If you’ve seen footage of the Charlottesville marches, you may have noticed that Chris Cantwell, a white supremacist, has an Asian tattoo on his arm.This actually isn’t that strange — a lot of white supremacists seem to have an unlikely fetish for all things Asian.Take Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, who wrote in his manifesto of his “great [respect] for the East Asian races.”“Even if we were to go extinct, they could carry something on,” he wrote, musing later in the same document that Asians “could be great allies of the White race.”
Then there’s former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, who has said he was “impressed by the Japanese people,” and Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who praised South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan for “protecting their monoculture” in his manifesto.It’s all part of a pattern that appears to go back to Hitler or further, and the reasoning has evolved over time. Now modern white supremacists are taking their Asian fetish way further than Hitler ever did.This segment originally aired Sept. 12, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.