When is a heavily armed extremist militia not a terrorist group?

When it’s white.

In Ferguson, Missouri, while young black men are being arrested on suspicion of carrying weapons, the police have invited a white militia called the Oath Keepers to help them "keep the peace." They're keeping the peace by toting assault weapons and swanking around in body armor.

The story in The Guardian

The story in the Washington Post, with background on the group.

The Oath Keeper story on NPR.

Reported by Reuters.

Many white Americans hear the word “militia” and think of the Minutemen and the Sons of Liberty. That’s an outdated concept. Militias these days are more like the irregular armies that have destroyed Lebanon and Syria and Iraq, creating millions of refugees and murdering thousands of civilians. The Taliban is a militia. ISIS is a militia. Their beliefs are no more radical and dangerous than these wild west gunmen with their assault weapons and their body armor. If you’re white does the term “terrorist” not apply to you? I guess one difference is ISIS doesn’t have an American news network in their pocket.

Despite the fact that few Americans have read or heard any news about this group, they were reported on by Mother Jones as far back as 2010.

I’ve been worried about the group Oath Keepers for some time. I’ve written letters about them to representatives in Washington and to law enforcement and security agencies. Answer comes there none. No interest might signify greater reason to worry.

How deeply has this group infiltrated our law enforcement agencies?

More concerning: how deeply have these Oath Keepers penetrated our security apparatus? Notably the Secret Service who protect the president the Oath Keepers dislike.

Our nuclear arsenal is controlled from one of the most radicalized right-wing cities in America, Colorado Springs. How deeply has this group, and others like it, infiltrated our nuclear weapons chain of command?

The Oath Keepers seem keen on removing the government. Isn’t this a direct and flagrant violation of the Second Amendment they all hide behind?

Why is a person of color with a Muslim sounding name a terrorist while a secretive white gang bent on overthrowing the government is not?

If Oath Keepers were a group comprised of non-Aryans or non-Christians, don’t you suppose FoxNews would be obsessed with it? And all officialdom would follow their lead. Since FoxNews isn't interested in reporting it our officials say nothing about it.

A close friend of mine made a documentary some years ago about Anwar Sadat. I’m remembering the death of Sadat, murdered by his own troops during an official parade. We’ve heard a great deal over the past six years about persons and groups (and an entire news network) who want to remove President Obama. President Obama is a person of color and has a Muslim-sounding name. I worry about him.

Even though I’ve grown used to the extremist rhetoric and constant inflammatory criticism of Obama and of the government we elected by sizable majorities twice, I worry that there is an apparatus out there who wants to put an abrupt end to it and to our way of life.

And yet nobody talks about it. Nobody responds to stories like this but there is a whole network organized to target the poor and people of color as dangerous.

In Ferguson young black men are being arrested on suspicion of carrying weapons. Properly so. But these same police embrace and welcome the arrival of non-uniformed, heavily-armed white men who are unofficial and avowedly antigovernment. What exactly is up with that? Presumably handguns are the weapons of terrorists but assault weapons are not? Or is it the color of the armed man that matters?

The Oath Keepers have been carefully tracked by RightWingWatch here.

And by the Southern Poverty Law Center here.

And then in magazines like PoliceMag you have the view of the police buffs. Police hobbyists. Police fantasists. They make police work sound like a cult, when it’s an honorable profession. Or, God help us, it should be.

If you or anyone thinks a modern government can’t be overthrown––if you think “it can’t happen here”–– in 1933 it nearly did. A coup organized to overthrow President Roosevelt had the backing of some of the largest corporations in America. It had Wall Street money behind it. Prescott Bush was part of the group. The plan was to mobilize the American Legion, which these same corporations had founded and funded to intimidate the American labor movement. The American Legion at the time outnumbered the U.S. military. The plot was the subject of congressional hearings. The evidence was there. But nobody went to jail. Too big to jail was true then as it is now. The plotters used the money to found the anti FDR Liberty League which devoted itself to derailing the New Deal and opposing American mobilization against the Nazis. These corporations did a profitable business with the Nazis, some of them right through the war.

The Attempt to Overthrow President Roosevelt was the subject of a BBC documentary. The story is hardly known in this country though. Old news?

Another link to an archived version of the White House Coup documentary.

A Few Sane Words From Chris Rock

Chris Rock understands a lot about our race problem. It's not black America's race problem, it's a problem white people have, even if they don't know it. White people have had a problem for centuries.

Should we feel guilty about what our ancestors did? Chris Rock puts it very neatly: "Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for."

If you understand anything you’ll realize that most of American wealth was stolen. Either land stolen from the Indians or labor stolen from black slaves brought here by violence and kept violently for hundreds of years. Every inheritance in America is laundered money. Inheritance is money laundering.

Maybe Chris Rock is right. Maybe in order to get that inheritance you have to be taught and fully understand the violent crimes your ancestors committed to get that wealth you are inheriting. Maybe you should have to hang that photo on your wall that shows your grandfather smiling at a lynching.

Most of the crime in our ancestry was done by remote control: they got the land after the cavalry had stolen it or they owned shares in King Cotton while living hundreds of miles away from where the slaves were whipped into picking it, which means they’re as innocent as Michael Corleone.

How We Think About The Dead

The New York Times described Michael Brown as “no angel.” An unfortunate choice of words on the day of his funeral. Especially if you consider (as Vox does here) the carefully worded descriptions they had published about some well-known mass killers. Timothy McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, the Columbine shooter, and others were described as "just like you and me." Was Michael Brown unlike you and me?

There is a very subtle mechanism we all insert into our judgments, to rationalize what has happened, to explain why it happened, to excuse it, to justify it. In the case of the white murderers it was a “who could have known?” rationalization. In the case of the young black man wrongly killed a week away from freshman year in college it is a reassurance that “Hell, he wasn’t really innocent at all.” A mechanism to help us not feel so bad about it, or at least not guilty ourselves.

Vox's Matthew Yglesias turns this on its head and asks the necessary question: what might happen to any of us in our own youthful brushes with the law if we were the color of Michael Brown?

We have a long and persistent habit of racism in this country. As William Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In his poem Let America Be America Again, Langston Hughes describes how different our inheritance of liberty and freedom and opportunity is depending on our skin color. It resonates especially loudly this month in Ferguson, Missouri.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

American newspaper archives are full of photographs from the last century and before of happy laughing crowds of white people gathered around the tortured, burned, disfigured, hung corpses of black men. The atmosphere is that of a town picnic. Who are those people? They are our ancestors. How should they be described in the New York Times? We know how the men they murdered were described.

A bit of history. A lynching in Omaha in 1919. Our ancestors were there and took part. We can't rationalize that away.