ustxtxb_obs_1992_01_17_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

TI TEXAS TN! server A JOURNAL OF FREE VOICES We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values aboVe all interests, to the rights of human-kind as the foundation of democracy: we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Writers areresponsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in publishing them we do not necessarily imply that we agree with them because this is a journal offree’voices. SINCE 1954 Publisher and Acting Editor: Ronnie Dugger Associate Editor: James Cullen Managing Editor: Brett Campbell Layout and Design: Diana Paciocco Copy Editors: Roxanne Bogucka, Amy Root Mexico City Correspondent: Barbara Belejack Editorial Intern: Roddy de la Garza Contributing Writers: Bill Adler, Betty Brink, Warren Burnett, Jo Clifton, Terry FitzPatrick, Gregg Franzwa, James Harrington, Bill Helmer, Ellen Hosmer, Steven Kellman, Michael King, Mary Lenz, Tom McClellan, Bryce Milligan, Greg Moses, Debbie Nathan, Gary Pomerantz, Lawrence Walsh. Editorial Advisory Board: David Anderson, Austin; Frances Barton, Austin; Elroy Bode, Kerrville; Chandler Davidson, Houston; Dave Denison, Cambridge, Mass; Bob Eckhardt, Washington, D.C.; Sissy Farenthold, Houston; Ruperto Garcia, Austin; John Kenneth Galbraith, Cambridge, Mass.; Lawrence Goodwyn, Durham, N.C.; George Hendrick, Urbana, Ill.; Molly Ivins, Austin; Larry L. 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Any current subscriber who finds the price a burden should say so at renewal time; no one need forgo reading the Observer simply because of the cost. biweekly except for a three-week interval between issues in January and July \(25 POSTMASTER: Send address changes to TH E TEXAS OBSERVER. 307 West 7th Street. Austin. Texas 78701. A Member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies BY RONNIE BUGGER Austin MORALLY IT IS ALMOST incomprehensible that a man who admires Adolf Hitler and denies that the Holocaust happened became a leading candidate for the U.S. Senate and governor of Louisiana, received 60 percent and then 55 percent of the votes of the white people of Louisiana for those offices, respectively, and now bids to embarrass and humiliate President Bush, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and the United States by making himself the potential margin of decision on the question of who will be our President from 1993 to 1997. For imagine our national and personal shame if, running for President as an independent next November, Duke makes the difference, and President Bush must credit Duke for his re-election or the Democrats must credit Duke for their presidential victory! Yet this is our real and present situation and we have prepared this special issue of the Texas Observer on David Duke to deal with it. The astonishing contents of Duke’s public career are established and documented in this issue on the simple chronological principle so that our readers can follow the continuous unbroken lines of his thought and action from 1967 up to the present moment. Duke is a vicious obsessive racist and anti-Semite who champions and promotes the master-race ideology of Hitlerian Naziism now, today, in the United States. Since late 1989, while running successively for U.S. senator of Louisiana, for governor of the same state, and now for President of the United States, he has been flying under false colors as a conservative Republican. No one who studies the record of his career which we have assembled here can fail to know the truth that he is not only a racist and anti-Semite, but also a leader of and a drummer for Third-Reich Nazism. In the well-informed opinion of Elizabeth Rickey, a member of the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee who had a series of penetrating interviews with him in 1989, “He is a Nazi.” In Duke the voters of Texas and a score of other states in the Union are presented with an appallingly popular candidate for President whose past as a Nazi and whose tenaciouslymaintained fundamentalist Nazism are so shameful that he seeks to camouflage them by putting the emphasis on his past work and role as a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, which he also was. He may be the most dangerous nationalistic extremist in American history for two reasons. First, he.is not only a political radical, he is a racial radical. Immured in Nazi ideology, this smoothly-speaking, well-dressed, facelifted zealot rationalizes, adapts and sells the kinder, gentler racism that has been used by. President Reagan and President Bush to win votes while Duke remains actually determined, within himself, to enforce Hitler’s racist and anti-Jewish master-race doctrines in the United States. Second, Duke has gotten farther than any other American extremist ever has before with the exception of Huey Long, who may have been a left-wing fascist, but was not a Nazi. How, in the fmal third of the Twentieth Century in the United States, do you champion the Nazi ideologies of anti-Semitism, race-hate, and the geographical ghettoization of undesired brands and colors of people? How, in the final third of the Twentieth Century in the United States, do you tnunpet forth the pre-Holocaust Nazi programs for the sterilization of mental defectives and “an all-white America” that is to be achieved by the consignmentobviously, by the forcible consignmentof Jewish, African, Mexican, native, Cuban, Asian, French, Cajun and southern European Americans into reservations which would be de facto prisons? How, in the final third of the Twentieth Century in the United States, while carrying on noisome pro-Nazi activity for more than three decades, do you deal with the fact that Hitler and his Nazi beasts “resettled to the East” and systematically and intentionally mass-murdered 11 million innocent civilians in the Holocaust during the course of Germany’s aggressive war which cost 407,316 American deaths and a total of 50 million deaths? You do it by denying that the Holocaust happened, denying that it existed, as David Duke does deny, and by saying the United States should have stayed out of World War II, as David Duke does say. Essentially Duke uses anti-Semitic arguments to deny what the anti-Semitic Nazis did to the Jews by saying that “the hoax” of the Holocaust has been used to build up Israel and by rejecting the work of Jewish scholars about the Holocaust because they are Jews. “It takes Jewish Hollywood to make crematoria into, quote, ‘ovens,'” Duke said six short years ago. Five years ago, at a site in Mauthausen concentration camp, Duke told his close friend at that time, “This wasn’t really a gas chamber, it was just to de-lice people.” By such statements, Duke commits indescribable offense against the voiceless slaughtered millions who are still lying tangled where they last were touched by light. Consider, too, what Duke’s position on the Holocaust passes An Introduction to This Special Issue Now If Ever Now 2 JANUARY 17 & 31, 1992 4.104. *fp..