33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, insightful and accurate, October 22, 2003
Eloquent, brilliant, insightful and fair, Elinor Langer's A Hundred Little Hitlers, published by Metropolitan Books is the true story of what really happened in Portland, Oregon on November 13, 1988 when three racist skinheads fought with three Ethiopians -- and one of the Ethiopians was beaten to death with a baseball bat.
I was a police officer on the Portland Police Bureau when this murder happened, working crime analysis at the downtown precinct, a job that included monitoring the growing number of racist and non-racist skinheads in the city. After the murder, the skinhead population and their crimes escalated as in no other city, so I was sent to the Gang Enforcement Team where I could monitor skins and investigate their crimes. I spent four years focusing on them, including working as a bodyguard for Tom Metzger during the two-week civil trial, which is covered so well in A Hundred Little Hitlers.
Though I was "the skinhead expert" and Public Information Officer for everything that was skinhead related, Langer's painstaking research and powerful, compelling writing kept me turning the pages, mumbling at least a hundred times, "I didn't know that."
This book is more than just a gripping tale of murder. Langer includes the history of the white supremacy movement; history of the various players; the politics in the movement, in the justice system and in the city; police procedure; and courtroom drama, all told from the standpoint of scholarly research, and profound analysis and conclusions. She shows great bravery as she paints a picture that isn't always politically correct in the delicate world of race relations. But she does so with truth, which wasn't always the case during this period (and still isn't today).
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, black gangs were shooting up neighborhoods virtually every night, Southeast Asian gangs were terrorizing their own community with high-tech, automatic weapons, and Hispanic gangs were killing each other and spraying innocent neighborhoods with bullets. Some of this made the news, but much of it didn't. But should a skinhead draw a swastika on a wall, it led at 5 o'clock.
I tried for two years to get a reporter to do a story that showed how black gangs often perpetrated more racially motivated crimes than skinheads. Finally, one reporter had the guts. The camera showed me holding 24 police reports of black on white crimes, but only six reports depicting skinhead crimes against minorities in the same four-week period. The next day, the reporter got in trouble at his TV station, and I was ordered by the chief's office to never, ever, do that again. The truth was not politically correct.
Langer doesn't mention this specifically, but she does discuss how the relationships between whites and blacks in Portland "required immediate vengeance for the death." She discusses how the police produced a politically acceptable case to the DA, rather than digging deeper into the facts of what really occurred the night of the murder. She talks about how the Justice Department had elicited the "racial motivation" plea bargain, which was the platform for all that followed. And she asks what would have happened if Tom Metzger had not been the "white supremacist of the hour," if Morris Dees had not had his "agency" theory all ready for his next target, and if the three skinheads had gone to trial and all the facts, the truth, had been brought out.
This is an incredible, courageous writing achievement, a definitive work about a murder, about hate, about our justice system, and about morals.
From a guy who was there, I highly recommend A Hundred Little Hitlers.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the action-the reaction, November 8, 2003
By A Customer
I am not going to make this a lengthy review but I do have to say that I found this book terribly interesting and extremely compelling. While I am fully aware of hate groups, it was not really until I read this book that I really thought about such groups. While I was saddened to read about the death of the Ethiopian man in the book, I was equally saddened to read the second part of the book and the travesty of the court proceedings. This book kept me reading... at stoplights, while cooking, and other places I shall not mention-lol. I also found myself checking out information on the web about hate groups and was disturbed to see how many hate groups-both mainstays and splinter groups there really are out there. I slightly agree with a previous reviewer that there are many other hate groups that deserve equal attention and may actually be a bigger threat to society as a whole than the skinhead movement.
What I found interesting in the book was that the author spent some time making the reader feel sorry for the victim for the injustice done to him by the skinheads, but in the second part of the book made the reader feel slightly sorry for the skinheads for the injustices in the trial(s). Overall, this book was excellent and worth reading.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling and memorable book, September 7, 2003
Elinor Langer's book examines the 1988 killing of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon, by three skinheads who identified with a neo-Nazi movement. Through extensive research, interviews with the participants and with friends of the victim, and extraordinary access to police records, she describes in brilliant detail the lives of the Portland skinheads, the origin of their beliefs, and their movements in the months and hours leading up to the killing. This is a courageous book because Langer, an avowed liberal who was deeply distressed by the incident and the values of the perpetrators, nevertheless looks at these young people with considerable detachment in an attempt to understand them. The case led to a trial in Portland prosecuted by Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Langer was present at the trial, and drawing both on her experience in the courtroom and a careful examination of the court records as well as the legal maneuvers that led to the conviction of Tom Metzger, a California racist and leader of the White Aryan Resistance, she shows how evidence at the trial was shaped in order to argue the influence of W.A.R. on the Portland skinheads. The prosecution gained a conviction against Metzger, in part, Langer maintains, to allow Portland and Oregonians to transcend if not ignore the state's and the city's own racist past. The book tells a fascinating story, and is gripping from start to finish. Above all, it suggests that racism and the neo-Nazi movement are ongoing problems, which, even in Oregon, did not disappear with the successful verdict against Metzger. This is a deliberately disturbing and memorable book, one which will be talked about for a long time to come.
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