Muren en dat zo

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De lonten branden, hoe lang zijn ze?

Terwijl de val van de fysieke muur in Berlijn herdacht wordt, wordt
elders gebouwd aan fysieke muren (West-Bank) en virtuele muren
(extreem-rechts in USA).
In de USA sterven bovendien elke dag ruim 120 mensen, doordat ze geen
toegang hebben tot de gezondheidszorg. Het huidige voorstel (nu in de
Senaat) gaat $10 miljard per jaar kosten.
De bank der goden (Goldman Sachs) maakt zich op $30 miljard aan bonussen
te verdelen.
Het aantal militias in de USA (50 in 2002) staat nu op 200.

'Onze' JP maakt zich op de heer Lieberman te ontvangen, die zijn
tegenstanders in de Dode Zee wil droppen, zoals de andere JP geacht
wordt ze in de Atlantische Oceaan gedropt te hebben.
Naast 'onze' JP staat een kennelijke kandidaat-premier, die als
buitenlandse-zaken heel kort voor elkaar kreeg dat Gaza-tuinders hun
bloemen mochten exporteren (terwijl toch ook nu dagelijks vliegtuigen
vol bloemen naar Europa worden gevlogen).

Te veel lontjes, te weinig tijd?

Groet / Cees
Stopping the Next McVeigh
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-07/stopping-the-next-mcveigh/

Neo-Nazis took to the streets in Arizona and Minnesota this weekend, a
new boldness that officials say echoes the homegrown terrorism of the
1990s. James Verini talks to the extremists leading the charge.

A year after President Obama's election, hate groups are feeling bolder
than they have in over a decade, and their usually insular anger is
beginning to spill into the public realm. This weekend, the National
Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, held rallies in Arizona and
Minnesota. Those demonstrations came on the heels of similar actions in
Southern California, where epithet-spewing white supremacists were
forced to disband by rock-throwing counter-protesters. The upsurge in
visibility is more than anecdotal—law-enforcement officials are
monitoring levels of agitation among extremist groups that they say are
the highest since Timothy McVeigh’s deadly attack in Oklahoma City
nearly 15 years ago.

The outcries of right-wing tea-partiers, death panellers, birthers, and
the like are accompanied by increased activity all along the paranoid
fringe.

“It’s sort of a beehive now,” says James Cavanaugh, a special agent with
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Cavanaugh was
one of the agents at the standoff at David Koresh’s Waco, Texas,
compound in 1993 (which McVeigh timed his terrorist act to commemorate,
two years later, on April 19, 1995). Last October in Tennessee,
Cavanaugh aided in the arrest of two white supremacists charged with
plotting to assassinate Obama, and in 2007 he helped bring down members
of the Alabama Free Militia, who were found with hundreds of hand- and
rifle grenades and other explosives. The arrests had an unsettling
familiarity. “We haven’t had that kind of activity since the 1990s,”
Cavanaugh says.

“We believe there is a real resurgence,” adds Lieutenant David Hall,
director of the Missouri Information Analysis Center, which tracks
antigovernment extremist groups around the Midwest. “The atmosphere is
ripe.”

So where might another McVeigh—or worse—spring from?

Experts on extremist groups say that the outcries of right-wing
tea-partiers, death panellers, birthers, and the like are accompanied by
increased activity all along the paranoid fringe—from radical
border-patrol groups to skinheads to sovereign citizens. Two camps are
particularly restive: militia enthusiasts and white supremacists; their
members are seething because of the persistence of two wars and the
election of a black (and Democratic) president with an ambitious agenda.
The previous upsurge of antigovernment activity in the 1990s—of which
McVeigh’s attack marked the apex—was set off in part by a recession and
the election of a liberal president.

The Anti-Defamation League is tracking about 200 militias, up from 50 in
2002, according to Mark Pitcavage, the ADL’s director of fact finding.
“The single greatest factor in the agitation is Obama. The extreme right
hated George W. Bush. If they hated him, you can imagine how they feel
about Obama,” Pitcavage says, adding “I see so many parallels today with
1994.”

To find out more about this, I got in touch with both a recent
militia-founder and a prominent white supremacist. First, I called James
Ambrose, an Idaho truck driver who last year founded the Idaho Citizens
Constitutional Militia. The ICCM is not difficult to find—it’s listed in
the “militia contacts” section of the Web site “A Well Regulated
Militia", and his email is listed on ICCM’s site. Ambrose, 34 and
unmarried, is a veteran of the Army, in which he served as an artillery
specialist, though not in Iraq or Afghanistan. (He was stationed in
Korea and Fort Bragg.) He says the ICCM now has 40 members, about half
of them veterans. Their “first muster” will be in the spring. In the
meantime, Captain Ambrose, as he prefers to be called, and his troops
keep in close touch and try to recruit more members.

Ambrose said he started the militia because he “felt something needed to
be done with the direction the government has taken. Not in the sense
that we’d ever go to war with government, but I felt Idaho should have a
militia. It was the strongest statement I could make.” I asked him what
he meant. “I formed it to defend Idaho if it wants to secede. If Idaho
decides it no longer wants to be part of the United States, we back that
decision.” Why would Idaho want secede? “I think we’re headed in a
direction of totalitarianism,” he said. As evidence of this slide
Ambrose mentioned George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, and, of
course, health-care reform. (“The crazy groups are trying to latch onto
the legitimate issues. They exploit them,” the ATF’s Cavanaugh
explains.)

Ambrose is also convinced that Obama plans to create a civilian defense
force, “funded on the scale of the military,” to keep American citizens
in check. “He’s given speeches about it,” Ambrose assured me.

Interestingly, though, Ambrose dismisses out of hand the conspiracy
theories about FEMA concentration camps perpetuated by one of his
favored news sources, Glenn Beck. (Beck is also a favorite of Nancy
Genovese, the mother of three who had posted prolifically on MySpace and
Twitter about FEMA concentration camps before she was arrested in August
for trespassing on an Air National Guard Base in New York's Long Island—
while in possession of an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a videocamera—
and of Richard Poplawski, the white supremacist who killed three
Pittsburgh police officers in April.)

Like Ambrose, Billy Roper, the head of White Revolution, a fast-growing
white-nationalist group, was willing, even eager, to talk to me. White
Revolution’s Web site is somewhat rambling and hysterical, promising
that “The United States of America was born in bloody revolution, and
the multiracial cesspool of squabbling minorities squealing for their
slice of the affirmative-action pie and taxpayer provided benefits that
it has become will die that way.” But in conversation Roper, 37, a
former skinhead and history teacher who now lives with his wife and
children and says he raises money for charities (he wouldn’t say which)
for a living, is almost unnervingly articulate in conversation.

There were “two reactions among people of my political stripe,” to
Obama’s election, he told me when I reached him on the phone at his home
in Arkansas, which was not difficult; his number is listed on White
Revolution’s Web site. “The first was panic. The paranoid mind-set was
that we’d all be rounded up and put in a gulag. The other reaction was
that this will be a wake-up call for people.” Roper situated himself in
the second camp. “People are going to become increasingly disenchanted
with Obama’s America.”

And that is why Roper is running for president in 2012, which he called
a “last-ditch election year” for America. His Nationalist Party of
America has completed its platform and is already raising money. “We
don’t anticipate winning or even being a spoiler for either party,”
Roper admitted, but he intends to add to the debate. (He says he is
especially excited about the health-care proposals. They focus on HMO
reform.)

“For years, white Americans were just concerned with watching sports and
drinking beer and being consumers,” Roper said. “They were like bad
puppies. Obama is like the rolled up newspaper smacking their butt. And
now they’re baring their teeth. We’re at the stage kind of like the
original 13 colonies around 1760. We’re at that awkward stage of the
revolution when it’s too late to work within the system and too early to
shoot the bastards.”

But Roper observed that any violence against the president would be
counterproductive. “Harming Obama would be one of the worst things that
could happen to our cause,” he said. “It would lead to the entire weight
and power of the government coming down on our heads.”

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