Lamb and Lynx

Tonight I saw one of the most moving films I've ever seen. It was a documentary by James Quinn about the Gaede family of California, focusing on the 14 year-old twins, Lamb and Lynx: the "Nazi Pop Twins" as the programme calls them. It might seem strange that a film about neo-Nazis - or "White Nationalists" as April Gaede, the twins' mother, describes herself - could be moving, but it was: here's why.

Several years ago, readers may recall a BBC TV series called "Weird Weekends". Each episode involved Louis Theroux visiting a group of "weird" people - almost all in the USA (where else?!) - and following their lives in an ultra-objective manner. Subjects included UFO enthusiasts, porn stars, gangster rappers, televangelists, and body builders. I loved the series and it kept me on the lookout for other programmes involving Louis Theroux, since he is the reason it was so brilliant. His next BBC TV project was "When Louis Met...", in which he met some weird/eccentric/wonderful people (depending on your point of view).

Then, in 2003, "Louis and the Nazis" was broadcast. This film changed my life. I had never before realised that violently racist people like Bill and April Gaede still existed anywhere - let alone America, the home of the Civil Rights movement. And if it did exist in America, I assumed it would be in some Deep South backwater where the KKK still had a membership not countable on one hand, but no: they lived in rural California. The story of how April Gaede had brought up her twin daughters shocked me. They had been taken out of school at a young age and their mother had taught them all she knew about what most people would call White Supremacy. Her views had, as you might expect, rubbed off on them. Actually, more than that: Lamb and Lynx had become indoctrinated to the extent of becoming almost robotic in their pronouncements of the evil doings of non-Whites (the capital 'W' definitely applies here) and their hatred was only topped by that of their mother. April's father, Bill, was similar: when Louis intimated to him that he might be Jewish, Bill said that if he ever caught a Jew on his land he'd shoot him unless he was running away at top speed. (Incidentally, Louis Theroux is a non-practising Jew.) But the twins were the focus of the story.

Lamb and Lynx together form a band called "Prussian Blue". (The name refers to a chemical found in small traces at Nazi death camps. Holocaust deniers claim that this supports their opinion that either Jews and other non-Aryans were not slaughtered on mass by the Nazis or that this was not done on the scale commonly believed by the vast majority of historians.) Their songs were the most violent I had ever heard coming from two pre-teen girls playing a guitar. They spoke of death and destruction in a future war between whites and "the rest". There didn't seem to be one iota of compassion in them when they were on stage, but as soon as they're done (and away from their mother), everything changes. Even aged around 8-10, they had strong views on immigration (then again, who doesn't in the Southern USA?), but it was always clear that they weren't so sure that all non-whites were bad and that all whites were good.

Several years later I bought a book by Theroux called "The Call of the Weird" in which he revisits some of the people he filmed in his various documentaries, including the Gaede family. At the time of writing, the twins were in their early teens and they had changed. They seemed to be becoming disenchanted with their mother, to the extent they would dissent when she was not around, albeit choosing their words carefully. They said they wanted to move into more mainstream music, something that seemed to imply a wish to break with their past. They continued to perform at "White Power" rallies but, to Louis, their hearts didn't seem in it any more.

I also learnt from this book (although it might well have been mentioned as an aside in the TV programme) that April Gaede had been attacked by a black man when she was in her teens. She says a man attacked her, entirely unprovoked, and that she managed to escape only after biting him, and she believes that, had she not done so, she would have been raped. While this one event can surely not explain her politics on its own, it does offer an insight into the mind of a person with such extreme views. People holding such views are often held up by the mainstream as delusional or mentally impaired. Perhaps she was indeed psychologically damaged by this attack to the extent that it made her hate all black people for the rest of her life; perhaps not. Either way, it seems to me that April Gaede does have some major, unresolved problems in her life that cause her vitriol to continue to propagate while her beloved daughters are turning away from her, at least politically.

The most recent part of this story was told in the film I began this article by describing. The twins are now 14 and they want to "take a break" from their music career for a while. They repeatedly say that they "just want to be normal", and they show this by telling James Quinn about their love of shopping and dressing up. As with the last stage of the story, the twins have further distanced themselves (politically, but certainly not emotionally) from their mother. They now openly express their disquiet about her racism and seem fed up of being lauded as the heroes of the White Nationalist movement. They don't want to be thrown out of bars any more - as they are in one scene in the film. They no longer want to be associated with people like "Stormtroop 16" (a White Power band who, in the film, tell of their admiration for Prussian Blue). However, they still love their mother and she still loves them. It's a very tense relationship and you can't help but feel sorry for the twins.

While I'm sure that my sympathy for Lamb and Lynx is shared by many people around the world, I also sympathise with April Gaede. This might seem an ultra-liberal stance, and not something I would advocate given my previous posts to this blog, but it is nevertheless true. I feel the same sort of sympathy for April Gaede as I do for the soldiers in Iraq who have been mentally scarred by what they have experienced to the extent that they can be exploited by over-zealous commanders and end up torturing prisoners in a pretence of extracting information, when their subconscious motive is really to release the pain and anger they feel inside for having taken part in such a brutal war. (I should point out that I, in no way, condone the torturing of prisoners, or anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances. All that I am saying is that people do strange things in strange situations and we should not judge them by the standards of those of us who are fortunate enough to live relatively stress- and pain-free lives.) April Gaede has known nothing her whole life except begrudged tolerance bordering on hate, and a combination of factors during her childhood seem to have pushed her to the extreme.

I believe that, one day, both April and her daughters will leave the politics of hate behind them, once and for all. I can't see them shaking hands with the Rev. Jesse Jackson any time soon, but neither can I see them participating in the "race war" they insist is imminent. Perhaps Lamb and Lynx's move away from White Nationalism will persuade others to take a step towards the mainstream too; we can only hope.