unorganized militias - book - 1996 - A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate

A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate
Kenneth S. Stern
Simon & Schuster
1996
303 pages

A Force Upon the Plain is an alarm call about the far right Militia movement in America that garnered widespread attention after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995.  That attack on a federal building, by Timothy McVey, an American terrorist and veteran of the 1991 US/Iraq conflict, put the spotlight on a national anti-government “patriot” movement of armed paramilitaries, due to McVey’s alleged (and eventually disproven) connections to the Michigan Militia.  Kenneth S. Stern’s text was one of the first in-depth responses to the attack, and its publication cemented the author’s expert status on topics concerning the radical right-wing.  Stern has also become a popular TV pundit for discussions about such topics on 24 hour news channels and an assortment of other media outlets.  

 
April 2010: Stern discussing the Huttaree Militia on CBS News 

Stern, a lawyer, approaches the subject of unorganized Militias in the United States as an emerging form of criminal organization.  He treats them as wholly devoted to white supremacism and the violent overthrow of the government.  While it is clear that racism is present, if not widespread, among the militias, and they have a clear dedication to gun ownership, it is not actually clear how pervasive racism is in the militias.  Many unorganized state militias, for example, have charters which contain clauses that denounce racism within its ranks.  While this may not mean racism is absent from these groups of armed men and women, it certainly means that racial hatred is a more nuanced issue with the state militia’s than it is with the Ku Klux Klan or the Northern Hammerskins.  Stern thus asks all of the wrong questions about the Militia’s and treats them as folk devils rather than actual and complex social entities.

One of the main reasons why Stern’s book veers towards the absurd is that he refuses to acknowledge any semblance of legitimacy or rational grounding for any of the anti-government positions held by militia members.  Presumably his attitude extends from his professional life as a defense attorney where he argues a case as though it only has one true side.  Stern simply wants to identify militia adherents as racist for a readership who presumably already hates racism.  The blunt rhetoric of his text, then, is a missed opportunity to investigate the complexities of the militia phenomenon: for example an actual militia member may state that they refuse racism, and may even state that racial tension is some form of social control exercised by a ruling elite, and at the same time give the name of Zionism, or ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), to that conspiratorial elite.  What is going on there?  I don’t quite know, the anti-Semitism is obvious, and I suspect Stern’s analysis wouldn’t go beyond denouncing such a statement as such. Instead of investigating the subtleties of meaning in such rhetoric, Stern denounces every single form Militia activity in a straightforward fashion, even while defending forms of federal misconduct, such as the fiasco perpetrated by the FBI at the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.  Stern does not investigate why militias formed at the moment and places they did but rather leads the reader to think these groups are simply an irrational mix of race-hate and anti-government sentiments. In militia's racial hatred appears to be a fairly common feature of the subculture (although it is not consistently distributed) and anti-government sentiments are a dominant feature of the militia movement, but how these groups have come to be constituted and continue to express these themes is a much more complicated matter that no one has really investigated.  Because Stern is playing attorney-as-author, he does not, for example, consider how militias, a largely rural phenomenon, may feel alienated by a political system that they perceive to privilege big business and urban centres, and instead flattens a complicated social formation into a one-dimensional courtroom defendant.

Stern’s shrill and hysterical rhetoric calls for new and harsh legislation against militias, mostly on the grounds of an event that had limited connections to this movement.  Stern’s text appears to portray the Militias as conspiratorial units, hellbent on subverting the social order and political system.  His own portrayal of the militia’s are ensconced in an edifice of paranoia that sounds quite similar to the Militia leader’s discussions regarding the ‘New World Order’ that threatens what they see as traditional ways of living in the United States.  The Militia obsession with Zionism is something Stern, as a crusader against Anti-Semetic currents in American society, should have investigated in greater detail (instead of making basic and dismissive arguments), because the repeated use of that term by Militia members is something different and more nuanced than the more traditional anti-semitism practiced by full-on hate groups.  I suspect Stern’s writing on Holocaust denialism is much better than this paranoid book-length rant.