Pravda Propaganda On The NRA, GOA and Militias
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 When agents of America's US Marshals surrounded the Indiana Baptist Temple, accusing the church and its parishioners of violating US tax laws by refusing to pay social security taxes on non-clergical employees, they didn't charge in with guns blazing, as they did at Waco. Concern about bad publicity was there, but there was a more serious concern just under the surface - the Southern Indiana Regional Militia, a 250-man "unorganized" citizen's militia unit, had pledged to defend the church - and their threats were taken seriously. "Steps have been taken and we are ready to respond if something does happen," Roger Stalcup, elected commander of the militia, told Indiana's Hoosier Times, "It's my opinion that if you've got people in that church and the U.S. marshals go in, anything can happen" His statements were taken seriously, and his unit, which marches under the slogan "God Bless The Republic -- Death to the New World Order", was listed in a press release by the US Marshals as a major reason they chose to negotiate, rather than raid, the dissident religious group's headquarters. The Southern Indiana Regional Militia had been trained in small-unit tactics by former US military personnel, several of whom hold officer ranks in the citizen's group, and their ability to take on the US government in a fire fight could not only have been difficult for the federal police forces - it could have been disastrous. The Southern Indiana Regional Militia is not an isolated phenomena - it is one of hundreds of similar units which have been growing in size and influence across the country since the announcement by George the First of his plans for a "New World Order" - a New World Order that many Americans believe is planning to destroy the US Constitution and enact dictatorial martial law in the name of the United Nations and the international corporate-socialism. Origins In America's Gun Activist Community 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. 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. In America, the people know that the foundation of their liberty is their ability to use firearms to resist government police and military personnel, and it is widely believed that an attempt to confiscate their arms will be the first step in imposing a dictatorship on US citizens. Daily this has seemed more real, and thus there has been a steady bleed of activists out of mainstream groups like the National Rifle Association, and into more confrontational activist groups, like Gun Owners of America and the Tyranny Response Team, and eventually into militias and other armed non-governmental formations. The NRA recently reported in the last election, with voters faced with the threat of anti-gun Al Gore winning the presidency, that its membership surged from under three million to over four million. Some say that number is slowly edging closer to five. In a nation of 280 million people, nearly 1.5% of the population - one person out of sixty six - is a member of the country's largest gun lobby. It is from these membership figures, and from the ability to mobilize large numbers of activists at the local level and bring them out to work polls and fill campaign offices for pro-gun politicians, that the NRA has always derived its power. While there is no doubt of the NRA's monetary power, it's opponents, often funded by billionaires like Andrew J. McKelvey, can usually match or exceed it in that arena. What the NRA has that anti-gun groups don't is the ability to bring out tens of thousands of Americans each election cycle to hand out literature, plant road signs, fold mailings, and engage in the community activism needed to fight anti-gun legislation. But it is in this arena that upstart groups have offered the most competition. Gun Owners of America, headed by Larry Pratt, is a radically pro-gun organization that, in contrast to the NRA, has called for the elimination of all regulations on firearms purchases and ownership, including mandatory background checks, and which has taken a hard line against the United Nations. Pratt is a radical Constitutionalist and Christian who openly mixes his religious beliefs with his politics, and has been accused of sharing the stage with even more extreme leaders - including members of the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan (though he has not been accused of sharing their views). In 1996, that accusation forced Pratt out as an aid to the Buchanan campaign. In 1998, according to anti-gun researcher Kenneth Stern, Pratt's organization had 100,000 members. Now, similar anti-gun researchers estimate his group has grown to as many as 150,000 - 200,000 in size, and there is no question that the core of his strength is NRA grassroots activists who are leaving the NRA to be involved in more militant forms of activism. Another group that has worked with Pratt's, and which forms an even more confrontational front of its own, is the Tyranny Response Team, a network of pro-gun "minute men", based on the minute men militias of the American Revolution, who go out to anti-gun events and to speeches by anti-gun politicians to confront and challenge the often skewed and distorted presentation of gun politics. The TRT, founded by Jewish gun store owner Bob Glass, has also gone beyond gun activism, holding regular 500-man protests against the Internal Revenue Service and the United Nations conference on small arms. While the TRT declined to give out membership information, it has branches in approximately 33 states, and most branches have 50 to 100 regular active members, meaning the group comprises at least 1500 regular activists nationwide - with an unknown number of less-active "supporting" members. These groups, with their anti-globalist, anti-UN rhetoric and primitive class perspective - what Americans call "populism" - have begun to draw more radical elements of the NRA, such as Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, to adopt similar rhetoric. In a recent issue of America's First Freedom - the NRA's fast-growing political magazine - LaPierre denounced global corporations, the wealthy, and ruling-class billionaires as being behind the plot to take away America's Second Amendment rights. And while groups like Gun Owner's of America and the Tyranny Response Team are not militias per se, and often engage in very mainstream pandering in some of their rhetoric - the headquarters branch of the TRT in particular is ultra-Zionist, with its members sometimes appearing in public with yellow Stars of David reading "gun owner" in an attempt to link the current conflict between gun owners and the US government with the conflict between Jews and the German Third Reich - they serve as a bridge for gun owners who don't want to engage in the compromising, pro-Republican politics of the NRA, but who also reject the more extreme step of joining armed formations that openly challenge the power of the central government - groups like the Southern Indiana Regional Militia. A Case Study In Radical Growth Recently, in Montgomery County, Maryland, a relatively affluent suburb of Washington, DC, the local government attempted to ban gun shows - large, open exhibitions where guns and traded and sold on tables set up at the local fairgrounds. The result was a series of protests that destroyed the local NRA organization, led to the radicalization of its local head, and which left a definite imprint on local politics. Augustus Alzona, an official in the Maryland Republican Party Central Committee, and the head of the County NRA's lobbying division at the time (NRA-ILA), was incensed at the decision of local officials to ban trading in guns. When he heard that a hearing was planned, he began organizing members to show up and protest the government's decision. But Greg Costa, the NRA's official lobbyist in the State of Maryland, was equally incensed at Alzona's decision to hold protests. Costa views the NRA as a "moderate" and "non-confrontational" organization, and decided to make his legislative priority in the state not a pending local ban on gun shows, but stopping a noise ordinance that would have threatened a business investment he had made in a local shooting range. He ordered Alzona not to hold protests, and when Alzona refused, Costa fired him from his position in the NRA: "I told him I didn't want them to protest and he wouldn't listen. I can't have people doing what I tell them not to do," Costa told a Pravda source. The meeting collapsed in a raucous bout as pro-gun protestors threatened to shoot local Councilmembers if they passed the legislation. Local news media focused on the role of the Tyranny Response Team in the protests, though the truth was that most of the anger came from more radical elements not affiliated with the TRT group. For Alzona, it was a decisive moment. He took on a new role in the TRT Maryland group as its Volunteer Media Coordinator. Regarding the NRA, he told Pravda that Costa was a liar, and that his non-involvement in activism was a motivator for this defection: "I've never spoken to [Costa] regarding the gun show bill and any of it's ramifications - never have, so far. I did try to reach him to discuss last February's hearing a week before the hearing, but, never did." And Alzona isn't the only Maryland activist that sees the NRA and its lobby as ineffective, unreachable, and out of touch. John Latham, a gun activist who joined the NRA in the wake of the anti-gun hysteria that followed the Columbine shootings, decided to move over to the TRT as well. He has now declared he is running for the State Legislature as an Independent in Maryland's 16th legislative district, and told Pravda he left the NRA because he grew tired of the people and their perspective on what gun rights activism means: "A man reaches a certain age he decides he wants to have a club," Latham told Pravda, "I don't consider that real activism that's a club, not a lobby." The Real Activists The Southern Poverty Law Center, a rather shady group of lawyers who make profit by suing organizations they label as "hateful", has been reporting that the number of "militia" groups active in the United States has been declining. Unfortunately, their research is badly skewed, as they count as a "militia" group anyone who opens a post office box and declares themselves a one-man "militia". Other figures, such as those circulated by the ADL, a Jewish organization which is opposed to the private ownership of firearms, estimates that while the number of groups may be shrinking, this is due to a consolidation of activists in a smaller number of larger organizations, and that as many as one million Americans may be sympathetic to, and peripherally involved in, militia activity. This has been evidenced as well by the "radicalization" of mainstream groups that share common views with the militias, but until recently have not shared the militia's extreme image and tactics. Southern groups - groups that represent the values of America's White Southern minority - have been particularly radicalized in recent months with the continuation of a campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a pro-black group with origins in the communist movement of the turn of the last century, to destroy public monuments to the Southern Revolution and to the Southern Nation - known as "Dixie" -- which existed from 1861-1865 during the American Civil War. With a heritage based in revolt against the US federal government, and with an often deeply held belief in the independence of the states and the decentralization of government power, views that motivate Southern political thinking and ideology have definitely exerted their influence over militia thinkers. 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. The local commander, Jimmy Wynn, in a message to his membership wrote: "When we cease to intervene in the affairs of every nation on earth, maybe some of these people will leave us alone. The WTC attack should be a WAKE UP CALL. I need each of you to become involved each of you needs to take preparedness seriously (we could go to war and it could reach our shores) The biggest thing we need is commitment: the commitment [to] prepare ourselves. THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW!!!" 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: "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." And Chute's movement is growing. She recently joked that she could probably maintain 1500 men under arms in the State of Maine alone "if she could keep up with the mail", and in a state of emergency, the number of women seeking protection under arms from ready formations would likely swell those ranks. With groups like Chute's growing in every state of the Union, and the central government growing more and more willing to enact the kind of emergency measures that these groups are willing to fight against, the potential for wide-spread confrontation, and wide-spread revolt, particularly in the context of a break-down of government control caused by massive terrorist attacks, is growing. Domestic Unrest and Anthrax As the US has continued to see its media and government institutions attacked by anthrax-infected letters, a debate has raged over who is responsible. The Zionist-dominated US media has used the attacks as an excuse to implicate Iraq, though that effort seems to be motivated more by political gain than the actual facts. Though Iraq was found by UN weapons inspectors, during the 1990s, to have built two missile warheads with liquid anthrax payloads, the weapons were discounted by US experts as "ineffective", and Iraq is not known to have the ability to create the refined powder form of anthrax being used in the recent attacks. In fact, that ability exists in only two organizations in two countries - the US and Russian governments. The US federal government also appears to believe in the domestic terror theory. Recently, the Center for Disease Control re-released a 1999 report authored by Jessica Stern of the Council of Foreign Relations, stating that most anthrax threats in the United States are linked to "far-right militia" organizations. Certainly, some of the recent scares, including the mailing of over 100 bogus threat letters to Planned Parenthood clinics, match the "far-right militia" pattern. But the possibility that the actual anthrax cases are linked to militia groups has been seized on by social democratic political lobbyists in an attempt to turn the US "war on terrorism" against dissident groups back at home. Australian terrorism "specialist" Clive Williams recently told the Times of India with utmost confidence: "I think the first instances of [the anthrax threats], the ones involving media, were more likely to have been caused by extremist militia in the US who have shown an interest in anthrax in the past and tried to acquire it. The subsequent instances were basically copy-cat episodes by mentally unbalanced people." But no US militia group is known to posses the refined, military form of anthrax being used against the US media and government, and most US militia groups are more concerned with defending themselves against anthrax than spreading it in such a way that their families and communities might be affected. That leaves a third possibility - that the recent anthrax attacks have been committed by members of the US political establishment against other members of that establishment - a theory boosted by the revelation that two of the most recent victims - Tom Brokaw and Tom Daschle - are apparently good friends who's families know each other and often vacation together in the Dakotas. In short, it appears more likely at this point that the recent string of anthrax threats in the US is the result of a deterioration of the internal political situation, than of an outside threat to the integrity of the nation. The question of whether it is related to the growing armed dissent against the central government is open however, as it may simply be a manifestation of political factions using instability as an excuse for assassination. 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. 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. Osama bin Laden has said that he feels that terrorist attacks can create enough instability in America that forces that already want to change the course of the government will see it weakened enough that an opportunity to act will emerge. With the growing divorce between an imperial government of usurpation and the nation's original Constitutional principles, bin Laden may not be far off. you may discuss the article in our forum Copyright ©1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made. ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************
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.
Copyright )1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made.
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
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"
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.
Copyright )1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made.
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
On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, alphabeta121 wrote:
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.
No it isn't. Poor people don't make the sorts of contributions (and concommitent expectations) into the coffers of the political. -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
At 09:01 -0700 2001/10/26, Tim May wrote:
(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.
It's been done that way for years on television vote tallies. They never use, say, purple and orange, almost always red and blue (and green, I think for independents). I'm not sure, but I think GOP has always been red and Dems have always been blue. -- J. Eric Townsend -- http://www.spies.com/jet Were you in USASSG/ACSI/MACV in Vietnam, 1967-1970? Drop me a line if so...
At 10:51 AM 10/26/01 -0700, j eric townsend wrote:
AIt's been done that way for years on television vote tallies. They never use, say, purple and orange, almost always red and blue (and green, I think for independents). I'm not sure, but I think GOP has always been red and Dems have always been blue. --
But the colors are backwards. As in the UK, the party of the Left should be Red and the party of the Right blue. Color of communism v the color of patriotism. DCF ---- "In 1776, fewer than 10% of Americans owned firearms. This proves that the American gun culture of today is an evil creation of gun manufacturers and the NRA." "In 1776 fewer than 10% of Americans owned a coach and four. This proves that the American car culture of today is an evil creation of General Motors and the AAA."
At 09:01 AM 10/26/01 -0700, Tim May wrote:
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.
I'm not so sure Bill White is a "red."
Copyright )1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made.
Gladly.
But, the web page should say "copyright 2001" eh? Bill White, the author of the subject-line story, wrote something for Indymedia.org also - it sheds a bit of light on him, perhaps also on Tim's response to the article. <paste> http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=79625 BILL WHITE: ISRAELI LOBBY SCRAMBLING FOR NEW APPROACH TO CRISIS (PART 1) The following is the first in a two-part series by Bill White. We will feature the second installment tomorrow. As Their Allies In Defense Face A Purge, America's "Official" Jewish Groups Look For Justice To Promote Agenda "America is finally running out of patience with us" the headline read in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz Tuesday. Sharon had just rebuffed the American demand that Israel withdraw its troops to behind the lines of occupation, and was holding more than five thousand Palestinian refugees trapped in the 'Aida and 'Azza/Beit Jibrin camps. On Wednesday, the butcher Sharon began shooting the refugees as he did in 1982.. The US State Department was "feeling like a fire brigade" struggling with the potential for war not just in Afghanistan, but in Occupied Palestine and Kashmir as well. On the home front, Israel's allies in the United States were also scrambling. Having been defeated in their attempts to use the September 11 bombing to draw the United States closer to Israel, they were facing a purge of their supporters in the Defense Department, as it became clear that their agents on the inside were leaking US secrets to both Israel and the press. The "official" Jewish lobby was now scrambling for damage control, and grasping at anything to distract public attention away from the US-Israeli relationship. "Saudi Arabia is the home of . one of the most fanatical, intolerant, and extreme forms of Islamic fundamentalism," Mortimer Zuckerman, an American media baron, publisher of US News and World Report as well as the New York Daily News, and head of the powerful Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, wrote in his weekly column. There had been a "mendacious implication . that the September 11 attacks were related to America's relationship with Israel" but now, Zuckerman wrote, "we . must face the harsh fact that Saudi Arabia, a nation we have long supported, is a central disseminator of the poisonous spores of fanaticism." Could the Zionist lobby be serious? Could it really be trying to persuade the public that the reason for bin Laden's attack on New York was not US support of Israel, but the fact that the US paid "moderate" Muslim regimes in the Middle East primarily to keep them from attacking Israel? If a directive issued by Israel's Foreign Ministry to pro- Israeli journalists was indication, they were. And the attempt to distract the public showed the growing desperation the lobby is using in its efforts to keep the disintegrating situation in the Middle East from becoming a disintegration of their political power here at home. The Changing Tune Only a month ago, the Zionist-dominated elements of the American press were demanding the heads not of just the Taliban, but of the entire population of the Islamic world. "America's enemy is the Islamic Axis: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Afghanistan and the groups they fund, support and direct. These groups include the cells of Osama Bin Laden, Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO," wrote ex-Israeli propaganda minister turned American journalist Zev Chafets, in Zuckerman's New York Daily News, "The U.S. must invade these countries (if there is time), dismantle their unlatched governments, disperse their armies and seize their arsenals. . If there isn't time [they] will have to be destroyed by whatever means necessary: the Japanese model." Chafets was not alone. "The enemy has identified itself in public and openly . Its name is radical Islam" wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer on Sept 12, "there should be no talk of bringing these people to 'swift justice' . We must carry their war to them." They were just two of hundreds of voices, most of them Zionist, or at least tied into America's "official" Jewish lobby, that demanded the destruction of Islam. Little more than a month later, their tune had changed, from a rumbling war-mongering drum beat to a softer song of explanation and excuses: "What spawned the real Osama bin Laden . was the infidel's 'occupation'' of Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities in Islam." wrote Krauthammer on October 19, as he played along with the fiddlers trying to dance America's attention away from Israel, "Bin Laden . in giving reasons for his jihad on America, never fails to cite the starving and bombing of Iraq." Newspaper columns now avoided talk of Israel, not even recognizing the Israeli occupation as a possible complaint of bin Laden's, and certainly not mentioning it in the context of "terrorism". Israel was no longer safe. The Israeli lobby was on the defensive. Elder Lore There is no question that a Jewish lobby, with goals and interest beyond just Zionism and Israel, exists in America. It is divided into three major "umbrella" organizations - the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NCRAC or "nacrac"), the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (the "President's Conference"), and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Each organizations is a council of smaller groups, and has responsibility for a certain area of Jewish political life -- NCRAC issues a yearly document laying out the domestic political line that the nation's Jewish groups have agreed to adhere to, the President's Conference issues the foreign policy line, and AIPAC conducts the actual lobbying of Congress and the Administration. There are nine major groups that form these councils, though each group has between 50 (for the President's Conference) and several hundred members on its theoretical governing body (and AIPAC is unofficially controlled by it's four-member "officer's committee"). There are the groups that represent the three main trends of American religious Judaism - the national unions for the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox synagogues. There are the three "defense agencies" - the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee. Then there are the three women's organizations - Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Women's American ORT. There are additionally as many as 300 other "official" Jewish organizations active in the country and contributing representatives to the councils in various ways. The lobby works like the Mafia within its own community, brutally suppressing Jewish voices that dissent from its foreign policy dictates. According to Jewish writer JJ Goldberg, editor of the Jewish commentary paper the Forward, and author of the book "Jewish Power": "By mid-1976 . NCRAC and the American Jewish Committee ordered up internal studies on the limits of dissent. The Presidents Conference and the Synagogue Council of American held public inquiries on the topic. All the organizations reached the same conclusion: American Jews had the right to discuss issues freely, but only within discreet forums, outside public view. . "Working closely with [Israeli Ambassador Simcha] Dinitz and his staff, the Presidents Conference and NCRAC began to draw up a set of baseline principles to govern behavior within the organized Jewish community. They boiled down to three basic tenants. One was that Israelis were the only ones entitled to decide Israeli policy, since they alone bore the risks. The second was that American Jews must stand publicly united with Israel, and air disagreements only in private. The third was that Israel would no negotiate with Palestinian terrorists, since talking to them would grant them legitimacy "These rules were quickly taken up by the Jewish leadership as sacred write from Jerusalem. Jews who disagreed found themselves unwelcome in community forums, asked to leave governing boards, shouted down at meetings. Even luminaries . began to find themselves ostracized after they endorsed Middle East compromise." Like the mafia, they will rub you out - not your life, but your reputation. With extensive contacts inside both political parties and the mainstream press, the "official" Jewish community keeps its members under tight lock and key. Cracks In The Press The Lobby's muscle arm in America and abroad, though it is often impolitic to state it outright, are the major media institutions in America that are owned by Jews, combined with those that are not owned by Jews, but dominated by non-Jewish Zionists. (see "American Media Uses Disinformation To Guide Policy") To this they add many of America's most widely published and widely read opinion columnists, editors, "independent" publishers, and reporters. Even those in the media who choose to distance themselves are not immune to its pressures, as two American journalists recently discovered when they were purged from their newspapers for anti-Israeli statements. Freelance writer Jim Moore was the first of the two. Over the weekend, he submitted an article to the Tallahassee Democrat, daily newspaper of Tallahassee, Florida, and owned by the Knight-Ridder Corporation. The article was one of several he had written that were critical of Israel, but this one was a little different. It included a quote from Ariel Sharon, broadcast on Col Yisrael radio, that "Jewish people rule America." Managing Editor Mizell Stewart feared the implications of Moore's piece and refused to print. Moore received notice barred from ever again writing for the paper the next day. Though Israeli officials have publicly admitted that Sharon "had bouts of anger during a recent Knesset meeting and that he said 'things that shouldn't be said,'" this didn't matter to Knight-Ridder. Though it is not a Jewish owned or managed company, it still plays ball. When asked to explain their actions, Stewart referred Pravda's inquiries to a secondary editor who declined to respond. A second, and bigger, crack appeared over the weekend in upstate New York, where two editors for the Oneida Daily Dispatch were fired after publishing an article quoting a Pakistani man who claimed that the September 11 attacks were conducted by Israel's Mossad. The article, and all references to the two, were pulled from the Daily Dispatch's website (http://www.oneidadispatch.com), and according to an Associated Press article on the case that ran on October 19, Managing Editor Jean Ryan and City Editor Dale Seth were dismissed from the paper. Notsurprisingly, the paper is owned by the Newhouse Media Group, a Jewish newspaper group owned by the brothers Samuel and Donald Newhouse - two men who's wire services regularly carry often ridiculous articlesattacking "right-wingers" and "racists", real and imagined, across America. But the third "crack", though it was only slight, is perhaps the one that most threatens the currently locked armed approach of the media in its attempts to misinform the American public. When Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud had his $10 million dollar check rejected by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, every newspaper in New York applauded Giuliani but one - the usually Zionist New York Post if Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Why? According to columnist Johnathan Tobin, writing in Jewish World Review, "[the Prince] is, among other things, a major stockholder in News Corp., the multinational media conglomerate that owns the Post." Defensive Front It is not the occasional slip of a reporter's tongue, however, which has the Lobby in a dither, nor is it the small financial influence of one Saudi on one paper that has never truly been in their control. What bothers them most is that everything they demanded of the Bush administration - war on Iraq, war on Syria, war on Hizbollah, war on Hamas - had not only been denied them, but they are facing, for the first time in thirty years, a government that seems ready to simply remove them from policy making altogether. Two Defense Department officials - Richard Perle on the Defense Policy Board and Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense - comprise the core of the Zionist lobby's influence over US foreign policy. But their dual loyalty has caused them to leak to the press a number of important details of the US military's actions in the Afghan campaign - including top secret information on a US Special Forces raid on airfield near the city of Kandahar. The information caused the raid to fail, and the nearly 200 Special Forces troops involved in it to force evacuate the area only two hours into their mission. The result has been a Secretary of Defense who has threatened to not only dismiss, but possibly arrest, the "unknown" individuals responsible: "The fact that some members of the press knew enough about those operations to ask the questions and to print the stories was clearly because someone in the Pentagon had provided them that information. And clearly, it put at risk the individuals involved in the operation," Rumsfeld told the London Times Monday, and "It is terrible. And I just can't imagine people being that irresponsible that they're willing to do that . I couldn't care less where the source of the leak is, the responsibility is the same." Though Rumsfeld did back off his threats to arrest those responsible, and stated that responsibility was "unclear", it is clear that the lead candidates for the leak, two men who have been previously identified as leaking Pentagon data to the members of the press such as radical pro-Israeli journalists Bill Safire and William Kristol, were Perle and Wolfowitz, causing some observers to wonder if the President's Conference's dynamic duo were about to be dismissed from public duties. And as a further indication of US unhappiness with Israeli-loyal "American" citizens in the military, the Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday on the first wartime purge of an Israeli-American "dual citizen" from US forces. US Army Reserve Major Shawn Pine was relieved of his command of the 300th Military Intelligence Company of Austin, Texas, Tuesday after being accused of suspicious links to the Israeli military-intelligence complex. Pine, of course, accused the Army of "anti-Semitism", but all his complaining has not gotten him his reinstatement. Part II tomorrow..... </paste>
At 11:06 PM -1000 10/28/01, Reese wrote:
I'm not so sure Bill White is a "red."
Copyright )1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made.
Gladly.
But, the web page should say "copyright 2001" eh?
Bill White, the author of the subject-line story, wrote something for Indymedia.org also - it sheds a bit of light on him, perhaps also on Tim's response to the article.
The copyright is something that they haven't changed on their website-Hasn't been updated. I had one of my Russian friends check Pravda to see how Bill White's article was inserted (Since I can't read Russian fluently). Here is what he said: Freematt's Russian friend in Moscow wrote:
It is, most probably, neither a posting in an open forum nor an editorial. It is just an outside commentary/opinion article. Pravda.ru has many writers doing this kind of articles for it. Sometimes it publishes articles by Antiwar.com authors, seemingly with their permission.
Regards, Matt- ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: freematt@coil.com with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ **************************************************************************
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.
Back when LaRouche was being a leftist, it was obvious that the Evil Rockefeller {Commie/Capitalist} Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy must be running the world, because everybody from wacko lefties to rightwingers like the Birchers and the more extreme rightwing wackos said so.
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.
The SPLC may have its problems, but it looks a lot like Pravda's problem with them is that they're Jews.
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.
Bush Sr. was the guy who got us into the whole New World Order biz; to see his son, elected because of his father's clout (ok, and the lack of any credible Republican opposition) and surrounded by his father's cronies, do anything else would have been highly surprising.
Copyright )1999 by "Pravda.RU". When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, reference to Pravda.RU should be made.
They may be Commies, but they want their own intellectual property enforced :-)
participants (8)
-
alphabeta121 -
Bill Stewart -
Duncan Frissell -
j eric townsend -
Jim Choate -
Matthew Gaylor -
Reese -
Tim May