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WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump continues to employ national security aide …
Even Before Trump, The Republican Party Was Reluctant To Push Out Nazi-Linked Officials
Is it really so surprising to see Sebastian Gorka keep his White House job?
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WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump continues to employ national security aide Sebastian Gorka despite a parade of evidence tying the counterterrorism adviser to Nazi-linked symbols, far-right politics and anti-Semitic political parties.
But
Gorka, who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents in 1970, is far
from the first Republican official with these sorts of ties. Throughout
the second half of the 20th century, as Eastern Europeans who had fought
the Soviet Union — many as part of explicitly Nazi or fascist-aligned
groups — immigrated to the U.S., GOP officeholders sought their support.
Gorka
isn’t unique: He “represents a long history, a century, of these types
of personalities being given personal status that they never should have
earned based on their ideology and their history and their
affiliations,” said Russ Bellant, a former reporter who helped expose a
previous wave of fascist-aligned GOP officials.
In
1968, Richard Nixon, who hoped to get elected by riding the backlash
against recent civil rights advances, rapidly changing cultural norms
among the youth and anti-authority riots, began aggressively courting
recent immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union
tightened its grip on the region in the 1940s and ‘50s. The Cold War had
led the U.S. government to overlook the fascist affiliations of some of
these immigrants.
Alex Wong via Getty Images
Laszlo
Pasztor, who came to the U.S. from Hungary during this period, helped
set up the National Republican Heritage Groups Council to organize
immigrants from Eastern Europe for Nixon in 1968. After Pasztor’s
success in that election, Nixon made the council a permanent feature of
the Republican National Committee.
But
Pasztor, who had served two years in a Hungarian prison for his role as
a Nazi collaborator, had deep ties to the fascist right. He had served
as a youth member of the Arrow Cross Party, the fascist Hungarian regime
that collaborated with Nazi Germany from 1944-45, and as a diplomat in
Germany. (This is the same Arrow Cross whose recent symbolic
re-emergence in right-wing Hungarian politics Gorka has defended.) In
his new role leading ethnic outreach, Pasztor would go on to recruit a
number of Eastern European immigrants with similar backgrounds.
The
famed investigative reporter Jack Anderson and his partner Les Whitten
were the first to bring attention to the background of those helping get
out the vote for Nixon in these white ethnic communities.
In a 1971 article titled “Nixon Appears a Little Soft on Nazis,”
Anderson revealed Pasztor’s fascist past and, with a tip from
Democratic National Committee official William Quinn, exposed another
council member, Dr. Joseph Pauco, a Slovakian who was editor-in-chief of
a pro-Nazi paper in the 1940s. Anderson also named two other emigres
with pro-Nazi histories who had visited Nixon in the White House or
received written praise from the president.
At the time, the Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish group opposed to anti-Semitic prejudice, asked for Pauco’s removal, calling it “inconceivable
that a person with Pauco’s appalling record should hold a high level
post with the Republican National Committee.”
Pauco resigned. Pasztor pleaded with Whitten that he was trying to weed out fascist elements in the ethnic council and stayed on.
But in 1988, investigative reporter Bellant took another look at Pasztor’s council and discovered little had changed.
Bellant revealed six more members of the ethnic council who had past
ties to pro-fascist, pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic political groups.
“I
think it was really important that Americans know that these people
with these war crimes backgrounds were brought into the United States
and elevated to leadership,” Bellant, who is now a political activist in
Detroit and former Democratic Party candidate for city council, told
The Huffington Post. “It’s not just the records of the people themselves
but who brought them in and elevated them.”
Mark Reinstein via Getty Images
The
ADL and Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz called for George H.W. Bush, then
the Republican presidential nominee, to dismiss people with pro-Nazi
pasts from the RNC’s council.
At
the time, Jewish groups were concerned about continued funding for the
Office of Special Investigations in the Department of Justice, which
sought to expose and prosecute ex-Nazis living in the U.S. Some of the
former Nazi-linked emigres identified by Bellant had been outspoken in
their opposition to the office. (The Office of Special Investigations
eventually moved on in 2003 to investigate individuals involved in post-World War II human rights abuses and then merged into a new office in 2010.)
“It is not enough to accept the resignations of a few handfuls of bigots after they are publicly exposed,” Dershowitz wrote in an op-ed. “The
Republican Party must forever rid itself of this cancer within the body
politic. There is no room within either major American party for Nazi
collaborators or sympathizers.”
Pasztor
and the others on the campaign with similar past ties to Nazi Germany
or fascist politics resigned their positions on the campaign. Bush
accepted the resignations, but blamed them on dirty politics practiced
by his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis.
“We
are resigning today from the ‘Coalition of American Nationalities’ and
removing ourselves from the controversy because we have been attacked
unfairly by George Bush’s political opponents,” the emigres said in a
statement in September 1988.
In
Gorka, the Republican Party now boasts a White House with a national
security aide who has clear ties to the next generation of
far-right-wing European politics. Gorka has been pictured wearing a medal of the Hungarian Order of Heroes,
also known as the Vitézi Rend. The Vitézi Rend is a controversial
right-wing group that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II; its
members are not allowed to immigrate to the United States. Gorka says that he wears the medal in honor
of his late father, Paul Gorka, who received it as “a declaration for
his resistance to a dictatorship.” But members of Vitézi Rend claim Gorka is a sworn member, a position he gained from his father’s membership. Gorka denies this.
When he worked in Hungarian politics, Gorka was closely associated with far-right, anti-Semitic political parties, including founding his own party with two former members of the openly anti-Semitic Jobbik party. In 2007, he defended his party’s support for the Hungarian Guard,
or Magyar Gárda, an anti-Semitic militia that uses the dress and
symbols of the Arrow Cross Party. The Hungarian Guard was later banned
by the country’s government for its violent and anti-Semitic actions.
The
new far-right European groups and parties that Gorka has participated
in are perhaps best known for their bigotry against Muslims. But they
also include anti-Semitic elements and venerate past symbols of native
fascist movements that supported the Nazis in World War II.
And
Gorka is not the only person in the White House with far-right
connections. White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was intimately
involved with far-right-wing parties in Europe when he led the far-right
publication Breitbart. Bannon boosted the new far right, including
France’s Marine Le Pen of the Front National, which was founded by her
father, the Holocaust-denying anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen. Bannon also
boosted the Austrian Freedom Party, which was founded by ex-Nazis.
Jewish
groups and senators have either called for Gorka’s resignation or asked
him to clarify his connections to anti-Semitic political parties and
groups in Hungary. But they shouldn’t get their hopes up. After all, it
took 20 years for the GOP to oust the last group of party officials
credibly accused of fascist ties.
And
even then, these figures did not drift too far from power: When
President George W. Bush hosted a 2006 White House screening of the film
“Children of Glory,” which depicted events surrounding 1956 Hungarian
revolt that was brutally crushed by the Soviet Union, his guest list included one Laszlo Pasztor.
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