A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate.

• Author: Kopel, David B.

Adam Parfrey, author of an October 1994 story about the militia movement in The Village Voice, became an instant militia "expert" after the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. Major news organizations contacted him, seeking a quote linking the militias to the bombing. When he suggested there was no connection, reporters quickly lost interest. The mainstream media's combination of certitude and ignorance was summed up by a statement from a Washington Post researcher who talked to Parfrey: "The militias - whoever the fuck they are - are a ticking time bomb composed of paranoid lunatics."

Many Americans, including many journalists who have written about militias, have never met an actual militia member, just as most militia members have never met an actual international banker. In a condition of ignorance, it is possible for militia members to believe dark tales of an international banking conspiracy that would be laughable to a person who knew international bankers from meeting them at Manhattan cocktail parties. Conversely, well-educated Americans who know all about international banking, but nothing about living on a farm in Idaho, may fall for stupendous exaggerations about evil militia conspiracies. Much of what Americans "know" about militias is based on uncritical media repetition of statements from activists who demonstrate that the militia movement does not have a monopoly on paranoia and misinformation.

This problem is illustrated by a pair of books published shortly before the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing: Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and A Force upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, by Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee. "The very future of the United States is at risk, because of treason in our midst," warns a militiaman quoted by Dees. The quote captures the apocalyptic exaggeration of some militia leaders, but Dees himself is hardly less alarmist. He opens his book with a paraphrase of the Gettysburg Address, observing that "we are engaged in a great civil war" and wondering "whether [our] nation...can long endure." Dees continues: "Unless checked," the militia movement "could lead to widespread devastation or ruin."

The mastermind of the militia movement, according to Dees, is Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam, Professor Moriarty to Dees's Sherlock Holmes. After the federal assault on Idaho separatist Randy Weaver and his family in 1992, Dees claims, Beam and a few other racists used the fear created by the incident to build the militia movement. (Beam and Dees are not the central characters of Stern's book, but Stern does write that "[t]he most significant precursor of the militias was the Ku Klux Klan.") Although even Dees's statistics show that most militias are not run...