Scotsman.com News - Extreme measures

You may think the Ku Klux Klan has long been consigned to history, but writer Nick Ryan spent six years living among racial extremists in the United States and reports here on its enduring hold on the Deep South. (...) Living with the BNP’s man in America, I travelled to a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-collar version of the Klan which was born out of the segregation and schooling battles of the 1950s and 1960s. I met the founder and owner of Stormfront, the world’s most notorious neo-Nazi website, who was himself a former Texan Klan leader. And I passed myself off as a fellow extremist at a KKK barbecue deep in the Virginian countryside, surrounded by gun-wielding bikers and youths in Adolf Hitler T-shirts. I even discovered that BNP leader Nick Griffin is a close friend of modern America’s most notorious Klan leader and anti-semite, David Duke, who in turn claims Edinburgh ancestry and enthuses on the distant Scottish roots of the Klan. As Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, the charismatic Duke urged Klan members to "get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms". Like Griffin, he put on a suit and tie and reinvented himself as a ‘white rights’ politician, very nearly being elected as governor of Louisiana in the process. So while it might seem a historical anomaly, the reach of the Klan goes further than mere numbers.