ABSTRACT

Drawing on a range of material from the British Newspaper Archives, the University of Northampton, the Institute of Race Relations, and other institutions, this article sheds new light on a widely overlooked British tour by American Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1978. Duke’s arrival was a cause célèbre for the British press and for the British tabloids in particular, which eagerly kept readers up-to-date on police efforts to ‘hunt the wizard.’ While such coverage sought to cast Duke as an outsider and political extremist, it played directly into the Klansman’s talents for media manipulation and helped to disseminate his racist ideologies to a wide audience. As this article demonstrates, by focusing on Duke’s ‘good-for-a-laugh’ encounters with law enforcement, the tabloids minimised both longstanding efforts to establish a Klan presence in Britain and a more recent surge in Klan-inspired attacks. Duke’s arrival was not simply an isolated visit by an American extremist. It was connected to the broader emergence of a ‘post-war Anglo-American far right’ and can be understood as a direct response to heightened racial tensions in Britain—tensions that the tabloids themselves had helped to cultivate and exacerbate.

摘要

本文借鉴了英国报纸档案馆，北安普敦大学，种族关系学院和其他机构的一系列资料，为1978年美国库·克卢克斯·科兰党领袖大卫·杜克（David Kuke）进行的一次被广泛忽视的英国之旅提供了新的启示。到来是一个原因尤其是针对英国媒体，尤其是针对英国的小报，这使读者对警察为“追捕巫师”所做的努力保持了最新状态。尽管这种报道试图使杜克成为局外人和政治极端主义者，但它直接发挥了克兰斯曼在操纵媒体方面的才能，并有助于向广泛的受众传播他的种族主义思想。正如本文所展示的那样，这些小报着眼于杜克与执法部门的“开怀大笑”遭遇，既减少了在英国建立克兰势力的长期努力，又减少了最近以克兰为灵感的袭击。杜克的到来不仅仅是美国极端主义者的一次孤立访问。