GATHERING STORM: AMERICA’S MILITIA THREAT. By Morris Dees with James Corcoran. HarperCollins. $24. 254 pp.
Last Friday, the nation mourned the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 169 people and exposed the threat of domestic terrorism from far-right militia groups.
Six months before the bombing, Morris Dees wrote a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno warning that heavily armed citizen militias were being infiltrated at the highest levels by white supremacists.
An Alabama attorney, Dees is the founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit legal activism organization that has had remarkable success since 1979 combating the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis by bringing suit against them in court.
“In our view,” Dees wrote the attorney general, “this mixture of armed groups and those who hate is a recipe for disaster.”
His words, of course, proved only too prophetic. Now, in a chilling but evenhanded book, Gathering Storm, Dees brings details of the militia movement – its discontents, its racism and anti-Semitism, its violent methods – to the attention of the public at large.
There are at least 441 militia units in the United States, Dees writes, along with 368 “Patriot” groups that provide indoctrination materials and organizational assistance. Not all of these groups advocate violent revolution, but 137 have “ties to the racist right – to groups like the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan.”
Until the 1990s, hate groups spent almost as much time bickering among themselves as they did working against the system. But they have been galvanized into unprecedented cooperation by the 1991 Ruby Ridge (Idaho) incident, in which the wife and son of a white supremacist were killed by the FBI, and by the botched federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
The most dangerous militias subscribe to Christian Identity beliefs, which teach that Aryans (including Anglo-Saxons) are the true children of Israel. “Identity is the theological thread that binds the diverse – and oftentimes feuding – segments of the racist movement.”They are anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-law enforcement, anti-tax religious fanatics who call the federal government “ZOG,” the Zionist Occupation Government.
They believe the government is so corrupt it cannot be redeemed by open political action, but must be overthrown by force. With God on their side, advanced weaponry in their hands, and rigorous military-style training, they are prepared to kill and die to purify the nation of blacks, Jews, homosexuals and anyone else who opposes them.
Their handbook is The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel by William Pierce, a former college physics professor and leader of the neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance.
Pierce’s book tells the story of a white supremacist revolution against the government, including a bombing with incredible similarities to the Oklahoma City tragedy.
“Although the book cannot be found in bookstores, more than [200,000) copies of The Turner Diaries have been sold to an underground army of believers, some of whom have used it as a guide for robbery, arson, assassination and mass murder,” Dees writes. Timothy McVeigh, one of two alleged conspirators in the Oklahoma bombing, is known to have revered the book, buying in quantity and reselling at a discount at gun shows.
In addition to Pierce, other hate-mongering leaders of the militia movement include former Klansman Louis Beam, a longtime antagonist of Dees’; Christian Identity minister Pete Peters, who organized a 1992 meeting in Estes Park, Colo., that began the process of allying diverse militias; John Trochman, founder of the Militia of Montana, who has helped organize dozens of militia units elsewhere.
Tactics espoused by the militia movement include robbing banks, stores and armored cars to fund the revolution; bombing public buildings; assassinating blacks, Jews, judges and law enforcement officers; raiding armories to obtain weapons; poisoning public water supplies. On two separate occasions, men with suspected ties to the militia movement have been arrested with large quantities of ricin, a poison 6,000 times more potent than cyanide.
Dees is not without sympathy for the impulse that drives people to join militias – unemployment, crime, social change, taxation, government interference. Nor is he insensible of government abuses, detailing mistakes made by the FBI at Ruby Ridge and other federal agents at Waco. He is also aware that any steps taken to deal with the militia threat must be careful not to trample constitutional rights.
In an eloquent final chapter, Dees outlines his program for containing the violent potential of the militias. He notes that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and freedom of speech for everyone – including the militias – but argues that there is no similar right for civilians to engage in military training.
Surprisingly, most states already have laws on the books banning either private militias or paramilitary training. But the laws are poorly enforced. Dees calls for better enforcement, and says a federal law is also needed. The Department of Defense should prohibit military personnel from any involvement in militia activity, he writes, and known militia members should be barred from the ranks of the armed forces and police.
Dees calls for law enforcement to improve its monitoring of militia activities, but only by way of “publicly available sources.”He opposes undercover intelligence gathering in the absence of a crime or conspiracy. “Presently the Militia Task Force at the Southern Poverty Law Center – a group of less than 10 people – knows more about the militia world than the FBI. This situation must change.”
More than anything, Dees argues, Americans must not lose faith in their government. “True patriots,” he writes, “are in voting lines, not militia columns, doing their part to ensure the continuation of our democratic way of life.”
