In St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, an international mélange of Holocaust deniers, Hitler apologists, white nationalists and Russian ultra-nationalist met in March at the Holiday Inn. They pressed the case for Russian opposition to American foreign policy and American multi-racial democracy, they supported the rebels in the eastern reaches of the Ukraine, and they opposed the European Union. Jared Taylor from American Renaissance was the fourth speaker up. Notably, he said things from that Russian platform that he has not quite said from any American dais. As such, this Russian event may signal some changes among American white nationalists.
Taylor told the crowd that his family had been living on American shores for 350 years. But he preferred to think of himself as European; European “as much as you are,” he told the crowd of Russians, Finns, Greeks, Germans and Brits. He then described America as the font of evil in the contemporary world, spewing immigration, diversity, and worthless ideas” that were the “greatest enemy and murderer of authentic tradition.”
To understand what this small shift means, please remember that Taylor presented himself in his first book in 1990, Paved with Good Intentions, as a disappointed liberal who has finally “figured out” that black people cannot make it in contemporary white society. In the mid-1990s, he no longer positioned himself as a disappointed liberal. Instead, he insisted that the key to his future success is for white people to develop a case of explicit white self-consciousness. At the same time, he was working with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. At that time, Taylor was enmeshed in American whiteness, trying to bring it to self-conscious fruition, and hoping to turn the entire society over to white ownership, control, and, in the view of this reporter, racist depravity.
Now he is calling for, in his words: “We support a strong and sovereign Russia that defends its traditions against all attacks. We support a Europe of nations and of regions, each with its own irreplaceable traditions.” And for the United States and its so-called white European traditions, it appeared as if Taylor has given up hope of any American renaissance. Instead, it seemed as if Jared Taylor was throwing his lot in with the Russians.
The other American speaker, Sam Dickson, an Atlanta attorney who once arranged for Holocaust denial speakers to give forth in his home town and now speaks at Taylor’s American Renaissance conferences, seemed to be sidling up to the Russian nationalists. According to Taylor’s recount of the St. Petersburg gathering, Dickson “praised Mr. Putin for encouraging higher birthrates in the West, while American rulers work for our dispossession by promoting Third-World immigration.”
Other speakers were from Golden Dawn in Greece; former British National Party boss Nick Griffin, now from the Alliance for Peace and Freedom in the UK; Udo Voigt from the German National Democratic Party (an old friend of William Pierce’s); and similar other naziesque groups across Europe. There were loads of Russians, of course. It seems that St. Petersburg, which once withstood Hitler’s Nazi army’s onslaught, has fallen from the inside.
