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Originally posted by dhamsaic
Fortunately, the Klan has toned down their, uh, "message".
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Perhaps, but IMO, the "threat" is still there, based on their history. I'm not putting anything past them.
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I think they're all worthless pieces of shit - of that, there is no doubt. However, if they're not really "terrifying" anymore, I don't know if we can consider them "terrorists".
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Mmm...maybe they don't terrify YOU, but if I were walking down the street, and I saw some dude with a hood on, I'd be running the other way like my life depended on it...Hell, it WOULD! Again: the potential is a greater threat to me that anything that they are trying to convince people of believeing: "Oh, we aren't like the Klan of the past." The hell you aren't. You STILL hate blacks, jews, catholics, gays, and God knows WHO else.
And who's to say that they won't summon up yet another revival at Stone Mountain, GA, like they've done during their history, to regroup, and "try" to revive some of the past? Sure, they may fail, but just the fact that they are ABLE to do so worries me more.
*from the history channel website*
KU KLUX KLAN
There have been three Ku Klux Klan movements, which, despite a
clear line of descent and strong family resemblances, were separate
from one another in time, organization, and purpose.
The first Klan flourished during the Reconstruction era and was all but
exclusively southern in its membership and concerns. Its objective was
to perpetuate white supremacy following emancipation and the
conferral of civil and political rights on blacks. It was founded at
Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 as a social fraternity, but rapidly became a
local regulator or vigilante organization similar to others at the time.
Perhaps intrigued by its secrecy, disguises, and unique name (derived
from a Greek word for "circle" or "band"), former Confederates
including Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest converted the Klan in 1867
into a paramilitary force to oppose the Republican state government
under William G. Brownlow. The order quickly spread across the
South in the spring of 1868 as other Republican state governments
came into being under the Congressional Reconstruction acts. A similar
group in southern Louisiana called itself the Knights of the White
Camellia.
Klansmen were drawn from every walk of life, but the leaders often
were from the landholding and professional elite. After a brief flurry of
practical joking and pretending to be ghosts, the Klan emerged as a
terrorist group dedicated to defeating the Republican party and
keeping blacks in "their place" socially and economically.
Most southern counties saw little of the Klan, but others were overrun
by it for months or years at a time. It tended to thrive where the two
parties or races were relatively evenly balanced; in such places,
terrorism was most apt to change election results. In the worst-affected
counties, disguised night riders ranged the countryside on a regular
basis, dragging people from their homes, whipping, shooting, or
otherwise assaulting them, destroying their property, or driving them
away. Most of the victims were black, but white Republicans were
also targets.
The Reconstruction Klan was largely rural; its victims fled to the towns
for safety. It was also predominantly local, differing from place to place
and with little or no central control. Members went their own way and
few dared stop them. Most southern whites sympathized with the
Klan's objectives if not its methods, and those who liked neither were
often intimidated by it. As a result, few southerners opposed it, and the
Klan often paralyzed the law enforcement process.
In a few states, such as Arkansas and North Carolina, white
Republicans organized militia units and broke up the Klan. In most
states, however, federal intervention was required, in the form of
congressional legislation, military arrests, and trials in federal courts. By
these means the Klan was virtually destroyed in 1871-1872.
Around the turn of the century the Klan, and the Confederate "lost
cause" generally, took on a retrospective romantic appeal for
southerners that had been lacking amid the suffering immediately after
the conflict. This appeal was greatly stimulated by Thomas Dixon's
1905 novel, The Clansman, and D. W. Griffith's 1915 motion picture
based on it, Birth of a Nation. The second Klan was born in that
environment in 1915, which encouraged the superpatriotism of World
War I. After the war its membership and geographic range expanded
dramatically.
During its heyday in the early 1920s this Klan numbered over 3 million
members nationwide, and it won political power in Indiana, Oklahoma,
Oregon, and a number of other states. Unlike its predecessor it was
mainly an urban phenomenon, reflecting the demographic changes in
the nation. It drew members and leaders from all ranks of white
society, but chiefly from lower-middle-class people, largely religious
fundamentalists who felt threatened by a national drift away from the
small-town Protestant culture they had grown up with.
The 1920s Klan fed on a variety of frustrations and fears: fear of the
immigrants who were entering the country in large numbers, of
communists and other radicals spawned by the Russian Revolution, of
blacks who were moving into northern cities in increasing numbers, of
Jews and Catholics who were rising in the economic and social order,
and of labor unions demanding a larger share of the pie for their
members.
Some of these Klansmen resorted to violence as in the days of old.
But, in a membership exceeding 3 million, the vast majority were
nonviolent. They marched in parades, paid dues, and bought regalia
(this Klan was, for some of its organizers, a financial bonanza). They
voted for Klan-endorsed political candidates and attended rallies
where crosses were burned. (The original Klan did not burn crosses;
the idea seems to have originated in Dixon's novels.) The organization
dwindled away in the late 1920s, the result of its own legal, financial,
and political excesses, though a remnant persisted until its final
disbandment in 1944.
Only two years later the third Klan emerged. It was fueled by the fear
of communism abroad and at home, but the civil rights movement
provided its major stimulus. Organized in many parts of the country, it
is primarily southern- and urban-based. Membership is still drawn
disproportionately from undereducated people with relatively low
social and economic status. The peak in membership came during the
civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, when it approached seventeen
thousand.
The modern Klan is small, chronically fragmented, and prone to
internal conflict over matters of policy and personal rivalry. Groups
differ in their readiness to embrace violence. Some have accumulated
substantial arsenals and have even manufactured and sold weapons to
raise funds. They have sometimes forged alliances with like-minded
organizations, as happened in 1979 when North Carolina Klansmen
briefly formed a United Racist front with the state's tiny Nazi party.
Klansmen have also had ties to such white supremacist organizations
as the National States' Rights party, the Aryan Nations, and the
Skinheads.
For all their power to make newspaper headlines, the three Klans
historically failed to accomplish their major objectives. The first did not
end southern Reconstruction in the 1870s; that was more nearly the
work of organized rioters and Red Shirt campaigners. The second did
not significantly deflect the nation's progress toward a pluralistic,
democratic society in the 1920s. And the major effect of the third on
the civil rights movement was to hasten the triumph of that cause when
the Klan's violence helped mobilize public support for passage of
landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
David Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of
the Ku Klux Klan, 3d ed. (1987); Allen W. Trelease,
White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and
Southern Reconstruction (1971); Wyn Craig Wade, The
Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (1987).
Allen W. Trelease