Willis Carto dead at 89

[C.E. Whiteoak]

http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/10 ... r-26-2015/

A most interesting man with a long and amazing career. I only met him once in 2006 when he held a Free Speech Conference in Washington, DC, but have read and heard a lot about him before that time and since. Mr. Carto was often at severe and unnecessary odds with other White Nationalists, but he will nevertheless be missed.

I mean absolutely no disrespect when I say this, but there are many Willis Carto stories, and a good many of them seem to have two sides.

[Mike G]

Wow that is a shame RIP. This man has done so much invaluable for this cause.

[Volker Zorn]

In 1968, Alabama Governor George Wallace mounted a presidential campaign as an independent candidate, opposing both the Republicans and the Democrats. Wallace presented himself as a disguised racialist, who would recapture the federal government from the traitors and "pointy-headed bureaucrats" and reinstitute a White Constitutional republic.

It was all a lie: Wallace was just a two-bit political huckster bent on riding a massive wave of White discontent over the direction the country was heading. But nevertheless, his campaign released and focused White resentment and anger as never before in the modern era.

Willis Carto was a shrewd judge of human character, and he knew that Wallace was a false White Messiah. But he saw a wonderful opportunity to harness the tremendous racial energy that Wallace had unleashed.

Carto founded the "Youth for Wallace," as an independent adjunct to the official Wallace movement. The goal was to amass a huge mailing list of young racially conscious White people who were attracted to the Wallace campaign, and to use that mailing list for a post-electoral effort. And this he did.

Following the election, he transformed the YFW into a new organization: the National Youth Alliance. He recuited Dr. Revilo Oliver to help him in the new enterprise. Carto had had a personal connection with the deceased neo-fascist ideologist Francis Parker Yockey, and was the publisher of a popular edition of Yockey's 1948 masterwork: Imperium: The Philosophy of Politics and History. Because of this connection, Carto used Yockey's thought as the ideological basis of the NYA. Yockey was not really a racialist as we consider the term today: rather than a racialism rooted in biological reality, he championed a wispy, insubstantial "spiritual" racial ideology. Oliver was not especially enthusiastic about Yockeyism, but went along with it, later explaining that Yockey's thought was "the best option open to us at the time."

Carto's NYA never went very far. He published one issue of a newspaper called Attack!, held a few meetings and distributed copies of Imperium. Within a year, the NYA was moribund.

Enter Dr. William Luther Pierce, who had recently split with Matt Koehl's National Socialist White People's Party, of which he had been the National Secretary and head of public outreach. Suddenly a new option was available! Dr. Pierce was intent on forming an new pro-NS organization. Carto wanted someone capable of reviving the NYA. He brought Dr. Pierce on board in 1970 for that purpose.

Both Willis Carto and Dr. Pierce can accurately be described as alpha males. Just as in a wolfpack, the NYA could be led by only one alpha. After a brief but bitter struggle, Dr. Pierce prevailed, and detached the NYA from the Carto empire. The first thing that Dr. Pierce did was to jettison the Yockey ideology, and put the resurrected NYA on a firm footing of reality-based biological racialism.

In 1974, the NYA was reorganized as the National Alliance.

If Carto's NYA had not been available, Dr. Pierce would have certainly founded a brand-new group, with a different name. But having the NYA as a base or framework upon which to build sped up and facilitated Dr. Pierce's work.

The internecine struggle of the early 1970s is now far behind us. Willis Carto had made his peace with the NA years ago. He may be honored today for the pivotal role he played in laying the organizational groundwork for the greater things that came to pass.

[Kevin Alfred Strom]

In 1968, Alabama Governor George Wallace . . . .

Thanks for this, Volker. It will be republished as an article on National Vanguard later today.

Willis Carto was a kind of contradiction. He could network and put together very effective teams of people who had sometimes never met each other to accomplish his rightist tasks (a few of which were worthwhile), and he always seemed to have money to pay salaries. But he had a lot of trouble keeping people from eventually rebelling against his rule and turning into his enemies. When this happens over and over again, it can't just be that he always picked the wrong associates.

I sat down with Carto and several others when the New Orleans Protocol was signed in 2004. The Protocol was merely an agreement among signatories, all of whom were on what might be called the racialist right, to refrain from harming each other publicly, whatever their differences. It did seem to have an effect -- prior to that time, he was pretty free with gratuitous attacks on Dr. Pierce, George Dietz, Dr. Oliver, Richard Cotten, and others who he believed had "crossed" him in one way or another. Frankly, I don't think he was in the right in any of these disputes. Dietz and Oliver, for example, were guilty only of writing and publishing a book with the word "Populism" in its title -- during a time when Carto was promoting his Populist Party.

Carto was not a deep thinker, and he was a man of somewhat fluid principles, but he had very solid people skills and the shrewd business sense that helps a man put whatever he's doing on a paying basis.

And the Spotlight certainly was interesting, sometimes absolutely hilarious, reading. My favorite part was the classified ad section, where the weirdest, most bizarre ideas and theories I have ever seen had free reign. I remember ads about "qualifying" for tickets on a saucer fleet that was imminently leaving for the Pleiades, ads that claimed that a huge crack was soon going to appear in the Earth, splitting it in two "as predicted in Bible prophecy," and ads for special gas masks that patriots could buy to protect themselves from the gigantic "poison cloud" through which our solar system was about to pass. And my favorite was the booklet being sold that "proved" that soon, through some secret financial trick, the "Cosmos Seafood Company" (controlled by a mysterious and unnamed group of patriots) would own almost all of the money on Earth and would bring the corrupt banking and governmental system to its knees -- and you could buy stock in Cosmos Seafood simply by sending a measly few hundred dollars to their PO Box address!

Although I knew and know good people who were harmed when they came into his sights, Carto's life did have an effect, and we can learn many lessons from it.

All the best,

Kevin.

[Volker Zorn]

The November 9 & 16 issue of the American Free Press, a tabloid newspaper founded and published by Willis Carto, contains a lengthy memorial tribute to him. In it, the anonymous author says that Carto was an "admirer" of Dr. Pierce, their long period of mutual antagonism notwithstanding.

Here is the exact passage:

...[T]he late William Pierce, ultimately rose to power as a direct consequence of Carto’s patronage [sic], a fact that many have forgotten. Carto brought Pierce into the National Youth Alliance, which Pierce took over and renamed the National Alliance, setting the stage for Pierce to become a major (almost mythical) figure in his own right. Carto himself was an admirer of Pierce’s efforts, although the two were estranged for many years…

[Will Williams]

The November 9 & 16 issue of the American Free Press, a tabloid newspaper founded and published by Willis Carto, contains a lengthy memorial tribute to him. In it, the anonymous author says that Carto was an "admirer" of Dr. Pierce, their long period of mutual antagonism notwithstanding.

Here is the exact passage:

...[T]he late William Pierce, ultimately rose to power as a direct consequence of Carto’s patronage [sic]...

Thanks for that, VZ. I dont know why such a letter to AFP would be anonymous except that what the writer says is so far off the mark.

Your "[sic]" is right when the writer says Dr. Pierce's rise was due to Mr. Carto's "patronage." His rise was more like despite Carto's so-called patronage. The two were bitter rivals for decades and as late as the 1990s Carto used his weekly Spotlight tabloid to smear Dr. Pierce, calling him a "government asset." In the past year the NARRG grouplet that has sued the National Alliance for $2 million and Carto's AFP (successor to the weekly Spotlight) has been promoted as legitimate in articles taken from the NARRG's blog, accompanied by full color advertisements telling AFP readers to support NARRG to help "take back the National Alliance. Carto knew about this because I emailed him telling him in no uncertain terms that NARRG is illegitimate, their lawsuit bogus, and asked to invoke my right of reply because I am mentioned in those articles. I received no response from either him or his editor.

I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, so recently departed, but Willis Carto's patronage of late has been to this ad hoc group of former National Alliance members, all of whom resigned from the Alliance more than three years ago and half of whom never met Dr. Pierce. They have no standing to sue the Chairman and board of the National Alliance and never did, yet they keep huffing and puffing and raising money through the patronage of Willis Carto's tabloid and other "movement" groups to pay their attorney to "carry on the fight to final victory." They are doing their level best, using JOG court no less, to destroy the National Alliance because they did not get what was left of the Alliance's assets. The principle defendant in NARRG's lawsuit is former NA Chairman Erich Gliebe who resigned from our Alliance more than 13 months ago.

To paraphrase Voltaire:

Protect me from my ["movement'] friends; I can take care of my enemies.

[Volker Zorn]

Just to clarify: the passage that I quoted was not from a letter-to-editor, but rather from a four-page feature article on Carto's life. Authorship was credited to "AFP Staff" rather than to any individual, which is why I characterized it as "anonymous."

I knew Carto slightly. I think the article is correct in stating that over time Carto's hostility to WLP went away, and that he saw his work in a positive light.

Carto was invited by Glebe to speak at an NA conference in Hillsboro. I forget which year. When it was his time to speak, he used the opportunity to attack Gliebe for ruining the NA. EG had Ring throw him out.

If the AFP is now praising WLP, that is a positive development.

[Will Williams]

Just to clarify: the passage that I quoted was not from a letter-to-editor, but rather from a four-page feature article on Carto's life. Authorship was credited to "AFP Staff" rather than to any individual, which is why I characterized it as "anonymous."

I knew Carto slightly. I think the article is correct in stating that over time Carto's hostility to WLP went away, and that he saw his work in a positive light.

Carto was invited by Glebe to speak at an NA conference in Hillsboro. I forget which year. When it was his time to speak, he used the opportunity to attack Gliebe for ruining the NA. EG had Ring throw him out.

If the AFP is now praising WLP, that is a positive development.

Thanks for the clarification, VZ. I'll take your word on that, having not seen the article.

It's easy to praise Dr. Pierce, but the fact remains that AFP promotes Ring's bogus NARRGs over our legitimate National Alliance, using the most outrageous claims that they are the "real" NA.

It is strange that it was Ring who threw Carto out of that NA gathering (2012?) after he'd simply said from the podium that "Erich Gliebe needs to step down as NA Chairman." You'd think both Ring & Co. and Carto would have been happy that Gliebe finally stepped down and he and his board named his successor. There is something about AFP's promotion of NARRG.

[Will Williams]

Here we are three and 1/2 years later. Where's NARRG now? Carto's American Free Press should have granted me my right of reply back then to answer his paper's support of NARRG as the "real" National Alliance.

...Carto's NYA never went very far. He published one issue of a newspaper called Attack!, held a few meetings and distributed copies of Imperium. Within a year, the NYA was moribund.

Enter Dr. William Luther Pierce, who had recently split with Matt Koehl's National Socialist White People's Party, of which he had been the National Secretary and head of public outreach. Suddenly a new option was available! Dr. Pierce was intent on forming an new pro-NS organization. Carto wanted someone capable of reviving the NYA. He brought Dr. Pierce on board in 1970 for that purpose.

Both Willis Carto and Dr. Pierce can accurately be described as alpha males. Just as in a wolfpack, the NYA could be led by only one alpha. After a brief but bitter struggle, Dr. Pierce prevailed, and detached the NYA from the Carto empire. The first thing that Dr. Pierce did was to jettison the Yockey ideology, and put the resurrected NYA on a firm footing of reality-based biological racialism.

In 1974, the NYA was reorganized as the National Alliance...

I have that first issue of Attack! that Carto published and every subsequent issue that WLP published. I'll scan those eventually, starting with Issue No. 1.