Ku Klux Klan

From Hobson's Choice

A movement in the United States devoted to White supremacy and the hard right.

History

The KKK was founded in 1867 by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate cavalry general of the US Civil War. It was arguably the most active terrorist organization of all time, implicated in the deaths of thousands of African Americans. It was active chiefly in the southeastern past of the USA, where it posed as form of armed resistance to Reconstruction. In fact, it was an early manifestation of fascism.

After 1893, the KKK appears to have become dormant as a result of achieving most of its goals.

After 1915, the KKK was revived in the wake of the lynching of Leo Frank and Griffith's movie, Birth of a Nation. It ballooned in membership for many reasons, but eventually was discredited by its extreme corruption. Its violent hostilities were directed against Blacks, Jews, and Roman Catholics; however, it was also reliably violent against Communists and Socialists, and anyone unfortunate enough to be mistaken for those two.

Since the Civil Rights Movement, the KKK has been mostly marginalized; it is only one of a large number of White Power organizations in North America, and (as before) severely fractured. In some respects, the surmise that the KKK was unique has been useful to White racists since those unfamiliar with the history of White supremacist activity would naturally assume opponents of the KKK were necessarily opponents of racism or racist-enabling laws. As in the case of European fascism, this is false. First, White supremacist ideology was so widespread at the time that most political movements among White Usonians were more or less vociferously racist against some group. Second, there were sharp divisions of class and philosophy among White supremacists, with upperclass Whites frequently repudiating the Klan's "Christian" pretensions and its pseudo-populism.

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