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August 7 - August 13, 2019
The Iran Contra scandal revealed rising paramilitarism in the nation itself. Hawks in the Reagan administration saw the executive as the head of a Cold War military chain of command rather than as one branch of a three-part government limited by checks and balances. The CIA, newly incorporated into Reagan’s cabinet, now functioned as part of the executive. The administration also further expanded army Special Forces and navy SEAL units, and militarized SWAT teams and other civilian police units as well as the National Guard by providing these agencies with military weapons and training.
As the New York Times reported mounting State Department and CIA concern about American mercenaries, Reagan commented publicly that aiding the Contras, whom he consistently characterized as freedom fighters, was “quite in line with what has been a pretty well established tradition in our country” and that he would “be inclined not to want to interfere with them.”
The CMA, one of the most visible examples of mercenary activity in Central America, worked to unite fringe and mainstream supporters of intervention.
By invoking both Reagan and Forrest, then, Black attempted to identify himself with the freedom fighters, and to collapse the distinction between official state action and rhetoric.
With no official declarations of war issued since 1941, Black reasoned, all military actions following that date had the same degree of legality as his invasion of Dominica. The Vietnam War itself, in other words, validated his mercenary action.
Here, Reagan interwove anti-immigration rhetoric with fears about communism and race.
Trump follows suit, but apprently not so worried about Communism anymore.
Opposition to immigration had rapidly gained traction nationwide, with a particularly strong foothold in the Southwest. The Arizona border had, by 1986, undergone a series of transformations that increased its militarization and surveillance. Only four days before the CMA border action, Congress had finally passed the long-debated Immigration Reform and Control Act. The measure granted amnesty to some three million undocumented immigrants, but also strengthened the Border Patrol, made it illegal to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants, further militarized the border, and criminalized
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The mercenaries had embarked from Tucson, Arizona, the epicenter of the Sanctuary Movement that provided refuge to victims of the very anticommunist guerrilla wars they had waged in Central America. The immigrants opposed by mercenaries and white power activists on the fringe had arrived in the United States in large part because of the violent impact of U.S. covert interventions in their home countries. While migrants from Mexico were still largely impelled by economic inequality, most other immigrants to the United States in these years came from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, and other
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The U.S. legal system broadly failed to respond to the CMA incident, which theoretically constituted both kidnapping and a violation of the Neutrality Act.
IN 1983 THE WHITE power movement declared war on the state. This marked a tectonic shift for the movement, which until then had featured populist and reactionary Klan mobilizations and vigilante violence.1 Rather than fighting on behalf of the state, white power activists now fought for a white homeland, attempted to destabilize the federal government, and waged revolutionary race war.
After the Aryan Nations World Congress, where white power leaders purportedly made a formal declaration of war, the movement shifted nationwide to call for revolution against the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG), bombing of public infrastructure, undermining of national currency, assassination of federal agents and judges, and attempts to break away into a white separatist nation. The movement after 1983 was decidedly revolutionary.
Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using early computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and “leaderless resistance,” cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders.
The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan elevated the antistatism that had long characterized New Right grassroots activism to the White House itself.14 From the 1970s forward, ideas of individualism and freedom broke loose from their Cold War counterbalances of social responsibility, morality, and justice.15 As Reagan said in his inaugural address about the nation’s ongoing economic problems, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Vigilantism should be understood as violence that served to constitute, shore up, and enforce systemic power, that is to say, not only overt power wielded by the state, but also the many informal structures that upheld law and order.
lynching
for the most part—and often even when its victims were white—vigilantism simultaneously served white supremacy and the state.
revolutionary violence.
Three veterans shaped a new wave of coordinated—though “leaderless”—revolutionary action nationwide. Louis Beam had served in Vietnam, and Richard Butler and Robert Miles claimed to have fought in World War II, Miles with the French Foreign Legion.
Leaderless resistance,
one man cells
What have (falsely?) been called "lone wolves."
Cell warfare without direction from movement leadership depended upon commonly held cultural narratives and values, and shared texts and symbols, to motivate and coordinate activity.
The Turner Diaries,
The Turner Diaries worked as a foundational how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war.
Modeling its name, structure, rituals, and actions on The Turner Diaries, Mathews outlined the Order’s six-step strategy. First was paramilitary training in the camps in Idaho and Missouri. Second, “fundraising”—robbery and counterfeiting. Third, the purchase of weapons. Fourth, distribution of stolen and counterfeit money to other white power groups. Fifth, “security,” or the assassination of individuals on a circulated hit list. Sixth, expansion into cells to avoid prosecution. The Order’s ultimate goal was to create a white separatist nation in the Northwest, and later to expand this
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They stood in a circle around a white female infant, who symbolized the race they sought to protect.
Yuck
Mathews, who cemented the Order together, insisted on high morality in its acts that distinguished the group from organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood. They thought of themselves as an elite military force, but also as the men responsible for protecting and propagating the white race.
Another major event in 1983 sent shock waves through the white power movement, calling the movement faithful to revolution. In February of that year, a radical tax protestor, self-proclaimed racist, and decorated World War II veteran named Gordon Kahl killed two federal marshals and injured three others in a firefight that had erupted as he left a meeting to organize a Posse Comitatus group in Medina, North Dakota.
His fiery martyrdom at the hands of federal agents became part of a white power call to arms against the state.
His idea of organizing groups, cells, and individual white power activists through the early Internet emerged directly from the 1983 World Congress. It would turn out to be the most radical, and the most wildly successful, idea proposed that weekend.
Decades before the popularization of social media as a method of organizing, white power activists used computers to connect with one another personally, and to coordinate violence and radical activism.
Liberty Net, implemented in 1984, featured recruitment materials; personal ads and pen pal match programs to connect white power activists; and messaging about targets for sabotage and assassination.
newly condoned polygamy within the movement, whose leaders put aside some ideas about traditional family structure in order to encourage the birth of white children.
Hate-group incidents had already increased more than 500 percent in Idaho between 1980 and 1984.
Klansmen linked to Aryan Nations firebombed the SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama.
until he killed and ate his pet dog
Of course, because that's what you do, apparently. 🙄
because he had a record of seeking out and hurting homosexuals.
I don't think I'm a pacifist anymore. I want to kill these people. Of course, the personal taboo against killing won't probably fade before I'm dead. Which is probably a good thing.
Nevertheless, strategies to insulate leaders proved enormously effective in other ways. Even if federal agents and a few journalists were aware of the white power movement, the mainstream public continued to see most white power violence as the work of errant madmen. The phrase “lone wolf,” previously used to describe criminals acting alone, was employed increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s to describe white power activists.
Still in 2019.
The white power movement’s cell structure stymied the kind of public understanding that had worked to limit the civil-rights-era Klan, as well as the political will that could have brought about real change in how the judicial system responded to violent white power activism.
Even so, I have no fear. For the reality of life is death, and the worst the enemy can do to me is shorten my tour of duty in this world.… As always, for blood, soil, honor, for faith and for race.
They're as bad as every other "terrorist." Hard to shut down a movemeny of dumb people willing (eager) to die.
Stories of Mathews’s lone stand and death reached mythic prominence in and beyond the movement, and have been used to bolster an analysis of warrior culture and paramilitary masculinity as a defining force of the 1980s.114 However, although the white power movement organized around the symbols and legacy of the Vietnam War and deployed notions of paramilitary masculinity, the revolutionary turn that necessitated cell-style organizing—the use of social networks and relationships to connect and coordinate activists—relied on the work of female activists.
The wives, daughters, and girlfriends of Order members brokered social relationships and performed supportive work for white power cells. They disguised male activists and drove getaway cars, trafficked weapons and matériel, created false identity documents, destroyed records when pursued by federal agents, and helped to produce the symbols and rhetoric that defined the group.
The movement quickly canonized Mathews as a martyr.
The article bemoaned the fact that Mathews had not fought in Vietnam, saying that war could have given him a legitimate outlet for his violence and bitterness.
This is disgusting in its own right.
Over the next few months, the FBI worked to round up Order members and associates, forming a joint task force with the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the ATF, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Bureau of Prisons.
Why this significant government response
to white power groups in the 80s, but so little response now? It can't be as simple as Trump. Is iy the fiasos of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the Bundies? What else???
The FBI intended to vigorously prosecute the Order; its director told Congress that the group represented the most violent manifestation of the white power movement to date.
The arrest and prosecution of the Order members shook the white power movement from foundation to rafter. The FBI had seized a significant amount of stolen and counterfeit money, straining the movement’s resources, and critical media attention suddenly focused on paramilitary white power activity.
The judge in the Berg murder trial clearly believed that Order members presented an ongoing threat. However, the trials of Order members represented only a minimally effective prosecution of the white power movement. While those found guilty received substantial sentences, fewer than half of the group’s members stood trial at all; the others remained free to continue their war. Beyond the Order itself, a multitude of other cells, activists, and groups continued to function. No national-level leaders such as Beam were indicted. The absence of direct ties between cells and leadership worked to
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The testimony about distribution of funds revealed a nationally connected and unified white power movement.
William Pierce’s second novel, Hunter.
the White Patriot Party stole weapons and matériel directly from military posts and armories
How do they do this over and over? Inside help?
