroff, "the Conservatives are granting important legitimacy to a false narrative that seeks to whitewash war crimes and erase the heroic victory of those who saved the world from Hitler and the Nazis." The UK-Latvia link is not an isolated phenomenon in Europe, where right-wing forces in many countries are pressing for bans against Communist political activity.

Here in Canada, the federal Conservatives have hitched their wagon to a similar attempt to falsify history. Stephen Harper and Tory cabinet minister Jason Kenney have both encouraged the groups which initiated the proposal for a "monument to the victims of communism" on the grounds of the National Capital Commission. (5)

We have got to start paying attention.

Continued: Odonists and the Western Guard

Sources:

1. ULTRA-NATIONALISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES: The Tories’ Latvian and Polish Friends,
By Michael Faulkner, TPJ Magazine, November 08, 2009

2. The Holocaust in Latvia, Wikipedia

3. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 83-84

4. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 215

5. UK TORIES LINKED TO LATVIAN FASCISTS, The People's Voice, November 2009

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: From Partisans to Pioneers

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

He liked greenhouses. So he built himself a greenhouse. He used to rest there, among the poinsettias and the cactuses, like an old lizard in the sun. Now they have buried him in the greenhouse, in front of his residence in Belgrade. There is a large white marble slab, with bronze lettering which reads Josip Broz Tito, 1892-1980.

No one much visits any more, and the place is neglected. On the day I visit it is raining, and rain is dripping from a broken skylight on to the Marshal's grave. Nobody cares. On his birthday in 1945, some teenagers ran a relay race from Kragujevac to Belgrade and presented him with a baton. Every year of his reign, the 'youth' of Yugoslavia repeated that race, and at the end of it they presented the old dictator with the relay batons. His birthday became 'Youth Day'. Twenty thousand batons are kept in the museum next to his grave. Nobody visits the batons any more.

How quickly the legitimacy of power drains away. The batons were not ridiculous twenty years ago. The relay race meant something to people. Now it seems to belong to the rites of some vanished tribe. (1)

Many of those youth so devoted to Tito, belonged to the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia. Like the Hitler Youth before them, they wore uniforms, but if Tito himself was paying a visit they dressed in traditional costume.

And one of "Tito's Pioneers" was a young man named Vilim Zlomislic. His father had been one of 'Partisans', the resistance fighters led by Tito himself. But he was killed fighting against the German occupation and Vilim's mother Rose was captured and transported to Germany in 1943 to work as slave labour for the Nazis, while young Vilim was placed in an orphanage.

Rose would survive the war and eventually marry a Canadian, Frederick Andrews, who was then working for a United Nations agency in a German displaced persons' camp. The couple moved to Toronto, but Rose never gave up looking for her son, even after she was told that he had been killed in an air raid.

Her perseverance paid off, and with the help of the Red Cross she was reunited with the ten-year-old Vilim, and immediately had him re-Christened, Donald Clarke Andrews, leaving their past behind for good. "As a youth, he was an excellent student who liked to read. He attended Ryerson Polytechnical Institute under a scholarship and, in his spare time, volunteered with various social democrat groups". (2)
But by the late 1960's he began to grow alarmed by Soviet expansionism, and became a dedicated anti-Communist and his life would change forever.

Don Andrews, through the Edmund Burke Society and the Western Guard, dominated the extreme right-wing stage in Toronto for most of the decade and became a sort of godfather to many of the present-day organizers of the Klan. "Many of them were my lieutenants in the Guard," he boasted ...

"I'm not upset if you call me a fascist," he once told a reporter. He worked in the Scarborough public health department and later at Toronto East General Hospital. Andrews, by his own admission, received money from right-wing sympathizers in the Serbian and other Eastern European immigrant communities. Neatly attired in business suits, Andrews was intelligent, well-read and eloquent.

In his six years as Guard leader, his penchant for violence seemed to be matched only by his political and organizational cunning. As a candidate in Toronto's mayoralty race in 1972, he polled 1,916 votes. Running again in 1974 on a white power ticket with his name on posters plastered across the city, he came in second in a field of eleven, with close to 6,000 votes. Andrews's political career did not come to an end when he was sentenced in 1978 to a brief jail term and forbidden to associate with the Guard. (3)

And of course that was the same Western Guard to which Alex McQuirter and Wolfgang Droege belonged.

Andrews and another Western Guard member, David (Tarzan) Zarytshansky, dreamt up a plot to launch a terrorist bomb attack on the Israeli soccer team during an exhibition match at Varsity Stadium.

Hearing this, Droege, who had been chafing under Andrews's dictatorial leadership style, was unimpressed. "By this time," he says, "I was getting pretty fed up, because I was starting to see what Andrews was all about. So I just conveniently left town because I didn't want to be any part of it. So I went fishing that weekend."

When he returned, Droege spotted the handcuffed Andrews and Zarytshansky on the evening news, being led away to the Don Jail by RCMP officers. The pair had been turned in by a paid informer. At his trial in late 1977, Andrews testified that non-whites were "human and organic garbage" and added, for good measure, that he possessed "a general dislike of Jews." He received two years in a federal penitentiary, while Zarytshansky received an I8-moth sentence in a provincial facility.

"After he was arrested," Droege says-of Andrews, "he was not allowed to be involved in the Western Guard any more. So he was gone for two years." (2)

It was at this time that Droege and McQuirter began to look into creating a KKK group in Canada. Andrews* would go on to found the Nationalist Party of Canada, which is still in existence. He also runs in every mayoral race in Toronto, including the last one.

My friend and I met him at his home. It was nice place around the Beach, and full of paintings (one was by a member of the Romanovs, he said.) There was also a
Swastika and a painting of SS soldiers on his wall. His teenage daughter was there too--a polite and kind looking girl.

"I'm running to give the white people an opportunity to express their views," he told me. The media "is always trying to shut you out; it's run by the Jews of course." I asked him whether he considers himself a Nazi, and he told me he's a racist first. "Call me what you want, just not late for dinner," he joked.

Andrews insisted he doesn't hate other ethnic groups, and said that "racism is for everyone." He expects people of different ethnicities to stay together. "It's about a sense of belonging," he concluded. (3)

Ah, yes. That's what it's about.

Footnotes:

*Andrews also endorsed Holocaust denier Jim Keegstra's bid to lead the Social Credit Party of Canada

Sources:

1. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, By Michael Ignatieff, Vintage Press, 1994, ISBN: 0-09-938951-7, Pg. 38

2. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 207

3. Toronto's Fringe Mayoral Candidates, By Guest Contributor, BlogTo, April 9, 2010

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: Wolfgang Droege and "Militant Conservative Activism"

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

After spending four years in Canada, and now a teenager, Wolfgang Droege was getting restless. His mother had remarried and started a new family, and maybe he felt that he didn't fit in:

Wolfie continues the story in his thick German accent: "I came to Canada when I was about 13 years old, in 1963. After living here for about four years, I went back to Germany. I thought I could maybe make a go of it there. I got a trade, working in a hotel, but I had a difficult time adjusting. I had become used to the Canadian way of life and Canadian values. In Germany, you know, there is much more discipline. Much more is expected of you. As a result I was kind of rebellious. Because of my rebellious attitude, I refused to cower before the people who were supposed to be my bosses. I had a difficult time." He sips at a Coke. "Then I tried to join the army. But they told me it would take about half a year for me to get in. There is a certain period you have to wait. I had no support from my family in Germany because they all felt my place was in Canada. For that reason, I came back to Toronto at the end of 1967 and lived with my mother and my stepfather." (1)

While in Germany Droege's neo-Nazi leanings became more obvious, and under the influence of his father and grandfather, his views on Jews and non-whites had grown even more extreme. At the time the far-right party of Adolf van Thadden, was making headlines, and Droege offered his services. He must have felt like one of Hitler's aids.

Virtually everywhere they campaign, the scene is the same: Helmeted police, chanting, angry demonstrators, occasional scuffles, the din of derisive "Sieg Hell" and "Nazis out!" Not since the 1920s, when the Nazis were reaching for power, has a German political party provoked so much tumult and violence as the far-right, ultranationalist National Democratic Party. Chancellor Kiesinger, admitting that the N.P.D. is not purely neo-Nazi, describes it as "extremely harmful." Judging from the intensity of the oratory directed against the N.P.D., there are times when it sounds as if it were the party in power.

There is, of course, no danger that Adolf ("Bubi") von Thadden, 48, the party's aristocratic, articulate leader, will sweep into power—or anywhere near it —in next Sunday's general elections; after all, there are but 30,000 card-carrying members. (2)

It's probably safe to assume that at least some member's of Wolfgang's family were among those 30,000.

Back home in Canada he drifted a bit, working at the International Nickel Company in Sudbury, until a lay-off brought him back to Toronto.

"Of course, by that time, my family was pressuring me, telling me I had to get a trade. They told me I had to do something with my life. So, as a result, I got involved with the printing trade." (1)

He found work as an offset press apprentice at Ready-Set Business Forms in Don Mills, while still living at home with his mother, brother, stepfather and three stepsiblings. Not an ideal situation for a rebellious young man.

But fuelled by his experiences in Germany and an interview on a Canadian station with George Lincoln Rockwell, then leader of the American Nazi Party, he was ready to jump into the neo-Nazi movement with both feet.

Rockwell had laid it all out there. The white race was the "master race", the Holocaust was a hoax and homosexuals should be gassed. He also stated that the real enemy was Communism, and that many Jews were traitors to that cause.

All of the things Wolfie would have heard as a boy, being read the stories of Julius Streicher and the 'Poisonous Mushroom'. He was now on a mission.




About the time of Droege's transformation, there existed a Nazi movement in Canada. Adrien Arcand, a Montreal journalist who called himself the Canadian Fuhrer, published many anti-Semitic articles and established a party that was anti-Communist and promoted the deportation of Jews. On November 14, 1965, he gave a speech in Montreal, which was attended by Gilles Caouette, future Social Credit Party of Canada Member of Parliament, and son of David Réal Caouette, who would later become the federal leader of the Socreds.

Arcand died in 1967, when in Toronto the movement was just getting started, under the leadership of William John Beattie. He created the National Socialist Party, formerly the Canadian Nazi Party, marking a re-emergence of organized neo-Nazi activity in Canada. Beattie held rallies that often turned violent, but he also enticed many to join the cause, including Wolfgang Droege.

In the mid-sixties, William John Beattie made headlines as the noisy leader of the Canadian Nazi Party. A six-foot-tall man who wore his dark, straight hair across his forehead in imitation of Hitler, Beattie maintained that the Nazi dictator was the best thing to come along in the world since Jesus Christ." His party caused a riot in 1965 at Toronto's Allan Gardens when about 5,000 people came out to protest a Nazi rally. Beattie was later arrested and convicted of public mischief for his attempt to paint swastikas on selected homes and sites in the Toronto area. Beattie was "constantly getting material from the American Klan," according to Max Chikofsky, an Ontario private investigator who followed the fascist movement closely at the time. A lot of Beattie's money came from European Nazis and fascists now living in Canada and from right-wing emigre Hungarians, Latvians, Serbians and others. "Some of these people have been fascists for 25 to 30 years; why should they stop now?" (3)

Vilim Zlomislic and the Western Guard

In the fall of 1974, while having a few beers at a bar called Maloney's in downtown Toronto, Droege met a man he had heard a lot about: Donald Clarke Andrews.

Born with the name Vilim Zlomislic in 1942 in the Serbian region of what was then Yugoslavia, Andrews came to Canada at the age of ten. As a youth, he was an excellent student who liked to read. He attended Ryerson Polytechnical Institute under a scholarship and, in his spare time, volunteered with various social democrat groups.

Certainly doesn't sound like a man who would become involved in far-right causes, but Andrews became a victim of the Baby Boomer revolution, that demanded societal changes. This culminated in the Civil Rights movement in the United States and our own rights revolution in Canada.

The Conservative Party were in the process of ousting their leader, John Diefenbaker, and replacing him with the more progressive thinking Robert Stanfield, while the Liberals chose a young "radical" named Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Times were changing and not everyone wanted to change with them. In February 1967, Donald Clarke Andrews, and two others, school teacher Paul Fromm and University of Toronto student Leigh Smith, formed the Edmund Burke Society, named after an arch-conservative British parliamentarian.

Along with communism, which it loathed with a vengeance, the Edmund Burke Society opposed immigration, sex education, welfare, homosexuality, abortion, big government and Pierre Trudeau.

The Burkers infiltrated left-wing groups and they organized dozens of counter-demonstrations whenever leftists were gathering to protest something. Often, brawls ensued, such as one bloody encounter between the Edmund Burke Society and Viet Cong supporters in April 1968, and another with anti-war protestors in May 1970. Andrews, who delighted in such conflicts, called the violence "militant conservative activism." Some members of the group were convicted of bomb threats, break-ins, thefts, arson, vandalism and countless assaults. At the start, the Burkers were singularly devoted to the anti-Communist cause. By 1968 or so, however, the group's official organ, Straight Talk, was describing the African people as "completely primitive" and describing the Holocaust as an "allegation." (3)

In February 1972, the group decided to change their name to the Western Guard and expanded its list of enemies to include Jews and non-whites. This new direction caused Paul Fromm and Leigh Smith to resign, and while Fromm got back in, Leigh Smith moved on to join Preston Manning's Reform Party.

"It's been a painful thing in my life. I should be proud of what I did, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.... I was and am a conservative and a right-winger. But I wasn't a racist." (3)

But the group's new direction, brought in new members, men who had been associated with John Beattie's Canadian Nazi Party, like John Ross Taylor, Jacob Prins and Martin Weiche. And their publication, Straight Talk, began calling for a "a white Canada" and featuring articles like: "Race is the Real Issue," "White Power," "Mongrelization of Toronto," "Negroes Massacre Whites," "Race Pollution," and "Canada—A White Man's Country." They also grew more anti-Semitic with references to "the jewdicial system" and referring to Jews as the instigators of international communism. (3)

It was at this time that Wolfgang Droege, encouraged by what he had heard about the Western Guard, decided to learn more about them.

Droege recalls his 1974 meeting with Andrews at Maloney's Bar: "I came up to him and said: 'Are you Don Andrews?' And basically we engaged in a conversation. And then we became friends. We talked a lot about politics, but we became more social friends. Shortly thereafter, he was trying to get me involved in the Western Guard, which I did. I was an activist, and I was promoting the cause. My whole life, from that point on, was devoted to promoting the cause. I was always racially conscious, but I just hadn't made any contacts. But that night I contacted someone who I realized was very conscious racially and that was Andrews."

Andrews laughs at the memory. "He probably heard me pontificating at the bar. His views were similar to mine. He seemed like an intelligent, middle-class guy. He went on to be an integral part of our operation. He did have the intellect, plus the bully factor—he was one of our strong-arm guys at the time." (4)

And Droege Would soon meet someone who would move him even deeper inside the far-right.

Continued: Sunshine Boys and a Flash in the Pan

Sources:

1. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 205-206

2. Echoes from an Unhappy Past, Time Magazine, September 26, 1969

3. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 78

4. Kinsella, 1994, Pg. 207-209

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: Sunshine Boys and a Flash in the Pan

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

The Toronto Sun became famous for their 'Sunshine Girls', and in 1972, under pressure from female readers, they introduced their first ever 'Sunshine Boy'.

Over the years, the daily Boy has featured the likes of Mark Messier, Rod Stewart, Ravishing Rick Rude and Mike Tyson. Besides, of course, the best Toronto has to offer. (1)

In 1980 one of those Sunshine Boys was James Alexander McQuirter, whose picture was published under the name Jim. "He'd like to find himself a seat on Parliament Hill," read the caption under his photograph. (2)

According to former colleague Robert Smith: "I worked with Jim McQuirter, the only Canadian Klansman to become a Toronto Sun "Sunshine Boy" We nicknamed him "Media Man," after a song by the 1980's band Flash in the Pan*". (3)

McQuirter would go on to lead the Canadian chapter of the KKK but it was a long journey.

Wolfgang and Jim

James Alexander "Jim" McQuirter was born in May of 1958, the eldest of five children, to a middle-class family in North York. At the age of 14, he began reading hate literature, that he tried to share with fellow students at York Mills Collegiate, hoping to convert his peers. His parents were less than impressed and forbid his discussing racial issues at home, so he took to streets to find kindred souls.

In 1975, when just 16, he met Wolfgang Droege and the two became instant friends.

Recalls Droege: "McQuirter was a very smart fellow. He was young, articulate and intelligent. Very capable, with a lot of ideas. We met, and we started to form a close friendship. (4)

McQuirter joined the Western Guard while still in his teens and describes his decision to get involved in far-right causes:

James Alexander McQuirter was attracted to Don Andrews's organization while still in his teens. His background was different from that of his fellow Guard members, many of whom seemed to have inherited their fascist leanings from their European families or experiences ... [and claimed to have come from a "liberal, middle class" home in the Toronto borough of North York. At "about 14 or 15" years of age McQuirter, through his own readings, became convinced of the inferiority of blacks and Jews and started to try and win his friends at York Mills Collegiate over to his beliefs: "I was always a conservationist. When I was going to high school, I was interested in the whales and seals. Then I started reading about some of the population statistics of the white race. We're a dying species. I used to talk to other conversationists about this, but they weren't interested — it was all racist stuff to them. But at the time, I wasn't a racist. I just thought, well, gee, everything should be protected.**

So I was forced to look at different groups, so-called right-wing fanatical groups. I was interested in what they had to offer, what their solutions were." McQuirter's parents apparently did not take too kindly to their son's new ideological bent, and he was told by his parents not to talk about the race question at home. "Today, I don't see any of [my parents] very much," he said in one newspaper interview. "Let's say they don't agree with me." After he graduated from high school, McQuirter spent four years in the Canadian militia [then] joined up with Don Andrews "... the Western Guard was the only game in town," McQuirter explains. Andrews was instrumental in fleshing out the style and substance of the young McQuirter's right-wing politics. 1 remember McQuirter coming to my house in the early days when he was about 18," recalls Andrews. "He used to come into my back yard and we would discuss organizational and political things. McQuirter didn't really know how to speak to the press all that much because he didn't have much background knowledge on political, international and other racial matters. So we would chit-chat and I would give him some pointers on how to answer some questions."" (4)

But McQuirter and Droege would eventually become disillusioned with Don Andrews.

We had the same feelings about Andrews. We felt he was trying to play this role of dictator and that he was not interested in working for our race or the advancement of our race. He just wanted a group so he could be the boss of it. He just wanted to be a mafia don." Andrews, not surprisingly, rejects this criticism: "A lot of Germans have an attitude problem when it comes to the right wing. They want to be in charge of everything—and, if they were, they would just go and lose it a third time." He pauses. "He got to be buddies with McQuirter, who wanted to do all sorts of wild things. Wolf assisted him in that." (5)

McQuirter certainly did want to do all sorts of "wild things".

In September 1976, Wolfgang Droege, John Ross Taylor and McQuirter attended David Duke's International Patriotic Congress of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in New Orleans, and the plan was hatched to start their own Klan.

Continued: From Partisans to Pioneers

Footnotes:

*The band also became a flash in the pan




**Sher believes that McQuirter may have fabriacated the conservationist story since it
is a favorite argument of the American Klan

Sources:

1. THE FIRST BOY AND MORE, Toronto Sun 25th Anniversay, August 27, 2008
Nationalist Party of Canada

2. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 13

3. Bayou of Pigs: Not Your Average Caribbean Cruise, Bob's Beat, Nationalist Party of Canada

4. Sher, 1983, Pg. 83-84

5. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg. 211

Chapter Thirty-Eight Continued: The Poisonous Mushroom

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Next to Joseph Goebbels, the best Nazi propagandist was a man named Julius Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element for Nazi messaging .

A devout anti-communist, he joined the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, a group formed in response to the failed German communist revolution of 1918.

And like many Germans at the time, be believed that the Jewish people were working with the Bolsheviks. However, his resulting anti-Semitism did not fit well with the group and he was asked to leave.

Then in 1921, he went to Munich to hear a man speak, who was gaining a reputation as a powerful voice for change.

I had never seen the man before. And there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbour said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace. (1)

That man was Adolf Hitler, and from that day on, Julias was a devout follower. He marched with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch and two years later, started his newspaper, with the purpose of promulgating anti-Semitic propaganda. “We will be slaves of the Jew, therefore he must go." Hitler declared that Der Stürmer was his favourite newspaper, and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in special glassed-in display cases known as Stürmerkasten".

As a reward for his dedication, when the Nazi party was re-organized in 1925 Streicher was appointed as head of the Bavarian region of Franconia, which included his home town of Nuremberg. His favourite hang out was a local pub called Cafe Blattnersberg, owned by a man named Werner Droege. Streicher and Droege became friends and when war broke out Droege's son Walter, joined the Lutwaffe, fighting for the Third Reich.

The "Education" of Children

While Streicher's newspaper incited hatred against the Jews, another project was more despicable. He published children's books, with an attempt to embed intolerance in young minds. The most popular of these was Der Giftpilz, or the Poisonous Mushroom.

“Look, Franz, human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, mother,” Franz replies. “I understand that in dealing with bad people trouble may arise, just as when one eats a poisonous mushroom. One may even die!”

“And do you know, too, who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?” the mother continued. Franz slaps his chest in pride: “Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews! "

Julias Streicher was tried at Nuremberg after the war and executed on October 1, 1946, but his legacy lived on in the family of his friend Werner Droege. Droege's son would marry a woman named Margot and they had a son named Wolfgang or "Wolfie", born in 1949 in Forchheim, Bavaria.

At the age of eight, he went to live with his grandfather Werner:

Wolfie was entranced by the exploits of Hitler and Streicher. At the age of eight, he resolved that he, too, like his father and like his grandfather, would grow to be a Nazi. (2)

In 1963, after his parents divorce, he arrived in Canada with his mother and younger brother Werner, and in time would get his wish, becoming one of the most powerful neo-Nazi leaders Canada has ever known. And he would also create quite a stir when it was discovered that he was the Ontario policy chair for the newly created Reform Party.

Continued: Wolfgang Droege and "Militant Conservative Activism"

Sources:

1. Testimony of Julius Streicher, Nuremberg Trials, April 26, 1946

2. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg 205

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Politics of Hate

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

"Less than 47 per cent of the people in Canada today are of British descent. Then do you wonder why the Klan has been called into being?" Saskatchewan Klan leader R.H. Hawkins 1928

"What, one wonders, would have been the result of the 1968 federal election if Trudeau had told the country that he would change the immigration picture completely, make untraditional immigration dominant, and bring in at least 650,000 colored immigrants in ten years—" Founding Reform Party member Doug Collins 1979

"Not in Canada, we say. Canada is different. But is it?... The Klan has been bringing its message of hate to Canadians. . . they can't be ignored." James Fleming, federal minister of state for multiculturalism 1982

The Ku Klux Klan had enjoyed a bit of prominence in the depression years, blaming immigrants and Catholics for the woes of Canadians, but they had pretty much fizzled out as most hate groups focused on anti-Semitism to vent their anger.

Even in the United States, they were dormant until the Civil Rights Movement, when they began to organize, gaining strength. But what made them even more powerful, was when they teamed up with the anti-Semites.

The KKK had faced opposition in every period of its existence, from anti-slavery abolitionists in the nineteenth century to labor unions in the 1930s and the massive civil rights marches of the 1960s. What distinguished the anti-Klan movement of the late 1970s was a greater organizational cohesion. In August, 1979, in response to the resurgence of Klan violence and particularly the Klan attack on peaceful marchers in Decatur, Alabama, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called a meeting of more than 30 organizations, and the National Anti-Klan Network was established.

The network was designed to help various church, community, labor and political groups co-ordinate their activities and pool their resources in countering the Klan. In 1979 as well, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group located in Montgomery, Alabama, began its Klanwatch project. Klanwatch was set up to identify and keep track of Klan members and Nazis across the U.S., recording their involvement in crime and violence, and regularly disseminating this information to the media, law enforcement agencies and politicians. Klanwatch's legal division won a permanent injunction in Texas against Klan harassment of Vietnamese fishermen, a favorite new target of the KKK. Klanwatch also won a major legal victory in that state when a federal judge banned Klan paramilitary activity there.

One of Klanwatch's fundraising letters was written by Maria von Trapp, whose flight from Nazism was made famous by the film The Sound of Music. She drew the connection between the resurgence of the Klan and fascism: "It is happening here, right now. The Ku Klux Klan and their brothers in hate, the American neo-Nazis, are growing in strength and belligerence across the country. Klansmen in their robes may look ridiculous, but the threat they pose is deadly serious. Hitler started out with just a handful of followers. Today, the Klan boasts thousands of members. (1)

And it was at this time that a resurgence began in Canada, in opposition to new immigration policies.

While David Duke and other U.S. Klan leaders were mustering their troops for battle, plans were also brewing among their ideological breathren to the north. In Canada, the Ku Klux Klan — and for that matter similar groups on the extreme right — had been largely dormant for three decades. What provided the bridge of continuity was the fascist movement. Just as many Klan members of the 1920s probably went on to become Canada's fascists of the depression years, so too did a good number of the Nazis who emerged in Toronto in the late 1960s and 1970s lay the groundwork for the rebirth of the Klan in that city. (1)

But what gave the movement strength, was that many of their actions had become legitimized by mainstream right-wing organizations, politicians, and even some churches.

...."Canadian Klan leader Alexander McQuirter, who attended the ceremony, was asked about the Klan's claim to have attracted a 'new breed' of recruit - businessmen instead of workers. He said 'the (people who wear) ties type' are the new Klan majority, but they want to protect their jobs, so they just provide money and other backroom assistance . . ." (2)

And as these groups became attracted to the Reform Party's stance on immigration, they would not only infiltrate the party, but also provide security and a few even shaped policy.

Continued: The Poisonous Mushroom

Sources:

1. White Hoods, By Julian Sher, New Star Books, 1983, ISBN 0-919573-13-4, Pg. 74-75

2. DEBATES OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY, Hansard, JUNE 23, 1981