William Cook Jr & Robert J Kelly. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. Volume 23, Issue 2, 1999.
In politically claustrophobic social systems stricken by irreconcilable ideological wrangling, it often happens that the ideological riptide stirred up by tensions and conflicts produces an emotional climate in which resentments rather than mere dispassionate politics dominates; in such an environment terrorism may emerge among those who see themselves on the political margins as nothing less than disenfranchised. The Militia and Patriot movements are arguably at the turn of the twentieth century, the most dangerous indigenous terrorist organizations to appear in the political landscape of the United States.
In the twentieth century, terrorism has been more secular than in earlier historical eras deployed by groups with definitive political objectives usually independence or some other type of nationalist goal. In 1968 when a Palestinian group hijacked an El Al flight en route from Rome to Tel Aviv, terrorism went global. That set off a wave of hijackings and airport shootouts. The real purpose of plane hijacks and explosions were plainly stated by the late George Habash, leader of the now defunct Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; when violence occurred, he said, the world paid attention. Indeed it did, so much so that in the ‘‘Black September’’ of 1972, a terrorist cell within the Palestinian movement struck lethally in Munich at the Olympic Games, killing eleven Israeli athletes after a violent gun and grenade battle with Bavarian police and security forces. Soon after, Yasir Arafat strapped a revolver to his hip when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The fact that terrorism produces recognition is underscored by Beama bin Laden, the individual branded by the United States government as the mastermind behind recent bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The spectacular double bombings put him and his cause on the front pages of newspapers and TV screens worldwide. Laden’s political agenda is rather murky beyond his seething Anti-American tirades and hatred of Americans and Jews who are, in his mind, interchangeable and indistinguishable. This may be true of many terrorists whose rationales have religious roots including the white supremacist militias in the United States.
Though scholars and law enforcement agencies may see the militias as serious anti-government movements only noticed by the public after the Oklahoma City bombing, much of the federal government’s approach is oriented towards forces outside the Unites States to, in the words of defense Secretary William Cohen, ‘‘catastrophic terrorism’’ by which he means terror that goes far beyond the conventional forms and types. Chemical warfare as with the Tokyo subway nerve gas attacks and Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons attacks on his own people are examples of terrorism where the perpetrators seek to increase the agony and grief of their victims.
The new threats are more ominous then those of the immediate past in revolutionary Iran, when Khomeini issued ‘‘fatwas’’ urging attacks on writers and intellectuals who would dare to criticize Islamic governments. Now, elaborate protective measures and expenditures are called for at the personal and governmental level; new intelligence services are required along with crisis management plans, as are security training exercises to be implemented quickly regardless of compromised constitutional rights.
The article by three high-level former government officials in the Defense Department and National Security Council suggests that a National Terrorism Intelligence Center ought to be created with access to domestic information gathered by various law enforcement agencies that are still constitutionally safeguarded. The writers develop a scare scenario that calls for tighter border controls, more sensing technology, expanded intelligence data collection and coordination centers that will centralize military, police and civilian information databases. This is potentially disastrous psychologically and pernicious in other ways for the country because there is no way to measure the real odds, to assess actual threat compared with the risk of not looking after all sorts of other human needs. Huge expenditures and governmental attention dedicated to a vast open-minded program to combat terrorism would obviously detract from programs for education, health, culture, pensions and so on all the things one ponders when not making a point of thinking that disaster from an external threat is conceivable.
Nearly three decades ago Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia, were swept up in a wave of terrorism. Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize physicist and a powerful critic of the Cold War that raged on recklessly, was forced into exile by the Soviet government for his remarks and comments. Sakharov deplored the worsening terrorism that gripped so many countries. He condemned all of it no matter the goals and objectives, as irrational, criminal and destructive.
Events, however, overwhelmed citizens and government officials in the United States in the aftermath of the 1993 New York City Twin Towers terrorist bombing by extremists affiliated with Middle Eastern terrorist organizations and the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Until the Oklahoma City event, terrorism was something that happened elsewhere, not in America. But now extremists struck close to home and not only were they foreigners with an abiding hatred of the United States but homegrown groups as well not new in America but also equipped with seething grievances, obsessions, and paranoia that could be acted out because they are heavily armed and well trained; militants prepared to kill, maim and disrupt for their various causes.
The Militias and the Mainstream
It does not help to observe that the surest way to reduce violence and crime in the United States would be to put all able-bodied males between twelve and twenty-eight into cryogenic sleep. Young men awash in testosterone may be a potential source of mischief, but it does not follow that they will or must get into trouble. Human societies have evolved various institutions to shape, control and sublimate their energies. While psychological explanations alone do not exhaustively explain the extremist orientation, it is informative to see the emergence of the terrorist as a process of psychic development occurring within a particular socio-political context. This is especially applicable with militia and patriot movement types in the year after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Anti-government groups appear to be growing in numbers; many have shed their marginal status as part of the millennial doomsday survivalist subculture and have began attracting support from a broader segment of economically struggling Americans most of whom, but not all, are white. Anti-government groups may be found in all 50 states. Since 1995, the number of militia and patriot organizations has increased by 6% to 858 identifiable groups, including 380 armed organizations. These figures do not include secessionist campaigns which deny that Texas, Hawaii and Alaska are legally part of the United States; property-rights and land-use advocates, who deny the legality of environmental and other federal laws; and tax protesters, who refuse to pay taxes on the grounds that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is an illegal entity violating the individual’s constitutional right against self-incrimination (Tax returns are voluntarily submitted and compliance with their questions obliges citizens to voluntarily disclose information which could harm them legally).
Tax resistance, radical environmentalists, and ultra religious fundamentalists in themselves are just ‘‘cranks.’’ But together, as they coalesce around more sophisticated information networks that give them a connection and sense of permanence, a ‘‘movement’’ has slowly come into existence with the more violent and vocal components startlingly visible.
Discontent and Domestic Terror
The groups appear to have a receptive audience of undetermined size and scope. They lay out an analysis of economic challenges that make sense to alienated people in many regions of the United States. Losses of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing to NAFTA policies, military downsizing, and a drastic decline in jobs within the agricultural sector have created pockets of unemployment and anger that have stimulated interest in protest groups. Efforts by environmentalists to limit the private use of public lands have infuriated forestry workers and ranch hands in the Western States. Terry Nichols, the man indicted for helping to plan the Oklahoma City bombing, started his Patriot career by becoming involved in groups that helped farmers hold onto their land by fighting the government and banks. The roots of anti-government anger appear to be as much economic as ideological, as measured by polls which show that more than 70 percent of men without a college education agreed that the U.S. government interferes too much in people’s lives. This may be a critical variable that distinguishes anti-government groups from traditional conservatives who also mistrust the government. For the antigovernment extremists their anger is fueled by direct threats to their livelihood. They also carry guns and know how to use them.
Within these groups, economic deprivations are explained by ideological interpretations which misuse and misappropriate Christian apocalyptic theology to promote a religious explanation of political events and processes that appeal to and confirm nativist xenophobia that stigmatizes minorities including Asians, Latinos, Muslims, and gays in a whirlwind of hate. ‘‘Christian’’ as elaborated by the Christian Identity Movement appears to serve as a unifying factor among an array of extremist groups who call for a struggle on earth against Satan’s forces which are determined to rule the world10. The apocalyptic imagery of Christian text has since the advent of atomic weaponry, spread into the mass culture where it has become an artifact widely and freely circulated in artistic, intellectual productions and in political and social fields. For example, films like the Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1981, 1985) trade on apocalyptic thinking and speculation. In the 1990’s films like Water World (1995) focused on the period after nuclear holocaust, and then in 1996 Independence Day and The Arrival dealt with hostile ‘‘alien invasions’’ of earth which has parallels with the nativist fear, the xenophobia associated with delusional thinking about hordes of foreigners and immigrants taking over the United States.
There are other dimensions in the nexus of Christian theology of the fundamentalist strain that links it with Islam. Both religious doctrines are essentially historical partners. For instance, both subscribe to views that their ‘‘truths’’ are plucked from sacred texts like the Bible and the Koran and are for that reason universal and beyond doubt. Both religious orientations see the world, its problems and their solutions in drastic Manichean terms: the forces of good and moral righteousness are confronted by the forces of evil; one is either with the religious movement uncompromisingly or incontrovertibly against it.
Many terrorist organizations operate quite violently without a religious gloss or rationale. Indeed, a community coalescing around a set of religious beliefs that may be racist and ethnocentric does not necessarily and inevitably utilize guns and bombs. It is quite possible that aggressive feelings that would otherwise be acted out may be muted, sublimated, and displaced in non-violent ways because of membership in a fundamentalist group. The legacies of Ghandi and Martin Luther King are testimonies to this capacity in which charismatic religious leaders can defuse explosive tensions and re-direct energies into peaceful directions.
What is increasingly clear is a drastic ‘‘resacralization’’ of the social world among some Christians in the U.S. In this country, the Christian Identity Movement construes Old Testament and Biblical texts in general in ways that are provocative of violence. Of course, no explicit call to arms is uttered by Identity theologians: they merely set the terms of the coming conflagration among races, religions, ethnic and minority groups with the white race. Particular logistical and tactical methods bombings, assassinations, intimidation, and so on are left to the imagination of the ‘‘soldiers for Christ’’ or, in another context, ‘‘the sons of Allah.’’
Within the right-wing extremists organizations in the United States some of whom incidentally have links with Neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Western Europe the basic ideological belief systems are bridged by the Christian Identity Movement; it significantly influences white supremacists and anarchistic survivalist groups.
The Christian Identity Movement serves as a main source of theological justification for radical action subgroups prepared to engage in violence. The Identity Movement pores through Biblical scripture and discovers the divine order of things. For example, interpretations of Genesis describe it as the story of the white race. Other races and groups are sub-categories of man, subhuman in effect, from which derives the idea of the threat of mongrelization. The fact that the notion cannot stand careful analysis, a point of view emerges which is taken as true because it fits into pre-conceived perspectives about racial origins. The nation is defined not so much as a geo-political entity but as a culture and moral space based on bloodlines and racial philosophy; policy or historical reality which subverts these divinely ordained prescriptions is false and sinful. The theological interpretation which sees the United States more as a Holy land and Homeland for the white race also provides the rationale for the use of force to fulfill the God-given mission. If racial supremacy and territorial preference is part of God’s law, then the violent elimination of those who are a threat to the integrity of the divinely ordained nation would be justified as a struggle against the forces of Satan.
The preservation of racial purity meaning, safeguarding the existence and reproduction of the white race is another theme closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. The latter group embraces the antiSemitism of the Identity Movement. Aryan Nations’ members believe that white Anglo-Saxons, not the Jews, are the ‘‘Chosen People’’ and the United States is the ‘‘promised land.’’ Jews are fakes and impostors, and as ‘‘children of Satan’’ must be exterminated.
Group membership is estimated to be in the thousands scattered throughout the United States and Canada. It is, in the minds of many, a hodge-podge of dissidents and political zanies. As with other groups, the Aryan Nations function as an umbrella-type coordinating body for a variety of similar, but smaller groups. Its ideology is a mixture of racism and sedition advocating the creation of a national racial state to preserve the white race and what they believe is white culture. The Nations advocate guerrilla-type IRA tactics throughout the United States that target politicians and federal government officials. Members are recruited from among disparate whites in prisons in the West and Southwest who are associated with the prison-based Aryan Brotherhood.
One of the best known groups, Posse Comitatus, was founded in 1969 by a former member of the American Nazi Party. Though small, chapters sprung up in almost every state. Initially, the organization practiced passive tax resistance against the federal government. The group is another example of paranoid xenophobia. To its members, the federal government is operated by a cabal of Jews, bankers and bureaucrats who usurp the rights of the people; and that is why the only legitimate forms of government for the people are local county structures directly answerable to the people. The Posse has attracted financially hard-pressed farmers and rural residents, and like Aryan Nations it is action-prone holding counter-insurgency seminars where training is offered in weapons use, explosives, and sabotage techniques.
These groups are bound together by a shared hostility to the federal government, which includes the vilification of non-white racial and ethnic groups, and an obsession with the racial and religious purification of the United States. All seem to accept a conspiracy theory of powerful Jewish groups influencing and controlling the banks, the media, and the federal government. To these Christian right-wing groups, the purity of white blood is paramount.
Integral to the aggressive advocacy of violence and ideological xenophobia is the indoctrination of children and youth and the role of women in the projected racial Utopia. It all seems frighteningly familiar: the Nazis propounded an hysterical ‘‘world view’’ that distorted history, defined the victims and villains, and proclaimed a ‘‘new society’’ whose principal trait was racial purity. And among the right-wing groups there is a basic education policy designed to purge members of the lies, deceits and delusions that they believe fill the curricula of state-sponsored schools where the minds of the highly impressionable young are exposed. As with Hitler Youth, children must be properly educated in Christian values and racial unity and physical fitness (in preparation for the future armed struggle); for young women, the value of sacrifice for the community must be imbued and their education must stress motherhood and homemaking. The Nazis originated the idea of the politicized ‘‘Volk’’ (the people) and its proper training including the specified role of women as progenitors of the race. The right-wing extremists show alarming similarities as they mobilize for the great racial and religious wars of this and the next generation.
The Militias and the Patriot Movement
At the end of the century, at the height of the disillusionment with democratic politics, is it possible to still indulge in the luxury of regarding violent anti-government movements as relics of the past or aberrant phenomena? The Oklahoma City bombing was a blatant attack on the federal government by individuals who appear to be connected to the militia movement in the United States. Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of the crime, was an army Gulf War combat veteran who had allegedly been associated with the Kingman, Arizona militia. As facts emerged in the aftermath of the tragedy, it became clear that the militias were dangerous and growing in numbers, and were composed of armed members angry at the federal government for creating an economic atmosphere that threatens jobs and traditional livelihoods and takes away gun rights.
It is not known how many militia members there are across the country. Some estimates indicate that militias operate in more than 40 states, with approximately 15,000 members.
Militias originated in small communities dating back to the colonial period when military garrisons and sheriffs constituted the main law enforcement apparatus. An informal cadre of ‘‘regulators’’ would often gather to carry out order maintenance activities, usually under the auspices of a territorial law enforcement official or military district command. The heroic tradition of a citizen defense force against Indians, bandits, colonial military forces, and even rebellious slaves and pirates harkens back to the legendary decades of pioneering in the untamed territories of the American frontier. Since then the old slapdash militia has evolved into a formal state-level force, the National Guard, which is not independent of government but subordinated to State Governors and federal military command in national emergencies. Militia leaders disavow these ties and define their groups as independent of government especially since they see themselves as the last bastion of defense against government.
It is a tenet of militia political thinking that a massive government conspiracy at the federal level exists among elite groups in finance, diplomacy and cultural organizations whose purpose is to destroy the sovereignty of the American government as the first step in a campaign to create a new world order. This paranoid world view derives some of its plausibility not so much from presenting any especially violent agenda clanking with guns and bombs but more from providing the true believers with a visible enemy a palpable scapegoat to victimize. There are always Jews at the center of militia conspiracy thinking to gratify certain psycho-political needs, and these are described as powerful enemies that are internationalists born into wealthy and powerful families, educated at elite schools, and connected to constellations of corporate and political groups whose intents are reputedly represented by the United Nations, the Council of Foreign Relations and the much vaunted TriLateral Commission.
The belief in a global-level conspiracy that seeks to expropriate the resources and the wealth of the United States is a central feature of the Patriot movement. According to Levin, the Patriot anti-government movement represents the greatest threat of domestic terrorism to the United States at the end of the 20th century. Ideologically, the Patriots reflect a broad, expansive, inchoate menu of goals, methods and leaders, including nonviolent political libertarians on the more moderate side of the scale to a small but influential number of white supremacists Aryan brotherhood types and gun-toting militia ‘‘freemen’’ who believe that America exists just for white Christians.
As with the Militias and Christian Identity Movement, the ideological components of the Patriots the paramilitary groups, the anti-Semitism, tax protests, ethnic and sexual xenophobia, gun rights advocacy, paranoid global conspiracy theories are not new; it is their mixture and the interaction of these perverted terrorist types with one another that gives the Patriots a fresh, bold, dangerous look.
The Patriot movement was at a crossroads in the 1990’s. Surveys indicated broad discontent and anxiety among a perplexed American public confused by the transformations in economic technology that promoted job loss but that also lowered unemployment and created jobs while the country’s industrial infrastructure appeared to be dismantling itself under the auspices of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Brutal federal bureaucratic actions (Waco, Ruby Ridge) side by side with humanitarian actions of Federal Emergency Management Relief Agency (FEMA) created contradictory programs and actions that reduced the confidence of the public at large in federal government institutions. In fact, in several surveys, 83% of Americans thought government regulations constituted a threat to their rights and freedoms.
The Patriot movement in its incipient state, provided theory and method for survival and conflict with ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government) the pernicious term the militia movement types use to describe the federal government. But because so many Americans are disaffected with government in particular with economic restructuring that suppresses wages and eliminates jobs when coupled with social policies (Affirmative Action) and immigration protocols that create social dislocations, this sector of white, disaffected males, seeing its privileges and status eroding steadily under the ideological attacks of feminists, gays, environmentalists, social and ethnic civil rights organizations, began to find the message of the movement relevant to their lives in many ways.
In the past decades through the historic period in 1989, the focus of attention was on the Soviet Empire and its Warsaw Pact missions as the major threat to American hegemony in the world. Patriot energies were mobilized around the dangers of communist encroachments in the western hemisphere and their virus-like spread through Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. With these dangers diminished the internal ‘‘cultural struggle’’ for the hearts and minds of Americans as to the role of government in their lives has re-ignited nativist fears of massive repression and foreign domination by internal ideological forces including political liberals, multiculturalists, and rights groups and environmentalists.
It is impossible to understand this political extremism without first considering the social isolation of the extremist themselves. By its eccentric politics, and through its rural, small-scale community life, the chasms between the militia/patriot political nexus and mainstream American politics appear unbridgeable. In short, the militia/patriot extremists are cut off, or they deliberately cut themselves off from the larger American cosmopolitan cultural and political world. A consequence of this insularity and self-induced segregation is that militia/patriot ideas and political theorizing are not forced to compete against other doctrines and attitudes originating outside their socio-cultural milieux and frameworks. When ideas and points of view are introduced in their circles they easily assume the status of holy dogma, and, as the printed documents of the groups reveal, they become panaceas for all the country’s ills, beyond questioning or the need to test them in real life. Ideas and speeches of Patriot and Militia leaders, like fashions, spread through the groups one after another: Pastor Pete Peters, Richard Butler, Louis Beam, Chris Temple, Linda Thompson. They are shrewd psychologists and superb stage managers. Yet they could not bewitch their followers if they did not share their secret emotions and incorporate their followers psychoses into their own psyches. When they speak, their listeners hail and idolize them, an exchange of pathologies occurs, and the union of individual and collective crises occurs through the mechanisms of released repressions.
While it is probably true that the fiery leader of the movements would tell every meeting what it wanted to hear, that in effect, charismatic speakers merely brought the mob’s true intentions to the surface and flaunted them for all to see; nevertheless, movement speakers and leaders are not just opportunistic crowd pleasers; rather, those in the leadership see themselves as the spokespeople for the masses who think of themselves as victims and they integrate such feelings and transform them into political dynamics. With regard to Linda Thompson, for example, the collective neurosis is the echo of her own obsessions.
Movement Messiahs and Soldiers: Thompson and McVeigh
‘‘The federal government’’, according to law, ‘‘has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of its protection and waging war against us. The federal government has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’’
Thompson is a lawyer and a firebrand leader of the Patriot movement in Indiana. Her ‘‘Declaration of Independence’’ circulated through the Internet in 1994. As with the original Declaration of Independence written by Jefferson in 1776, Thompson’s statement makes a call for revolution because the current American government has usurped and abused its powers. She describes the federal government as the principal agent undermining the domestic economy of the United States. Her most inflammatory rhetoric and condemnations are reserved for the oppressive law enforcement establishment that seizes property, and imprisons and murders those who refuse to submit to its demands. The more farfetched and preposterous claims, the depopulation policies, the biological and chemical warfare the government is waging on the people, attract a following not because of the logic of the arguments nor the pithiness of the sloganeering but because the audience and the speaker/writer communicate on the level of common, shared distress. The aggressiveness of the movement’s leaders, their style of defiance, their passionate banality and vulgarity links them together with their followers. All the historic trappings, the lavish display of weapons, sentimental rituals and ceremonials involving flags and symbols of America form the framework for patriot/militia events. In these circumstances, the meetings, conferences, the atmosphere build up suspense and make speeches and declarations seem like a kind of annunciation. Thompson and other leaders are interested in big ideas that gives the discourse and rhetoric of the movement its unique character and power; and yet the underside of this idealism is a badgering didacticism, a dogmatism, and intolerance which in its own way is just as harmful as the government it opposes. Convinced that their ideas are the key to the future of the United States and that its fate rests upon the outcome of Patriot/Militia doctrinal struggles, the movement’s intellectuals much like their critics and opponents tend to divide up the political world into the forces of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘reaction,’’ friends and enemies, which leaves little room for sincere doubters or temporizing critics. Here are the origins of the totalitarian world-view. Because the FBI, ATF and various other crises, obstinate misunderstandings have led to disastrous crises involving the wanton loss of life at Waco and Ruby Ridge; do we have grounds for demanding a revolution of the scope and depth of the struggle that occurred two centuries ago?
Just ten minutes after 9:00 a.m., on April 19, 1995, a massive explosion blew out the entire front of the A.P. Murrah federal building, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. It was the single worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. The individual convicted of the crime, Timothy McVeigh, a 26 year old veteran of Desert Storm who left the Army and drifted nomadically around the Midwest and Southwest, was an angry young man who found the extremist views of Patriot and Militia groups congenial. Shortly before April, 1995 he made a pilgrimage to Waco, Texas where the Branch Davidians and David Koresh went up in flames after negotiations with the FBI and the ATF broke down. McVeigh visited Patriot gun and survivalist expositions; he collected anti-government literature, participated in paramilitary training and learned to construct and detonate bombs.
He was an avid reader of The Turner Diaries and attempted to sell the volume at gun shows. The book may well have been the inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing. Its plot is a bit threadbare with a great internal war emerging in the United States between ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) which by the 1900s rules in the nation’s capital, and white guerrilla warriors expounding the political doctrines of the Christian Identity right-wing. The Christian warriors attack ZOG, its politicians, federal and state authorities, and Jews. They bomb federal buildings and disrupt public utilities ultimately destroying ZOG and exterminating all minorities and their sympathizers.
McVeigh and others used the USA Patriot Network as a source of information. A loosely organized group of radio stations, many on shortwave bands linked by satellite to wider audiences, the Patriot network promotes the agenda of the movement and has become a beacon for militia members. Incidentally, the explicit detail in Pierce’s novel and the actual events in Oklahoma City are uncanny in their similarities from the explosive materials used in a truck bomb, in the book, to a federal building as a symbol of governmental oppression.
Contrary to media representations, McVeigh and one of his accomplices, Terry Nichols, another U.S. Army veteran, are examples not just of lone, deranged psychopathic murderers, but what Louis Beam called a ‘‘leaderless resistance.’’ Apparently there are numerous groups of bombers and assassins prepared to do what McVeigh and Nichols did at Oklahoma City. Since that fateful day in April, 1995, Patriot inspired violence has occurred again and again.
The pattern of Patriot-inspired violence continued in 1995 after the Murrah building explosion in Oklahoma City. On October 9, 1995, the Sunset Limited Amtrak train was derailed near Hyder, Arizona and the perpetrators left behind a copy of An Indictment of the ATF and FBI which criticizes law enforcement abuses at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Through 1996, militia violence continued, as evidenced by the Freeman standoff (an offshoot of the Posse Comitatus Tax Protest movement) in Montana in which armed militia men held out against federal authorities for almost three months. Militia members were arrested in Arizona, West Virginia and Washington on conspiracy charges, illegal possession of explosives and weapon charges. A similar pattern of miscellaneous violence occurred around the nation in 1997.
Domestic Terrorist Trends
From these incidents and events, some of which are clearly well-planned, a pattern is discernible that involves two general types of criminal activity. First, there are carefully orchestrated acts of high intensity violence usually carried out by small, disciplined bands. These events are typically single mass catastrophic events, such as the Twin Towers bombing in New York City and the Oklahoma City bombing. A second kind of event is the Waco type stand-off including fortified compounds and well-armed resisters with an agenda.
Technical proficiency, the ability to acquire weapons, explosive materials, and knowledge of communication tools are now standard ingredients in the pool of knowledge and expertise ‘‘resistance groups,’’ as terrorists like to call themselves, possess. They are small cell-like ‘‘membranes’’ capable of expansion or contraction as the contingencies of their projects demand. By being small and self-contained, they are less likely to be infiltrated or uncovered by law enforcement surveillance and investigation.
The Internet has become a key tool for terrorists. It enables them to spread their hate and to offer a sort of ‘‘surrogate leadership’’ for fledgling groups of would-be Patriot guerrillas or militia men (and women) without the direct relationship necessary to make them legally responsible for the terrorism they may inspire. Moreover, as secure communications channel, the Internet allows the transfer of encrypted information that is safer than telephone or mail.
Summary
We do not know if the desperate organizations that make up the Patriot/Militia movements seek to destroy and displace the political system of the United States and substitute their own blueprints for a new social order. That seems unlikely. We do not know that these groups are not merely political extremists with deluded ideologies marching through late twentieth century American history. There are real life actors and personalities involved. Some might describe their contentious political agenda as a baroque melange of dogmas and fictions, or as a twisted nationalist nostalgia a sentimental but nonetheless dangerous romantic longing for a bucolic past. What the rhetoric of the movement suggests about their beliefs is [1] that the United States is perceived by its members as under a grave institutional threat because its normative political structure is weakened, [2] that the culture of individualism which still characterizes rural political interests and social custom has been scapegoated by cosmopolitan elites in the distant power centers of the New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston, and [3] that networks of cultural and political entrepreneurs have expanded into the power and decision making structures and become increasingly intrusive and encroach on the quality of their lives. Patriots, militia men and women, and Freemen Identity Movement believers see themselves being slowly crushed by government agencies on one side, and by anonymous corporation interests on the other all of which produces a sense of panic. In these crude terms, the Patriots and Militia may be understood as a third force positioned between these dominant social and political powers of the times, between big business and big government each as callous as the other, each contributing to the atmosphere of crisis that leads to tragedies like those from Oklahoma City and Waco. The mass of the American people have yet to be touched by acts of terrorism; these small, but resolute groups of disillusioned men and women may represent the first act of a nationwide tragedy. It may not be farfetched to suggest that the Oklahoma City bombing was a retaliation for the Branch Davidian, Waco Texas debacle and a signal for revolutionary activity by right-wing extremists across the country. The militia movement seems to be structured in leaderless cells that are designed to deter the impacts of arrest, interdictions and containment by the federal government.
The recent modern history of the far right in the United States is traceable to such groups as the Posse Comitatus, The Aryan Nations, the Christian Patriots and the emotional shards of the Klan. These are the misty shores of the American right wing. This cluster of nativists, xenophobic groups is informed ideologically by the Christian Identity Movement, a religious theory that constitutes one of the most important intellectual underpinnings of the extremists. Christian Identity hold that white Anglo Saxons are the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and that everyone else is no more than the spawns of Satan, or ‘‘mudpeople.’’ In many ways, the Identity Movement functions as a ‘‘jihad’’ offering ‘‘fatwas’’ (rulings), theological rulings, rationales and justifications for violent conduct and vigilante actions by Christian white men.
Today’s militias, active in more than twenty states, are a much expanded version of the Posse Comitatus that emerged in the 1980’s. The militias take their place in a burgeoning movement clogged with offsprings of the Posse and Klan. The leaders of these different groups function as spokesmen for the far right, setting its ideological and political agenda.
The militias also serve another, less visible purpose. They are recruiting pools for all groups that are autonomous ideological fighting units lacking specific leadership cadres. As with former American communist party cells, militia life is organized around the cells whose members’ identities are known only within the small nucleus group and then only by an immediate superior. All training is done within the cell, and all codes, passwords, training sites and telephone networks are similarly restricted.
The belief in the ‘‘original’’ Constitution and the Posse Comitatus law is at the political surfaces of the militia movement and central to its modes of energy. The original Constitution is the Constitution plus the first 10 Amendments. Noticeably absent in their thinking is the 13th Amendment the abolition of slavery and the 14th Amendment which guaranteed newly emancipated slaves equal protection of the laws. Many militia members draw a distinction between ‘‘organic sovereigns,’’ who are the white people mentioned in the Constitution’s preamble, with inalienable rights derived from God, and ‘‘14th Amendment citizens,’’ whose rights are conferred on them by the government. Fourteenth Amendment citizens do not have inalienable rights, only limited statutory ‘‘civil rights’’ that Congress has seen fit to grant them.
According to this bizarre theory of law, 14th Amendment citizens which by implication includes all non-white immigrants, native Americans and others not part of the formative demographic groups of English, Dutch, French, German and Scotch Irish stock exist only under admiralty or equity jurisdictions. The distinction between a foundational state common law for whites and statutory admiralty law for all others means little to most Americans, but it is the infra structural bedrock of the white supremacy ideology across the entire spectrum of the militia movement. The genius of the movement is that code phrases such as ‘‘admiralty law’’ are not understood by casual observers; but the ability to decipher the code and agree with its meanings sociopolitical ramifications is a key to winning long-term, dedicated adherents to the movement.
This version of Constitutional originary conditions justifies the opposition of militia members and other Christian patriots to paying taxes. These attitudes emboldened Timothy McVeigh to drive without a license and to claim that he did not posses a social security number.
Nowhere has the movement taken a stronger hold than in Michigan and Kansas where the sense of marginality and isolation for many whites seems acute. Through newsletters, and Internet messages, the militias urge a militant psychological posture of resistance and opposition, and suggest ways to insulate members from mainstream contamination that strengthens their solidarity and consciousness of the struggle. Every household, for instance, is encouraged to arm itself with automatic rifles and pistols, and members are expected to set up their own cashless societies through the substitution of barter networks that help them become self-sufficient for the future great struggle. Psychologically, the careful and willfully constructed defensiveness is reinforced religiously by the interpretive activities of Christian Identity ministers, and politically by the harangues and potted histories of movement intellectuals and leaders about nationalism, language, and background. All of these stock strategies shield the members from the reality of others and give tangible currency to paranoid formulas such as ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ To feel that the communists are coming, that the Japanese economic invasion is at hand or that racial amalgamation is the preferred policy of the Washington political elites of both major parties is not only to experience collective alarm, but also to consolidate ‘‘our’’ identity as beleaguered and at risk.
To see the events of Oklahoma City as a desperate, hate-filled gesture of revenge and fear by those who define and declare themselves as outsiders in their own country may be understood as an experience of internal exile a restlessness that is unsettled and deeply unsettling for others; it is a corrosive, cruel anger that is bitter and irrational. Timothy McVeigh may have acted in just this way: immersion in a militia milieu equipped him with a radical simplifying perspective that interprets events in terms of what has been left behind in a distant Arcadian past of patriotic heroism and nationalist trimphalism and what is actual, here and now. Every scene and event in the double perspective that isolation breeds necessarily draws on its nostalgic, historic counterpart. This side of political isolation induces a sense of marginality where one’s fate is experienced as a deprivation, a victimization not as a sort of freedom or process of discovery, but as a relentless instability living within an environment of fear and threat that would confound or terrify most people.