6 Comments

1. thomas brinson:

   Thanks, Stan. It, indeed, was a privilege and an honor to march with you and the valiant “happy band” of sisters and brothers along the Gulf Coast.

   I have a blog of numerous photos and comments about the experience at: http://ltbrin.typepad.com/marchin/.

   3 April 2006, 9:14 am

2. Hubris Sonic:

   thanks Stan, sorry i couldnt make it. but I am sure you feet hurt enough for 2.

   3 April 2006, 9:47 am

3. James Starowicz:

   Stan, we missed you folks, in Fayetteville this year, but a few of us held the fort while instead of cadence calls {didn’t print out the text for them and don’t own a bull-horn} we had Very Energetic Young Cheerleaders, dodging through the March giving out their Cheerleader Calls for Peace and Justice!!

   One injured her angle but stayed around for the Rally!!

   Peace Bro

   3 April 2006, 2:10 pm

4. Linda Shaw:

   Stan…

   It’s all so necessary and so noble. Will it help? Where do we go from here? What is next? I’m almost without any hope at all…

   Please say something that will make me believe again.

   Peace,
   Linda Shaw

   3 April 2006, 7:49 pm

5. Charles:

   David Duke is from Louisiana.

   CB

   http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=21

   The Wandering Jew-Hater
   Neo-Nazi David Duke found many new friends — and even more buyers of
   his books — during his recent years in Europe
   By Martin A. Lee

   During his high-flying career as a professional white supremacist,
   David Duke made several trips to Europe in an effort to raise his
   international profile. Of all the countries he visited, Duke had the
   highest hopes for Russia, where he preached to the anti-Semitic choir
   about “the Aryan race’s main enemy — world Zionism!”

   Russia holds the “key to white survival,” he declared while touring
   Moscow after the Cold War ended. Praising Moscow as the “Whitest”
   capital city in Europe, he added: “Russia has a greater sense of
   racial understanding among its population than does any other
   predominantly White nation.”

   If a “racially aware,” patriotic party came to power in Russia, Duke
   effused, it could cause “a domino effect that would cascade through
   the whole world.”

   Duke traveled to Russia for the first time in September 1995. There he
   met Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the bombastic neofascist leader who played
   upon the wounded pride and deep despair that engulfed post-Soviet
   Russia, which was reeling from the whiplash transition from Communism
   to “savage capitalism.”

   Two years earlier, “Vlad the Mad” had shocked the world when his
   misnamed Liberal Democratic Party topped all other contestants with
   23% of the vote in Russia’s parliamentary elections. Zhirinovsky’s
   prescription for Russia was simple: “We must deal with minorities as
   America did with the Indians and Germany did with the Jews.”

   Zhirinovsky exchanged views with his American guest and found they had
   a lot in common. “We’re nationalists,” Duke explained later. “And
   Zhirinovsky is very protective of what you might call the white race.”
   The Russian demagogue commended Duke, calling him his favorite
   American politician.

   With his legal problems mounting at home, Duke brought his snake-oil
   sales pitch back to Russia in August 1999. While in Moscow, he
   befriended several anti-Semitic leaders, including Gen. Albert
   Makashov, head of the ultranationalist wing of the Communist Party,
   who urged his followers to kill Jews: “Round up all the Yids and send
   them to the next world!”

   It may seem odd that Duke, an ardent anti-Communist, should have found
   a soul-mate in Makashov, a Communist member of the Duma (Russia’s
   parliament) who dreamed of resurrecting the USSR. Yet the two men got
   along famously when they discussed “the new world order orchestrated
   by Jews” at the editorial offices of Zavtra (”Tomorrow”), Moscow’s
   main ultranationalist newspaper, where a young Russian aide could be
   seen wearing a David Duke button.

   Duke returned to Moscow the following year to promote the Russian
   edition of his new book, The Jewish Question through the Eyes of an
   American. (Actually, the book was a translation of several chapters of
   Duke’s 1998 autobiography.)

   The first 5,000 copies sold out quickly and subsequent printings were
   available at kiosks and book stalls, along with dozens of other
   anti-Semitic titles, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious
   Czarist-era forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Duke’s
   racist screed was even available in the bookstore of the Duma.

   “It was a very big hit,” Duke said in a December interview. “My book
   is sold all over Russia. You can buy it anywhere on the streets of
   Moscow.”

   Dr. Duke, I Presume?
   While in Russia, Duke catered to the deep-rooted anti-Semitism that
   had long been a potent force in that country’s history. At the time,
   widespread economic and social deprivation had strengthened the hand
   of neo-Nazi cadres and Skinhead gangs that terrorized ethnic
   minorities and foreigners in the Russian capital.

   For the most part, Duke kept a relatively low profile, preferring to
   meet privately with extremist politicians and small groups of
   hard-core activists, such as Semyon Tokmakov, the shaven-headed deputy
   director of the People’s National Party, a neo-Nazi youth group.
   Tokmakov, who typically wore camouflage pants, a black armband, and a
   knife on his belt, had served time in a Russian jail for severely
   beating a black Marine guard from the U.S. embassy in 1998.

   Duke offered public relations tips to his Russian comrades on how to
   market hate. But his experience as “a well-known American patriot,” as
   Duke was described on an Internet chat forum for Russian Skinheads,
   had only limited relevance to the political situation in Russia.

   After hearing him speak and reading his book, Zavtra Editor Alexander
   Prokhanov, one of the most influential figures on the ultranationalist
   scene, concluded that Duke’s ideas were hardly original. “All things
   that are said in the book are as old as time,” Prokhanov shrugged.

   Duke was on his fourth visit to Russia when his house in Louisiana was
   besieged by federal agents in November 2000. Fearing that he’d be
   arrested and sent to prison if he returned to the United States, he
   decided to remain overseas. Russian authorities never granted him a
   residency permit, but they allowed him to travel freely to other
   countries.

   Duke would spend the next two years in unofficial exile, a white
   nationalist without a nation, crisscrossing Europe, the former Soviet
   Union, and points beyond.

   Wherever he went, Duke tried to pass himself off as a respected
   American author and politician. He found a gullible audience in Kiev,
   where Duke received an honorary degree in political science from the
   National Academy of Management, a private Ukrainian university with
   close ties to the Arab world. “They asked me to give a couple of
   lectures, which I did, and they published my articles in the
   university magazine,” Duke said. “They also reprinted my book in
   Ukrainian.”

   Outside the former Soviet Union, Duke’s main base of operations was
   northern Italy, where he lived part time. Through contacts among
   right-wing extremists in Verona and the Milan area, Duke found a
   publisher for a forthcoming Italian version of his book.

   According to Duke, translations of the book will soon be available in
   several more languages. “I’m certain it will be published in Arabic,”
   he said, “but nothing is settled yet.”

   Italy and Beyond
   >From his perch in northern Italy, Duke traveled to Austria,
   Switzerland, Romania, and other European countries where right-wing
   extremist parties have been flexing their muscles at the ballot box.
   He turned up in Germany at a convention hosted by the neo-Nazi
   National Democratic Party (NPD) on Aug. 3, 2002. Two thousand NPD
   militants converged in Koenigslutter, Lower Saxony, for a day of
   rabble-rousing speeches, folk music, and various outdoor activities.
   For Duke, it was an opportunity to renew old ties and forge new
   contacts with neofascist leaders from Germany and elsewhere.

   In France, Duke claims to have a good rapport with Front National
   leader Jean Marie Le Pen and his top deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, who
   currently serves in the European Parliament. A photo of Le Pen with
   his arm around Duke is posted on the website of EURO, Duke’s
   Louisiana-based “white rights” organization.

   Last summer, EURO announced that in the interests of free speech it
   was going to host the Web site of Radical Unity, a French hate group
   recently outlawed by the government after one of its members tried to
   assassinate French President Jacques Chirac.

   Last year, Duke also attended an international “revisionist”
   conference in Moscow, where a rogue’s gallery of Holocaust deniers
   took aim at the gargantuan Jewish conspiracy that supposedly rules the
   world. Jürgen Graf, a Swiss fugitive who currently resides in Teheran,
   chaired this event, which was co-sponsored by the Washington,
   D.C.-based Barnes Review. Duke spoke on “The Zionist Factor in the
   USA.”

   Another American author, Michael Collins Piper, claimed that Israeli
   spies were behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
   (Piper writes for the anti-Semitic publication American Free Press.)
   Several Russian speakers ruminated on globalization and the Zionist
   menace.

   Ahmed Rami, a Moroccan native who now lives in Sweden and runs a major
   Holocaust denial Web site, thrilled the home crowd when he said that
   Russia is the only country that can stop the perilous march of
   globalization.

   Inventing an Expert
   In the wake of Sept. 11, Duke began touting himself as “one of the
   leading commentators in the world on the Mideast conflict.” He became
   an avid purveyor of the conspiracy theory that Israel was complicit in
   the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

   Published by the on-line version of the Russian newspaper Pravda (the
   former mouthpiece of the Communist Party), Duke’s essay about Israel
   and 9-11 found a sympathetic audience in Russia and parts of the
   Muslim world as well.

   Most recently, Discover Islam, a group of businessmen and
   professionals eager to popularize Islamic culture, invited Duke to
   lecture in Bahrain, a small but wealthy Persian Gulf state, last
   November. Duke alleged there that “the Zionist-controlled media” was
   stirring up animosity between Christians and Muslims, who should work
   together against the Jewish archenemy.

   He also trumpeted the usual medley of anti-Semitic canards when
   interviewed on Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite TV network, during his
   visit to the Persian Gulf. Duke’s appearance on Al-Jazeera prompted a
   protest by the U.S. State Department.

   As 2002 drew to a close, David Duke finally decided he’d had enough of
   his international travels, returning home to ignominiously plead
   guilty to two felony charges of tax and mail fraud.

   But at least some staunch allies quickly leapt to his defense, despite
   Duke’s admission that he had ripped off his supporters, spending their
   donations on personal investments and at the gaming tables.

   Duke was prison-bound, according to EURO National Director Vincent
   Breeding, because the U.S. government wanted to silence him to keep
   the truth about Sept. 11 under wraps.

   Intelligence Report
   Spring 2003

   17 November 2006, 12:03 pm

6. James M:

   Questioning the relevance of this post, but then again it’s nice to hear what that sleazebag is up to these days. I wonder if he’s had any more bad plastic surgery? The story didn’t say. There was a time back in the early 90’s when we Louisianians were faced with a classic dilemma (two bad choices) for who would be our next governor: A well-known crook who’s since been convicted of taking bribes (even wearing a “money-suit” to a meeting with an undercover FBI agent), and this former Imperial Grand muckety-muck of the KKK.

   There was a bumper-sticker that was popular at the time. It read: “Vote for the Crook, It’s Important.” The crook won, which I guess was fortunate.

   17 November 2006, 3:27 pm

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