This article touches on a note that irritates me, a pro-Capitalist, pro-gun American. The fact that many militias, 'right winger's' and so on are claiming that "global corporations, the wealthy, and ruling-class billionaires as being behind the plot to take away America's Second Amendment rights. " I'll agree that global corperations (such as lowe's) and "ruling-class billionaires" (such as George Soros) are 'behind the plot to take away 2nd amendment rights. But generalizing that to "the wealthy" is a big mistake. By allying with 'populists' and nationalists, we could see the NRA supporting protectionism, stronger Union laws, and other anti-capitalist dogma. So should libertarians do to fight the NRA's trend left, as well as the "liberal power-elite" alpha ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim May" <tcmay@got.net> To: <cypherpunks@lne.com> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 9:01 AM Subject: Re: Pravda Propaganda On The NRA, GOA and Militias
On Friday, October 26, 2001, at 08:27 AM, Matthew Gaylor wrote:
Matt Gaylor has forwarded this article. My profound thanks to him. This is one of the most insightful articles I've seen on the real internal political situation in the U.S., the "red" vs. "blue" separation.
Truly ironic that it takes a "red" to understand the "reds" in the U.S.
(For those outside the U.S., a word of explanation. For some reason, political mappers showed votes for Al Gore in _blue_ and votes for Bush in _red_. I have no idea how this came to be...I had never noticed it until this past election. In fact, it was only in this past election that most of the commentators glommed on this "look at the red parts of the map versus the blue parts of the map" meme, so apparently a lot of us got exposed to this red vs. blue mapping only recently.)
While there's still a little bit of "propaganda" language in the article, it is generally a more incisive analysis of the developing trends in American politics than nearly all of what passes for analysis by American journalists.
I urge people to read the full article carefully. I'll only comment on a handful of paragraphs.
--Tim May
<http://english.pravda.ru/usa/2001/10/18/18529.html>
Oct, 18 2001 20:11 2001-10-18
BILL WHITE: GUN GROUPS SEE STEADY BLEED INTO MILITIAS; DOMESTIC UNREST STILL GROWING IN UNITED STATES There are three issues that motivate America's militia movement - support of gun rights, opposition to taxation, and opposition to the United Nations and the loss of America's sovereignty to global corporate rule - a system the militias see as socialism and anti-globalists label capitalism, and which is really a blend of the worst elements of the two.
Amazing that a Russian publication (is it really Russian, or just reprinted by them?) gets this so right. Nearly all American journalists just babble about skinheads and survivalists when they talk about the militia movement.
Among these issues, the most important, the one that seems most immediately threatening, and which has been the prime motivation for the existence of the militia movement, has been the possibility of nation-wide confiscation of firearms by the US Federal government.
Indeed.
The Real Activists
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a rather shady group of lawyers who make profit by suing organizations they label as "hateful",
Wow. It takes a Russian to call a spade a spade.
The SPLC is the most anti-liberty organization in the U.S. Words fail me in describing them.
One militia group based in Southern values that recently drew attention was the Militia of Georgia, an armed formation consisting of what researchers claim is 300 men who operate in at least 20 cells throughout the state, which ordered its members to mobilize in the wake of the September 11 bombings, and to be on guard against attempts by the government to use the bombings to create a New World Order.
This move to a police state took a big move forward this morning, October 26th.
The Potential For Separatism
America's Southerners aren't the only regional-ethnic groups seeking independence from the cosmopolitan internationalism of the nations' elite. Rural New Englanders have launched a "blood and soil" separatist movement of their own. Carolyn Chute's Second Maine Militia, a group that has mixed right-wing, left-wing, and green politics, as well as regional ethnic identity and national separatism, into a 500+ man armed formation based in Northern New England and Canada's eastern provinces, re-released a manifesto calling for people in New England and Canada to revolt and create a new nation - the New Atlantic Confederacy - independent of either government, should the impending war on terrorism cause the central government to lose the ability to maintain control in America's more remote rural areas. Her movement is explicitly pro-gun and anti-capitalist, and deals regularly with other "right-wing" militia organization active in the area. As Chute put it in a 2000 interview:
No particular comment on this excerpt, but I include it to give a flavor of this guy's detailed understanding (he knows a lot more than I do about militia movements, that's for sure!).
"Behind all those urban killings are people created by the Great Progressive Society. These people are not revolting against the Great Progressive Society. They are raw imitations of the Great Progressive Society. We are led to believe that the professional middle class are the winners, the working class are the losers. As I see it, class is about values, dependence and ways of communicating. The working class person values place, interdependence, cooperation, the tribe. Rural working class especially values land. Many of us would kill to keep our land, our home, which for thousands of years was not considered a crazy thing to do. Middle-class professionals are into "success" and they are a dependent people, happily dependent on the consumer system for everything. You call it independence. But if you lost your electricity, your service people, your access to stores, you'd see how independent you are! Working-class people have become dependent on these things, too, but working-class values resent this dependency."
Wow.
Conclusion: America's Militia Movement Is Not To Be Discounted
It is clear that the rural people of American - the mostly white population descended from the original European settlers of the nation - have become alienated from the cosmopolitan blend of urban white liberals and their train of ethnically defined special interests that have gained control of America's cities. One only has to look at a map of who voted for George Bush and who voted for Al Gore to see that a clear divide has occurred between the values of the country's elite and their lackeys, and the real working people of the nation.
Agreed. Too bad Bush is pushing the New World Order agenda, though I suppose it was thrust upon him by events. Al Gore certainly would have been even more internationalist.
America's white working class, so long reviled by the intellectuals and the clique that control the government, has been organizing itself into regional-ethnically based citizen militias that are prepared to fight to restore the values of their ancestor's revolution two hundred and twenty five years ago. For the first time in a century, more of America's white population lives in rural areas than in it's cities, and that demographic change is only one indicator of the larger, more widely spread divide.
Should the American nation fracture, whether due to a massive terrorist attack, the repressive domestic policies of its government, or a combination of both, it is clear that there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Americans who are already organized in paramilitary armed formation for the goal of seizing power and restoring the Constitutional Republic that they feel progressive liberalism has lost them.
An insightful summary.
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Gladly.
--Tim May "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Nietzsche