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Old June 3rd, 2011 #32
Alex Linder
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From Amazon.com, a review of "A Hundred Little Hitlers," about Tom Metzger being tied to a skinhead who whipped an African nigger in Portland, which nigger ended up dying.

Powerful, insightful and accurate, October 22, 2003
By
Loren w Christensen (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America (Hardcover)

Eloquent, brilliant, insightful and fair, Elinor Langer's A Hundred Little Hitlers, published by Metropolitan Books is the true story of what really happened in Portland, Oregon on November 13, 1988 when three racist skinheads fought with three Ethiopians -- and one of the Ethiopians was beaten to death with a baseball bat.

I was a police officer on the Portland Police Bureau when this murder happened, working crime analysis at the downtown precinct, a job that included monitoring the growing number of racist and non-racist skinheads in the city. After the murder, the skinhead population and their crimes escalated as in no other city, so I was sent to the Gang Enforcement Team where I could monitor skins and investigate their crimes. I spent four years focusing on them, including working as a bodyguard for Tom Metzger during the two-week civil trial, which is covered so well in A Hundred Little Hitlers.

Though I was "the skinhead expert" and Public Information Officer for everything that was skinhead related, Langer's painstaking research and powerful, compelling writing kept me turning the pages, mumbling at least a hundred times, "I didn't know that."

This book is more than just a gripping tale of murder. Langer includes the history of the white supremacy movement; history of the various players; the politics in the movement, in the justice system and in the city; police procedure; and courtroom drama, all told from the standpoint of scholarly research, and profound analysis and conclusions. She shows great bravery as she paints a picture that isn't always politically correct in the delicate world of race relations. But she does so with truth, which wasn't always the case during this period (and still isn't today).

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, black gangs were shooting up neighborhoods virtually every night, Southeast Asian gangs were terrorizing their own community with high-tech, automatic weapons, and Hispanic gangs were killing each other and spraying innocent neighborhoods with bullets. Some of this made the news, but much of it didn't. But should a skinhead draw a swastika on a wall, it led at 5 o'clock.

I tried for two years to get a reporter to do a story that showed how black gangs often perpetrated more racially motivated crimes than skinheads. Finally, one reporter had the guts. The camera showed me holding 24 police reports of black on white crimes, but only six reports depicting skinhead crimes against minorities in the same four-week period. The next day, the reporter got in trouble at his TV station, and I was ordered by the chief's office to never, ever, do that again. The truth was not politically correct.

Langer doesn't mention this specifically, but she does discuss how the relationships between whites and blacks in Portland "required immediate vengeance for the death." She discusses how the police produced a politically acceptable case to the DA, rather than digging deeper into the facts of what really occurred the night of the murder. She talks about how the Justice Department had elicited the "racial motivation" plea bargain, which was the platform for all that followed. And she asks what would have happened if Tom Metzger had not been the "white supremacist of the hour," if Morris Dees had not had his "agency" theory all ready for his next target, and if the three skinheads had gone to trial and all the facts, the truth, had been brought out.

This is an incredible, courageous writing achievement, a definitive work about a murder, about hate, about our justice system, and about morals.

From a guy who was there, I highly recommend A Hundred Little Hitlers.

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America