Opposites Attract

Take a good look at this picture. Even if the acronyms "ANP" and "NOI" mean nothing to you, you can surely tell that there is something strange at work here. The 3 white men in the foreground are Nazis, specifically members of the American Nazi Party. The far more numerous black men behind them are members of the Nation of Islam.

The obvious question is why Nazis (white separatists) and the Nation of Islam (black separatists) would be attending the same function without killing each other. And the answer has to do with the nature of extremes. If we understand the political spectrum as a circle rather than a line, we see that extremes are actually neighbors.

Just as Nazis and Communists were nearly identical while they fixated on destroying each other, the ANP and NOI were nearly identical as well. And while the Nazis and Communists would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy of liberal democracy, the ANP and NOI would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy.

And who was the common enemy of the NOI and the ANP? Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement in general. And here we see how "opposites" attract.

Deep down, the Muslims and the Nazis wanted the same thing. They wanted separation. Despite the fact that each group was racially monolithic and explicitly preached the inferiority of the other race, they were able to identify a common enemy in people who favored integration. So while these groups may have warred with each other if they were forced into close proximity, their entire ideologies were geared at preventing any sort of proximity.

Ironically enough, the NOI and the ANP were able to forge an alliance based on their hatred for one another. Their hatred for one another ran so deep that the only thing worse than the other was any person or group who would propose mixing the races. Therefore these hate groups hated integrationists more than they hated each other.

Martin Luther King was a threat to the Nazis for obvious reasons. He wanted black integration into the white-dominated civil society. Martin Luther King was a threat to the NOI for reasons that may seem counter intuitive but which are no less obvious than the former. King was a threat to the NOI for the same reason; he advocated black access to white institutions. To the NOI, who preached that all whites were "the devil", the threat is clear.

What is much less know, however, is who brought these groups together. Because no matter how logical their common interest may have been on paper, we should remember that these groups explicitly hated each other with a profound bloodlust. Nazis killed black folks and the NOI was exclusively black. Quite a bump in the road. So who bridged this bump?

Malcolm X. It wasn't in the movie, of course, but Malcolm X personally arranged this alliance and invited Nazis to NOI rallies and speeches. He forged a similar alliance with the KKK. Anyone who knows the contours of Malcolm's life knows that he considered King to be naive in the extreme and that black folks' salvation lay in separation and self-reliance.

But most people do not know how far he took that logic. And he took it far indeed, to the point where he was meeting with and making tactical alliances with groups who were murdering black people. Even if Malcolm and the NOI thought those black people were misguided, they were still "their" people, being brutalized and murdered by "the devil".

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but this one may take the cake. The closest analogy I can think of offhand would be an alliance between al Qaeda and the Christian Coalition, founded on the common conviction that American society was decadent and sinful. Quite a few inconvenient truths would have to be ignored to forge such a bond, but this should illuminate the bizarre gravity of the NOI-ANP alliance.

This part of Malcolm's life, and it was only a small part, is ignored by nearly all Americans today, and especially black Americans. But ignoring is not the same as erasing. The marginal nature of both groups should remind us that movements based on exclusion ultimately fail and that "the devil" is always in the details.