[From Dag Forssell (950604 1330)]
I found the recent thread on Hate talk, stories, belief and
knowledge very interesting and important for our appreciation of
how HPCT helps us understand our experience. (I have saved it as
the PCT text GULLIBIL.ITY).
Bill P's post on hate talk was part of this:
[Bill Powers (950429.1540)]
When you hear hate talk or read hate literature, what do you
find? Do you find statements like "Black people ought to hate
Jews" or "White people ought to hate black people?" Not at all.
What you find are stories about things that happened or are
happening now. . . .
In today's paper I find a book review that embellishes upon this
perspective.
···
----------------------------
EXTREMISM IN AMERICA
A reader
Edited by Lyman Tower Sargent
(New York University Press: $17.95 paperback; 380 pp.)
Skipping the introductory paragraphs, here is most of a Los Angeles
Times book review by Katherine Dunn and Jim Redden.
------------------
The great majority of Americans believes that it is not just our
right but our duty to criticize government in all its forms. And
citizens' complaints don't materialize out of thin air.
Government--unintentionally and otherwise--does things to irritate
people. Within memory, the federal government has withheld
information from us about the Kennedy assassination, lied to us
about the war in Vietnam, disgusted us with Watergate, insulted us
with the Iran/Contra affair, picked our pockets with the
savings-and-loan scandal, horrified us with the Waco fiasco--and
now wonders what everybody's so mad about.
Rushing to help answer this question, New York University Press is
pushing forward the publishing date of an anthology peculiarly
suited for the times. "Extremism in America," edited by political
scientist Lyman Tower Sargent of the University of Missouri/St.
Louis, collects original source material from a broad range of
fringe political groups. Read together, they may provide insight
into not only the social concerns that fueled the 1994 Republican
landslide but also the radical sentiments that may have led to the
Oklahoma City bombing.
Sargent's book is drawn from the remarkable Wilcox Collection of
Contemporary Political Movements at the University of Kansas.
Compiled by Laird Wilcox, the country's unofficial archivist of
volatile-political movements, it includes material from about 8,000
radical and fringe organizations, including posters, flyers,
pamphlets, books, newsletters, magazines, photographs, videotapes
and taped and transcribed interviews.
Choosing seminal writings from dozens of organizations on the Far
Right and both the Old and New Left, Sargent offers a sampling of
direct, unexpurgated statements delineating the political stances
of groups ranging from the right-wing American Nazi Party to the
left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, from the racist Aryan
Nations to the Black liberation-oriented African People's Party,
from the ultra-conservative John Birch Society to the Communist
Party of America.
Sargent has organized the tracts into chapters dealing with common
themes: race relations, family values, education, taxes and so
forth. The arrangement usually offers various right-wing views of
the topic, followed by some representation of left-wing thinking on
the same subject., Each section and group is introduced by
Sargent's remarks placing the material in historical and political
contexts. The writings are largely products of the last 25 years,
primarily became that is the period covered by the Wilcox
Collection.
As Sargent acknowledges, this anthology gives substantially more
space to far-right organizations than to the left wing. The
feminist presence, for example, is extremely limited. Very few
black organizations are represented, and there is a notable absence
of other minority groups. Sargent offers two reasons for this slant
The Wilcox Collection itself includes more far right-wing than
leftist material, and, in Sargent's view, the New Left has
traditionally been discussed more seriously and in a more balanced
fashion. The far right has more often been viewed as the ravings of
a few lunatics, and is better known for what it is against than for
what it supports.
The result is a demonstrative primer of the intricate complex of
themes and views that make up the modern history of American
extremism. What might have been simply a required text for
undergraduate poli-sci classes takes on more general relevance now
because extremism is in the air, and this volume contains original
documents from some of the groups that are making news today. By
drawing the voices of so many different groups together, Sargent
allows w to see how much they have in common, despite their
opposing positions on the political spectrum.
Most of the texts in this volume--right, left and
otherwise--presume a mind-numbingly vast conspiracy theory. Some
shadowy group is always portrayed as pulling the levers of power,
lining its pockets at the expense of average citizens. The power-
brokers vary from conspiracy to conspiracy, depending on the group
doing the theorizing. To the Aryan Nations, the villains are the
Jews. To the Left Green Network, they're capitalists. To the Posse
Comitatus, it's the Federal Reserve Board. To the Lavender Left,
it's the Patriarchy. To other groups, the villains are Masons,
Humanists, the Illuminati, blacks, feminists--but whatever the
case, government is nearly always a part of the conspiracy.
Although it's hard to imagine the John Birch Society and the
Association of Libertarian Feminists agreeing on much, both oppose
public child care as a government plot.
The enemies always have monumental power, which naturally enhances
the prestige of the groups who are fighting them. A powerful enemy
can only be defied by a noble and courageous hero. Or, to use the
emotional rhetoric of the Posse Comitatus: "We are facing a lawless
group in power who are in the process of destroying our freedoms
and making us serfs of a ONE-WORLD GOVERNMENT, ruled by the
ANTI-CHRIST. It is time that we stand up and be counted. This is no
game for weak-knees or panty-waists. This calls for men with guts-
men who will fight to protect their rights and God-given heritage,
not those who would feed their neighbors to the crocodiles in hopes
that the crocodiles would eat them last."
The layout of this book inadvertently clarifies the profound
similarities in tone and style between the various groups.
Sargent's explanations of each group are italicized at the
beginning of their tracts, but it's easy to overlook these
transitions and plow through an entire chapter without realizing
where, exactly, one screed ended and another began. This is
partially due to the stentorian pomp that seems endemic to
political diatribes. But sometimes opposing
groups even attack the same targets, as in these passages railing
against international bankers by the far-right Lord's Covenant
Church and the socialist Left Green Network
"America will not shake off her Banker-controlled dictatorship
as long as people are ignorant of the hidden consequences.
International Financiers, who control our government, as they
control almost all governments in the world, and the news
media, have us almost completely within their grasp. They can
begin and end wars at will, bring prosperity or depression to
our nation, give w peace or unleash 'urban guerrilla warfare'
on our cities." (from LCC's The Constitutional Way-Every
Citizen a Stockholder,"
"The world economy today, under both corporate capitalism and
state-'socialism,' is an interconnected system based on the
exploitation of the many. Its goal is not to meet human needs
in harmony with nature, but the investment of capital to create
more capital in order to satisfy the profit and power motives
of the elite few that control the means of production and
militarist nation-states." (from "Principle of the Left Green
Network," 1989)
The virulence of the "enemy" rhetoric has prompted more objective
readers to apply the "Hate Group" label to extremists. But it is
also apparent that many of these groups exhibit a similar style of
"love" for their cause. Their enemies may be evil incarnate, but
their friends and supporters are equally good--incapable of wrong,
and prepared to create heaven on earth, if only the conspiracy
which they oppose were put to rest.
Sargent is alert to the progression of ideas through time, and the
fact that an extremist view may eventually become mainstream, and
vice versa. Consider the following quote.
"Legal and illegal aliens are citizens, adding to already
overburdened welfare rolls, and contributing to violent crime.
The time has come to demand enforcement of our laws concerning
illegal immigration and to severely limit legal immigration."
These words are taken not from 1 a recent speech by Gov. Pete
Wilson but from a 1980 flyer from the rabidly racist National Assn.
for the Advancement of White People. This doesn't necessarily mean
that the NAAWP has infiltrated the California Republican Party; it
simply shows that the group happened to identify a hot-button issue
long before it was acknowledged by politicians.
Perhaps Sargent's most important contribution to the escalating
debate is his analysis of populism. In his scholarly introduction,
Sargent discusses the rise in the l9th Century of a movement to
make government more responsive to the needs of farmers and small
business owners, to limit federal activity and retain more power on
the state level. Not surprisingly, populism and its fundamental
question--who holds the power, who makes the decisions--is also at
the heart of many of today's radical fringe movements. This
thinking is apparent in tracts from groups on both the right and
left. The right-wing Posse Comitatus, for example, believes that
the county sheriff should be the highest government official. This
small and diffuse group has clashed with officials over taxes and
weapons since its founding in 1969. But the leftist Students for a
Democratic Society (from the same era) and the Left Green Party
have also argued for radical decentralization of government and
devolvement of power to the governed.
Although civil rights groups and the media are quick to label -the
Far Right as racist and anti-Semitic, these modern populists are
obsessed less with blacks and Jews than with the growing size and
power of such agencies as the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms and the Bureau of Land Management. If the material in
this book is any indication, these anti-government views can be
just as passionately felt as bigoted belief. This may come as a
revelation to a nation groping to understand an act of the enormity
of the Oklahoma City bombing and may help explain how someone like
Timothy McVeigh, who does not seem overtly racist or anti-Semitic,
or conform to our clearest image of someone filled with hate, could
-carry out such a barbaric act. As Sargent explains in his
introduction "If there is something seriously wrong with the
world--and everyone in this book believes there is--it is only
sensible to go to whatever lengths are necessary to correct that
wrong or those wrongs."
In recognizing the intense convictions and volatile emotions
revealed by the groups depicted in this book, one can't help but
remember that this is only a small sampling of the 8,000 groups
represented in the Wilcox Collection, and that the primary focus of
the collection itself is on just the last 25 years of American
history. The reader may come away from all this vehement rhetoric
convinced that it's not at all surprising that the Federal Building
in Oklahoma was bombed. What is surprising is that much more
violent terrorist activity does not happen in this country.
We can only suppose that, for the great majority of sympathizers
with these extremes, talking about it, writing about it, getting
together with a few like-minded cronies over pizza and beer to
staple and mail pamphlets or to pass out flyers are sufficiently
satisfying actions. The evidence suggests that in many cases the
First Amendment may act as an effective steam valve releasing
pressure by nontoxic means and that attempts to suppress it would
only increase the incidence of violence in the future.
The United States is an ongoing experiment in the evolution of a
culture based on idealistic principles. The same energy that spawns
our multifarious, constantly changing music, art, literature and
technology, the chaotic diversity that makes this nation a prolific
source of innovation in every field is also expressed in our
politics. Today's government is tar from perfect in the eyes of
most Americans. It is not the same government as it was 50 or 100
years ago, much less identical with what was designed by its
founders. And it will continue to change, to shift and grow and
shed like the enormous and complex human ecology it serves. Part of
the reason government changes is the constant spawning, growing and
dying of political groups and views that test each other and the
status quo. This huge and intricate social organism we call a
nation is far more complex and interdependent than that of the
deepest rain forest. It may be that, as in other complex ecologies,
it is the balance created by opposing forces that sustains life for
the whole.
END