Pravda Propaganda On The NRA, GOA and Militias

Fri Oct 26 08:27:24 PDT 2001

<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.
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