The Road to Elohim

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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Fri Apr 17, 2015 4:29 pm

Sis often mentioned the 'hammerskins'. Thanks for the background.
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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 18, 2015 9:59 am

Here is more, as we come up on the 20th anniversary of that horrific act:

"According to a report from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), Strassmeir training platoon-size groups consisting of 30 to 40 individuals from throughout the U.S. every three months at the reclusive compound. acc Ading to a law enforcement source interviewed by the McCurtain Gazette, they consisted primarily of members from the Aryan Nations, and included Timothy McVeigh. As the Gazette reports:

'Strassmeir went out and replaced all our deer rifles with assault weapons,' said [resident Zara] Patterson. 'Next, he wanted us to start going illegal stuff... a lot of illegal stuff. I kept telling Andy that we were defensive here, and we didn't want any problems from the law. During the mid-80s, we had a standoff with the Feds. I told him to keep us out of trouble.

"Was Strassmeir attempting to infiltrate Elohim City? 'If the agent penetrates the group,' Strassmeir said in an interview with the author, 'the first thing they do is try to sell them weapons.' When asked if that wasn't exactly what he did, he replied, 'I just advised them about weapons, as an experienced soldier. That's what I did for years and years. I was an infantry man -- I just gave advice. But, I always obeyed the law.' He then admitted that he 'didn't know the law. I'd have to consult my lawyer.'"
(The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, David Hoffman, pg. 130)


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The notion that Strassmeir was dispatched to Elohim City to infiltrated it is ludicrous. By the early 90s Elohim was already thoroughly "infiltrated," possibly by the founder and "spiritual leader" himself, Robert Millar.

"Perhaps most surprisingly, during a July, 1997 pre-trial hearing for Howe, FBI agent Peter Rickel revealed that 'Grandpa' Millar was a confidential FBI informant! When asked if Millar had been a source of government information or an informant, Rickel replied, ' generally, yes.'"
(ibid, pgs. 146-147)


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Millar

The notion that Millar had some type of relationship with the feds is highly plausible as it is the most logical explanation as to how Elohim City has managed operate in relative anonymity for decades. Authorities, both local and federal, were aware that something very strange and potentially illegal was going on at the compound for years. Former FBI agent James Rogers had apparently plotted a major raid on Elohim City in 1988 but it was called off for reasons that have never been made clear, for instance.

What's more, Millar was hardly the only informant residing at Elohim. There was BATF informant Carol Howe, who was a little late in the game having not signed on with the agency until sometime around 1994. There was also potentially Dennis Mahon, a former head of the White Knights of the KKK in Tulsa credited with forging extensive ties between American and German hate groups, who kept a trailer at Elohim.

"Investigator Jeff Steinberg takes this one step further, believing that Mahon himself may be an ATF operative. He says the ATF had him on a charge then dropped it. 'He may have been turn,' said Steinberg."
(ibid, pg.139)


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Mahon

Easily the most curious of the informants was James Ellison, the founder of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. It was Ellison who turned state's evidence in 1988 and testified against numerous figures in the Christian Identity underground.

"In 1983, members of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), a white supremacist group based in northern Arkansas, planned to truck-bomb the Alfred P Murrah Building. In 1988, former CSA leader James Ellison turned state's evidence and testified that CSA member Richard Wayne Snell and others had participated in the plot. Snell was bitter towards the government, Ellison claimed, because the IRS and FBI had seized his property.

"Other defendants included Richard Girnt Butler, chief of the Aryan Nations; Robert E. Miles, a former Ku Klux Klansman; and Louis Beam, Jr., former Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations 'Ambassador at Large '...

"Ellison, who fancied himself 'King James,' was surrounded at his CSA compound near the Missouri-Arkansas border on the prophetic date of April 19 (ten years to the day of the Oklahoma City bombing), leading to a four-day standoff against 200 heavily armed agents. Ellison later testified at his sedition trial that at Snell's request, he had cased several buildings, including the Alfred P. Murrah Building."
(ibid, pg. 115)


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James 'King James' Ellison

Apparently there were no hard feelings between Ellison and the rest of the Christian Identity movement as he was allowed to move to Elohim City after completing his prison sentence.

Numerous other individuals have been cited as potential informants at Elohim, including Timothy McVeigh himself. As the story goes McVeigh was recruited by US intelligence to infiltrate the radical right, a job which he was allegedly immensely suited for.

"Timothy McVeigh would have been what the intelligence community were looking for --a top-notch, gung-ho but impressionable young soldier, a taciturn individual who followed orders without hesitation and who knew when to keep his mouth shut, a prerequiste of any good intelligence operative.

"... intelligence agencies regularly recruit from the military, and military files are routinely reviewed for potential candidates -- those who have proven their willingness and ability to kill on command and without hesitation. Those whose combat training and proficiency with weapons make them excellent candidates for field operations. Having taken the PSYOP course at Fort Riely, McVeigh was well on his way to a career in covert intelligence. His above-average military record and his try out for Special Forces, created as the covert military arm of the CIA, would've made him a natural choice.

"McVeigh's racism and espousal of mila-type views would have made him a perfect operative to infiltrate any far right-wing or white supremacist group. Likewise it would have made him the perfect patsy to implicate in connection with any right-wing group, possessing all the qualities that would have made him an excellent undercover operative and a perfect fall-guy...

"While this explanation may strike one as bizarre, McVeigh wrote his sister Jennifer that he was picked by the Army for a highly specialized Special Forces Covert Tactical Unit (CTU) involved in illegal activities. The letter was introduced to the Federal Grand Jury. According to former grand juror Hoppy Heidelberg, these illegal activities included 'protecting drug shipments, eliminating the competition, and population control.' While all the details of the letter aren't clear, Heidelbergsaid that there were five to six duties in all, and that the group was comprised of 10 men."
(ibid, pgs. 61-62)


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McVeigh

Thus, with so many potential informants present at Elohim, it's easy to understand why Strassmeir didn't raise any red flags when he sought to join up. As was noted in part two, Strassmeir had already been kicked out of the Texas Light Infantry militia after they began to suspect that he was an informant. Shortly after moving to Elohim Strassmeir had another curious encounter with law enforcement that was also apparently ignored by the compound.

"In 1992, Strassmeir committed a traffic offense and his car was impounded by the Oklahoma highway patrol. Inside, police found a valise full of government documents. Strassmeir called in his calvary -- the State Department and the Governor's office phoned police to urge his release, as did an unnamed caller who argued that Strassmeir --his proof of citizenship notwithstanding -- enjoyed the protection of diplomatic immunity."
(Virtual Government, Alex Constantine, pg. 275)


Once this ruckus died down Andy the German got back to work at Elohim. The compound began constructing armored bunkers while rumors of drug trafficking emerged.

"ATF agent Angela Finley-Graham, the agent who supervised ATF informant Carol Howell, had aerial surveillance photos of Strassmeir with an assault weapon, and photos of concrete bunkers at Elohim City. In fact, in 1992, some 960 yards of concrete were transported to the compound, presumably for bunkers and weapon storage facilities.

"Law enforcement officials also received reports that the compound was believed to be generating income throug the sale of illegal drugs. A source I spoke with who is familiar with the community told me that Bruce Millar, Robert Mllar's son, was supposedly 'strung out' a methamphetamines. Speed is a highly popular drug among the neo-Nazi crowd, and was in fact invented by the Nazis during WWII to bolster the fighting ability of their troops."
(The Oklaholma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, David Hoffman, pgs. 130-131)


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There have also been reports that Timothy McVeigh himself was involved in drug trafficking, potentially supporting himself financially via this endeavor in the years leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing.

"Was there a connection between investigation of neo-Nazis in the Southwest and the bombing? The contents of the files were not divulged, but federal agents told reporters that they were 'looking into the possibility that alleged bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices had targeted the nine-story building in an effort to destroy DEA or ATF investigation files.'

"Acquaintances of McVeigh told reporters that Timothy McVeigh... supported himself by peddling methamphetamines. McVeigh ran his drug concession in Kingman, Arizona. Ralph McPeak, a Kingman resident and friend of McVeigh's, told the Los Angeles Times: 'When I met him [last year], he was wired up. He couldn't stand still.' McPeak and his estranged wife said in separate interviews that some of the same people who would frequent the house also designed and detonated explosives. Two of the acquaintances fled when a fertilizer and fuel oil bomb damaged their house. They accused 'McVeigh or his associates in the drug trade...'

"A sensitive investigation of Nazi activity in drugs was allegedly underway in Oklahoma City. If the building was destroyed, in part, to bury evidence of virtual government involvement in the distribution of drugs, it's certain that a representative from this murky milieu would step forward to float disinformation and divert attention from higher-ups."
(Virtual Government, Alex Constantine, pgs. 266-267)


In addition to the drug trade there were strong indications that McVeigh was involved with the Aryan Republican Army, a group that pulled off a series of daring bank robberies in the mid-90s.

"... Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a fanatical neo-Nazi group that pulled off more bank robberies in the Midwest during the mid-1990s than Jesse James managed his day. Another ARA extremist, Richard Lee Guthrie, was found hanged in a Kentucky jail on July 12, 1996, after he pled guilty to nineteen holdups in seven states. These armed assaults were carried out by ARA members wearing Count Dracula and Ronald Reagan masks. Money raised from the robberies were shared among various White Power groups in the United States.

"Timothy McVeigh also participated in a series of Midwest bank robberies, according to his sister. It appears that McVeigh was part of an underground ARA cadre, which function in accordance with the leaderless resistance strategy promoted by militia tactician Louis Beam. The goal of this strategy was to engender antigovernment violence while providing semipublic militia organizations with a built-in means of plausible deniability that would scare any direct link to breakaway terrorist cells."
(The Beast Reawakens, Martin A. Lee, pg. 354)


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members of the ARA



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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby 82_28 » Sat Apr 18, 2015 4:06 pm

Well, well, well. This is from 1997.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/21/us/sp ... prise.html

Spate of Skinhead Violence Catches Denver by Surprise

DENVER, Nov. 20— The emergency call about a prowler seemed normal enough. But when a Denver police officer searched the working-class neighborhood this morning, a young white man with short cropped hair popped up from behind a bush and emptied an automatic pistol at him.

The bullets missed their target, but the ambush echoed as the latest of a series of attacks by racist skinheads that belie Denver's modern image of tolerance and affluence.

Two weeks ago, a 20-mile car chase ended in a blaze of gunfire and the arrest of a young man who proudly sported the tattoo ''God of Hate.'' Last week, another car chase, this one stretching 30 miles, ended with the killing of a Denver officer and the suicide of a skinhead.

Tuesday night, two white men taunted a West African at a downtown bus stop and then shot him to death. A few hours later, at the station where the policeman who was killed last week had worked, someone dropped off a dead pig. The carcass was daubed with the drawing of a police badge and ''Vanderjagt,'' the name of the dead policeman.

''The pig's head said that they are ready to go to war with the police,'' said Carl Raschke, a University of Denver religion professor who has studied white supremacist groups here and nationwide. ''This is the worst outbreak of skinhead violence that has happened anywhere. Nowhere has there been such a direct challenge to the police.''

The crude racial hatred flies in the face of Denver's image of an open-minded city where a white majority population has twice elected Wellington Webb, a black man, as mayor. The violence flies in the face of Denver's world image as a city proud of its $5 billion international airport and of its smooth handling of a summit of world leaders last June.

But Denver's unexpected outbreak of violence, most of it by young, white skinheads, is part of a national trend in which skinheads groups are growing while Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups decline, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group based in Alabama that tracks hate groups nationwide.

According to the center, the number of Klan and neo-Nazi groups dropped by one-quarter from 1995 to 1996, hitting 140 last year.

''As the economy goes better for most people, you get less of this scapegoating rage,'' Mark Potok, a Center spokesman, said.

At the same time, the number of organized skinhead groups increased by 23 percent, hitting 37 in 1996. The difference seems to be demographic. The Klan often attracts a more middle-aged group. The skinheads draw on young people, often teen-agers facing job markets without high school diplomas.

The largest city of the Rocky Mountain West, modern Denver has occasionally seen eruptions of white supremacist activity.

In 1984, Alan Berg, a radio talk show host, was shot to death outside his home here. Three years later, two men were convicted of murder in the case. Members of a neo-Nazi gang, the Order of the Silent Brotherhood, the men apparently targeted Mr. Berg because he was Jewish.

Through the early 1990's, rallies on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday regularly drew counterrallies by skinheads and Klansmen.

But, in general, reported hate incidents tapered off in Colorado through the 1990's.

The number of victims of hate crimes dropped 14 percent from 1994 to 1996, according to statistics from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Anti-Semitic incidents dropped by three-quarters during the 1990's, falling to 17 last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

''Police around Denver cracked down very hard on skinhead activity in the early 1990's,'' Mr. Potok said. ''Last year, we didn't document the existence of any organized skinhead groups in Colorado at all.''

The new outbreak started on Nov. 6, when two young men barricaded themselves in a house overnight, leading to a police siege. Escaping in a car the next morning, they traded dozens of shots with the police before surrendering unharmed.

One of the men, Jerald Dean Allen, sported such tattoos as ''100% hate'' and ''God of Hate.'' ''I believe in white pride,'' Mr. Allen told The Rocky Mountain News from jail. ''I'm fighting for my own cause.''

One week later, Matthaeus Jaehnig, led police on another car chase. According to the police, his girlfriend drove part of the way, while he fired at pursuers with an automatic rifle. Cornered, he shot to death a police officer, Bruce Vanderjagt, then committed suicide with the officer's handgun.

A longtime member of the Denver Skins, a loosely knit group of young men, Mr. Jaehnig, 25, had been arrested seven times since he dropped out of high school. One arrest was for ordering his dogs, a pit bull and a Rottweiler, to attack a police officer. The officer was Mr. Vanderjagt.

For all his arrests, Mr. Jaehnig spent about 30 days in jail. His affluent family routinely paid his bail and legal fees. Mr. Jaehnig grew up in a large house in a comfortable neighborhood and his father was a founder of the Denver Waldorf School, a school that teaches racial tolerance.

Dozens of skinheads attended Mr. Jaehnig's funeral. Death threats were telephoned to the condolence line for the dead police officer.

Late Tuesday night, two young white men approached Oumar Dia, a 38-year-old black immigrant from Mauritania who waiting for a bus after working his shift as a housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Denver. They made fun of his hat, throwing it into the street. Then the two shot him twice, killing him on the spot.

When another person at the bus stop, Jeannie VanVelkinburgh, sought to intervene, the men shot her, also. Ms. VanVelkinburgh, a single mother of two boys, is now paralyzed from the waist down.

This afternoon, Bruce Ritter, the Denver District Attorney, announced that Nathan Thill, 19, was being held for investigation of first-degree murder. Arrested on outstanding traffic warrants, Mr. Thill appeared in court today, wearing a black leather jacket, his hair shaved to his skin.

Photos: Denver police officers searched yesterday for a man who had fired at an officer earlier in the day. (Kevin Moloney for The New York Times); On Tuesday, a dead pig labeled with the name of a slain police officer, Bruce Vanderjagt, was dumped at the Denver station where Officer Vanderjagt had worked. (Dave Buresh/The Denver Post)
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby 82_28 » Sat Apr 18, 2015 4:34 pm

Oh here's this from 1999:

http://www.westword.com/news/zero-to-life-5059766

Lisl Auman was finally freed. But I knew her. Wasn't friends but ran around in groups that did so. I met her a few times. I was friends with her friends -- non skin who vouched for her innocence. I think I even contributed to her appeal campaign. We really did all we could to stop what happened in Denver and it basically stopped. We didn't do it forcefully (I do have another story or two about that) but we kicked them out because all these kids realized they'd lost all their friends and the racist outreach dwindled away leaving the kids having to apologize and saying how stupid it was what they did. I have many memories of skins. I really could go on and on.

Last me and Twyla hung out we both agreed that there is a good chance that I probably ran into her sister at some point in the 90s. Skins were fucking weird.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Sun Apr 19, 2015 1:32 pm

It was weird that day, hearing about the skatepark concert with the skinheads linking arms and sweeping down the crowd from the opposite perspective of how I heard it originally.

I probably owe you a cigarette from that adventure, cowboy. I don't remember smoking my own.
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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 10, 2018 7:11 am

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the ... extremism/

The Surprising Roots of Recent White Extremism

By Joseph Darda


THIS WAS NO ordinary jacket copy. “What will you do when they come to take your guns?” asks white supremacist William Luther Pierce on the back cover of his 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, an enduring literary icon among Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Identitarian Christians, and skinheads. Timothy McVeigh sold it at gun shows and brought pages of the book with him to Oklahoma City when he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in 1995. Pierce immodestly declared his creation “a novel with a message in the venerable tradition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Morris Dees, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, called it “an invitation to kill blacks and Jews.”

Part conspiracy thriller and part race war how-to manual, The Turner Diaries is written as the personal journal of a foot soldier in a guerilla movement against a Jewish-controlled government secured by black enforcers and abetted by white liberals. “The System,” as the government is known, outlaws guns, introduces tax incentives for mixed-raced couples, decriminalizes rape, and declares it a hate crime for white people to defend themselves from people of color. Turner’s resistance movement builds a cell network of ex-military men who execute coordinated terrorist attacks on the System, including the bombing of a federal building that may have inspired McVeigh. The diaries end with Turner crashing a plane into the Pentagon, sacrificing himself for his race. Though the prose is laughable and the premise absurd, it nevertheless put a mirror to a growing subliminal belief in the late 1970s that white men were the real victims of post–civil rights America — that it was time they took their country back.

That belief, Kathleen Belew argues in her new book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, arose from the Vietnam War. The publication of Pierce’s novel coincided with some of the first revisionist Vietnam War films, including Coming Home and the Best Picture–winning The Deer Hunter. These films all, regardless of their more explicit politics, addressed the suffering of white veterans abandoned by their government in Southeast Asia and shunned by civilians at home. The United States pulled out of Vietnam amid an oil crisis and the Watergate scandal. Inflation rose as wages shrank. Manufacturing jobs moved overseas as organized labor came under attack. Some white men, feeling the sting of deindustrialization, blamed the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements and a government that they believed had surrendered to minority demands. The Vietnam veteran became the embodiment of their grievances. Ronald Reagan recognized the value of that story, suggesting in his 1980 presidential campaign that the government had been “afraid to let them win” in Vietnam and had subjected them to “shabby” treatment ever since. So did white supremacist activists, who found in this mythology an idea that would unite a growing white power movement: a belief in government-orchestrated anti-white discrimination. “We know now what we could not know in 1968 — our government never intended to win in Vietnam,” Klan leader Louis Beam wrote in 1983, calling for white vets to “bring [the war] on home.”

Belew, a history professor at the University of Chicago, counters the treatment of white terrorists as “lone wolves” by tracing the contours of an organized white power movement that connected radical white extremists from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and from Waco, Texas, to Oklahoma City. From 1978, when Pierce published his novel, to 1995, when McVeigh bombed the Murrah building, white supremacists banded together like never before, forming alliances through early computer networks, intermarriage, survivalist and paramilitary groups, and literature. But they also hid these connections by adopting the cell structure of Pierce’s fictional resistance movement.

Belew does the hard work of restoring those connections, revealing how white supremacists built a coalition of rural survivalists, urban skinheads, and anti-Semitic Christian Identity believers. The unified white power movement coalesced around stories not of triumph but of defeat. Klansmen and neo-Nazis set aside their differences — some Klan leaders held strong anti-Nazi feelings stemming from their service in World War II — to defend a white race that they believed to be under siege by black radicals, Jews, feminists, global elites, and a federal government that had left good white men for dead in Vietnam.

The late-20th-century white power movement may have been extreme, but it fed off some of the same revanchist discourse circulating in the halls of Congress and on Hollywood sets. That hasn’t changed. In February 2016, then-Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump hesitated to disavow David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, when Duke endorsed him for president. Then he appeared to bless Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and militia groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, as including “some very fine people.” The history of the white power movement suggests that the election of Donald Trump was not a perfect storm but a gale in the American weather.

The Ku Klux Klan has periodically surged and waned since its founding in 1865, and it prospers in the aftermath of war. Louis Beam returned to his home state of Texas in 1968 with a Distinguished Flying Cross for heroism in aerial combat. A violent racist and fervent anticommunist, Beam joined the Texas chapter of the United Klans of America and pinned his combat medals to his white robes, seeing his Klan activities as a continuation of his military service. “The mere fact that I had returned from Vietnam didn’t mean the war was over. It was going on right here in the States,” he told an undercover reporter. “Over here, if you killed the enemy, you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they give you a medal. I couldn’t see the difference.” As white veterans returned from Southeast Asia and joined the Klan and other hate groups, they militarized an emerging white power movement.

Beam purchased 50 acres of swampland outside Houston where he established Camp Puller, a paramilitary training camp dedicated to turning Klansmen into soldiers. His trainees traded their robes for camouflage fatigues, armed themselves with AR-15s, and manufactured landmines. From Camp Puller, Beam founded the Texas Emergency Reserve, the “special forces” of the Ku Klux Klan, to enforce the rule of law where he believed the government had fallen down on the job. He launched a Klan Border Watch to intimidate undocumented immigrants along the US-Mexico border and led a harassment campaign against Vietnamese refugee fishermen who had resettled along the Texas coast, where local white fishermen accused refugees of getting rich off welfare checks and harboring Viet Cong. (In fact, less than nine percent of Houston-area refugees received any kind of welfare, and most had allied with the United States in the war, some having served alongside the Americans.) The New York Times described the harassment campaign as “one of the last pitched battles of the Vietnam War.” The Texas district attorney eventually shut down Camp Puller, but the movement had spread. Other white supremacist groups built training camps across the South and throughout the western states in the late 1970s. The Invisible Empire Knights, a Klan affiliate, even founded a Camp Mai Lai — named for the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers killed some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians — outside Cullman, Alabama.

The Texas Emergency Reserve and other paramilitary groups claimed to be serving the state by enforcing immigration laws and weeding out alleged communists. That changed in 1983, when the white power movement declared war on the government itself. After a judge barred him from running military camps in Texas, Beam relocated to Northern Idaho, where he joined Aryan Nations, an arm of the Christian Identity movement. The 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress, held at the groups compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, marked a turning point for the white power movement as white supremacists from different ideological camps gathered to affirm their shared commitment to undermining the federal government. It marked what Belew calls “a tectonic shift for the movement,” a turn to all-out race war on the liberal state.

That year, Beam, then serving as Aryan Nations “ambassador,” published his influential Essays of a Klansman in which he began advocating a “leaderless resistance” that looked an awful lot like the cell-based terrorism of the fictional Earl Turner. Affirming the Aryan Nations declaration of war, he wrote, “The old ways have failed miserably […] Out with the conservatives and in with the radicals! Out with plans for compromise and in with plans for the sword!” The white power movement had consolidated against the legal structure it had once claimed to defend.

From the 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress to the Oklahoma City bombing, the white power movement grew more violent. In 1984, the Order — a white supremacist group named after the resistance movement in The Turner Diaries — murdered liberal talk radio host Alan Berg at his home in Denver and robbed an armored car near Ukiah, California, netting more than three million dollars in stolen cash. The Order gave some of their take to Beam, who used the money to build a computer network, Liberty Net, that connected white supremacist groups across the country through password-protected message boards. Aryan Nations, the Order, the Aryan Brotherhood, and local Klan chapters shared information and coordinated their efforts through Liberty Net, forming the first white supremacist social network of the internet era. In 1987, the federal government, using Liberty Net data as evidence, brought sedition charges against Beam and 13 other men. Beam defended himself by citing his mistreatment as a Vietnam veteran. An all-white jury acquitted him and his co-defendants of all charges.

White power leaders turned the trial into a rallying cry. A few years later, Beam could declare at a summit in Colorado, “For the first time in the 22 years that I have been in the movement, we are all marching to the beat of the same drum!” The war on the state had, he suggested, united the white power movement: “We are all viewed by the government as the same: enemies of the state. When they come for you, the federals will not ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity Covenant believer, Klansman, Nazi, homeschooler, Freeman, New Testament believer, [or] fundamentalist.” These groups didn’t need to agree on everything. They believed in white supremacy and state-sanctioned white oppression. They were at war for the survival of their race.

The white power movement declined in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh was executed in 2001. Pierce died in 2002. Beam, now 71 and living in central Texas, has kept a low profile since the 1990s. But the last few years have made it hard to ignore that the movement is still with us. After 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black churchgoers in Charlestown, South Carolina, in 2015, his website and Facebook page showed a young man who waved Confederate flags; celebrated the white governance of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa, neither of which existed in his lifetime; flaunted the number 88, a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”; and lifted ideas from the website of the white separatist Council of Conservative Citizens. This may seem incoherent, and it is. But it isn’t without precedent. The white power movement created a culture in which, as Belew writes, “a suburban California skinhead might bear Klan tattoos, read Nazi tracts, and attend meetings of a local Klan chapter, a National Socialist political party, the militant White Aryan Resistance — or all three.”

What motivated Roof’s act of terror? The same thing that drove Pierce, Beam, and McVeigh: a belief in white supremacy mixed with a belief in white oppression, a call for white power augmented by a fear of white disempowerment. Roof did not act alone. He carried a powerful and poisonous story into that church that connects him to the white men who declared war on the government in Hayden Lake, robbed an armored car outside Ukiah, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City, and now carry tiki torches down the streets of Charlottesville.

Throughout the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump excoriated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama for refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” But none of these three was willing to call the Charlestown massacre what it was: an act of radical white extremism. Adding those three words to our political vocabulary would represent a small but important first step toward acknowledging that white supremacist violence emerges not from the disordered mind of a lone wolf but from a perceptible and ugly American movement.

¤

Joseph Darda is an assistant professor of English and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University.
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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby American Dream » Sat May 12, 2018 10:05 am

These themes are worth some serious consideration:


Janet Biehl

The Fallacy of “Neither Left nor Right”: Militia Fever

At a time when the political sands have shifted massively to the right nearly everywhere, when the right is riding high while the left languishes in debris, it is increasingly common to hear the cry “Neither left nor right!” Few right-wingers issue this cry — but then, why should they? Their political label is the toast of several continents today. The fact is that the strongest political winds are blowing many leftists, like the rest of the society, toward conservatism and a glorification of the market.

Although the cry has become more common since the collapse of the Soviet system, it did not originate in this era. Realo Greens were known to define their party as “neither left nor right” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much earlier in this century, in the interwar years, European fascists who intended to reject both capitalism and communism used a related concept to find their supposed “third way.” During the Spanish Civil War, the Falangists thought of themselves as “neither of the left nor right nor centre,” according to one farmer:

We were a movement with our own spirit, out not to defend the rich but also not to put the poor above the rich. In many points we agreed with the socialists. But they were materialist revolutionaries and we were spiritual ones. What differentiated us most was that we lacked the hatred of capitalism which they exhibited. The marxists declared war on anyone with wealth; our idea was that the rich must give up a part in order to allow others to live better.[1]


In recent months the insurgent militia movement has occasioned still more rejections of the left-right dichotomy. In the leftist Nation, Alexander *censored*burn describes a “Patriot” rally in Michigan as “amiable.”[2] The Boston Globe advises its readers that the “Freemen” movement of Montana, with its ties to the militias and to apocalyptic religiosity, is “so far off the generally accepted political scale that terms like ‘left’ and ‘right’ do not apply” (3/30/96). Jason McQuinn, formerly editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and currently editor of Alternative Press Review, denounces left and right as two sides of the same problem:

Left and right have both proved their bankruptcy throughout this century. And neither can lay legitimate claim to our loyalties. It’s way past time that both traditions received the scathing critiques they deserve, so that we can take what is best from them and discard what is worthless. It may be true that the left has often added far more of value to the defense of community and international solidarity than the right has ever been able to conceive. But both left and right have ultimately colluded in their support for the two “opposing” sides of capitalist development.[3]


Meanwhile libertarian author and publisher Adam Parfrey objects to leftists who would uphold distinctions between left and right, who “stump for the division of anti-establishment rightists and leftists,” since they are ultimately serving the interests of the ruling system.[4] In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, he argues, the militias have lamentably “become a scapegoat, a justification for intelligence agencies’ headlong rush into technocratic dystopia, where every financial transaction is instantly monitored by computers operated by the Fortune 500 and its omnipotent police force.” Those who criticize the militia movement, like the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Political Research Associates, ultimately serve the conspiracy itself. Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates demands “ideological purification” that “creates divisions between individuals,” while Holly Sklar, in her book on the Trilateral Commission, advances a “crypto-Socialist theology.” So runs Parfrey’s argument.

That Parfrey’s neither-left-nor-right approach has found a congenial home in the pages of McQuinn’s Alternative Press Review reflects the drift of a major American anarchist editor away from the movement’s leftist roots. Meanwhile, some militia members themselves are happy to meet Parfrey and Quinn halfway in their rightward lurch. Bob Fletcher, chief propagandist for the Militia of Montana, is reassuring: “We don’t want to hear about left and right, conservative and liberal, all these bullshit labels. Let’s get back to the idea of good guys and bad guys, righteous governments — the honest, fair, proper, American government that all of us have been fooled into believing was being maintained.”[5]

To some extent, Americans of all political stripes have received a libertarian education. The United States was born in a revolution, and some of its most revered Founding Fathers extolled the right to make one. A too-obvious betrayal of the main pillar of the American promise — the ideal of democracy — could potentially inspire rebellion, even at a time when capitalism is deeply embedded in American social life. Antidemocratic forces that serve the interests of a privileged few rather than the people as a whole find that they must either mask their activities entirely or else stupefy the population by using the mass media. Still, suspicion of government persists, even intensifies today, as the institutions of the American republic are ever more palpably hocked to capitalist masters. Distrust of capitalism has not kept pace with distrust of government, even though corporate rapacity has at times been so extreme as to beget movements like the Populists of the 1890s that cast capitalism’s “creative destructiveness” as a betrayal of the American promise.

It was a year ago this month that the militia movement came to national attention, denouncing “the tyranny of a run-away, out of control government.”[6] In the wake of bungled government attacks on a militant separatist at Ruby Ridge (where an FBI sniper killed two people) and on an apocalyptic preacher and his followers at Waco (in which more than seventy people died), sentiment ran high that the government was out to divest ordinary Americans of their rights as citizens. In particular, the right to bear arms seemed under threat by the passage of the Brady bill, which authorized the beginnings of gun control. These smoldering resentments were intensified by real grievances among working-class people in the American heartland, where global and domestic restructuring was bringing downsizing, declining real wages, and permanent layoffs. Resentments burst into flames, and militia groups were established in at least forty states.

This movement swore to uphold American sovereignty against an array of international forces that seemed intent on diminishing it: the “new world order.” The Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, international trade treaties like NAFTA and GATT, and the United Nations had all at one time or another been castigated by the left; now the militias saw these institutions as components of a “new world order” subverting American sovereignty. They perceived, and still do perceive, a global conspiracy in which unseen but powerful hands are manipulating the American government and economy.

Conspiratorialism has a long history, as Michael Kelly recently wrote in The New Yorker, one that dates back to the late eighteenth century, when some began to believe that conspirators have been at it for more than two thousand years, perpetuating their plots through a succession of secret and semisecret societies arcing across time and cultures from the early-Christian-era Gnostics and the Jewish Cabalists, and on to the Knights Templars of the twelfth century, the Rosicrucians of the fifteenth, the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth, and from there, through the Freemasons, to the schemers of the twentieth — the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission. Along the way, step by step toward one-worldism, the plotters have caused everything from the French and Russian Revolutions to the creation of the Federal Reserve, the United Nations, and the Gulf War.[7]

In the nascent militia ideology, black helicopters, the Hong Kong police, microchips inserted under the skin, and programs to change the weather all become parts of the world-conspiratorial plot. An army representing the “new world order,” composed of United Nations troops and inner-city gangs, was soon going to occupy America and reduce its citizens to slaves. The Militia of Montana, one of the earliest and most influential of the militia groups, warns that “the Conspirators to form a socialist one world government under the United Nations are ... at work treasonously subverting the Constitution in order to enslave the Citizens of the State of Montana, The United States of America, and the world in a socialist union.”[8]

The remnant left objects with equal ardor to the ongoing globalization and centralization of social, political, and economic forces, but its warrant is not that these forces are threatening American sovereignty; it makes no appeal to patriotism. Nor would the old leftist analysis perceive a sinister conspiracy manipulating the course of events. Rather, it rightfully argued, a specific social force is siphoning off people’s control over their lives and pulverizing their communities, commodifying social life and despoiling the biosphere, enervating convivial relationships and reducing people to wage slaves when they are at work and to mindless consumers the rest of the time. That system is capitalism.

To be sure, elite planning bodies do exist, according to Holly Sklar, author of Trilateralism, but they are not conspiracies:

Going back to the early 20th century, there are organizations that have placed fundamental role — not conspiracies but elite planning bodies, there’s a fundamental difference — in planning not just U.S. policy but global policy. I want to distinguish how I see the Trilateral Commission from a conspiracy theory. It’s not a conspiracy that pulls puppet strings and controls everything and everybody. It is the single most important international planning and consensus building organization among people from Western Europe, Japan, the U.S. and Canada who represent the interests of global corporations and banks — corporations like Exxon, General Motors, Sony, Toyota, Siemens, etc... Too many think there’s either a grand conspiracy that controls everything all the time, or there are no important institutions whose motives and goals we need to understand. Too many people look at the Trilateral Commission that way. Either it’s a conspiracy or it’s a joke. That’s completely absurd.[9]


Some leftists have apparently suspended this rational understanding of social and economic forces to find a certain sympathy with the militias. The siren song of conspiratorialism, with its facile explanations and its occasional relish for dystopia, makes it all too easy to forget the overwhelmingly structural social forces that have produced misery in the world today. “This is the terrain,” as Philip Smith puts it, “where the Liberty Lobby meets the left, where the Trilateral Commission runs the world, and one-time Vietnam War protesters join militias to fend off the New World Order.” Distinctions between left and right can fall by the wayside, on the “climb toward the speculative heights where Communism and Capitalism are merely facets of the one great conspiracy.”[10] Avowed anarchist McQuinn maintains that while we must always remember our social analysis, we should not shut our minds to conspiracies: he would investigate and expose “the workings of the real world, whether this leads down the road to conspiratorial or structural explanations, or both.” Meanwhile Parfrey, a true conspiratorialist, defends the militias as kindred albeit misinformed spirits, since “the militia man with his Manichean conspiracies and apocalyptic dreams” presents a challenge to the “interlocking network” of government, private corporations, foundations, universities, and media.


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Re: The Road to Elohim

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 22, 2018 2:16 pm

Terrorism cell linked to crimes in Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana

June 22, 2018 Bill Morlin

New federal charges shed light on a cell of suspected domestic terrorists known as the “White Rabbits” who allegedly were involved in assorted crimes, including firearms violations and fire-bombings of an Islamic Center and a women’s health clinic.

Additionally, the suspects have been linked by federal investigators to robbing Walmart stores and drug dealers to fund their campaign of domestic terrorism, bombing Canadian National railroad tracks and extortion of the railway company.

Michael Hari, 47, Michael McWhorter, 29 and Joe Morris, 22, all of Clarence, Illinois, were named in a superseding indictment returned Thursday in Minnesota, charging them with federal civil rights and hate crime violations related to an explosion at the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center (DAF) in Bloomington, Minnesota, on August 5, 2017.

The three men, along with Ellis Mack, 18, also of Clarence, Illinois, were arrested on March 13 and currently are in custody in Urbana, Illinois, on federal charges of illegally possessing a machine gun and conspiracy to interfere with commerce by threats and violence. Hari is also charged with possession of a firearm by a felon.

The federal conspiracy charge filed in the Central District of Illinois is related to an alleged attempt to damage by fire and explosive the Women’s Health Practice, in Champaign, Illinois, on November. 7, 2017, court documents say.

The Illinois indictment alleges that the four conspired from August 2017 to March 10, 2018, to affect commerce by robbery and extortion by actual or threatened “force, violence and fear.”

Last August, the indictment says the conspirators formed a “militia group” that became known as the “White Rabbits.” Its members obtained explosive materials, provided weapons and uniforms to members and assigned ranks to its members. Items, including weapons, belonging to the militia group were kept in a building located in Clarence, Illinois.

“On multiple occasions, the conspirators met in Clarence and agreed to perform what they referred to as ‘jobs’ or criminal acts to promote the conspiracy and to fund the group,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.

The co-conspirators traveled together from Clarence to the locations of their jobs and sometimes used rented vehicles to avoid detection by law enforcement, the statement said.

The indictment cites several acts allegedly committed to further the conspiracy, including:

• Robbing or attempting to rob Walmart stores, including but not limited to stores in Watseka, Illinois, on December 4, 2017, and Mt. Vernon, Illinois., on December 17, 2017;

• Robbing or attempting to rob individuals suspected of being involved in drug trafficking, including but not limited to individuals in Ambia, Indiana., on December 16, 2017.

• Damaging or attempting to damage Canadian National Railway railroad tracks located near Effingham, Illinois, by an explosive device on or about January 7, 2018, and then attempting to extort money from the railroad by threatening additional attempts to damage the tracks if the railroad did not pay a ransom.

• Planting materials that could be used to make explosives devices on the property of a person in Clarence, Illinois, on or about February 8, 2018, to deflect law enforcement suspicion from the conspirators to the property owner.

The indictment alleges Hari, having a previous felony conviction in Illinois, possessed four AR-style platform rifles with no serial numbers and four 12-gauge shotguns.

In the latest federal indictment returned in Minnesota, it is alleged that Hari constructed a pipe bomb and rented a pickup truck in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Hari, McWhorter and Morris then drove from Illinois to Bloomington, Minnesota, in the pickup truck, stopping along the way to purchase diesel fuel and gasoline. The defendants mixed these ingredients together in a plastic container.

The indictment alleges that, in the early morning of August 5, 2017, Morris broke a window at DAF and threw the plastic container containing the diesel fuel and gasoline mixture into the building. It is alleged that McWhorter then lit the fuse and threw the pipe bomb in the broken window at the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington.

When the pipe bomb exploded, it ignited the mixture in the plastic container, causing extensive damage to the imam’s office. McWhorter and Morris returned to the pickup truck, where Hari was waiting, and sped off, driving back to Illinois, the indictment alleges.

The defendants targeted the Islamic center “with intent to damage the mosque because of its religious character and with intent to obstruct Muslims from worshipping there,” the Justice Department said in a statement. The facility serves as a religious center and as a school for children.

In related court documents, one of the suspects said the “White Rabbits” didn’t intend to kill anyone, but wanted to “scare [Muslims] out of the country and to show them, ‘Hey, you’re not welcome here…’”

Erica H. MacDonald, the U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said in a statement that the defendants “plotted and executed a plan designed specifically to spread fear and threaten a fundamental right afforded to all — the freedom of religion.”

“In spite of the destructive and violent act alleged in the indictment, our communities have found strength in taking a unified stand against the attack,” MacDonald said. “My office and our law enforcement partners are committed to upholding the laws that protect the civil rights of all Americans.”


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