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Notes -
Can you name any other organizations that get close to 200 murders a year?
By your standard, most organizations mostly do nothing. They prefer legally and socially defensible activities like fundraising and complaining on Twitter. The big exceptions are outright criminal gangs where violence is instrumental.
Which would be the normal framing of the Klan in history and pop culture! As an outright criminal gang, dedicated primarily to violence against black people. If you asked MoPs for historical peer organizations for the KKK, you'd probably get a lot of the Mafia, the IRA, Crips and Bloods, MS13, maybe Al Qaeda or ISIS. You typically wouldn't get a lot of comparisons to the Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Optimists Club, BSA Order of the Arrow, Knights of Columbus, the Campfire Girls. ((FWIW, the best comparison is probably the Black Panthers))
The former, on a murders-by-membership basis, typically run pretty close to even, if you say you're in La Cosa Nostra or a Cartel or in Al Qaeda I expect you to have been involved directly in acts of violence over the course of your career. The same could not be said of the typical KKK member: taking 200 as our upper bound (assuming KKK involvement in every lynching) and even taking a crazy number like 100 Klansmen involved in every lynching, that's only 20,000 Klansmen if they all only participate in one lynching. Over a ten year period, that's only 200,000 Klansmen who were actually involved in a lynching, as against 8,000,000 Klansmen nationally. Your modal Klansmen never lynched anyone. They may have participated in other, smaller scale violence, but that's a lot harder to track. By comparison, the Cartel membership estimates vs body count runs close to 1% a year; if the Klan ran that high at its peak we would have been seeing 70,000 lynchings a year.
Of course, the Masons aren't an entirely apt comparison on this basis, I would expect that most years the Masons have zero associated murders. But the experience of the average Klansman was probably closer to that of the average Mason than to that of the average Mafiosi.
I agree that cartels and international terrorists are bad comparisons. I’m trying to say that the Elks are also a terrible comparison.
The gap between “zero” and “200” is huge! There is a categorical difference between a club that refuses minorities and one that occasionally goes out and kills them pour encourageur les autres. Not incidental protests turned violent, not even organized patrols spoiling for a fight, but actual, premeditated murder. Putting them in the same category as some xenophobic philanthropists is doing the latter a disservice.
Hezbollah, the Muslim brotherhood, and the longshoreman’s union do extralegal violence. All of them have lots of members dedicated to the organizations other functions and not involved in personally doing terrorism.
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I'm focused on the experience of joining and participating in the Klan for the average Klansman. Who never murdered anyone, though he probably approved of it pour encourager les autres.
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