From Russia, with hate

October 20, 2007

Guest Post by Morbo

Here’s just what we don’t need: Hordes of crazed, anti-gay Russian extremists with a proclivity toward violence invading major U.S. cities.

But like it or not, here they come. Several progressive organizations have reported recently on a scary group called “The Watchmen on the Walls.” Based in Latvia, the Ukraine and other Slavic regions, the movement mixes fundamentalist Christianity with virulent hatred of gays. This toxic cocktail has already surfaced on the West Coast and may be spreading nationwide.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, the Watchmen seem to take delight in deliberately provocative actions.

In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Watchmen frequently wield a crazy book titled The Pink Swastika by an anti-gay activist named Scott Lively. The Pink Swastika argues that Adolf Hitler was gay, even though there is absolutely no evidence for this. Any history of the Holocaust will tell you that the Nazis killed gays alongside Jews and others deemed “undesirable.”

The Watchmen movement also has ties with Christian Reconstructionism, a radical fringe of the Religious Right that champions a theocratic state based on Old Testament law. The Watchmen are also, unfortunately, making inroads into homophobic elements in some black churches.

I realize these reports sound alarming, but I don’t think they are exaggerated. I have friends on the West Coast who have encountered the Watchmen and affirm that they are as bad as critics say. I urge you to visit these sites and get informed in case the Watchmen surface in your town.

Homegrown homophobia and gay-bashing are bad enough. Now these Watchmen are importing a brand of gay hatred that puts even Fred Phelps to shame. It would be some comfort to think that the U.S. Justice Department is keeping eye on extremist movements like this, but somehow I doubt it. Maybe in 2009.

I used to have a couple of great links to sites debunking “The Pink Swastika”, but after several upgrades and hard drive replacements, I can’t find them. The closest I can come now is the result of a Google search.

The Annotated Pink Swastika

  • I assume that these Russian clowns are legal immigrants. It looks like we need a better screening process before we admit these people.

    So why is everyone so worried about some would-be strawberry pickers crossing over the border from Mexico to get jobs, when we have these people coming in?

    Oh. Right. The Mexicans are kind of brown-skinned.

  • This is the first Carpetbagger post that I have to characterize as silly.

    Hordes of crazed, anti-gay Russian extremists with a proclivity toward violence invading major U.S. cities. Is this anything like the of hordes of Islamofascist terrorists coming to make us wear burkhas? Actually, it’s a lot like the article in today’s WaPo titled “IED’s Seen As Rising Threat in The U.S.”.

    If the Watchmen are finding a constituency in Sacramento it’s because California’s inland agricultural valleys have always been closer culturally to Kansas than they are to Malibu. The gay-hating hordes of the Watchmen will gain traction where segments of the population are predisposed to gay-hating. Everywhere else they’ll be seen as a law enforcement issue – just like the terrorists.

  • My, how times change. Wasn’t it just a couple of decades ago that the same gay-hatin’, white-bread, Bible-bangers were ready to nuke those Commie bastards at the drop of a hat? So what are they doing now? Teaming up with – gasp! Russkies…Reds….former Commies! against that greatest of all threats to civilization – teh gay.

    Wow. In ten or fifteen years, the morons will figure out that the Muslims don’t like homosexuals either, and guess what will happen.

  • Yeah, that’s actually kinda creepy.

    Also, something that’s important, that somehow didn’t peg Google last month – but is important to a small eastern european nation – and important in embarrassing Bush: President of Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus is a hate mongering idiot. he spoke more than once in the US, including the secret location in Utah, spreading his message of hate and ignorance.

    It’s also important because the only thing on the web about him in English are glowing reviews from right-wing morons.

    Please help the poor Czech Republic.

  • These people are definitely working to create a cult of hate much like Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu, Milosevic, and other modern Eastern European dictators have done except in their case they are dictating religions instead of countries. It appears that they learned well from those despots about how to stir the masses to follow them by fomenting hate of a particular group of people. Anti-Semitism would be way too over the top for the US — unless you buy into the plot of Philip Roth’s novel A Plot Against America — so next choice is anti-Gayism.

    Except for a few religious leaders in the US desperately looking for any way they can to increase their power base, I don’t see Americans tolerating this because this is not about religious freedom. We fought and continue to fight wars to stop people just like this. With Putin lining up with Iran against the US it is clear that the Cold War is not over and hate mongering post-Communist Russian immigrants perpetrating violence in the US will be curbed.

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