Film director Spike Lee's recent film about a black cop joining the Ku Klux Klan is a caustic reminder of America's "original sin" of slavery and our raw, homegrown racism. The KKK is truly an American original, but it has not remained within U.S borders. No wall of ideas has corralled this toxic concept from jumping the Atlantic and infecting Europe, where the KKK has found a new home.
KKK promoters do not regularly crow about their network or membership numbers. The European Klan plays a coy game, often masking its illegal affiliations and private intentions while publicly sugarcoating its rancid message. But their goals are clear. As German investigative journalist Frederick Obermaier told Deutsche Welle, "The German groups admire the American Klan, and they hope to be as big as the KKK in the U.S." Blood and soil is their refrain.
European public officials and national laws regularly stop the organization and assembly of KKK adherents. A high-profile case concerned former Grand Wizard David Duke, who started the neo-fascist, paleo-racist European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO). Duke, whose character starred in Lee's "BlacKkKlansman", was expelled from Italy a few years back, after a Venice court found him guilty of trying to establish "an organization aiming to exterminate the black and Jewish races in Europe."
