generalspeaking

The Impressionable Conscript

The story of the once-fascist James McQuirter who set up a Canadian arm of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s presents as quite an enquiry into the frailty of human nature. And the propensity of young people to take up a cause they feel sympathy with. In Mr. McQuirter's case, it was the racist cause of preserving the purity of 'white' supremacy in North America. To agitate for the separation and removal, of 'outsiders' by any means, whether through oppression and isolation or violent underground atrocities.

People of colour should not be admitted entry to Canada, nor should Jews, long resident in the country, be allowed to remain in the country. Their presence defiled the purity of 'white' quality of thought and values in the British and Nordic traditions. While he was a young man he was exposed to racist thought and printed material, as a student at York Mills Collegiate Institute in Toronto. His parents spurned these racist activities and forbade his newfound fascination with rescuing the country from tarnished races, so he left home.

On a trip to New Orleans he met David Duke of the Louisiana KKK and was inspired to begin a Klan in Canada. His reasoning was that no one paid much attention to him, as a young man spouting racial hatred, but if he were to found a KKK branch in Canada it would garner attention from the news media and it most certainly did that. Suddenly he became well known, a hideous caricature of the rights of the white man. Suddenly all media outlets scrambled to interview him, as he became a public figure of notoriety.

"Given his charm, and his capacity to interact with people beyond the movement, especially in the media, he was able to not only galvanize the movement but he was also able to put a positive light on it that nobody else had been able to achieve", said Professor Stanley Barrett of the University of Guelph who had interviewed Mr. McQuirter, researching the Canadian far right. A positive light on racism? Making racism respectable? Personability and charm enabling a racist to spread his blighted message?

One thinks back to the descriptions of Chancellor Herr Hitler's purported magnetic charisma, in disseminating his racist agenda, the fascist fantasy of Aryan physical perfection, and the miasma of his anti-Semitic pathology of hate, enabling him to infect an already-ripe population to accept Jews as scum, bacteria to be eradicated without a qualm. Jewish organizations in Canada were fearfully alarmed, and to this date credit McQuirter with popularizing anti-Semitism within the larger community.

"It created a lot of fear and anxiety within ethnic communities, specifically within the Jewish community and communities of colour", according to Bernie Farber of B'nai B'rith. "He had a terrible, terrible impact." To which Mr. McQuirter, the new McQuirter who re-fashioned himself as a respected businessman and educator post-prison under a pseudonym responded: "I never thought about the impact. I don't think my sense of empathy was fully developed."

The irony is that this man who miraculously developed a conscience rather late in life, and who was sent to prison for hiring a hitman to kill another Klansman, read the literature of a Jew, Ayn Rand, while in prison, seeing in her view of individualism another perspective entirely: "It gave me a way to view the world differently." Abandoning his mission of achieving white supremacy within Canada. "Prison allowed me the time to sort out my mistakes and understand fatal flaws in my beliefs. Gradually I changed."

He discovered multi-level marketing, as a "good industry" to get involved with, and there, under the name of James Tavian Alexander, he embarked upon a new life. Becoming successful, writing books, explaining the "ancient cycles" of the universe, enabling the practitioner to "double or triple your income", his method amenable to anyone's successful use: "It doesn't matter who you are, where you live, your background, language, sex or colour".

The pity is that someone who had potential to succeed in life succumbed to hate before he turned himself to other means of expressing his wish to be a leader in society. The damage he managed to wreak on society with his impassioned belief in the superiority of one 'race' over another, denigrating those who are different, denying them their humanity, cannot be erased by regret, by covertly posing as someone else.

He speaks now of shame and remorse, but it is open to conjecture whether those emotions owe to the fact that his wretched racist background was revealed through the work of an intrigued reporter, or by the realization of the damage he brought to society.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Canada, Human Relations, Realities

posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 24, 2009