Apparently the US media doesn’t really think it’s a big deal for a small army of heavily armed fanatics to take over government property in hopes of spurring some sort of armed revolution — if the armed fanatics in question are white guys.
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And, as you may already be aware, alt-right trolls are actively spreading misinformation about this standoff, so if you run across any of that please point it out here as well.
No trolls, MRAs, etc.
Yes, that’s true – France does have a bit of a tradition of turning a blind eye to violent militancy. But other countries have had their own homegrown terrorists – think Baader-Meinhof in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy, and I’m honestly hard pushed to see much difference between them and what’s happening in Oregon.
Yacob,
There have been more acts of terrorism on US soil by right wing “patriot ” types than Islamic extremists in the past decade. Just because you don’t notice, thanks to the racially biased coverage of the media, doesn’t mean right wing militia terrorism doesn’t exist and isn’t dangerous.
And I don’t think any of the anarchists I’ve ever known would support this, so don’t project this on to them.
@ wetherby
There’s a interesting bit of national stereotyping in how the German authorities caught the bulk of the RAF (Baader-Meinhof) group. The group followed the international terrorist handbook tactic of trying to live off the grid, this included things like always paying bills in cash.
Germans though seem to enjoy efficiency and compliance, so the authorities just looked for the one house *not* paying bills by direct debit and were able to make a major bust.
@Wetherby:
I think the main difference between Oregon and Europe is that the Sovereign Citizens’ gripes about big government and self-sufficiency have a lot more traction in America’s mainstream conservative politics than any similar European group. Just look at how Fox News showered Cliven Bundy with praise for his temper tantrum over land taxes.
D’you think this anti-tax thing is because of a fundamentally poor grasp of Anglo-American history?
Reading comprehension is not traditionally a strong skill for these libertarian types, be it school textbook or the constitution they claim to be defending.
It seems like the sort of thing you’d get when a child has been taught that the brave patriotic Americans fought against the tyrannical British over taxes… but hasn’t fully understood that it was the US taxes going overseas to the British government, and not the general concept of taxes that was the source of the dispute.
Here’s another history lesson – It’s become a Neo-Reactionary meme that X current progressive social movement destroyed Rome, but it actually had more to do with crumbling infrastructure caused by… failure of the wealthy to pay their damn taxes.
Education is so important.
@occasional reader
Malheur is indeed the name of the park and the lake it’s on. A lot of place names in that area are in French because some of the early settlers were French. http://www.fws.gov/refuge/Malheur/about.html
It sounds like there’s a building you can visit in the park, which is pretty typical of US National parks. They usually have gift shops, often convenience stores, sometimes guided tours, etc.
@occasional reader
They’ve taken over the headquarters for the park management employees.
The local police are presently avoiding the area, which is probably for the best since reporters say Y’allQaeda has AR-15s and probably outgun the local police. Assuming this isn’t one of the counties that picked up a spare APC from the military, which is wildly unnecessary for police work unless basically exactly this happens.
I have this vague hope that this ends in a way that makes it clear to everyone that no, owning guns does not constitute the ability to overthrow the federal government and we finally get some progress on gun control. Not very likely, though.
@Wetherby
There are huge differences between the militia movement in the US and left-wing terrorism in Europe, as there are important differences between the latter and right-wing terrorism (and their respective treatment by law enforcement).
The RAF started with bankrobberies and sabotage, laying bombs in warehouses, US Army barracks and the building of the publisher of the Bild tabloid, and escalated to targeted kidnappings and killings of high-profile bankers, entrepreneurs and politicians. They claimed they had a moral right to do so because some of the people they targeted had been relatively prominent National Socialists or Wehrmacht Generals who not only had gotten off scott-free, but continued to profit from their connection to old Nazi networks. They expressed themselves in a revolutionary rhetoric which saw the “post-fascist” German state as an oppressor and thought that once an elite of revolutionary fighters started taking up arms against that state, “the masses” would follow. They also saw Thirld World guerrillas and nationalist movements as their heroes, as the ones who had taken up arms first and whose revolutionary momentum needed to be transported into the “centers” of the capitalist world. They did not, however, condemn states in general as tyrannical, but fought for the establishment of a communist state (albeit purportedly less socially and culturally rigid as the Soviet Union). Their Anti-Americanism (stemming from their involvement with anti-imperialism and the Vietnam protest movement) was strong and in the end, morphed (ironically, given their anti-fascist rhetoric) into full-blown antisemitism.
Their saying was that one needed to “cut the Hydra off at the head”, meaning that they weren’t interested in everyday presence of the state bureaucracies (although they didn’t mind killing police, they didn’t target them), but sought high-profile targets amongst the business and political elite, who they wanted to feel unsafe.
That’s very different to me from a right-wing anarchist Christian militia which, in this ideological combination, can only exist in the US, because it thrives on a frontier and Manifest Destiny myth that just isn’t there in Europe.
Also, to the point you made earlier about how these people would, in Europe, be automaticall regarded as terrorists:
There has, at least in Germany, but also in Italy, long been a huge difference in the prosecution of left-wing vs. right-wing terrorists, to the point that secret networks such as P2 or Gladio have actively supported extreme right militias as a partner against the “communist threat”. The investigation into the famous bombing of Bologna main station was long obstructed by P2 members in high positions; and there are still a lot of open questions about why there was never an investigation into the links of the Oktoberfest bomber to right-wing militias which were connected to Gladio at the time.
More recently, the fact that for ten years, three wanted Neonazis could live off widespread support in the scene and conduct a murder spree among people of Turkish and Greek descent, incuding the murder of a policewoman without being found by police or the Secret Service. Again, their MO was to target normal people to spread fear among migrants in Germany, which is very different from left.wing terrorism trying to kill high-ranking representatives of state and business.
@Alan
I’ve never heard that before; it’s hilarious, but can you give me a source for that?
President Obama has to be secretly behind this, just like every other evil plot against America. Has anyone checked to make sure Bill Ayers hasn’t joined the militia group? He has a history of leading this kind of protest operation.
@ Terrabeau:
There is actually a movement similar to the Sovereign Citizens in Germany, but it has a distinctly German flavour. They call themselves “Reichsbürger” (Citizens of the Reich). There are different groups, but all claim that Germany does not have a constitution and is an illegal entity according to international law. Most claim that the Weimar constitution is still active, so the Reich still exists, and Germany is still an occupied country. Mostly their “resistance” contains of not paying their parking tickets or buying fake identity documents off the internet, but several groups have tried to establish their own state in some rural backwater property. They seem mostly harmless, but can become aggressive, are loosely connected to more violent right-wing groups and are under surveillance by the Verfassungsschutz.
@ bernardo
It’s something I picked up at a counter-terrorism seminar.
Another great example of (hash)terroristfails is the first WTC bombing. One of the terrorists turned up at the Ryder rental office and tried to get his deposit back on the van they used. As it happened the FBI were in the back office going through the paperwork. One of the FBI chaps went out front, pretended he was the manager and said that he needed the names and addresses of everyone who’d been in the van before he could return the deposit. Guess what?
“the Verfassungsschutz.”
What I like with German is that the name of everything in german look like the name of the big bad in a cheesy action-adventure movie.
Based on my five year of studie in german, I think it’s the name of a governemental spying agency that use its old necromantic lore to kill people then reanimate as mindless zombie used as spy.
After they bust the circle they target, they take the zombie to the nearest church and pray for their resurrections because come on, it would be impolite to let them stay in that state.
Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, the Paris Commune, Buenaventura Durretti, and the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War didn’t fight for the landowners like these fools. They fought for the downtrodden. Bakunin especially saw the response of Metternich to the French Revolution and tried to keep the dream going.
Look to the Diggers in England after the English Civil War for a better anarchist example. The Diggers seized common property like these assholes, but they started growing crops and eventually moved on after facing eviction. Their main opponents were the Bundys of the time, rich landowners who resorted to violence.
Yakob, find better anarchists to be friends with than ‘anarcho’-capitalists. There’s much better stuff there than white guys complaining about taxes and zoning laws.
AltoFronte, that’s true, but keep in mind the Tea Act didn’t raise taxes leading to the Tea Party, it actually cut them, but only for the East India Company, which had a surplus at the time and was on shaky footing. The Partiers anger was because they were illegally smuggling tea and other goods, and a duty free source threatened their income. Which does fit in here actually. Rich white guys who built their fortunes on questionably legal practices getting pissy when they’re challenged.
@ altofronto and bakunin
There’s some suggestion that Twinings may have been involved with the Boston Tea Party; they being the main suppliers of off the books tea. Who knows; although it may not be a coincidence that the party didn’t throw any Twinings tea overboard?
@Ohlmann:
That’s a pretty accurate description of how the Verfassungsschutz works. 😉
Any other country on earth would’ve taken the heads off of these terrorists by now.
re:numbers
I’ve noticed a huge tendency to inflate the number of people who show up to these types of things. My spouse’s workplace was the focus of a targeted campaign by a left-wing group. At one point they showed video, claiming that it showed as many as 300 people at the protest. They got this number by measuring the length of the sidewalk where the protest was occurring and dividing by how much space they thought each person took up. If you actually paused the video and counted it was closer to 30 or 40. I honestly don’t think this was an intentional deception – people were just really excited that the Revolution was finally starting.*
I’m assuming the 150 thing is probably the same – people who see a handful of people they don’t know and thus vastly overestimate how many showed up.
*Spoiler alert: the Revolution was not, in fact, happening.
> Kupo and Guy
Thank you very much for the informations.
Well, if you allow me, it is strange for a bit superstitious country like America, with no room 13, to allow such an “bad omen” name for a national place.
Anyway, the article speaks of the invaders not as terrorists but as some demonstrators who were initially coming to a close place for their demonstration. The article says they are protesting against something about “federal lands”, by opposition to “private lands”, or something like that. I do not know what it means and involves, so i can not judge.
It’s not just police that are at risk from this bunch–there’s a history of violence by anti-government types against park employees.
The arsonists have a history with Malheur Wildlife Refuge.
I think a big part of it is a sort of particular, longstanding American mistrust of the federal government in general, rather than any policy in particular; or even a mistrust of state governments, for that matter. Apparently Cliven Bundy – celebrated patriarch of the family so prominently involved in this takeover – draws a big chunk of his personal politics from Posse Comitatus: a 1960s-70s far-right, white-supremacist movement which insisted that governmental authority ends with the local sheriff. This movement can trace a direct lineage to some right-wing responses to the abolition of slavery: the idea, essentially, being that if the federal government was trying to outlaw slavery, well, then perhaps the federal government shouldn’t be invested with any sort of power whatsoever.
(Rachel Maddow has the goods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2VK4k-bBag )
So with that in mind, I’d say that as with so much right-wing extremism, it’s not about resisting/changing any particular law, and has more to do with a heady brew of racism, guns, misplaced religious fervor and toxic identity politics.
@occasional reader
This is a small subgroup of a larger protest in the nearby town. Overall story goes like this:
The US Federal Government directly owns significant chunks of land, and leases some of it out to private citizens for use as grazing land. Two ranchers had been grazing cattle on federal land, and on two seperate occasions intentionally started fires on it. The first time was allegedly to cover up evidence of illegal deer hunting. The second was to create a backfire to prevent nearby wildfires from destroying their winter grazing. While backfires are a legitimate firefighting technique*, they must be handled with care or risk getting out of control. This one was unauthorized and endangered firefighters fighting ongoing wildfires, during a period when Oregon had imposed a burn ban for precisely that reason. They were arrested and convicted under an anti-terrorism law with a minimum five-year sentence. The judge in the original case sentenced them to less than that. Now another judge has ruled that they need to serve out the minimum five years, which is what the protests are about.
This is related to the Clive Bundy incident. Bundy was a rancher in Nevada who had been grazing his cattle on federal land. The Bureau of Land Management updated the rules to protect an environmentally sensitive area. Bundy objected to the new rules and stopped paying the land use fee but kept grazing his cattle there. This spent years in the court system, and somewhat recently the Bureau of Land Management came back with a court order saying that if he didn’t remove his cattle they would remove them for him. Bundy refused and rallied a disturbingly large number of armed supporters. The government backed off and did not come back with tanks. Now Bundy’s sons are leading the group that has seized this building.
*Several aspects here. First, by burning an area before the main wildfire reaches it, it’s possible to destroy the fuel the wildfire would consume. The smaller fire is easier to contain and extinguish. Large trees may also survive a smaller fire but ignite in the path of a sufficiently large one if there’s enough flammable material around, though that’s usually dealt with by scheduled burns during off periods; ecologies in wildfire areas are somewhat dependent on regular fires and aggressive fire suppression without controlled burns can cause issues. Fires also spread based on the wind, and wildfires make their own wind. A backfire can disrupt air currents to weaken or divert the wildfire. It’s a somewhat risky technique because fires can move and grow unpredictably. Incidentally, this is the primary legitimate use of the Dragon’s Breath shotgun round, which fires a spray of burning magnesium.
Ding!Ding!Ding!
@Yacob – If they haven’t stated anything against policy per se (I’ve got to admit that I haven’t taken the time to read their statements/manifestos/whatevs), it’s only because (as I understand it) they don’t think that the Federal government can take any legitimate domestic action – that is, they’d define all domestic federal policy as illegitmate.
Soo.
Yeah.
While they’re not being currently violent, their actions have leapfrogged over being peaceful protest and towards being terrorism in that they’re heavily armed and have expressed a willingness (eagerness?) to partake in violence in order to force policy change.
I calls them as I sees them: terrorist thugs. Calling them militias is probably giving them an ego boost. Fuck that! They are terrorists! These assholes are obviously looking for a gun fight if they brought along weapons, but being white, they are looked at as being “peaceful protesters.”
Looks like a few brought their kids along, as well. What a new low these people sunk down to. Kind of feels like they’re being used as de facto hostages. Slime! All of them!
Hey David,
I don’t have enough time for links but Vox Day and Hal Turner (check superstation95 for details) support the takeover. Andrew Anglin’s support is tepid. He says this just isn’t something he cares much about but will always back the people in disputes with the federal gov’t. Nothing at Alternative Right yet.
Most left-wing terrorism in the United States has involved destruction of property since the 1970’s and it’s mostly been environmental and animal rights activists. But destruction of property counts as “violence” in FBI crime statistics.
Generally speaking, left-wing groups in the US haven’t intentionally hurt people since the 1970’s. The Weather Underground was pretty much dead after the Vietnam War ended and a few New Communist Movement groups had paramilitary wings but never decided it was time to engage in “armed struggle” against the government. Much of the Radical Left eventually joined the left of the Democratic Party.
I think the far right in the US has been ideologically similar to more radical fascist groups like the Nazis since at least the nineteenth century. The point of the lebensraum policy was to expand Germany’s territory into Eastern Europe and kill, deport, or assimilate (or “Germanize”) the population. So the Nazis were closer to supporting a quasi-anarchist society based on land that would be similar to the United States. Anti-Semitism fit in because people perceived Jews as leftists and internationalists.