More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 7 - August 13, 2019
growing concern in the U.S. Armed Forces over missing weapons.
Yeah. I should think so.
In 1986, a Pentagon official estimated, $900 million in arms, electronic components, parts, and other equipment and supplies disappeared nationwide.
Staggering incompetence (and/or complicity)
recruiting active-duty military personnel to its cause.
Active-duty personnel who joined the white power movement after 1983 could make no such claim. Instead, they joined a movement that openly advocated war on the state and the overthrow of the federal government. By becoming part of the movement, U.S. soldiers and Marines broke their induction oath to protect the United States from “enemies foreign and domestic.” As the movement organized a campaign of domestic terrorism in its war on the state, active-duty personnel who joined its ranks sought to become those enemies.
Active-duty personnel continued both passive and active participation in the white power movement. It would take until 1996—after Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Oklahoma City in April 1995, and after the December 1995 murder of two black people by a group of active-duty skinheads at Fort Bragg—for the military to forcefully prohibit active-duty personnel from joining white power groups.6 Even then, the effort to bar active-duty troops from participating in the movement was not wholly successful.
Of course it wasn't. How could it be?
In 1981, Miller staged a Jacksonville rally attended by hundreds of Marines protesting the U.S. military’s ban on open racism.
Jones purchased all of these from active-duty soldiers stationed in Fort Bragg, using either cash or drugs for currency.
So many assholes.
During the investigation it was revealed that it was possible to obtain weapons simply by checking them out for training, but Fort Bragg officials, despite clear evidence of major lapses, planned no changes in security.
Despite the impending threat documented by the FBI, active-duty soldiers remained free to participate in a movement involved in the sustained theft of military weapons and matériel, and dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government.
Even the massive and sustained theft of weapons from a U.S. military post over three years—with the express intention of violence against both the state and its civilians, and accompanying murders at the Shelby III—held only six years’ worth of consequences.
Despite this clear evidence, however, the jury would acquit all thirteen white power defendants.
Despite a compelling case, the jury delivered no convictions, and white power activists proclaimed a major victory.
A pattern, it seems. See the Bundy trials.
The trial revealed the movement’s deep dependence on social connections, often brokered by women.
How so??
The Fort Smith acquittals can be better understood through a close analysis of the symbolic invocation of women within white power ideology, and the activism and performance—that is to say, the public actions that embodied symbolic and political meaning—of women in the movement.
The defendants, many of whom represented themselves, tapped into a deeply rooted and powerful rhetoric about protecting white female bodies, one that found easy traction not only in the white power movement but among many other Americans. In the purportedly colorblind 1980s, the rhetorical defense of white women from miscegenation, racial pollution, and other dangers continued to structure the worldview not only of white power movement activists but also of several jurors as well as the mainstream media coverage that shaped the trial’s public perception. Danger to civilians, though clearly
...more
Almost Identical to the Bundy case in Oregon.
That two defendants formed romantic relationships with jurors after the trial indicates that white power rhetoric held a romantic appeal for some people in broader American society.
WTF
Women’s activism, while consciously antifeminist in the sense that women almost uniformly avoided leadership roles and combat, worked to forge the social ties that bound the movement, to support the war on the state waged through men’s violence, and to perform white womanhood in ways that carried direct appeals both to the mainstream and to juries.
Ideas about women, sexuality, and birth in this period were deeply intertwined with racial ideology, and not just on the fringe. American white supremacy had long depended upon the policing of white women’s bodies. In order to propagate a white race, white women had to bear white children. While white men’s sexual relationships with nonwhite women mattered less to white supremacists, especially if such activity was secretive, profitable, or part of systematic violence against communities of color, for a white woman to bear nonwhite children was tantamount to racial annihilation.
The continued focus on policing white women’s sexuality and reproduction in the post–Vietnam War era indicates the tacit presence of white supremacy in many social issues that remained important to the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s, and belies the idea of a colorblind mainstream.
White power activists claimed that the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) wanted to abort white babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages—all of this, they said, to destroy the white race. In this context, the wombs of white women became battlegrounds.
In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children.
People could say they were “separatist,” rather than use older, volatile labels such as “segregationist” or “white supremacist,” just as they could replace “racist” with the pseudo-scientific “racialist.”
The idea of separatism facilitated recruitment even as the movement prepared for and waged race war.
At the 1986 Aryan Nations World Congress, Miles pressed activists to pack up and move. He preached that the Northwest nation for whites would be won not by violence or treaty but by migration and reproduction.
In some ways, the white power movement’s emphasis on motherhood mirrored similar currents in both mainstream New Right conservatism and American culture at large.
Those who supported school segregation, restrictions on welfare and public housing, tough-on-crime policing, and mandatory sterilization (largely aimed at poor women of color), as well as those who opposed immigration and overpopulation, all justified their positions by invoking the hyperfertile bodies of nonwhite women.
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” This reproductive mandate, which quickly became known as “Fourteen Words,”
Women in the white power movement would shape the sedition trial, both because of the symbolic invocation of their bodies as terrain in need of defense, and because of the work real women did in forming the movement, furthering its war on the state, and performing white womanhood to garner sympathy from jurors and the public. This worked precisely because the movement story about women’s purity resonated with mainstream Americans.
To some extent the strategy of leaderless resistance had worked as intended, both in protecting leaders from prosecution and by isolating cells infiltrated by informants. In 1985, the Department of Justice began Operation Clean Sweep, a massive investigation with the goal of a major court case against white power movement leaders.59 In recognizing the linkages between seemingly disparate white power groups, Operation Clean Sweep had several early victories.
However, the Fort Smith trial represented the only attempt at prosecuting white power as a coherent social movement, and the scope of the proceedings reflected this goal.
Sheila Beam acted the martyr in a way that further united activists and appealed to people beyond the movement.
It is difficult to gauge the impact of such performative acts on the outcome of a jury trial, but Sheila Beam’s symbolic work toward acquittal should not be discounted. Even in the pages of academic accounts that have argued that white power paramilitarism partially or wholly excluded them, women nevertheless appear as historical actors who impact events.
In other words, Sheila Beam played her part as a movement activist by creating and embodying a particular narrative of her innocence, the arrest, the justified shooting of the Mexican officer, and her husband’s wrongful detention—one persuasive enough to be accepted uncritically by journalists and academic observers.
Romantic relationships also cast doubt upon the acquittal. Two female jurors became involved in public romantic relationships with defendants following the trial, raising questions about whether the Fort Smith proceedings met the constitutional mandate of an impartial jury and signaling the continued importance of white women to the movement.
With white power social networks only partially exposed, the Fort Smith proceedings faced another hurdle in the charismatic testimony of white power leaders.
Compare to Bundy trials 30+ years later. So many judges and juries are racist that these twats get off free over and over.
All law and authority rest in the people.”
When they say this, it's simple narcissistic vigilantism. Self-serving and corrupt.
On April 8, 1988, after three days of deliberation, the jury found all the defendants not guilty on all counts.
Immediately after the acquittal, jubilant white power leaders touted this victory loudly and movement-wide. Miles said the verdict “restore[d] my faith in the people.”112 FBI agent Knox resigned in frustration. Beam founded a new publication, The Seditionist, and published a second edition of Essays of a Klansman.113 White power activists used the trial victory to enhance and encourage further underground operations and hone their appeal to the mainstream. In the post-1988 period, the movement would incorporate new legions of skinhead members, reemerge as the purportedly nonracist militia
...more
Within and beyond the white power movement, the siege at Ruby Ridge—along with the 1992 Los Angeles riots that preceded it and the fiery, catastrophic end to the Waco standoff that followed in 1993—inflamed a renewed apocalyptic imaginary, a worldview characterized by intensifying urgency that would eventually lead to the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.1 If guerrilla war on the state characterized white power movement activity in the 1980s, spectacular state violence defined the early 1990s. White power activists reacted to these events with ideas of apocalypse on their minds.
Apocalyptic rhetoric augmented violence and separatism within the white power movement, but also worked as a bridge issue with the evangelical right, creating opportunities for recruitment.
White power activists used antistatist currents from earlier formations to refine the idea of a Jewish-controlled Zionist Occupational Government, increasingly referring instead to a “New World Order”—an alliance of malevolent internationalist forces—as an agent of the coming end times.
The white power activists enthralled by the Vietnam War now confronted another sphere in which the spillover of wartime violence had militarized domestic life: paramilitary civilian policing.
Before Ruby Ridge, the state had wielded military strategies and weapons against American citizens countless times. The civilian-targeted violence that became a feature of combat in the Vietnam War had been generated, at least in part, by policing tactics in urban communities of color. After the war, military training of police departments and paramilitary units such as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams brought violence home once again and disproportionately targeted the same communities.
Such an important theme: that black and poor people have been subject to actual violence and terrorism from the state for centuries. The white power version of victimization varies in its authenticity, but it never takes into account the experiences of POC. And the attacks on poor and POC communities don't garner the sympathy of mainstream white Americans like the white power "victims" do.
Almost 90 percent of cities with 50,000 or more residents would have paramilitary police units by 1995.
Civilian policing increasingly bore the same markers of paramilitary culture that defined white power activism: the presence of both veterans and active-duty soldiers in training and patrols, secrecy about operations, and, as sociologists have documented, “changing uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics.”
The vast majority of SWAT team and other paramilitary police deployments responded with military force to nonviolent drug crimes. Weapons and money seized during such actions often went toward the purchase of equipment and weapons for further paramilitarization.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the 1033 Program of the National Defense Authorization Act arranged for the free or low-cost transfer of surplus military weapons, gear, and other equipment such as vehicles to local police departments.
As the historian Kimberley Phillips has argued, by the early 1990s “policing had become a war,” largely waged against communities of color.
Before Ruby Ridge and Waco, however, the rhetoric of the war on drugs and policing strategies that brought the full force of military violence down on civilians had targeted people of color in urban areas. Ruby Ridge and Waco were notable because of their rural locales, sensational media coverage, and the deaths of white women, children, and men at the hands of the militarized state.
Militias appeared in the Northwest at least as early as 1989, and shared personnel, funds, images, and ideologies with the established white power movement.
