[Fwd: militia research]

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jun 2 11:51:40 PDT 1998


Katha Pollitt wrote:


>Well, good question. And not just for me -- for all of us. Let's all be
>more specific about who we are talking about. I think I'm mostly
>thinking about the Aryan Nation and Christian Identity people, Posse
>comitatus etc. I don't know if you'd call those Militia people. The
>people who are upset about black helicopters, call the US govt the
>Zionist Occupation Government, refer to nonwhites as "mud people," love
>the "turner Diaries" etc. I think they are anti-semitic because they
>are!

Oh yeah, and they're Nazis too. They're horrible, no question about it. But there are also lots of people who aren't like that, who are just "anti-system," who know that they're being fucked over but just don't know exactly how, etc. There's a rich mine of barely articulated discontent in America, and it doesn't help when The Nation denounces it as crypto-fascism.

There's also a way in which fear of the right is used to cement people to Clinton and the Democrats. Vote for Clinton or Ralph Reed and Mark from Michigan will run America! It's no accident that Joe Conason finds a Nazi under every heartland bed.


> Who are you talking about when you refer to the militias?

Hard to say exactly. There are all kinds of militias, from Nazi ones to wacked-out libertarian ones, plus all kinds of plainclothes sympathizers. I'd say we need to know a lot more about the people and ideas of rebellious groups than we do. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz was telling me about the anti-racist skinheads in Oklahoma that love her book and the race traitor stuff. We never hear about them anywhere.

Doug



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