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.

radical right - book - 1995 - The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Milita Movement

The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement
David H. Bennett
Vintage Books
1995 (revised from original 1988 edition)
585 pages

Salutations, readers!  I picked up my copy of The Party of Fear: The American Far Right Movement from Nativism to the Militia Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.

The Party of Fear is a historical survey of the far right political scene in the United States.  American nativism, the social ideology which persecutes peoples coded as outsiders to the ideal American society, in the various forms it has taken since late 18th century, serves as the axle around which Bennett’s history of right-wing extremism revolves.  Nativist movements are composed of individuals who have constructed identities of what it means to be a true American by establishing who aren’t true Americans and then victimizing them in a variety of ways.  This usually takes the form of anti-immigrant or ethnocentric sentiments.  An illustrative example of nativist is the Party of Native Americans led by Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York.  Bill the Butcher leads his gang, the Party of Native Americans against recent immigrants from Ireland and the gangs they formed in response to such assaults.  And by the way, in Party of Fear Bennett actually discusses the historical Native American Party, and Bill “the butcher” Poole, that was represented in Scorsese’s film.



A More recent example are these recent political ads that identify immigration from Mexico as a major threat to the American way of life:





David H. Bennett is a professor of history at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York.  One of his major research interests is political extremism in the United States, and this book appears to be the culmination of his work on this topic (although he has also published the book, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-36, in 1969, which I’ll  get around to reading eventually).  This work is a survey of virtually every manifestation of right-wing radicalism in the United States going right back to the revolutionary period.  Nativism was and is a core concept of the extreme right wing, and almost all of the movements featured in Bennett's text are underscored by nativist fears.  Bennett finds a wax and wane to the history of nativism, which he weaves through his overarching history of the American radical-right.   Nativist sentiments may, at one point, be a flag carried primarily by fringe groups to only explode into the mainstream later in an event as celebrated as the McCarthy hearings to root out communists, or the incredibly popular Anti-Catholic ‘Know-Nothing’ party of the 19th century.

At other times, Nativism is represented by fringe movements at the very tip of the political spectrum.  The Ku Klux Klan (discussed at length by Bennett) and its violent paramilitary enforcement of the notion of the true American as white and protestant serves as a recurring example.  Furthermore, my copy of the book, the updated 1995 revision, ends with discussions about the unorganized militia movements that emerged in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s which found national attention after Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building.  Bennett’s book is not just about the pervasive existence of nativist sentiments but about nativist action taken against the perceived intrusion of America’s eternal outsiders, it’s about forming specific social units that identify themselves as American by taking action against that which they identify as non-American, whether its via the judicial and political apparatus ala Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, or via night raids and other forms of terror a-la the Ku klux Klan.  Bennett discusses all of these movements, as well as the more mainstream forms, including those presidents whose administration were defined by promoting nativist sentiments, such as Calvin Coolidge.  This book is excellent as a historical survey of these social movements, and although it never studies any of these movements in depth, it has a large bibliography that points to books about each individual movement.

This edition was revised to include discussion of the militia movements that emerged in the 1990s.  I hope that Bennett publishes another update soon to include many of the new forms of right-wing extremism that orbit around the nativist ideals since Barack Obama’s 2008 election.  The profound rise of Islamophobia, manifested in the Dove World Outreach Center and its leader (who recieved global attention for his heavily publicized wish to ritualistically burn the Koran), but also discussed at length in this report.  The post-911 prominence of conspiracist Alex Jones, who, for example, issued paranoid proclamations that the film Machete was a call to Mexicans to attack white American’s in a race-war, and the renewed explosion in far-right racist groups as studied by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and the anti-Obama ‘Birther’ movement that claims that the current president is, in fact, an alien.

white nationalism - book - 2003 - Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America

Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism
Carol M. Swain and Russ Nieli
Cambridge University Press
2003
298 pages


    Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism is the second book that I’ve read by Carol M. Swain.  This text can be viewed as a companion to her book, The New White Nationalism in America, which has already been profiled on this blog, and which purports to analyze and critique new forms of radical hate organizations in pre-Millennial America. In this book Swain and her collaborator, Russell Nieli (a lecturer at Princeton University), interview several leading figures of the contemporary White Power scene that Swain already discussed at length.  Such individuals as Lisa Turner of the World Church of the Creator (a footnote mentions that she has since left this organization) National Alliance leader William Pierce (now deceased, but arguably the most influential American Neo-Nazi of the last forty years) David Duke, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, Matthew Hale (currently incarcerated), and a number of others are all given a forum by Swain and Nieli.

The book reveals the interviewees as articulate and thoughtful despite their hateful rhetoric.  This is not necessarily surprising since the interview subjects are already the spokespeople for a variety of hate organizations, and being articulate and thoughtful is their only real job.  Interestingly, many of these subjects, such as David Duke, have internalized aspects of politically correct discourse (despite their overt hostility to that form of language) and position themselves as simply crusaders for equal rights for the white race.  The implication is that granting equal rights to all races is, in fact, to give preference to all non-white races, even though there was a time when white-preference was taken for granted and a social structure that largely remains in-tact to this day was built on such a principle.
Typical of the speech of these leaders are expressions that the races are better off as separate but equal social entities.  According to these society would function better, and  everyone would be happier under the circumstances of racial separatism.  As articulate as these interview subjects may be, they are essentially calling for a return to prehistoric tribal units where each group's name for themselves is also their linguistic term for 'people'. 

The interviewers do not ask challenging questions of their subjects.  Presumably this no-pressure approach was a means to elicit as much about their ideologies as possible when, I'm sure, they're treated with hostility in so many other contexts.  In merely asking questions about their white power perspectives, however, this book is virtually useless.  Leaders of fringe movements generally strain themselves to have their voices heard and make use of virtually every low-fi communications technology available to them to get their messages out.  Conducting research on any of Swain and Neili’s subjects is not difficult as they have all made frequent use of the internet to speak in their own words. Furthermore the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center (possibly the two best sources for recent information on the racist right-wing) have been collecting information on all of these people for years.  Contemporary Voices White Nationalism is only really notable for being a book.


Contemporary Voices White Nationalism significantly altered my perception of Swain's other book, The New White Nationalism in America... for the worse.  The New White Nationalism in America goes to great length to present the contentious issues surrounding the affirmative action program, and suggesting that this is the issue that’s driving people towards White Nationalism organizations.  Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism reveal that many of these leaders simply believe in the superiority of the white race over all other races and that affirmative action is a means of bringing inferiors into positions where they don’t belong.  These interview subjects state such views themselves and no one needs to add any commentary to make their views clear.  While Swain, in her extended discussion of white nationalism, suggests that there is a need for reform on affirmative action programs, Contemporary Voices brings Swain’s arguments back to this Earth, where the white nationalists are exactly the deranged bigots you would expect them to be.  If there is to be a discussion on such programs, lets not have it at the request of fringe white power people.


The New Voices of White Nationalism shows its author (Swain) arguing that an emerging group of educated white-power radicals were gaining in strength because they were capable of articulating arguments about racial issues in a manner that appealed to a particular segment of the American populace.  Contemporary Voices in White Nationalism shows that very group of educated white-power radicals to actually be pompous and intellectually bankrupt pseudointellectals (a number of them hold advanced degrees and some have or do hold academic positions) who base their racial views on scientific theories that are generally laughed at, and studies that are methodologically ridiculous.  Many of the interviewees believe that the differences in the races are obvious, and are enunciated through the social performances of each race’s members.  This kind of “just open your eyes, goddammit!” argument fails to consider that many races have previously functioned under an elaborate cultural edifice of white privilege that arguably still exists, which prevented non-whites from participating in society.  The white nationalists who interest Swain tend to believe that white privilege is a natural right that has been subverted by the civil rights movement.  The real truth to be apprehended by an aware gaze is that multi-cultural societies actually function fine. Generally people of different cultures can come into contact with one another without conflict erupting.  

Unfortunately the memory of a past where society was organized strictly around white privilege lingers in the present day. The justification for that society was never based on anything truthful, but rather it was built (in part) upon the symbolic force of a large number grotesque racial stereotypes that continually return to haunt a minority of white folks who now must occasionally make contact with the embodiments of those repulsive images.  What's difficult for these White Nationalist people is the reality that inherent white superiority is no longer a socially diffuse idea that lives in everyone's heads.  As a closing note, I think that researchers who use this text and The New White Nationalism in America should also read Melvin L. Leiman's excellent text The Political Economy of Racism, as a counterpoint to some of Swain's textual representations of racial tensions and their causes.

white nationalism - book - 2002 - The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration

title: The New White Nationalism in America: It’s Challenge to Integration 

author: Carol M. Swain
year: 2002
publisher: Cambridge University Press
526 pages

Hi out there in the cybernet, I borrowed The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration from Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

Carol M. Swain is an African-American professor of law at Vanderbilt University who has written a number of books about issues pertaining to race and class in the United States.  The New White Nationalism is a major book of analysis of the subculture of white supremacists and their struggle for legitimacy in American political discourse.  The other major recent book that focuses on this subject matter is Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind, a heavy book that surveys the history of the American white power scene.  Swain’s text is not a history, but rather a detailed analysis of the White Nationalist movement as a subset of the overall white power subculture.   Swain describes the movement's rhetoric, their methods of disseminating their ideas, and the socio-political conditions that underscore their activity and lend them appeal.  

The first section of Swain’s text is fairly up to date in its detail regarding the white nationalist scene, noting such relatively recent entries into the movement as the American Renaissance website and magazine (which made headlines recently due to it being favorite source of information for Jared Lee Loughner, the man who shot Senator Gabrielle Gifford and killed a number of bystanders at a Safeway parking lot in Tucson AZ in January 2011).  Swain’s survey of the scene and the varieties of White Nationalist rhetoric is remarkable now, as that movement has experienced considerable growth since Obama ascended to the US presidency.  Swain’s studies focused on the movement as it existed and developed through the 1990’s, and what is noteworthy to a 2011 reader of her text is that much of the ideas she attributes to these extremists are easily found, albeit in the form of more temperate rhetoric, in mainstream cable news.

This drift - from the cultural margins to the centre - of nativist and white supremacist ideas, has its roots in some of the shifts that marked the ‘NEW’ White Nationalism Swain identifies in her work.  Such changes included the alterations the media savvy, ex-KKK leader, David Duke made in his public image during the 1980s and 90s.  Duke progressed towards becoming a mainstream political figure by softening his racist rhetoric to be palatable for more politically moderate audiences.  Duke was the vanguard of a sector of the white power scene that eased off the use of violent and apocalyptic language without divesting itself of its racist ideals.  Furthermore, the New White Nationalists invested much of their energy on challenging Affirmative Action, a contentious government program that even many moderate whites feel is a government mandated form of “reverse” discrimination.  The entire second part of Swain’s text is devoted to discussing popular, and White Nationalist, views towards Affirmative Action, and to analyzing the effects of the program during the 1990s.  Swain acknowledges that the program is, indeed, problematic and aspects of it should be reconsidered especially when it is a key issue in garnering support for the White Nationalist cause.  

Swain’s text is varied in its presentation of details regarding her subject matter.  She includes transcripts of interviews conducted with White Power leaders, and even includes many of her own memories and reflections throughout her text, punctuating her chapters with anecdotes during which she recalls confronting an issue of race.  Much of the final section of her text, titled ‘Remedies’ is a discussion of how she believes that religion has the potential to heal the rift between races.  While this may sound somewhat naive as a solution, Swain presents some insightful arguments in favour of her position and, unlike many of her subjects of study, she is not a zealot.  Swain presents a vision of religion induced racial harmony as a possible pathway to improvement that may be combined with other possible solutions.

The information Swain presents in The New White Nationalism in America is accompanied by a number of charts and diagrams representing statistics such as the numbers pertaining to hate groups.  The book also contains a number of appendices containing statistical analysis of college enrollment by race in the United States or arguments pertaining to issues such as hate crime legislation or reparations for slavery.  Finally the text ends with the kind of structured bibliography I am most fond of, where sources are listed by type, and books are listed separately from journal articles, and from interviews.  Swain’s text is notable for treating White Nationalism as a serious, ongoing social presence, and not as an odd vestige of a white supremacist past, or as a strange fringe movement.  The New White Nationalism is an excellent resource in the study of the contemporary racist radical right-wing in the United States.