radical right - 1996 - The Siege at Ruby Ridge

The Siege at Ruby Ridge
Roger Young
1996
Victor Television Production
192 min.

The Siege at Ruby Ridge is a 1996 television mini-series dramatizing the events of the 1992 armed stand-off between the apocalyptic/survivalist Weaver family and multiple federal agencies at the northern Idaho Weaver homestead situated on a mountain hilltop called Ruby Ridge. The stand-off resulted in the deaths of Weaver matriarch Vicki Weaver, her son Sammy, their dog Striker, and a U.S. Marshal. The event was a catalyst for the anti-government far right movements of the 1990s and an episode in the excessive authoritarian force the U.S. government is willing to use to suppress nonconformist citizens. The story of the siege was, in brief, that an illegal firearms sale set off a sequence of events that escalated to an armed stand-off with three dead. For the Weavers, the stand-off was the apocalypse, and it confirmed all of their anti-government ideas and attitudes to be valid.

Something that interests me about the representations of the far right in America is that there is mainstream media willing to portray its figures positively. Probably the most extreme example is the heroic representation of the Neo-Nazi Daniel Vinyard in American History X. Whether as a Nazi or as an anti-racist, Vinyard always lives his ideals, and he suffers for them. Here too, in The Seige at Ruby Ridge, survivalist and Aryan Nations hangaround Randy Weaver, along with his wife Vicki, are represented as intense, unwavering, acolytes of their anti-government worldview who stand rocksteady when the FBI and US Marshals come for them. Randy falters for a moment, considering whether or not he should turn himself in over the charges stemming from an illegal firearms sale, but Vicki encourages him to stand strong against ZOG (ZOG is a white power consipiracy acronym referring to the 'zionist occupied government'). What really interests me is that this work is one of a small number of examples of American mainstream media that positively represents the far right, I am not aware of any such films, television shows, mini-series, etc that represent figures of the American left in a positive manner.

There are films of other countries representing leftists positively, such as the German films The Baader-Meinhof Complex, and The Edukators. There are the Stephen Soderberg Che films about the great Marxist guerrilla leader, a positive portrayal but of an international figure most strongly associated with the Cuban revolution. The 1999 TV movie The 60s portrays its leftist as dangerously ignorant youth who just need to grow up and learn how the world works. There are films about the Chicago 8 and the Black Panthers, for example, which portray their subjects positively but they're produced outside of media systems that draw mass audiences. The Siege at Ruby Ridge was a network TV movie shown on CBS. As far as I know there are no leftist counterparts to this.

The event of Ruby Ridge and the preservation of its memory as a historical example of a dramatic tragedy involving the government repressing non-conformist ideological minorities has its leftist counterparts. The story of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Haymarket Affair are two examples that have been represented in PBS documentaries and independent films. Right wing radicals are more likely to be be commemorated by mainstream American media with a sympathetic portrayal, presumably because their values more closely correspond with those that are dominant in America. I wonder if there will ever be a film like this, shown on network television, that represents the Michael Brown murder, for example, and the subsequent protests in a manner that is sympathetic to the protesters. Given the existing patterns demonstrated in media history, of the choices made in subject matter and ideologies represented in mainstream media, we're far more likely to see a TV movie positively representing the Bundy Ranch affair. A Ferguson film would likely focus on the anguish of the MI governor and other public officials, who have to make the tough decisions to return order.

radical right - book - 1987 - Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right
James Coates
Hill and Wang
1987
294 pages

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right is one of the earliest books to investigate the contemporary white nationalist and patriot movements in the United States.  This book is somewhat uneven, as it discusses what author James Coates describes as the ‘survivalist right’ which is an assortment of groups or individuals who are of disparate backgrounds and ideological bent (albeit within the sphere of right-wing radicalism), many of whom are not necessarily survivalist.   The author’s title phrase, likely conceived as an attempt to provide an appropriate umbrella term to evoke an emerging socio-cultural phenomena, is pressed into use by the author even if its not always appropriate.  Many of the groups the author discusses are white power organizations, some of whom are survivalist.  Some groups discussed are anti-government in the “paranoid style” and fit into a tradition that extends into the past and continues to this day with groups such as the Oath Keepers and the American Resistance Movement.  

James Coates is currently a retired investigative journalist who worked for decades at the Chicago Tribune.  He worked as a Pentagon correspondent and the Tribune’s White House reporter during the late-1970s to mid-1980s.  He was also an early adopter of personal computer technology and from 1993 to 2008 Coates wrote a computer advice column for his newspaper.  His interest in network communications and computer technologies are apparent in Armed and Dangerous as he discussed the use of bulletin board systems as a means for white nationalists and anti-government “patriots” to stay connected.  Coates even included a sampling of some of the menus and text that was featured on an anti-Semitic system called Chicago Liberty Net, creating a sense that these fringe groups were on the cutting edge in the use of consumer communications technologies.  Towards a similar horizon, Coates also discussed the survivalist right’s use of other media to disseminate their message, including the distribution of a popular tabloid published by the Liberty Lobby called Spotlight, and a public-access cable TV show titled Race and Reason produced by neo-nazi group White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger.

Coates investigations into the political fringe came at a time when there appeared to be a turn towards greater violence by the adherents of the ‘survivalist right’.  The publication of this book, however, predates a number of significant developments in the ‘survivalist right’, including the rise of the citizen’s militia movement, Timothy McVeh, the Unabomber -Theodore Kaczynski (who began mailing bombs before 1986 but did not cause serious injury to a target person before 1985), and the emergence of the internet (designed as a tool to maintain communications in a nuclear war scenario) to build upon the communications networks already established via BBS systems.  The far-right groups and individuals of the 1990s were even more fringe and dramatic than those of 1980s, and what Coates describes are the predecessors of some of the most extreme pre-Millennium survivalist-right adherents.  Coates discussed The Order, a radical and violent vanguard for the white nationalist movement.  The Order, lead by Robert Matthews (a man who, according to Kevin Flynn in his book The Silent Brotherhood, was alleged to have joined the far-right John Birch Society at the age of twelve) provided funds for a number of white nationalist groups through a series of armed robberies and counterfeiting ventures.  The Order also planned assignations against anti-racist enemies including lawyer Morris Dees (founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center) and caustic liberal Denver area radio personality Alan Berg, whom The Order murdered in 1984.  

Operating over a brief two-year period, The Order provided some of the most dramatic material in Coates book.  Robert Matthews perished in a fire that began during a gunfight with the FBI.  Coates also discusses other dramatic episodes of the ‘Survival Right’ however, including Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus leader who in 1983 died in a shootout with law enforcement after he was already being hunted for the murder of two Federal Marshals.  The Posse Comitatus is a loosely connected social movement that refuses to recognize any form of authority above the county level.  They consider the US federal government to infiltrated by Jewish agents, the federal income tax as illegal and, according to Coates, their leaders gave seminars to instruct failing farmers to refuse to repay their federal loans.  

In addition to the Gordon Kahl episode, Coates described other dramatic scenarios with the survivalist right including the murder-house survivalist compound inhabited by serial killer Charles Ng.  Ng’s inclusion is a partial deviation from the theme of the book, which is to identify emerging trends in a crossing of far-right ideologies with a violence-driven survival instinct in anticipation of a (racial/political/nuclear) catastrophe.  Ng was an ex-Marine survivalist, but his status as a sadistic serial killer does not fit into any model of far-right behavior or organization.  Of course, Coates was attempting to identify a new form of cultural activity that appeared to be emerging at the time of his writing, and perhaps the inclusion of Ng appeared appropriate as him and a number of other survivalists were individualist “trust no one” paranoid types.  Ng was a hypermacho sadist survivalist, and he resembles, in attitude, the fictional Holnists of David Brin’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel The Postman. 

The only real pushback against these groups that is detailed in Armed and Dangerous comes in the form of law enforcement shootouts or IRS investigations.  The year after Coates text was published, in 1988, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued Tom Metzger into near-inactivity.  In 2000 the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Aryan Nations (a white nationalist religious group) for over six million dollars.  The SPLC strategy of seeking financial damages against white power groups has proved very successful in undermining the strength of what Coates has called the survivalist right.
 
Books that survey the ultrafar-right groups often show difficulty in interpreting those groups along more than one axis of understanding. Coates text is likely one of the closest (that I’ve read) in achieving such a synthesis.  Not all of the groups Coates discussed are intrinsically survivalist, but most of them are, and they do all preach violence and most preach racialized hate.  Morris Dee’s mid-90s book, Gathering Storm, about the citizens militia movement, attempted to portray all such organizations as racist, which was not entirely true.  Meanwhile, Richard G. Mitchell’s 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times hardly acknowledges the racist aspect of these movements (although there is a brief discussion of Aryan Nations), even though Robert Matthews’ widow, Zillah Craig, appears in the text.  Mitchell rather emphasizes the millenarian aspect of the groups, which is also featured in Coates analysis of his subject.  Finally, Coates describes numerous elements of mainstream culture that appear to touch upon the virulent attitudes expressed by the right-wing’s radical edge 

survivalism - book - 1985 - The Postman

The Postman 

David Brin 

Bantam Books 

1985 

321 pages

    The Postman is an acclaimed science fiction novel that is now well known for inspiring a film adaptation that is considered one of the unloved movies of the 1990s.  The film was directed by, and starred Kevin Costner, and its notoriety as a three hour long waste-of-money is probably only exceeded by his previous film, Waterworld.  With that being said, the novel that provided the film with its source material is an interesting speculation on a post-apocalyptic America without industrial or electronic technology, that struggles to find a foundational myth upon which to rebuild.  With THAT being said, and having read the novel, I am now interested in viewing the film adaptation regardless of how bad its supposed to be.  

    David Brin, the author of The Postman,  is an astronomer and science-fiction novelist whose work is identified with an emphasis on ‘hard’ science in fiction.  He has won a number of prestigious awards for science-fiction writing, including the Hugo award and the Nebula award.  The Postman received the John W. Campbell award and the Locus Award for Science Fiction.  Brin also writes a blog wherein he comments upon the political and cultural uses of science and technology, and maintains a speaking schedule where he gives talks on such matters.

    The Postman is one of a number of science-fiction novels wherein the United States has experienced an apocalyptic collapse of their high-tech infrastructure, rather than the millennial singularity of a technological mediated Heavenly Jerusalem predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil.  Other novels that carry similar themes to Brin’s text are Hello America (1981) by JG Ballard, a post-apocalyptic parody of American culture, and the more recent World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler.  While Kunstler’s novel is primarily focused on the details of an ecological collapse and the day to day life of its survivors, Brin’s novel appears focused on survival via cultural myths.  In both Kunstler’s and Brin’s novels the characters do not know exactly what caused collapse, or what the state of the nation is, but it is presumed in both novels that former official forms of governance have been decimated and lawlessness and danger are the prevailing order.

The protagonist of Brin's novel is Gordon Krantz, a nomadic, reluctant hero. Following an ambush by bandits who took his clothes and belongings, Krantz stumbles across the skeleton of a postman in an old USPS van.  Krantz took the uniform and mailbag off of the skeleton and began posing as a postman for the Restored United States.  For Krantz, his new profession was simply a ruse he developed so that he could better survive the treacheries of long distance foot-travel and gain leverage in dealing with dangerous town officials.  Krantz skillfully escapes many dangerous situations and that, in combination with his consistent posturing as a postman, establishes him as a trickster. This role for Krantz recalls in a distant although not unconnected manner the character of Nicho, the (actual) postman who transforms into a coyote (a trickster animal), from Miguel Ángel Asturias’ novel, Men of Maize (1949).  Krantz pretends to be founding post offices in various towns across the northwestern United States and he finds that people are eager to assist his work because of their desire to believe that the United States may be restored.

The bane of existance for Krantz and everyone he meets are the ‘hypersurvivalist’ followers of an ultra-Macho philosopher named Nathan Holn.  These men are referred to as Holnists and through their devotion to Holn’s philosophy, believe that they are superior human specimens and that the conditions of the collapse will reshuffle the social order so that their natural abilities and will-to-violence will place them on top.  In The Postman, encounters with Holnists are a recurring problem, and fighting with them is the theme of the second half of the novel, however it is also clear that many communities have already driven away Holnist groups.  This representation of macho survivalists as a threat to communities is the result of fairly astute observation of actual far-right survivalist groups.  Rebecca Solnit, in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, suggests that when collapse or disaster occurs, most people consolidate community bonds and build mutual networks of support.  The converse side to this  behavior is that individualist survivalists who consider the accumulation of weapons to be rule number one for post-disaster continuity are inevitably threats to such altruistic social networks.  

The Holnists are, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect to The Postman.  They preach a perverse gospel of Übermenschianism, and to emphasize their ethos, two of their leaders are, in fact, artificially augmented as the results of a pre-collapse military experiment.  Their adherence to the text of a distant philosopher recalls the real-life survivalist-terror group, The Order.  In the early 1980s, The Order was a small group of violent white power nationalists who drew inspiration from the writings of William Luther Pierce, a former physics professor who became the leader of the white power organization, National Alliance.  The Order lived in the wilderness of the American Northwest (rural Washington in particular, and incidentally some of the filming for The Postman was done relatively close to The Order member’s homesteads) and launched attacks on sites in nearby cities.  Some statements issued by Holnists are inflected by concerns about race, although they are not explicitly racist, and there is some resemblance between the fictional survivalists and the real white nationalist cell.

Fundamentally, The Postman is about cultural myths; how they compete for dominance or possibly merge with others into a foundation for national development.  The Holnist myth was persistent but already dying before the events of the novel.  A group of women, working as assassins but posing as submissives, exploit the macho ideals of the Holnists to get close to them in order to kill them off.  Krantz reflects on how this event created a new myth, one that may pose similar dangers to that of the Holnist philosophy.  The novel thus thrives on a tension between negative cultural myths of violent destruction and inherent group superiority, and positive myths of community building and social advancement.  For much of the novel Gordon works with a group of people who maintain a myth that an artificial intelligence called ‘Cyclops’ is in command of the social order, ironically so that people do not give up on the idea of the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress.  Finally, the novel ends with Krantz reflecting on one of his postmen doing the work to perpetuate the myth of a postal system until the myth is no longer necessary.  Krantz imagines the possibility that his illusory postal system will become real, and in becoming real, unify the states into the actual Restored United States. 

vagabondia - book - 2009 - Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999

Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999
Bert and Holly Davis
Microcosm Publishing
2009
164 pages


This book is one of three volumes that anthologize the Message Post/Dwelling Portably print newsletter.  MP/DP is a handmade publication full of practical lifestyle tips for people who ‘dwell portably’, or in otherwords, live without a house.  The publication has run since 1980, and continues to be published by the Davises for the benefit of a loose community of proactively homeless people.  This post pertains to the second volume which contains all of the issues of the newsletter published between February 1990 and ending in November 1999.  

The book contains no introduction, or afterword, or table of contents.  The book is simply the content of the newsletters, as they originally appeared (presumably), with an index at the back to help the reader find needed tips.  All of the text is written in courier typeface and all of the images are hand-drawn diagrams or illustrations.  Each newsletter appears exactly like it would have, with a unique heading, subscription/contact information, and a publication date.  The individual newsletters vary in length, from 2 to 10 pages.  The editors of the newsletter are Bert and Holly Davis, presumably a couple who live an ascetic lifestyle.  Much of the content is submitted by others who live similar lifestyles and wish to share their tips, with occasional tips or responses to submissions written by Bert and/or Holly Davis.  Some items are taken from camping magazines or other related publications.

Dwelling Portably is interesting for a number of reasons.  The publication points to a community of people who desire homelessness and share tips on how to thrive without a house or many of the amenities offered by post-industrial consumer society.  Bert and Holly, I think, live in a yurt, while many of their submissions come from people who live in cars or busses, in small tents with bicycles, in tree-shelters, or any number of variations.  Also many of the entries contain practical information about tools, cooking, bedding, insulation, transportation, and re-purposing found materials for this kind of lifestyle.  Many other entries deal with things like how to discourage potential assailants, how to deal with police who do not understand such lifestyles, etc.  The entries I, personally found to be most interesting, were those that contained detailed descriptions for how such lives are lived.  Many submitters described renovated old buses or vans for living (which recalls Dishwasher Pete’s description of his renovated van) some travelled on bicycle with a small tent with them and one man described life while travelling on horseback.  These entries were not necessarily meant as lifestyle tips but perhaps rather as indications of possibility.

Some messages are very short and are requests for information on how to live a certain lifestyle that relates to the theme of ‘dwelling portably’.  Someone may write stating that they would like information on how to live on a boat, or how to ride the rails successfully (see Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere) for example.  The inclusion of such requests suggests that the Message Post/Dwelling Portably newsletter is a chief point of connection between the people who live this way.  

One interesting implication of Dwelling Portably is that the publication presents an alternative form of survivalism to the more apocalyptic second-amendment obsessed ultra-right wing milieu that the term usually applies to.  When attitudes are expressed, Dwelling Portably is upbeat about light living, and otherwise the newsletter simply wants to provide some helpful tips.  The publication is by and for people who already live survivalist lifestyles, and it does not need to declare that it is necessary to know this stuff in order to weather an impending Armageddon.  The people who ‘dwell portably’ and contribute to the newsletter approach their lifestyle with more of a 1960s ‘drop-out’ attitude.  They aren’t preparing for war or catastrophic scarcity, they have chosen such a lifestyle because it suits them.  

Dwelling Portably: 1990-1999 is the middle of three volumes of collected newsletters.  I suspect that the other two are similar in format, although I am curious about the practical matters of publishing the newsletter itself and I hope that one of the other books contains such information.  Bert and Holly speak about their own circumstances occasionally, although usually in response to an idea another writer had, or to address a practical issue such as bathing or waste disposal.  They move occasionally and the inside of the book’s back cover contains an email address from which a reader may receive their mailing address.  I would like to know how they manage publishing a newsletter themselves while they move, and sending it to a readership who may, in part at least, do the same.