Following today's arrest of Kevin Harpham, 36, as the suspect in the Spokane Martin Luther King Day parade attempted bombing, a picture of the bomber as a white supremacist is emerging. The arrest took place near the town of Addy (pop. about 1,200) about 70 miles north of Spokane This comes from the Spokane Spokesman-Review:
Suspect in MLK bomb tied to racist movement
An ex-soldier with ties to the white supremacist movement has been taken into custody in connection with the planting of a backpack bomb along the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. march in downtown Spokane, authorities have confirmed.
Kevin William Harpham, 36, of Colville, could face life imprisonment on charges of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and possession of an unregistered explosive device, according to documents on file in U.S. District Court. An initial court appearance is scheduled for this afternoon.
Harpham was arrested this morning during a raid at his home near Addy, Wash., by dozens of federal agents who had been assembling in Spokane during the past few days.
The Southern Poverty Law Center confirmed that Harpham in 2004 was a member of the National Alliance, which is one of the most visible white supremacist organizations in the nation. It was founded by the late William Pierce, who authored “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a future race war. That book was believed to be the blueprint behind the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh.
Harpham is being arraigned this afternoon. It will be very interesting to see what the search of his mobile home turns up.
So what exactly does the National Alliance advocate? These are excerpts of the profile of the National Alliance at the Southern Poverty Law Center:
National Alliance
Founded: 1970
Location: Mill Point, WV
Ideology: Neo-Nazi
The National Alliance (NA) was for decades the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America. Explicitly genocidal in its ideology, NA materials call for the eradication of the Jews and other races — what a principal foundational document describes as "a temporary unpleasantness" — and the creation of an all-white homeland. Founded by William Pierce in 1970, the group produced assassins, bombers and bank robbers, among other things. Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries, was the inspiration for Timothy McVeigh's 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and many other acts of terror.
No doubt the National Alliance would probably also characterize the Holocaust as "a temporary unpleasantness".
Background
For nearly thirty years, the National Alliance, headquartered at a rural hilltop compound outside the village of Mill Point, W. Va., was the most dominant and dangerous hate group in America. Founded and long led by William Pierce, a one-time university physics professor, the neo-Nazi group peaked in the late 1990s, when it developed a remarkably successful business model and Pierce's ideological influence stretched across much of the Western hemisphere.
The National Alliance developed out of the National Youth Alliance (NYA), which had formed out of the remains of an organization called Youth for Wallace that backed Governor George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign (Wallace ran on a pro-segregationist platform). The NYA broke into factions as a result of infighting, and Pierce gained control of the largest faction in 1970 and continued the organization under that name until its reorganization in 1974 as the National Alliance.
"We must have new societies throughout the White world which are based on Aryan values and are compatible with the Aryan nature. We do not need to homogenize the White world: there will be room for Germanic societies, Celtic societies, Slavic societies, Baltic societies, and so on, each with its own roots, traditions, and language. What we must have, however, is a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values and customs everywhere. … In specific terms, this means a society in which young men and women gather to revel with polkas or waltzes, reels or jigs, or any other White dances, but never to undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms. It means pop music without Barry Manilow and art galleries without Marc Chagall. It means films in which the appearance of any non-White face on the screen is a sure sign that what's being shown is either archival newsreel footage or a historical drama about the bad, old days."
— National Alliance website
Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries, which inspired numerous acts of terror including the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that left 168 people, including 19 children, dead. The manuscript, which was first published in 1978 under the pseudonym of Andrew Macdonald, described a future race war in which Jews and others are slaughtered by the thousands,...
Pierce once described how he hoped to lock Jews, "race traitors" and other enemies of the "Aryan" race into cattle cars and send them to the bottom of abandoned coal mines.
You can't get much more cold blooded than that.
Following the death of leader William Pierce in 2002 the National Alliance has undergone a fight over the group's leadership accompanied by a dramatic drop in membership.
A little over a month after Pierce's death, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report undermined Gliebe's new authority by publicizing a videotape of Pierce's last speech, given in April of that year at one of the group's semi-annual secret "leadership conferences" that were held at the compound. The Report published excerpts of the speech, in which Pierce pilloried members of other hate groups as "freaks and weaklings" and "human defectives."
In all, NA members were connected to at least 14 violent crimes between 1984 and 2005, including bank robberies, shootouts with police and, in Florida, a plan to bomb the main approach to Disney World.
Whether accuserd bomber Kevin Harpham remained a member of the National Allience after 2004 isn't known yet.
Its apparent that this kind of genocidal ideology was being carried to its own twisted logical conclusion with a bomb designed for maximum causalities targeting a Martin Luther King Day parade where one could expect to find a concentration of Spokane's people of color.
For more background also see my diary from day after MLK bombing attempt: Domestic Terrorist bomb attack on Spokane MLK Day Parade foiled
For a overview of the whole Patriot Movement see: The 'Patriot' Movement Timeline
Send the Southern Poverty Law Center some love.