Waking Up In America
Over a decade ago, my father, James von Brunn, wrote a racist manifesto, a detailed instruction manual for a coup of the United States government. It was a blatant “call to arms’’ that is still disseminated amongst white nationalists world-wide with a frightening reverence. At 89 years old, my father committed his second act of domestic terror when he walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C and murdered African-American security officer Stephen Johns.
As a young man, my father was a PT boat captain in the United States Navy. He patrolled the Mediterranean and Pacific theatres during WWII, fighting Nazis at the time, not supporting and encouraging them to infiltrate the U.S. government. In 1983, almost 40 years ago, in his first act of domestic terror, he attempted to make a “citizen’s arrest” of the Federal Reserve Board, in which he intended to demand nationally televised air-time to espouse his belief that the media, one controlled by what he believed were Zionist and Marxist “Globalists,” was working to undermine white hegemony and the destruction of white civilization via an “international cabal,” and “fake news.” These terms and words sound familiar don’t they? They should. They’re the same buzz words being used by key political figures in our country’s current administration. The most disturbing part of this story is not what my father did, but who supported him at the time.
United States Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin, the eldest of five brothers, all graduates of the Naval Academy, and the man my father’s manifesto was dedicated to, was, like my father, a decorated WWII hero. Like my father, Crommelin was also a vocal racist and anti-Semite despite, and throughout, his long political career. When my father was imprisoned for his terrorist actions at the Federal Reserve, Crommelin petitioned then-president Ronald Reagan for a pardon on my father’s behalf. Crommelin himself even wrote to me when I was six years old. Here is an excerpt of that letter: “[Your father] has taken very courageous and patriotic actions to try and alert the U.S. citizens to the real organization of the Federal Reserve System and its great danger to the survival of our once White Christian constitutional Republic, the cornerstone of Western Civilization. It is my conviction that James von Brunn deserves the gratitude and assistance of every White Christian citizen of these United States. And I believe he would have this support were it not for the cabal which controls not only the Federal Reserve System but also the nationally effective communications media.”
Crommelin continued in his letter to boast of discussing this “media control” with General Douglas McArthur, who “agreed that the greatest internal and external threat to the United States is the near ironclad control over the United States communications media.” Crommelin went on to mention the “oath” that every service member takes, an affirmation they “will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and praises my father for taking actions he believed every white man should take in order to secure a future for the white race. The letter itself is evidence that white supremacists have not only infiltrated every facet of the government of the United States, but even its military at the highest levels, going as far back to the concept of manifest destiny, the pinnacle of white privilege.
The American Dream: what used to be the goal of almost every freedom loving person in the world has morphed into a nightmare, even for its own citizens. We are beset on all sides with anxiety inducing desensitization to a multitude of horrors taking place all around us if only we could open our clenched eyes to see them. Only over these last few years have people begun to realize the exponential growth of the white supremacist threat within our nation. It is perhaps the most severe reality Americans of every culture are being compelled to recognize as a corrupt force that has pervaded every aspect of our society. White supremacy isn’t a movement or belief system, but a public health crisis, mutating and contagious, disenfranchising and killing innocent Americans The most troubling dichotomy of this racist infection, in my opinion, is that the average person believes the rise in white supremacy and violent acts of racism are a relatively new by-product of the not so “silent majority,” a term, by the way, my neo-Nazi father would say with pride in his attempts in indoctrinate me, a term the President of the United States also uses repeatedly with pride. What is unknown, is the extent of how pervasive white supremacist ideals and its representatives are established within the upper echelons of our government, of for how long it has existed.
The above is evidence that not only are the corrupt ideals of white supremacist thinking gaining traction, but it has been alive and well right under our noses. As people begin to either remove their head from the sand or bury it further, “waking up” to the idea that white supremacy is a problem may be too little, too late. While Americans have been sleeping, the cancer has spread. We can choose to medicate ourselves into going back to sleep and numbing our awareness into complicit ignorance, or choose in this very moment to recognize the severity of our situation, and fight this cancer of racism by whatever means we have left. American citizens, alongside their military, must recognize the oath to defend this country applies to domestic enemies more than ever
It should be noted that the USS Crommelin (named for the blatantly racist Rear Admiral Crommelin, and his brothers), a guided missile frigate, was commissioned in 1980 (before my father’s domestic terror attack at the Federal Reserve, an indication the authorities involved in naming and commissioning a U.S. military war ship were at least sympathetic to white supremacists) was only decommissioned in a grandiose ceremony at Pearl Harbor in 2012.
