Anger and Ideology: The Milwaukee Sikh Temple Shooting

The August 5 shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin by Wade Michael Page closely followed the July 20 movie theater

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massacre in Colorado by James Holmes and preceded the August 7 guilty plea by Jared Loughner for the 2011 Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords at a public meeting.

Each perpetrator represents a unique psychological history. Loughner, who responded to forced medication under psychiatric care, is a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. Holmes emulated a villain from popular culture, the Joker, depicted in the 2008 film The Dark Knight as a remorseless agent of chaos. Page was alone in his willingness to die, preferring suicide to surrender. His assault on the Sikhs was also the only incident that conforms to terrorism, defined as the use of violence to achieve a political objective.

Page has more in common with Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 69 people in a military style commando raid at a Labor Party summer youth camp in 2011, than with Holmes or Loughner. Page and Breivik were both white supremacists, heirs to the ideology and pseudo-science that undergirded Nazism, and fed a loose-knit international network embracing militant racism laced with Nordic references. Both Page and Breivik sought victims whom they regarded as outsiders, foreigners and parasites in white society.

Page bonded with white supremacist hate groups while in the U.S. Army, where a racist subculture thrived despite decades of racial integration. “Up until his going into the service, I just knew him as that kind, gentle boy,” his stepmother Laurie Page told the press. “He said that it was the best thing he ever did,” she added. “He thought he was making a career of the military” (Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “Sikh Temple Shootings: Stepmother Describes ‘Kind, Loving’ Boy,” Los Angeles Times website, August 7, 2012).

The possibility for alienation and dissociation was implanted in Page’s adolescence. His father remarried when he was 10 and three years later, when his birth mother died, “he was devastated,” according to Laurie Page. His father and stepmother moved to Texas when he was a teenager, leaving him behind in Colorado in the care of an aunt and grandmother. Thus, his father was absent at a critical phase in Page’s development. After graduating from high school, Page joined his father and stepmother in Texas before

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enlisting in 1992. The nurturing he enjoyed during his early years was uncertain and conditional; family did not sustain the bonds he sought, and the military did not provide a sense of purpose as strong as he found among white supremacists.

By 1995, Page was with the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where a billboard on the road to the post screamed: “Enough! Let’s Start Taking Back America!” The ad was purchased by the National Alliance, one of several white supremacist groups thriving on the base. During this period, two neo-Nazis from the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg murdered a black couple in nearby Fayetteville. According to a March 1999 article in the Military Law Review, Nazi flags adorned the barracks of National Alliance members (“Shooter’s Odd Behavior Did Not Go Unnoticed,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 7, 2012).

As early as the 1980s, younger generations of neo-Nazis began shedding the brown shirts of their predecessors in favor of emblems drawn from the British skinheads. While off duty, National Alliance members from Fort Bragg tied their boots with white laces and wore jeans held up by suspenders, also in emulation of British skinheads, with hair buzzed to the scalp. The British skinheads had also been rebelliously aggressive: they preyed upon West Indian and Pakistani immigrants, venting their resentment over the white working class’ ostensible decline (Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979, pp. 54-59).

The skinhead ethos came to the U.S. in the 1980s in the baggage of the punk rock movement, along with hardcore bands who extolled Aryan superiority to the beat of aggressive rock largely bleached of its black roots. Page embraced the aesthetic, shaving his head and covering his body in tattoos, flaunting his ideology in indelible ink. He performed with bands such as End Apathy, Celtic Warrior, Aggressive Force and Blue Eyed Devils, traveling an underground circuit of white power concerts, record labels, fan magazines and websites replete with images of Viking warriors and Nazi rallies.

It is ironic that Page served in a “psy-ops” unit whose mission involved shaping the perceptions of civilians in Latin America.

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At that time, Page was already espousing hatred for non-white “dirt people,” according to fellow soldier Fred Allen Lucas. “It didn’t matter if they were black, Indian, Native American, Latin—he hated them all,” Lucas said (“Shooter’s Odd Behavior Did Not Go Unnoticed”).

Plus, Page alarmed superiors. He fell in rank from sergeant to specialist and was given a general discharge in 1998, a step below an honorable discharge which barred him from re-enlisting. If Page thought he had found a home in the army, the doors were now locked. He was left with only the network of Aryan supremacists to provide him with community and meaning. Page became a militant activist in those circles, drawing the concern of the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center as well as federal authorities, who suspected him of raising money for domestic terrorists (Brian Bennett, “Sikh Temple Shooting: Gunman had been on Investigators’ Radar,” Los Angeles Times website, August 6, 2012).

The skinheads with whom Page identified were not content to preach hatred; they practiced it violently. The Anti-Defamation League published its first report on the skinheads in 1987 and continued to closely monitor the subculture as it swelled throughout the 1990s. According to the League, skinheads were responsible for murdering dozens of Latinos, blacks and Asians and committed many lesser crimes, including stabbings, shootings, thefts and the desecration of synagogues (Anti-Defamation League Special Report, Young Nazi Killers: The Rising Skinhead Danger, 1993).

In targeting the Sikh Temple, Page acted out the ideology he had long advocated, but his mode of attack contrasted with his white power peers, who usually committed their crimes under cover of darkness with the full expectation of living to kill again. Page’s brazen assault had the mark of a suicide mission, his death wish directed against himself as much as his victims. The circumstances of Page’s recent life give every indication of disappointment compounded by anxiety. In his eyes, he was a victim of the white working class’s loss of status.

In studying mass murderers, Reid Melroy, psychology professor at the University of California-San Diego and FBI consult-

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ant, developed a profile of sociological and behavioral clues. Page was exceptional only in that he was 40, and the median age for mass killers is 27. But, like many mass murderers, Page had a criminal history, albeit his record was shorter than many of his predecessors, consisting only of guilty pleas for criminal damage to property and driving under the influence. The most prevalent common denominator, according to Melroy, is a sense of victimization (John Cloud, “Preventing Mass Murders: Can We Identify Dangerous Men Before They Kill,” Time, August 6, 2012). By definition, most white supremacists cast themselves as victims in their fanaticized conception of a society under threat from the rising tide of immigration, a “Zionist Occupied Government” and the decline of the white race.

In addition, Page had endured a succession of losses typical for mass killers, including financial setbacks and professional and personal problems. He had been dismissed from the Harley-Davidson dealership in Fayetteville, North Carolina after clashing with supervisors and fired from his next job with a trucking company. He purchased a house in Fayetteville but lost it to foreclosure. In 2011, he moved to the Milwaukee area to be with his girlfriend, who was also active in the skinhead movement, but by June 2012 he had lost both her and his factory job. Neighbors at his final residence describe him as a sullen, depressed, erratic loner. According to psychiatric nurse Jennifer Dunn, who lived below him, Page “made no eye contact” and spent the last two days before the Sikh shooting playing angry, pounding, high-decibel rock music (“Shooter’s Odd Behavior Did Not Go Unnoticed”). Perhaps Page felt he no longer had anything to lose. Immersed in a subculture of bigotry, victimization and violence, he amplified his sense of failure into murderous rage and directed it against an object of white power, demonizing one of the more exotic immigrant groups, the Sikhs.

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