Just One among Thousands

The Wisconsin Sikh temple shooter was a known Nazi, and the number of extremist groups in the U.S. is on the rise.

The man who caused a bloodbath Sunday in the Sikh temple in Milwaukee sang songs about white supremacy and posed in front of swastika flags. The shootings turned the spotlight on the neo-Nazi scene in the U.S.; the perpetrator had long been under observation prior to the shootings. No one saw any reason to intervene because he was just one more of many others on the right-wing American scene.

The Milwaukee attack could probably have been prevented. When Mark Potok heard what had happened on that Sunday at the Sikh temple, he wasn’t in the least surprised. Wade Page, the man who stormed into the temple and gunned down six people at random was well known to Potok, who said the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had had him in its sights for 10 years. The SPLC is a U.S. watchdog organization that tracks racist and right-wing extremist groups.

Wade Page did little to remain under the SPLC’s radar. He had a regular presence on neo-Nazi forums such as “Storm Front” and “Hammerskin,” inciting hatred and violence against African-Americans and homosexuals. And as a member of several skinhead bands like “End Apathy” and “The Blue-eyed Devils,” he screamed — loud enough for anyone with an internet connection to hear — his unmistakable speech into the microphone: “I struggle for White salvation, / Never stray from the path, victory for my race and nation.” The rant ends with a “Sieg Heil!” and the lyrics are from a song titled “White Victory,” which appeared on his record company’s website, Label56, until it was hastily taken off the server on Monday. In the number called “Beating and Kicking,” he was even more graphic in his intentions: “Beating, kicking, smash in your face, Kneel on the ground cause we’re the Master race, / Beating, kicking, feel the hate / You had your chance but now it’s too late.” In another instance, he claims killing for “the Reich” is his job.

Despite these messages, the SPLC saw no grounds for informing the authorities. The reasoning behind that, according to Potok, was that Page wasn’t breaking the law. Considerably more frightening, however, is Potok’s other explanation: that Page was nothing out of the ordinary and was just one of a thousand others like him. The neo-Nazi scene in the U.S. that showed its ugly face so unmistakably in Milwaukee last Sunday is apparently more lively and active than had been previously thought. Conventional wisdom had it that right-wing terrorism had reached its high point in the mid-1990s, after which it had tapered off. In 1995, right-wing radical Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Following that, dozens of attacks were planned and partially executed: The Ku Klux Klan wanted to bomb an oil refinery in 1997, a “Commander Pedro” of the “Aryan Nation” took part in a shootout with the FBI, and neo-Nazi circles birthed the attempted bombing at the Olympic games in Atlanta in 1996. The Olympic bomber was a member of the anti-Semitic organization “Christian Identity.”

Thereafter, the neo-Nazis effectively disappeared from public view. As it turns out, however, that was less due to a decrease in their activity than it was to the fact that Islamist terrorism took center stage. The SPLC’s website exposes more than 70 cases of planned or executed right-wing radical terrorist acts since 2001 — several times the number of Islamist terrorist acts. That’s why seasoned security experts have been saying for years that the danger from the U.S. right-wing far exceeds that coming from the Islamist quarter.

“The Hutaree, an extremist Christian militia in Michigan accused last year of plotting to kill police officers and planting bombs at their funerals, had an arsenal of weapons larger than all the Muslim plotters charged in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks combined,” said Daryl Johnson, a former analyst for the Department of Homeland Security. He went on to say that right-wing danger has increased dramatically since 2008 — since the election of America’s first black President and the emergence of immigration as a concern on the national agenda. The number of right-wing radical groups has risen from 50 to 200, but no additional funding has been allocated to combat this danger. A report submitted by Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano was dismissed as “misguided” by conservative congressional representatives, who further recommended that the national focus had to remain on combating the Islamic danger.

Wade Page, meanwhile, was a part of the right-wing radical scene long before 2008. He was discharged from the Army under less-than-honorable conditions in 1998 for being drunk on duty. He then traveled through the U.S. West and lived for a time as a homeless person on the streets of Denver. He finally settled in North Carolina where he established contact with the neo-Nazis and founded the rock band “End Apathy.”

What ultimately prompted him to commit the massacre on Sunday in Milwaukee is still unclear. His neighbors describe him — as is so common in similar cases — as quiet and withdrawn. A former Army buddy says that Page had often talked about a holy racial war, but never seemed likely to follow through with action. As it turned out, that was a fatal miscalculation.