This is the second installment of a series examining views of white supremacy. The first article,”The art of inhumane hypocrisy,” ran Sept. 17, 2009.

Despite having a black president, the cold and dark reality is that organizations entrenched in racist ideology still exist in America. The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi political group founded by Dr. William Pierce in 1974 that promotes racism, segregation, and natural eugenics under the guise of white pride.

Pierce worked with the founder of the American Nazi Party George Lincoln Rockwell. Pierce founded the religion Cosmotheism, which has White Racialism and eugenics as part of its principle tenets, and wrote a book called The Turner Diaries that the FBI calls “The Bible of the radical right.” Timothy McVeigh promoted the book after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Since Pierce’s death in July 2002, the organization has been led by ex-professional boxer Erich Gliebe, whose father was a soldier for the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Gliebe was 8-0 as a boxer but retired after breaking his elbow in 1990. Gliebe gained recognition as being the chief executive officer of the National Alliance’s musical branch Resistance Records, a white-power metal label that has neo-Nazi messages. He was banned on May 5 from England for inciting hate.

The National Alliance is based in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and has members across the world, according to Smith, who is also a retired Eastern education professor. However, Smith said the Alliance would not divulge how many members it has for reasons he did not clearly mention.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in December 2003 that The National Alliance’s paying due members fell from 1,400 to less than 800 since Pierce died with Gliebe cutting the organization’s staff in half. According to the Anti-Defamation League, members left because Gliebe criticized skinheads and other white supremacist groups and forced out prominent group members who splintered off into competing groups.

Views on white supremacy

One of the main goals of The National Alliance, Smith said, is preserving the white race and Western culture. He said whites are a minority in the world and will soon be minorities in the United States.

Part of this push for “race pride,” Smith added, was in response to how blacks do not have any great cultures in history aside from “possibly Egypt.”

Dr. Don Holly, professor of anthropology, does not support Smith and Gliebe’s stance on Euro-Americans having superior cultures due to intelligence.

Smith said in all the studies he has seen, whites have a 15 to 20 point Intelligence Quotient advantage over blacks. Holly said race based on skin color is absurd.

“The idea of linking skin color to intelligence doesn’t make sense as if you link one’s height affecting the color of your eyes or earlobes,” he said. “They are totally independent traits.

“This is a discredited idea and no anthropologist of any credibility would support this. Anthropologists know skin color to be an adaptation to sunlight.”

Anthropologists disproved in the early 1900s that unity of race, language, race and nation has a neat overlap. Holly said one could look at America and see first generation immigrants more in tune with American children than from their home country.

People Americans call white have not been considered white in the past, Holly said. He pointed to Italians in the 1800s not being white and Jews.

“The assumption to bundle things like culture, which is learned and not genetic, and other traits like cultural complexity is not a strong case,” Holly said. “Race is a social construction. There is no basis genetically.”

In terms on genetics, Smith said he is not against President Barack Obama for being a mulatto, but later he said that whites marrying blacks or Hispanics would “bring down the gene pool.” This means he indirectly said he believes in natural eugenics, which is a part of social Darwinism.

Bob Bajek can be reached at 581-7942 or rtbajek@eiu.edu.