Pravda Propaganda On The NRA, GOA and Militias
Matthew Gaylor
freematt at coil.com
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.
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 at 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/
**************************************************************************
More information about the Testlist
mailing list