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Are Prince George white supremacists gaining momentum?

Nazi flags, white power tattoos, racially adorned clothing, racist online chatter and clustering up around common cultural activities... these are familiar sights in Prince George, The Citizen has discovered. And local racists are getting organized.

Nazi flags, white power tattoos, racially adorned clothing, racist online chatter and clustering up around common cultural activities... these are familiar sights in Prince George, The Citizen has discovered.

And local racists are getting organized.

One indication is a local white power proponent's online invitation to attend an upcoming racist rally in Calgary.

A Facebook discussion about a photo of a living room wall draped with a swastika flag posted by self-proclaimed white supremacists calling themselves Steve Corpse and Nuh'deen Amber Corpse shows how easy it is to gather support for racist views, according to David Gallant, a former violent skinhead convicted of hate-based violence turned UNBC Native Studies student.

Gallant, who is working on a Master's degree in social work, said it didn't take much online effort to find others who shared the Corpses' views.

"It's just rumblings, but right there you see a start, and there are other platforms as well," he said.

The Facebook exchange pitted online acquaintances against one another.

"Your a leftist [expletive]," one participant said. "Go love the Jews who plan to destroy our race, oh wait you probably don't care. Maybe if you were properly educated as opposed to the liberal bull [expletive] the teach you in public school. My Opa was an SS soldier in the war and can tell me from first hand experience that six million Jews were not killed. But you leftists don't care cause you have been brainwashed by the Zionist occupied government Canada has. Good Night Left Side. Heil Hitler".

Gallant said the black metal scene is not innately racist but is a place racists feel comfortable to gather. Some black metal bands are outright or only thinly veiled racist as their core value.

"To create a platform you have to work on racial tension," said Gallant. "I used that in my past white power organizing. The black metal scene is a great place to do this, and there is a big black metal scene in Prince George.

"There are guys in that scene who talk openly about white power on websites and Facebook, and they get together at these concerts. It is hard and solid here, forming something organized."

The non-racists in the audience either don't notice, don't know what they are actually seeing/hearing, or consider it such a caricature that they don't act against it, he said.

A spokesperson for the Calgary Police Service said the police is aware of white supremacist gatherings in the city.

"There seems to be an annual event of that nature here in the last few years, and I believe it is expected to happen again in March," said the spokesperson.

The local public should consider themselves in danger from Prince George people attending the white power gathering in Calgary, said Gallant.

"There might be some connections being formed with the white power people in Calgary, which is really active there," he said. "The Aryan Guard [white supremacy faction] was based in Calgary but it collapsed, but there are all sorts of fragments still there, and they are getting together in the spring for a march, is what I hear."

Gallant said there is currently a loosely organized undercurrent of racism in Prince George, which forms as those with white power beliefs in common soon gather and attract others, turning the racism from passive and social to active and political.

Usually there is a strong overabundance of alcohol, illicit drugs, a gym/workout habit, subculture aggression, acceptance (even promotion) of violent tendencies, and a sense of social permission from their friends.

It means, he said, that random people could get beaten up, and social groups could be targeted for physical or vandalism attacks, and visible minorities (especially Aboriginal) could get victimized by everything from misinformation to bullying to less social acceptance to outright violence.

UNBC Anthropology professor Michel Bouchard, a specialist in race and national identity, said there are a few common problems with white separatists and supremacists ideology.

"Racial purity is a fiction at best," he said. "The idea doesn't correspond to the genetic, cultural, historical reality of the planet. Put humans of any description in the same area, and they will find a way to mix, and that happened over thousands of years to those white races these [white power proponents] commonly look to.

"Race as a purely biological concept is meaningless," he added. "Yes, some Inuit look different from someone from Sub-Saharan Africa, but the true genetic differences negate that. Those characteristics people take to mean race, like skin tone, very often is too tight of a category. If we take blood types or other genetic indicators, you find North Africans can be lumped in with eastern Europeans if you pick indicator X or indicator Y. Race, from a biological perspective, doesn't exist in a concrete sense. And from an anthropological sense, racial purity has never existed."