The NSM is undoubtedly the most media-savvy group, in terms of their showiness and their accessibility. Through their media spokesman I am put in contact with Mark Connelly, the head of the SS division in New York, who I’m told is a college student and a “genius.” I’m not given a number but rather told I will be called. “You limey bastard” is the first I hear from Mark. He suspects me of being part of the Jewish Defense Force, a radical Jewish organization. I call up the spokesman who pledges to sort it out for me. A few weeks after I get another call from Mark and this time he is less truculent. “Sorry about that,” he says. “We just had a problem with the JDF; they were trying to mess us up.” I assure Mark that I just want to find out what’s going on with the NSM, and he seems to have the arrogance of youth, so I play to that. “I do the job pro bono,” he says of his role. “It’s something that you have to have a love for, it’s hard, it takes character for people who want to learn about history. This is about the reality of World War Two and the demonized German society, and being in support of National Socialism.” What brought him in? “I got into the movement when in high school, when I was learning things about certain events. They only tell you the victors’ side of the war; I found many discrepancies. I used to be Republican, but it comes to the point where you can’t trust the system.”
Connelly won’t give his age but by the sound of his voice he’s young. He lives in upstate New York, near the capital, Albany. “I’ve been disowned by my mother,” he says. The NSM are the most explicit Nazis in the US. They unashamedly worship Hitler, and dress up in 1940s Nazi regalia at their events. I attended their “historic” march on Congress in April 2008, billed as the biggest in decades. As the hundreds of cops and large numbers of anti-fascist protesters lined the streets before the march there was a feeling of great foreboding—until the NSM contingent arrived in a beat-up old van, containing perhaps thirty people, all waving swastikas, and dressed in jackboots. Scary it wasn’t. Metzger calls them, without irony, “right-wing reactionaries”: “They try to get in to the military covered in tattoos; my kind of people are taught to keep their mouth shut, to pretend they are race-mixing liberals; they don’t join any racial organization,” he says. “They are all nerds to me,” adds Forrest. “I fit in more with the Hammerskin agenda: they are more political, we are more for street activism. We’re skinheads, we’re not politicians, we’re street soldiers.”
Away from the NSM’s ostentatious pageants are the genuinely dangerous underground operators. One such is Dennis Mahon, who has been on the extremist scene for decades and had links with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, although he remains coy with me as to what they were. “It drives you crazy,” he once said. “Thousands think I was involved. I’ve started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotized and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me.”15 Tom Metzger, an old friend of Mahon’s, puts me in contact with him, and when I get hold of him he picks up the phone panting like someone who has been doing strenuous exercise. He’s at home and it’s 2 p.m. “Now’s not a good time,” he says. “What are you doing?” I ask. “Oh, I really can’t say,” he replies. When I finally get him for the interview he talks about how he started out in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before joining the National Alliance in 1980. “I thought they were too conservative,” he says initially. “I read a lot of books, like the Turner diaries, but then I was in Miami when we had the Haitian invasion.” Mahon is alluding to the “Mariel boatlift,” which saw an influx of asylum seekers during a seven-month period in 1980 when approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians arrived by boat to South Florida. At the time Mahon was in the National Guard and was drafted in to help out. “I had to take them from federal prison; they were defecating and urinating in the back of the bus.” His ideas started to change. “I thought the National Alliance wasn’t radical enough, I went back to join the KKK in Columbia, Alabama.” Now, Mahon acts as a “lone warrior,” much like Metzger, not bogged down by the politics of petty rivalries which distract from his central mission: causing carnage in his race war against the government. “I guarantee something will happen—we’ve all got our targets. The Weathermen is a book about how to destroy America. The Achilles’ heel is the grid system: when energy is needed the most you blast the stations, and once the power goes out the cities go out. I know of a lot of vulnerable areas. I’m not going to say I’m going to do this, but there are some lone wolves. Chicago will be out for a week.”
Mahon received basic training while in the National Guard and, he says, put it to good use at the time. “I was in National Guard and I was doing some real serious shit,” he continues. “No one was ever the wiser—shootings and bombings.” He pauses. “No I can’t say, they can get you on civil rights violations, believe you me; the Klan can see what the results are, but you don’t see them.” He talks about a legendary “lone wolf” in Arizona, who goes by the code name Tom E. Gunn, a former Marine. “He does a lot of damage to people’s business and harasses people; he’s kind of nuts, I hear he’s a master of unconventional warfare, he does some damage to people and he was in the Marines. I’ve tried to talk to him,” he continues, “I talked to him one time, he is above ground; the underground guys, they are not supposed to contact me, but they send me newspaper clippings, there’s so many organizations getting busted.” Tom E. Gunn can be found attacking Tom Metzger— “Metzger, you are an old nobody, a has-been, and a never-was. Go away and nobody gets hurt. Show up with ANY of your kind and it will be your LAST mistake”—in a Phoenix New Times article about an Arizonian neo-Nazi icon named Elton Hall being hit by a vehicle while taking part in a protest,16 but that’s about the extent of the evidence of his existence. Because he goes by an alias, tracking him down is near impossible.
Although joining the armed forces has been a frequently successful mission in the past, Mahon says now it’s even easier. “I know two people in the military—one in Marines and one in the army. One has done two tours of Iraq,” he says. “They are so desperate at the moment; they are going to let you in with a small swastika. If you are an obvious racist and shoot niggers and queers you might find it difficult, but generally you are fine. I’ve got reports from some of my sources in the military,” he continues. “They say they are getting a lot more skinhead types, quasi-racists, more tattoos; essentially they want guys that want to kill. In Iraq you don’t know who your enemies are, there’s no frontline.” But, he believes, this new liberalism will come back to haunt the authorities. “They are hard to stop,” he says. “The soldiers learn from unconventional warfare in Iraq and they realize that they can use that type of warfare in America, and it’s impossible to stop. I tell people to learn as much as you can to improve munitions capabilities, patrolling; I want them to learn sniping and explosives, the Green Berets. Once they go in they are not supposed to tell anyone who they are.”
By the time this book hit the press, Mahon had been sentenced to forty years for a bomb attack that injured a black city official in Phoenix.
It’s Kill or Be Killed
Back in the zoo, Forrest plays around with his boys, throwing them about as the rain subsides and we once again start off around the enclosures. The zoo is divided into different themes: we hang out with the cats for a while, then we head over to the elephants under duress from the youngest. According to Mahon’s rhetoric the US will erupt in flames when soldiers like Forrest return from Iraq, but looking at him languidly walking around with his kids, talking about his girl troubles and boredom at work, I find it hard to imagine. He laughs a lot when I mention the grandstanding rhetoric of his fellow-thinkers. “Talking about race war right now, we’d be wiped off the planet!” he cries. Despite this, Forrest says a lot of his friends in the Hammerskins are under constant surveillance by the authorities. “All my friends have been to prison. The FBI paid $30,000 to infiltrate the ’skins . . . They learn that, guess what, we drink a lot of beer and chase pussy!” He continues, “I know my name has been brought up a lot of times by the FBI, they are out for my mates Cobi and Richie, they are trying to put something together, it’s totally crazy. They are on the Terrorist Watch List. The FBI contacted them, came to their house, the cops came to my house when I busted up the anti-war protest.”
As the afternoon wears on the