Attend not only to contemporary USA born/bred supremacist “extremists.” Dare to consider the long and sorted United States history featuring our 'classic' extremists.
Excerpts, re-reporting with minor editing and comment by Carolyn Bennett
I listened this week to Al Jazeera’s “People in Power” segment titled “White Power USA.” The piece features filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen’s investigation from inside the white nationalist movement. Later I came across Tim King’s insightful but limited view in “Are White Racists a Threat to U.S. Security?”
King’s poll of Government sources answered, “Yes,” white racists are indeed a threat to U.S. security.
Last spring a U.S. Department of Homeland Security report ─ for which DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized for offense to veterans ─ issued a warning that “rightwing extremists are ‘the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.’”
Former ATF (U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) special agent Bart McEntire’s expert opinion made up most of King’s article. McEntire allowed that U.S. extremism is rooted in or rises from [not unlike among Taliban or Al Qaeda elsewhere] dire economic conditions (which, in all honesty, have been deepening for decades in the U.S.); also a black American heading the Executive Branch of U.S. Government; and Democratic Party members holding majority seats in the U.S. Legislature. McEntire warns of an out-of-hand doomsday downward spiral sparked by “an event sitting out there” waiting to hurl the white supremacist movement into a sudden, exponential rise ─ more likely resurgence ─ in its membership.
In addition to extremist talk show hosts (who, by the way, make their living inflaming the masses or anyone with nothing better to do than listen to their drivel), McEntire reports that the U.S. military has gone rogue. Members of the armed forces are “stealing federal weapons” and dispensing them to groups capable of turning these weapons back on “regular U.S. military personnel and police” ─ and immigrants and Jews and homosexuals and colored people and anyone else they’ve a fancy to harass or disappear. Soldiers stationed in Columbus, Georgia, who are “tied to the white supremacist movements” are “stealing weapons including explosives” from the military base. McEntire warns citizens to remember that Oklahoma federal building [Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City,
April 19, 1995] bomber Timothy McVeigh “was a decorated U.S. veteran” who had been deployed in the Gulf War.
Tim King’s piece shows insight ─ and sets fear du jure in the masses, maybe ─ but his reporting misses a deeper “Why.” The situation is not just one of nuts and fruitcakes and mad bombers. This internal situation resurges repeatedly because Americans are careless, short of memory, and deliberately ignorant.
Let us stroll down the halls of history. Walk the bloody path of United States icons (religion, state and individual) against Americans (without touching on much earlier brutalizing of “Indigenous Americans”) from nineteenth century Reconstruction and Suffrage through the early, middle, late twentieth century rights struggles and violent opposition.
Men and, sadly, “their women” on this land have always become intimidated (scared), paranoid and defensive. Irrationalism donned violent aggression against fellow human beings and justified their violence through lies and smear campaigns. Armchair whiners and pooh-poohs including “liberals” have sat, historically, and said nothing in the face of brute force. U.S. extremists have throughout U.S. history attacked (persecuted and prosecuted) people who have earned, even more than they have ─ and earned without legacy or “entitlement” ─ their rights and place.
The reason we are “shocked” and “surprised” (though we should not be); the reason we keep repeating the same violence in character and response is that we are carelessly ignorant of and unconcerned about our history.
Filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen have taken their investigation inside the contemporary white nationalist movement. No doubt, Al Jazeera reporters are better schooled in U.S. history than are U.S. citizens. What is different, what is new in this era of resurgent supremacists is a borderless news and information medium via a relatively accessible Internet: not the existence of armed U.S. extremists.
Sources and notes
Tim King (newsroom@salem-news.com) is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. He is a war correspondent and Executive News Editor for Salem-News.com.
“Are White Racists a Threat to U.S. Security?” (Tim King), January 8, 2010, Are White Racists a Threat to U.S. Security?Salem-News.com, http://salem-news.com/articles/january082010/racist_usa_tk.php
The “White Power USA” episode of “People & Power” began airing Wednesday, January 6, continues through Monday, January 10, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/01/201015124739316797.html
No comments:
Post a Comment