“Terror Begins at Home”
Philip Jenkins’s article on militia panics and liberal paranoia about right-wing extremism is now on-line. Already Jenkins looks prophetic: two days after we went to press with this essay, news broke that the Missouri State Police think Ron Paul supporters and Constitution and Libertarian Party members are potential terrorists. (Says one Missouri activist, Tim Neal, interviewed by the Associated Press: “I was going down the list and thinking, ‘Check, that’s me,’” he said. “I’m a Ron Paul supporter, check. I talk about the North American union, check. I’ve got the ‘America: Freedom to Fascism’ video loaned out to somebody right now. So that means I’m a domestic terrorist? Because I’ve got a video about the Federal Reserve?”) That may be just the beginning, if Jenkins is right.
Also, don’t miss John Carney on the AIG mess and Michael Brendan Dougherty on Kathleen Sebelius’s ties to the Kansas abortion industry.
What??? This last non-Democratic adminstration exploited fear more than anyone. Signing statements, THE WAR, Gitmo, wiretapping. Is he kidding? It was all fear-based.
One MUST worship at the alter of the Donkey or the Elephant ONLY…
A dubious rewrite of history.. by Philip Jenkins
Philip Jenkins is an author and scholar I really respect. I am dumbfounded, therefore, to read that he considers the plot to seize the White House (aka the Business Plot) to have been a mere contrivance, a bit of “leftist scaremongering”.
The character of this attempt has been well explored in subsequent years, and it was far from being just some wild-eyed work of the imagination.. nor was it a politically motivated attempt by Reds to portray the Far Right in a bad light. Jenkins implies all this was just Stalinist disinformation, and that no serious attempt to unseat Roosevelt was ever entertained.
Per Wikipedia, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. said, “Most people agreed with Mayor LaGuardia of New York in dismissing it as a ‘cocktail putsch’ . . . As for the House committee, headed by John McCormack of Massachusetts, it declared itself “able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler”, except for MacGuire’s direct proposal to him, and it considered this more or less confirmed by MacGuire’s European reports. No doubt, MacGuire did have some wild scheme in mind, though the gap between contemplation and execution was considerable, and it can hardly be supposed that the Republic was in much danger”.
Perhaps so. But had General Butler decided to put a patriotic face on the contemplated putsch (involving many more principals than their cutout man, McGuire) it may well have been a different story.
The prerequisite to carrying out such a plan was a charismatic front man, to beguile the public and enlist them in the good fight against a gang of mistakenly elected lefties. And that, the plotters did not get. Butler dropped the dime on them, bringing this nascent plot to the attention of Congress.
Against this interpretation we have.. MacGuire’s earnest denial. Puh-leeze.
So please, Mr Jenkins.. tell it straight. We very much had a problem in those days with Daddy Warbucks-style homegrown fascists. And although they were not regnant, they should not be so casually swept under the rug.
According to the wikipedia article on said business plot:
The Business Plot (also the Plot Against FDR and the White House Putsch) was a political conspiracy alleged by retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who testified to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a military coup.[1] One of the purported plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their report, the Congressional committee stated that it was able to confirm Butler’s statements other than the proposal from MacGuire. [2] No prosecutions or further investigations followed, and historians[3][4][5][6] and contemporary journalists[7] largely rejected the idea that any such plan was near execution, with the New York Times characterizing it as a “gigantic hoax.”[8]
Well, if the reigning factions in America’s political class wanted to use law enforcement to suppress dissent, they certainly have the tools. And let’s face it, C4L and other peaceful organizations could represent a real challenge to the status quo if they were taken seriously by a large minority of Americans.
Can you imagine a large, well-educated and peaceful movement advocating legal and constitutional efforts to dismantle the excesses of government and government privilege? Everyone who has prospered in the current system is legitimately afraid of that kind of peaceful change, because they are winning in the game that they perpetuate. If I were connected in any meaningful way to real power I would fully expect these threatening (though non-violent) organizations/movements to be discredited as extremist. It’s a sensible defense of one’s position, really.
In the end, I think, obvious abuses of law enforcement power will be few and mostly quiet. Those that hold the reigns are not monsters, as the wing-nuts believe. That being said, we might get a public example or two. One wing-nut with a Ron Paul bumper sticker holed up inside his house with the ATF outside might just do the trick.
Where did Jenkins’ article refer to the Business Plot? It took place (or was alleged to have taken place; I don’t want to get into that debate) in FDR’s first term. The Brown scare began around 1938, and the alleged Christian Front plot that Jenkins discusses was in 1940.
Jenkins refers to McVeigh as a “neo-Nazi”. I’ve never come across any evidence that he was. His article on Wikipedia has him denouncing government agents as “fascists” and approvingly citing the example of the Nuremburg Trials.
Not surprising since the CIA teaches that the founders were terrorists…. don’t forget independents are also on that list as well as homeschollers are also on that list…
Since Wikipedia is now apparently a reputable source, can anybody tell me who killed JFK this week?
if there were evidence that McVeigh had been a neo-nazi
Wikipedia would certainly call him one.
Check out the book “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing”. It’s based on 75 hours of interviews with McVeigh and interviews with 150+ persons
from “from every stage of McVeigh’s life”. The authors say
he was not a racist or neo-nazi.
Since McVeigh willingly went to the death chamber he had no reason to lie about his beliefs.
BTW, Jenkins prediction may already be coming true (in case anyone missed it:):
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=14035
Jason, if you’ve got evidence that McVeigh thought well of fascism or considered Nuremburg a travesty you could provide it. In his statements I’ve read he doesn’t say anything about ZOG or any new order he had planned, just that the government had violently overstepped his bounds and his act was retaliation. I’m not saying that in his defense, just that it’s as silly as claiming bin Laden is a communist.
The main evidence that McVeigh was a neo-nazi seems to be that he distributed The Turner Diaries at gun shows.
I seem to recall that McVeigh liked the pro-gun rights and
anti-government message of the novel but was indifferent to its racism.
[...] Terror is slowly crippling the nation’s impoverished citizens as world markets continue to plunge for the past eight months in response to the ongoing financial crisis gripping the world’s economies triggered by the takeover of enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the United States Treasury last year. [...]