Reading Freely

The Terrorist Next Door

Posted on June 20, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right

How does the grandson of Jewish immigrants become a leading voice in anti-Semitic movements? The Terrorist Next Door reviews domestic militancy in the United States, as viewed through the life of Bill Gale, founder of the Posse Comitatus. Taking its name from an act meant to prevent Federal troops from interfering in civil affairs, the group’s abiding faith was animosity towards a government viewed as corrupt at best, and taken over by alien forces at worst. (“Alien” in this case referring to the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, or agents of the One World Government. No one here fears the sneaky Reptilian menace.) Covering essentially the same kind of reactionary violence as Harvest of Rage, but with less grace, it doesn’t avail much other than to build on biases. Unfortunately, the use of one monstrous man as a lens to view related movements casts an evil light on even the comparatively innocent.

The Posse Comitatus is a fairly vile bunch, a Klan without robes and with less concern with decency. Gale himself took to the racist politics of the Christian Identity movement – which sees Anglo-Saxons as the true children of Israel, and contemporary Jews as Russian pretenders – fairly early on, but the popular support he built was based on a kind of localism on steroids. The basic government unit of every American state, he maintained, was the county, and its only constitutionally-sanctioned officer the Sheriff. The sheriff could summon the men of the county as a posse to deal with serious threats to law and order. Gale’s posse considered itself a self-organizing and constitutionally-sanctioned force in service of the same. Their enemies varied, as Gale was able to build a following beyond his initial band of white supremacists, appealing first to farmers on the road to ruin and then later the burgeoning tax resistance movement. Later still, during the Clinton administration, the comitatus would inspire dozens of self-organized militia movements, all of which viewed the federal government as its chief object of contempt, dread, and hostility.

Gale’s posse wasn’t merely a right-wing crank group that gathered together to swap bits of foreboding news and complain about what the government was up to; they were a force in the true sense of the word, applying violence to ‘solve’ problems. One man with a claim on a farm, for instance, called the group to come to his aid: they took possession of the place, running off the owner and blockading the only access road. They also vigorously defended themselves, shooting Federal agents who attempted to subdue them. Civilian casualties in Federal encounters gone wrong only inflamed passions and spurred on greater activity: after the ideologically-linked Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, militia involvement grew. The same was true after President Clinton introduced the Brady Bill, viewed as an attempt by the government to disarm the populace.

Like Harvest of Rage, The Terrorist Next Door is written as a warning, but whereas Harvest seeks to understand its subjects, Terrorist is content to condemn them and anyone it can connect ever so tangentially to their cause. Under Levitas’ pen, anyone who resists the government, who cries overreach — especially if they do so from a Christian perspective — is a racist with a lynching rope in the closet. The problem with this is that the people covered in this book aren’t part of a uniform organization, or ones even like the Comitatus. For instance, Alabama’s chief justice, Roy Moore takes heat here for installing a monument to the ten commandments within his courthouse. As problematic as that is from a constitutional perspective, to smear him as connected to the Christian Identity clan is contemptible. Even those with actual connections to Gale’s group weren’t under his violent command: they had their own motivations and ideas for taking action, like attempting to pay tax bills with fraudulent checks and filing false liens in their courthouses. Criminal, yes, but ‘terrorist’? Tarring any reaction against the growth and abuses of the state as violently racist makes as much sense as declaring at the Federal Reserve is a Zionist conspiracy to take over the world, or regarding every man on a motorcycle as a card-carrying member of the Mongols.

My interest in this book came from the hopes of gaining some insight into the militia mentality, but Levitas is more concerned with declaring that they exist, they’re everywhere, and something oughta be done about `em. Sure, have the Federal government go after them — that’s worked so well so far. Levitas himself documents how militancy and paranoia flourished amid real or perceived persecution, spiking after Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Brady Bill. Obviously, going after armed people who already think the government is against them is a really swell idea that will lead to happy times for everyone. At least the author of Harvest of Rage knew, as nutty as his subjects could be, at the root of their paranoia lay real despair and genuine concerns — about their status as economic losers in a globalized world, or the collusion of big agriculture, big banks, and big government. Their pain and fear was twisted by the Bill Gales of this world, but for Levitas anyone remotely connected to Gale is as bad as him. This is an alarmist and dismissive account that will make those already predisposed to view grassroots reaction as ignorant, racist, and violent feel justified, but has little purpose beyond that Its focus on the Comitatus has its uses, but as far as understanding right-wing militancy goes, this is far inferior to Harvest of Rage.

Related:
Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged cults and conspiracies, gangs tribes and parties, politics, Politics-CivicInterest | Leave a comment

American Colonies

Posted on June 13, 2015 by smellincoffee

American Colonies: The Settling of North America
© 2001 Alan Taylor
526 pages

American Colonies is a sweeping history of the New World, one that attempts to convey the full American experience, beginning with the arrival of natives and then covering Spanish, French, English, Dutch, and Russian colonial efforts in turn. (Hawaii is also addressed, though it’s a bit of a two-thousand mile stretch to call it ‘American’.) Taylor’s declared intention is to tell more than simply the Anglo-American story, which relegates the Indians and other European powers to the role of villains. At this, he is largely successful, providing a complete survey of native and European settlement and rendering the history of their relations with one another. The work demonstrates how profoundly diverse both the natives and the Europeans were, documenting the extent of their tangled military and diplomatic relationships. The tacks taken against the natives by Europe varied not only from country to country (in Spain’s case, no tact was involved), but from colony to colony, as varied geography and the nature of the neighbors demanded intelligent adaptation. The story of the New World is not simply one of Europeans plowing over the war-and-disease-ravaged lands of peoples like the Iroquois and the Lakota, however, for Europe’s nations also waged war against one another in this new battlefield.

Taylor’s narrative style is pleasant enough, even if bothered with a little factual repetition. The content itself is a different story, being nearly five hundred pages of disease, war, slavery, misery, and death. No group discussed here comes off particularly well, not even the one-paragraph Vikings. Both the European and native powers wage war against one another and themselves, and in utterly vicious ways; every chapter brings descriptions of women raped, children executed, homes and fields burned, men tortured. There are no noble savages here, and no exemplars of Christian civilization — only ambitious and wrathful men with blood on their hands.

Taylor’s narrative gives a good general view of European evolution, as explorers turned to nation-builders. Death ended to follow in the wake of the pioneers, as many of the diseases Europeans were exposed to as children never existed in the Americas, particularly those which originated from domestic animals, like smallpox. Early colonists arrived with varying motives; some seeking fortune, some to create a new society in their own ideal image, and others because it beat starving to death at home. Invariably they offended their new neighbors, and war erupted. Conflict between the native peoples and the newly-arriving colonists forced them to adapt to one another: after seizing Canada, for instance, the English realized it was easier to give their new neighbors tribute every now and again than to maintain a war-footing. The natives, too, had adjustments to make: in the first pitched battle between European forces and Indians, for instance, the tribe in question attacked in a massed formation that fared none too well against organized gunfire. They quickly adopted the guerrilla tactics now associated with ‘Indian warfare’.

Taylor also puts forth a few theories of his own, all rooted in a worldview that sees economic warfare as the driver of everything else. In his view, the French and Iroquois maintained war between themselves for economic advantage, as the warzone between their territories prevented regional competition with other powers for their goods. Though no fan of capitalism, Taylor’s punches against mercantilism could be thrown by Adam Smith himself, pointing out how mother-country meddling smothered economic development time and again. Intriguingly, he suggests that the tax policies that sparked the American Revolution were not simply enacted to cover the costs of the French and Indian War, but to discourage too much emigration to the colonies.

Slavery is a recurring topic here; a common byproduct of war, in the age of discovery and colonization it became an economic institution, especially as practiced in the colonies of the deep south and in the Caribbean. The sugar plantations of the Indies were particularly dependent on slave labor; for this reason the abolitionists of William Wilberforce’s day avowed that those who took sugar in their tea might as well be drinking the blood of captives. The ranks of slaves were initially more diverse, consisting of captive natives who died in great numbers, and indentured Europeans who ran away and assumed the identity and status of free settlers. Africans were already accustomed to Old World domestic diseases, and stood out from among both the native and European populations. Consequently, the plantation lords drew more from African markets, and slavery assumed a racial-and color-based nature, the legacy of which continues to poison the society of the New World. Before this, however, African slaves had been treated like any other indentured servants, freed after a time of service and thereafter at liberty to create their own fortune – sometimes by investing in slaves.

American Colonies is a book to be considered, taking on centuries of North American history and taming it. Taylor’s stated goal was to go beyond the English colonies on the seaboard, and this he does — taking the reader as far south as Mexico, and galloping through the plains of the Apache to the northern wastes of Alaska. He makes the complex comprehensible and is especially valuable in the time spent on Spain and France. He has a particular animus against the English and their American ‘spawn’ that grows tiresome; to his credit, however, he does not make their rivals into moral paragons. Perhaps it’s not so easy to be detached from one’s ancestors as those in academia might wish.

Related:

1491: The Americas Before Columbus, Charles C Mann
The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, James Wilson
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged Britain, Colonial America, France, Hispanic, history, Latino, Native America, Netherlands, Russia, slavery and rebellion, Spain, survey | Leave a comment

The Ashes of Waco

Posted on June 12, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation
© 1995 Dick Reavis
320 pages

What happened at Waco? Dick Reavis had an itch to find out, and since no one else at his alternative newspaper was curious, he volunteered as man on the ground to investigate. Getting close wasn’t easy: during the fifty-one day siege, the ATF and FBI kept journalists at a distance, and their scissor job with the phone lines restricted communication in and out of the surrounded center. Inside the center were nearly a hundred members of the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of the Seventh-Day Adventists, expecting the apocalypse and living in the belief that their leader David Koresh was chosen as the next messiah, meant to reveal God’s word to the world. What Reavis found was a gung-ho mob of bureaucrats and gunmen, constantly getting in one another’s way and approaching a situation that demanded delicacy with all the tact of a bull in a china shop.

The Ashes of Waco is a more comprehensive text on the Waco disaster, which started off with the deaths of ten people – six civilians, four agents — and ended in an inferno that killed eighty more, including children. Reavis covers the sect’s religious background in a series of introductory chapters, covering their revolution from an Adventist group to one increasingly dominated by Koresh’s interpretative of the Book of Revelation, then moves on to the ATF investigation and the bloodshed that followed. If Reavis seems at all partial in his sharp criticism of the government which follows, this owes more to their half-cocked Rambo tactics than overt sympathy for the Davidians. He doesn’t dwell on the child marriages, but at the time of writing Koresh was still being lynched by the media as a deranged pedophile with a private arsenal. Reavis doesn’t shy away from their kookiness, covering aspects that Tabor missed altogether, like a belief in biblical UFOs that transported people from Earth into Heaven. In Reavis’ eyes, however, a government which uses extreme force recklessly is far more dangerous than a religious group that had lived peaceably in Texas for decades. From moment one, Waco was a catastrophe for civil, competent law enforcement. From the raid’s opening, with a helicopter strafing the building, to its closing fifty-one days later with tanks used to batter down walls and shoot in tear gas grenades banned from war and known to be incendiary in enclosed situations, the operative word was Fiasco.

The Ashes of Waco is well-done, drawing on extensive interviews with Federal agents, Waco residents (the centers’ neighbors), and Davidian survivors. Reavis conveys a good sense of what life was like inside the community, including maps of the connected buildings. He also looks beyond the front lines to consider how neighbors reacted to the showdown, including one radio host who — after realizing the center’s residents were listening to his show — had them move a dish mounted on their roof in response to questions, a la Christopher Pike in “The Menagerie”, in Star Trek. Although obviously appalled by the actions of the ATF and FBI, they are not villainized, All told, this is as even-handed and thorough an account one could hope for, written so soon after the debacle.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged 1990s, law and disorder, religion | 3 Comments

So you say you want a revolution?

Posted on June 6, 2015 by smellincoffee

After a couple of months almost entirely devoted to England, ’tis time to part — momentarily. It’s June, and almost time for my annual tribute to the American revolution. I had thought to have an appropriate mix of English and American colonial history before launching into the revolution itself, but the books ensnaring my interest lately have been more diverse. I’m not through with England for this year, as I still have an itch to read about the English Civil War. The next couple of weeks will feature a couple of books on the colonial period as a segue. We’ve already seen one in Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans: The Colonial Experience.

Once the Revolution series starts in earnest, it will include:
– two biographies of lesser known Founders, one being John Dickinson;
– a novel by David Liss (whom I’ve read before) set in the early Republic during a crisis
– a book on Tom Paine and political philosophy
– a look at Constitutional opposition
– a comparison of Canadian, American, Australian, and English governance
…and possibly a history of how Parliament came to fight its own colony.

If time allows, I’ll also throw in Bob Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, as it’s inspired by the American revolution.

Read of England 2015

English Classics
Come Rack! Come Rope!, Robert Hugh Benson
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

English History
Boudica, Vanessa Collingridge
Faith and Treason, Antonia Frasier
The Fall of Saxon England, Richard Humble
Agincourt: The Battle that Made England, Juliet Barker
The Wars of the Roses, Alison Weir

Fiction, Set in England
Armada, John Stack (Historical)
In a Dark Wood, Michael Cadnum (Historical)
The Other Queen, Phillipa Gregory (Historical)
Ruled Britannia, Harry Turtledove (Alt-History)
The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse
Bachelors Anonymous, P.G. Wodehouse
Very Good, Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse

Books by English Authors
Medieval Essays, Christopher Dawson.
The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton

I also made it halfway through The Vicar of Wakefield before becoming distracted by history.

Posted in General | 9 Comments

The Colonial Experience

Posted on June 5, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Americans: The Colonial Experience
© 1967 Daniel Boorstin
528 pages

Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans delivers a cultural history of the American colonies, beginning first with profiles on the disparate groups that settled on the eastern seaboard (Puritans, Quakers, and Cavaliers), and then following the growth of American religion, law, and education in the new world. Though appearing weighty, being five hundred pages or so, the expanse flies by in a multitude of comparatively short chapters, divided (appropriately enough) into thirteen sections. This is an inbetween America, neither raw nor finished. For students of American history, this is deftly written, and gives a feel for how truly distinct the settling populations were, both in their origins and in their evolution. While the Pennsylvania Quakers and New England Puritans set out to create utopias on a fresh plain, for instance, Virginia’s settlers knew perfectly well that the utopian mark already existed in England, and their intention was to re-create its social institutions. Despite the wide variety of these cultures, constant resettlement from one area to another in the pursue of fresh land ensured a mix of experience, and prevented rabid clannishness. Despite being mostly agrarian, agriculture would be the nascent American civilization’s weak point: flush with land, no one had any interest in putting a great deal of imagination or work into improving their lot. Once tobacco or cotton had drained the soil, they could simply move on. Otherwise, the abounding energy and optimism of the Americas, so distant from the institutions of Europe, allowed for enthusiastic questioning that led to early triumphs in technological and scientific innovation. For Americans interested in the lives of the founders, this provides an enormous amount of storied context.

Related:
Daily Life in Early America, David Freeman Hawke

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged America, Colonial America, Daniel Boorstin, history, law, religion | Leave a comment

Why Waco?

Posted on June 5, 2015 by smellincoffee

Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America
© 1997 James Tabor
254 pages, including text of David Koresh’s manifesto on the “Seven Seals”

In February 1995, Federal forces arrived outside a large home owned by a religious sect living in expectation of the apocalypse and led by a man who claimed to be the Messiah. Alarmed by rumors of child marriage and the fact that members of the group were involved in the gun trade, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived to execute arrest warrants. An exchange of fire that killed six residents and four agents prompted them to back down and lay siege instead. After token efforts at communication, after fifty-one days tanks rolled in to batter holes in the walls and flood the massive complex with CS case, over the protests of some on the ground who were attempting to reach the group’s leader. One of those dissenting voices was James Tabor, who in Why Waco explains the religious background of the Davidians in an effort to humanize a group derided by the media as suicidal kooks.

This strangely sympathetic account of the group’s downfall begins with another group in the 1840s, who, following their century’s version of Harold Camping, believed earnestly that Jesus would return to Earth on October 22nd, 1844. These Adventists survived their ‘great disappointment’ on the lack of the world ending; those who kept the faith eventually found other issues to coalescence around, including an insistence that Saturday, not Sunday, was the Sabbath. Certain elements of this denomination grew progressively more estranged from the main current of Christianity, forming an intentional community on the Texas plains that survived for decades, through several successive leaders — one of whom, a woman, would reveal that the Holy Spirit was in fact a woman, and the Catholic church was an insidious plot to subvert worship of the divine feminine by focusing it on Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Branch David took its name from its expectation that when Revelation was fulfilled, the world would hail a new Messiah, descended from the biblical David.

Into this group came young Vernon Howell, later known as David Koresh. He came searching, to pit their claims against his studious knowledge of the Bible and its prophecies. Consumed by a desire to understand the secret truths of Isaiah and Revelation, he flourished and eventually inherited leadership of the community. He was especially charismatic after a trip to Israel, where he claimed an encounter with the Divine. Koresh also became increasing messianic, changing his name to conform to a role he felt called to: the sinful Messiah. Although modern Christians regard messiah as Jesus’ title alone, the word is used several times throughout the Bible, and at one time in connection with Cyrus of Persia, whose name is rendered Koresh. Cyrus was used by God as messiah, called to wage war against the satanic power of Babylon and restore the Temple and the Jewish people to their rightful place. Vernon Howell, becoming David Koresh, believed he was the new messiah: He wasn’t Jesus, but he was called by God to gather around him a chosen few and reveal the Final Revelation to the world. When the Final Revelation came, Koresh would be at one with the Word of God, comprehending the entire Bible as a mystical whole, and guide the world into a new era. This greatness would not come without price; the powers of the world would rise against the chosen few, and even kill them just as they did Jesus, but God would prevail.

Against this figure, whose vocabulary was saturated with references to arcane prophecies, whose days were spent in intense discussions about theology, propagating increasingly esoteric doctrines and practices, rose the ATF. While agents on the ground attempted to talk to Koresh and convince him to surrender, all they heard in response was “bible babble”,not comprehending that just as they were trying to squeeze him into the criminal profile boxes that they understood, so to was he understanding them in the light of his own narrative. Their initial attack on the center, followed by their encirclement of it that cut all electricity and communication with the outside world, seemed to him the fulfillment of the “Fifth Seal”, in which the forces of darkness rise against the righteous. They were playing the perfect villains, convincing him that he was right and that the end was night. So they held out and perished in fire, almost eighty souls.

Tabor’s goal in this is to humanize the Davidians, and it works for the most part. They obviously weren’t too strange at first or on the whole, given how good their relations were with their neighbors: when the raid happened, the Davidians were expecting it, having received numerous tips. Although the ATF and FBI referred to the siege as a prolonged “hostage situation”, Davidians plainly were not under coercive force. They came and left the group as they pleased, drawn mainly by desire to see what Koresh was teaching, attracted by his energy. The fly in the ointment is that by the time the center was attacked, Koresh was in a pecuilar spot, psychologically. He was the chief fixation of attention for scores of people, whose awe at his abilities at arguing scripture convinced him that he was the chosen one. Unrestrained by the fear of social reprisal, his body followed its desires, carefully justified by seemingly rational arguments: bit by bit, he convinced himself that it was just and proper for him to be married to several women, including teenage girls, and father children by them. They were to be the new royal priesthood of the next epoch of human history. The Davidians could have been quirky but harmless even living on a compound by themselves and earning money by selling guns, but once polygamous child-marriage enters the picture even the most sympathetic soul has to say, “…that boy’s off his rocker.”

However, Tabor’s principle object may not be the Waco group themselves, but cults in general. Tabor objects to their being demonized: what modern religion, he asks, does not match the attempts at quantifying what exactly a cult is? He rightly criticizes the agents on the ground for not seriously attempting to understanding who they were dealing with, beyond wacky gun-cultists, but even if the group had been able to send regular messages to the world through the siege, but who is to say they could? The group’s entire bent was occultic, fixated on its elite status. Tabor does a good job at comparing Waco to Jonestown, which was more domineering where its members were. David Koresh may have told his followers that that were called to be celibate (unless David felt a call to know another man’s wife in the biblical sense), but if they insisted on remaining married to one another, they could leave. Koresh’s group was definitely weird, increasingly dominated by the man’s sexual fetish, but from this account they seem more likely just to be a danger to themselves, and especially to their children. Of course, the government’s brutal attempt to force the group to surrender only led to the deaths of most of the children at risk, so the entire episode is an utter tragedy.

Why Waco? has a jarring sympathy for its bizarre subjects, one that struggles to be professional and errs on the side of indulgence. It does make comprehensible the group’s apocalyptic teachings, and can’t help but entertain…but the author’s lack of judgment, even when horror would be appropriate, is unsettling

Posted in Reviews | Tagged 1990s, cults and conspiracies, doomsday, law and disorder, religion | 5 Comments

Rise of the Warrior Cop

Posted on May 30, 2015 by smellincoffee

A man’s home is his castle…but now the cops have bettering rams.. Among the sins of George the III, according to the Declaration of Independence, was his practice of keeping a standing army. Militias might be raised to defend against outside invasion, but they dispersed upon peacetime; standing peacetime armies were regarded always the weapons of tyrants. In Warrior Cop, Radney Balko argues that the nation’s civil police forces have been turned into a standing army, beginning in the 1970s after the Watts Riots but even more quickly in the 9/11 era. Police violence has been especially notorious in the last year, but the recent spate of deaths is not an anomaly. As Warrior Cops indicates, not only have police forces assumed a more militaristic attitude in recent decades, but they now come armed with the army’s weapons.

In setting up his argument, Balko gives a brief history of law enforcement in the United States which expands in the mid-20^th century, during a rising crime wave that put stress on the government to “do something”. Law and order rose to become a mainstay, with liberals arguing for social programs that would combat poverty and reform criminals, and conservatives advocating stern enforcement and prison expansion. The latter approach met with more popular support, but few could predict what Nixon’s approach would result in. Balko details several problems that would arise in the decades to follow: first, the excessive formation and use of SWAT teams, initially devise to deal with extraordinary situations beyond the means of beat cops. This initially meant high-powered rifles, but it wasn’t long before SWAT officers were lobbing grenades into private homes. At the same time as they were using more brutal weapons, they were deployed for mundane ends, like serving arrest warrants. This stemmed from a use-it-or-lose-it mentality: if cities couldn’t point to any recent uses of the team’s training and equipment, how could it justify further expenses to the public?

Fortunately for them, that problem soon fell away when D.C. initiated programs that would funnel money to purchase arms, and equipment itself, to the cities. This made it easier for local law enforcement agencies to purchase military surplus, from the practical to the insane: one California city attempted to requisition a submarine. Even as the wall keeping civil and military uses of force crumbled, the legal walls protecting citizens from illicit police force vanished together: warrantless raids and arrests skyrocketed after 9/11, leading to tragedy after tragedy. Although advocates for “no-knock raids” maintained that they prevented intended arrests from destroying evidence and scampering away, the sudden and violent invasion of homes by masked men screaming obscenities was time and again met with alarm, confusion, and legitimate attempts at defense that led to slaughter, especially tragic given how many times SWAT teams invaded the wrong house. Still worse, in the modern age new Federal programs helping military officers transition into the police force, or programs training police for anti-terrorist programs, mold the law enforcement mind in the pattern of search-and-destroy soldiers.

Despite all of this, Balko sees some meager grounds for hope. Legal objections to no-knock raids and police employed military equipment have for the most part fallen away, but in the light of widespread videography by citizens, abuses are much more publicized — and some parts of the war on drugs are finally losing support. By way of offering grounds of hope, Balko looks at efforts at reintroducing community policing, in which police officers build relationships with the communities they patrol (preferably on foot) and create solutions that don’t involve ramming down doors and rushing in with MP-5s at the ready. This is a profoundly disturbing book, but worth any American’s attention, especially in light of the recent deaths at the hands of policemen in Balitmore and New York.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged civic awareness, civil liberties, drug war on America, law, law and disorder, politics, Politics-CivicInterest, The Bill of Rights | 3 Comments

Patriots

Posted on May 29, 2015 by smellincoffee

So…much…testosterone.

Well, D.C. finally spent itself into oblivion. After decades of deficits and a series of bailouts that do nothing but inflate the problem, the financial sector is hemorrhaging and taking with it the entire American economy. Few institutions will survive the crash, and now a generation is on its own. Todd Gray isn’t alarmed, though. He smelled the storm coming a long time before it hit; for nine years, ever since September 11, he and a group of likeminded friends have prepared for the worst. They’re survivalists, or ‘preppers’: not only do they maintain extra supplies at home to see them through extended power outages or local disasters, but their group has purchased an expanse of land in rural Idaho to use as a retreat in case something catastrophic happens. From their retreat, this small band of friends will labor to rebuild the Republic. Patriots follows their trials after the collapse, as they face off against human desperation, disease, the threat of starvation, and worst of all: the government.

Patriots is a how-and-why argument for prepping in the form of a novel. There are characters and things happen to them, but mostly they’re there to explain what they’re doing to the reader, what they’re doing it with, why one tool or behavior is better in this or that situation ,and so on. There is action throughout the novel, including car chases, first-fights, pitched brawls between raiders and strongholds, and even a town invasion, and its second half features a looming showdown between cells of free citizens who have survived, and a resurrected Federal government that employs UN soldiers to do its eeevil bidding. Unlike One Second After or Lucifer’s Hammer, there’s not a great deal of emotional drama, let alone grisly scenes like cannibal hordes. The book’s characters are preppers, calm in the face of whatever happens. They’ve spent nine years practicing together, keeping one another’s skills sharp, running through scenarios and improvising solutions. They even purposely recruited members with diverse strengths, so whether they need an arm stitched back together or something welded, they’ve got it covered.

One is almost relieved when a helicopter descends from on high to deposit an overfed bureaucrat announcing that the Federal government is alive and well and on the way to ‘pacifying’ the country. The emergency does require some extraordinary measures on the government’s part, of course – a little suppression of free speech here, a little confiscation of guns there, total wage-and-price controls – nothing to worry over. It reads like a Top Ten List of Evil, and comes off as preposterous given that the United States’ entire civil and economic infrastructure has collapsed. By that point five years have passed, and society has recovered a bit, building around cells of order like the central characters retreat, but this is an armed society with no fond memories of the government, whose gross irresponsibility led to the collapse. Regardless of the merits of this scenario, including the outlandish invasion of the United States by U.N troops, it at least gives the characters a challenge to overcome.

Whatever else, one must give credit to Rawls for infusing a massive amount of information into novel form. His characters’ actions are factual; every book and product they discuss is commercially available. I recognized a fair few of the book titles (The Encyclopedia of Country Living, for instance, and When There Is No Dentist). Impressive, too, is the range of events he gives information on: forging IDs, rain cachement, rotation of storage supplies, gun cleaning, home fortification, and blood transfusions. The characters are forgettable and the plot weak, but this is a mild kind of wish-fulfillment that combines action and lectures on food storage. It’s a strange kind of fun if you’re into self-reliance, disaster-preparedness, or attacking tanks.

Related:
One Second After, William Forstchen. An EMP attack shuts down most electronics in the United States. Misery ensues.
Lucifer’s Hammer, Larry Niven. Asteroid impact levels most of civilization.
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler. Peak oil novel.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged disaster, doomsday, survivalism, thriller | 6 Comments

Harvest of Rage

Posted on May 28, 2015 by smellincoffee

In the spring of 1996, the peace of Oklahoma City was shattered when a truck bomb ignited outside a federal office. Nearly two hundred people were killed, and nigh a thousand injured, in one man’s act of rage against the government. But in Harvest of Rage, Joel Dyer writes that McVeigh was far from alone: he was part of a movement of thousands, spread across the country but concentrated in its withering agricultural heartland. The farm crisis — the growing poverty and destruction of rural life in the wake of globalization — has created legion of homegrown terrorists, whose despair has been crafted into insurrection against the government. Dyer spent seven years interviewing and visiting anti-government types attempting to get to the bottom of rural militancy, and offers sections on the movement’s ideological bases as well as his economic argument. Although portions of this are badly dated, especially given that Dyer sees Endtimes-paranoia about the coming of the Millennium as a factor, the central issues are alive and well twenty years later.

Dyer is not sympathetic to most of the ideas that he encounters during his seven-year investigation (he refers to the free enterprise system as one “in which the government does nothing to help people”), but he does empathize with the plight of his subjects, sharing some of their concerns if not their response. The central issue, as Dyer sees it, is economic: as globalization allows for American firms to manufacture goods and purchase food more cheaply overseas, America’s own primary industries are being gutted. Family farms are being eaten alive by monstrously large international entities like Cargill, and as they fail they take with them rural towns. Further , Dyer writes, a farm is different from other small businesses; a farmer is more likely to have inherited the estate from his father, who inherited from his own. The farm is home, and can contain within it an family’s entire history. To be responsible for losing that heritage can be emotionally crippling: little wonder when this ruin looms, some farmers clutch at whatever desperate straws they can find.

Having established the nature of the farm crisis as one not causing a shortage of food, but one obliterating the livelihoods of families and local economies of families throughout the west, Dyer then argues that their legitimate grievances are being twisted into sometimes violent conspiracy theories. Farmers are not simply competing with multinationals; in fact, they depend on them for storage, equipment, and some supplies. Some chicken farmers are functional sharecroppers, doomed to contracts with giants like Tyson which constantly demand equipment upgrades that keep them in debt. The law is no recourse; not only are the oversight agencies tasked with keeping monopolies in check staffed by former members of the very companies they are policing, but the government bears responsibility in promoting “get big or get out” policies. Many of the families interviewed within were crippled by the farm policies of the 1970s and the monkeying-around with of interest rates. On realizing how many of their woes came from monopolies, and their sinister connection with the government which was supposed to be fair referee, the door was pried open for conspiracy. Government policy was not simply inappropriate, or corrupt: it became viewed as evil. Here was a plot to destroy individual freeholders and replace them by massive conglomerates controlled by a few, in one measure strengthening the cabal and undermining economic resistance. It was a sign of the times, the advent of a New World Order. The architect of this scheme was not a pocket-lining bureaucrat, but Satan himself. Obviously, it was the duty of every true Christian to resist – little wonder the government was so interested in taking the weapons of Americans! From there follows militia movements, composed of individuals willing to shoulder arms in defense of their rights – against the tyranny of the state, if need be.

All of this is tremendously interesting, although the central argument tends to wander away from its roots. Dyer’s goal is to link the farm crisis with rising antigovernment rhetoric and violence, but after some sections on farmers attempting to defraud lenders through legalese, he examines various parts of the antigovernment as a whole, not all of them with any rural dependence. Religious obsession with the rise of the New World Order and doomsday, for instance, was common in the sect of Christianity I was raised in, but we haven’t been farmers for three generations. The same is true of the book’s sections on strict Constitutionalism and monetary policy: one need not be a distressed farmer to hold the government in contempt for granting itself war powers in peacetime, or for entrusting the nation’s financial security to an entity that has control over the money supply, but no accountability whatsoever. Dyer has a tendency to make sweeping statements – at one time, he urges the reader to go into any small rural town and take note of the abundance of people with Constitutions in their front pockets. 99.9999% of the time, he says, these people are involved to some degree in the antigovernment movement. Well, who isn’tinvolved in antigovernment activity to some degree? He also assumes that all of the pipe bombs discovered in the United States in a given year were deployed by agents of the vast rural agenda. Dyer is genuine, though, both in his concern about how the heartland is being devestation, and in his fear of what is to come. No war of disaffected farmers ever broke out, however, despite the coming of the Millennium, and I for one think Dyer’s extensive time embedded in some fairly radical groups gave him his own acute sense of paranoia.

Harvest’s argument is stretched too thin sometimes to be credible, but the facts and stories Dyer turns up are worth the read alone. The issues at hand are still relevant: many of the grievances aired here drive the contemporary Tea Party movement, for instance. Even with its tares, Harvest of Rage is a commendable look inside American populism and how it can turn tragically violent.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged 1990s, America, crime, cults and conspiracies, farming, gangs tribes and parties, globalization, Man vs State, politics, Politics-CivicInterest, populism | 1 Comment

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