Militia nation.

• Author: Berlet, Chip
• Position: Oklahoma City federal building bombing - Includes related article on anti-hate activists - Cover Story

We have been studying the armed militias with a group of more than 100 analysts and reporters for many months. The issue for us was never if there was going to be violence, but how much violence would be tolerated by society before there was a decision to do something about it. The violence has been against health clinics and reproductive-rights activists, environmental activists, people of, color, gays and lesbians, and Jews. Threats against government officials have become commonplace, especially in the Pacific Northwest.

Many of us thought that April 19 would bring a physical confrontation of some sort, given that Waco is the central icon of this movement. No one imagined a horror of the magnitude of what happened in Oklahoma City.

The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building on April 19 and the reported involvement of perpetrators linked to armed rightwing militias finally made the danger of these groups evident to all. But the warning signs were there all along.

The growth of armed militias has been rapid, with new units appearing on a weekly basis. An educated guess about the number of militia members ranges from 10,000 to 40,000. There is at least one militia unit up and running in forty states, with militia organizing most likely happening in all fifty states.

Anyone with an ear to the ground could have heard the rumblings.

The Oklahoma bombing was not by any means the first act of public violence with connections to the armed militias and the Patriot movement they grow out of John Salvi, who is accused of shooting reproductive-rights workers in Brookline, Massachusetts, last year, told his former employer that he was interested in the armed militias. And Francisco Duran, who was convicted of spraying the White House with bullets, was linked to the Patriot movement and armed militias.

Two years ago, even before the militias had settled on a name, alternative journalists began writing about them. Small research groups issued report after report, but no one seemed to be listening. The best early research came from such groups as the Coalition for Human Dignity, People Against Racist Terror, Western States Center, Institute for First Amendment Studies, Alternet, the Montana Human Rights Network, Political Research Associates, the Center for Democratic Renewal, and many others.

The first national groups that tried to get reporters to pay attention to the threat included Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Working Group. The first national conference on the threat posed by the militias was held near Seattle in January 1995 and was organized by the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote to Janet Reno on October 25, 1994, alerting her to the danger of the militias. The Anti-Defamation League of B'Nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee published reports on the militias.

So how were the warnings of scores of groups and hundreds of people so systematically ignored by government officials? Activists and researchers had been pleading with Congress to hold hearings on the ongoing rightwing violence for years. It took a stack of bodies to force the hearing onto the calendar, and now we see that Congressional attention is focused on terrorism rather than the underlying causes that fuel the rightwing militia movement.

If there had been a movement set on violent confrontation with the U.S. government and consisting of 10,000 to 40,000 armed militia members who were African-American, you can bet they would have been investigated months ago, with many members arrested. And you can bet that Congress and the media would have played up the danger.

The armed militias are the militant wing of the Patriot movement, which has perhaps five million followers in this country. This diverse rightwing populist movement is composed of independent groups in many states, unified around the idea that the government is increasingly tyrannical. This antigovernment ideology focuses on federal gun control, taxes, regulations, and perceived federal attacks on constitutional liberties.

Many militia members also believe in a variety of conspiracy theories that identify a secret elite that controls the government, the economy, and the culture. Variations on these themes include theories of a secular-humanist conspiracy of liberals to take God out of society, to impose a One World Global Government or a New World Order under the auspices of the United Nations. Though many militia members appear unaware of this, these theories conform to longstanding anti-Semitic ideologies dating to the Nineteenth Century. White-supremacist states'-rights arguments and other theories rooted in racial bigotry also pervade the militia movement.

The Patriot movement is bracketed on the "moderate" side by the John Birch Society and some of Pat Robertson's followers, and on the more militant side by Liberty Lobby and avowedly white-supremacist and anti-Semitic groups, such as neo-Nazi...