White Supremacist Arthur Kemp Reprinting Forgotten Racist Texts
Notorious South African white supremacist Arthur Kemp has added a new project to his portfolio of transnational activism. In addition to writing for white supremacist publications and running a prominent website for British racists, he has opened an online bookstore featuring reprints of previously impossible-to-find racist tracts from times gone by.
According to its website, Ostara Publications (which Kemp founded in 1999 as a means of distributing his own white supremacist screeds) was “developed in response to anti-white discrimination the world over” and “intends to be the world’s primary Eurocentric resource.”
The collection so far is small – but what Kemp’s bookstore lacks in breadth, it makes up for in nastiness. One of the most striking resurrected titles is Arthur Compte de Gobineau’s 1853 tract The Inequality of the Human Races, the first book to promulgate the concept of a superior “Aryan race.” Tremendously popular among late 19th- and early 20th-century “Pan-Germans,” the book inspired generations of white supremacists and anti-Semites – including a young aspiring artist named Adolf Hitler.
Kemp is also hawking several civil rights-era tracts that were used to fight school desegregation in the South. Among them is Race and Reason: A Yankee View by Carleton Putnam, whose pseudo-scientific “proof” that blacks were biologically inferior to whites was used by the White Citizen’s Councils (predecessors to today’s Council of Conservative Citizens) in their battle to keep black children out of white schools. Also for sale is the equally influential The Biology of the Race Problem, commissioned in 1962 by Klan-endorsed Alabama Governor John Patterson and authored by Wesley Critz George, once a department head at the University of North Carolina Medical School.
Ostara offers some new titles as well. It is the U.K. and European distributor for White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, by racist ideologue Jared Taylor, editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance. Of course, the complete works of Arthur Kemp are also available, including a new 90-page text in which he states as fact that the I.Q. range in predominantly Muslim countries is between 70 and 79 (100 is an “average” I.Q. on most tests).
Looking at Kemp’s career, it’s no surprise that he would open a bookstore stocked primarily with hateful racist texts. Starting with his attempt in the early 1980s to revive a pro-apartheid student club at South Africa’s University of Cape Town, Kemp has spent the bulk of his years trying to breathe new life into fading pro-white causes. He was a pro-apartheid journalist in the 1980s and early 1990s, ultimately going to work in the South African security forces, which were implicated in assassinations and other violence directed at the African National Conference and other militant opponents of apartheid.
Kemp moved to England in 1996 and fell in with the National Alliance, which was at the time America’s leading neo-Nazi group. Always a fan of a losing white supremacist cause, Kemp threw himself into saving the collapsing group after founder William Pierce’s unexpected death in 2002. He wrote for and helped edit the Alliance’s National Vanguard magazine, and he drafted speeches and radio essays for its leader. He eventually got fed up, and in 2009 denounced Pierce’s recommendation that his followers abstain from participation in the democratic process and plan instead to seize power after the system’s collapse as “possibly the single most damaging influence in pro-white politics in American history.”
Between 2004 and 2011, Kemp worked in a variety of capacities for the whites-only British National Party. He resigned in March to become editor-in-chief of a British nationalist website owned by European Parliament member Andrew Brons.