I left off my last post on William Luther Pierce by mentioning that Timothy McVeigh said he was motivated more by concern about gun issues than that of racism. I want to zero in on this issue, because from my read of the literature, it strikes me that McVeigh was suffering from a poorly thought-out understanding of "freedom" plus a gun fetish.
Here's a short clip from an interview with Ed Bradley from the show 60 Minutes.
Notice how his interaction with Ted Kaczynski led him to repudiate the categories of "left" versus "right". Instead, he finds connection with the uni-bomber by saying that they both are in favour of being allowed the freedom to live their lives "as they see fit".
The problem with this worldview is that it falls prey to old adage that "your freedom to swing your fist ends at someone else's nose". Different freedom's are at odds with one another. Without some sort of social constraint, freedom becomes license and society becomes chaos. And in a very real sense, if everyone who exists just lives their own life "as they see fit", everyone is constrained by the need to constantly "look over their shoulder" out of fear of what someone else might be doing.
I'm not necessarily thinking about something like the dystopian societies depicted in movies like Escape From New York or Mad Max. Even if everyone follows the rules of traditional civility, things can turn sideways very fast if everyone were really allowed to "do your own thing". For example, I once heard a complaint by a "back to the land" type who was bitter because he wasn't allowed to put a dam on his property to run a water turbine "off the grid" electricity.
I wasn't privy to the details of the situation, but a dam can have catastrophic impact on things like a species of fish's ability to migrate upstream in order to spawn. It can also impact the water quality downstream by slowing the rate of flow. It can also cause problems for farmers that depend on a certain flow of water to irrigate their fields. Perhaps a wetland downstream would no longer flood in the spring, which means it will dry up in the summer. That would cause problems for migrating water fowl. It could also cause some people's wells to dry up because the ground water wasn't being recharged anymore by the now dried-up swamp. And, a poorly designed "do it yourself" dam might fail during spring run-off or torrential rains, spreading at best a wall of spawning-bed-destroying mud downstream---or at worst a house destroying flood. All of the above scenarios have taken place in the past with various "do it yourself dams", which is why governments have regulations concerning them. (There's that swung fist hitting someone else's nose---.)
The important issue that people like Kaczynski and McVeigh don't understand (probably more accurately: "refuse to admit") is that the world is a complex, interdependent web. Individuals simply cannot live their lives "the way they see fit" without running the risk of dramatically interfering in the lives of other people. It might be that this problem is greatly accelerated by the huge increases in human population that the world has recently seen---but the only solutions that I can think of that would deal with that particular problem would dramatically intrude on people's ability to have as many children "as they see fit". And I suspect both McVeigh and Kaczynski have issues with them too.
And, of course, this is all just a festival of bullshit
anyway. All the people killed by the two of them weren't consulted about whether being blown up was the life that they "saw fit to live". The sort of "freedom" that McVeigh has built his worldview around is actually rather childish and solipsistic. Ultimately, only one person in any given society can have complete freedom to live "as he sees fit" (ie: an absolute dictator). That's because everyone else would have to end up "working around" and accommodating whatever he (probably a he) wants to do. (More about this later.)
I've worked a lot on these articles. That involves reading several absolutely dreadful books from cover to cover, plus a lot of time wading through academic articles, FBI bulletins, and so on. It's work that I take on gladly because I think it serves a useful purpose. And that purpose is served by letting anyone read them even if they cannot afford to support me financially. But if you can afford it, why not sign up for a subscription? Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do.
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| Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. |
Moreover, the term "fetish" originally comes from anthropology where it refers to objects that become imbued with meaning beyond their own particular utility. In our society, for example, Catholic relics are a type of fetish that are purported to have the power to heal the sick.
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| Skull of St. Ivo of Kermartin, copyleft image c/o Wikimedia Commons. |
In the same way, I would suggest that guns have become a similar fetish for many people who have built their entire worldview around the word "freedom".
Lest people think this so far-fetched that it should be dismissed out of hand, I'd like them to consider the case of Sean Moon and the Rod of Iron Ministries. He is the son of the late Sun Myung Moon who was the head of the notorious cult known as the "Moonies" (or the Unification Church). This spin-off cult has explicitly built itself around a gun fetish to the point where the leader wears a gold-plated bullet crown and carries a gold-plated AR-15 rifle. Moreover, ordinary members carry weapons as part of religious services---including marriages. ("With these assault rifles I take you as my lawfully wedded wife. To have and to hold, to kill Commies with, and, to stand at the ramparts with defending Donald Trump, until the libruls pry them from our cold, dead, hands.")
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| Sean Moon in full church regalia, image from Washington Post article Locked and Loaded for God. Used under the Fair Dealing provision of Copyright law. |
The "Rod of Iron" that the denomination is named after comes from the King James translation of the Second Psalm:
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?The idea is that in the modern world, the equivalent of a "rod of iron" would be the ArmaLite rifle.
2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.
5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.
6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.
7 I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.
8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.
9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.
10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth.
11 Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.
12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.
Who cares what the Moonies believe? Well, maybe the Alt Right does---check out the following Vice Media clip from YouTube.
Oh, one last point. Sean Moon took part in the January 6th coup attempt and Steve Bannon was one of the speakers at his last "Freedom Festival".
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I raise the issue of gun fetishes as a way of warming up readers to an issue that I was surprised to find while researching these articles. That is, it makes a lot more sense to see the rise of White Nationalism as being about religious cults rather than politics.
There's a lot of other stuff that happens too, including a rogue FBI agent who blackmails the "hero" into being his own personal assassin. But what's of interest to this article involves one of Oscar's new friends who is really good at playing the part of a television evangelist. Yeager convinces the group to get the guy a slot on TV so they can raise lots of money from the rubes and subtly start to slip them the message that maybe there's something a bit "off" about non-whites and maybe, just maybe we should do something about them. This meets with resounding success and lots more violent racist fun ensues, and I can't tell you any more without barfing all over my keyboard---.
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The point I want to raise is that the use of religion to promote racism is something that keeps re-occurring in white nationalist literature. From my reading of academic papers on the subject (there are a few), it seems that there are three different streams to this sewer:
I identified William Luther Pierce as the grand-daddy of all this nonsense. That's because his book The Turner Diaries was so successful in selling his vision of the world, that he's been copied by two other streams---which also have authors who've written their own novels promoting this particular vision. In the following, I'll do a quick intro to each and show how they've used the "Pierce method" to build their groups.
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Christian Identity
This is a strain of evangelical Christianity that believes that the "ten lost tribes" of the Old Testament were not Semites, but actually Aryans. They migrated North and became the founders of the Scandinavian, German, and, Anglo-Saxon nations. In this worldview the covenant between God and the tribes of Israel was between the people of Northern Europe, not the Jews of the middle-East.
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| Yeah, that's right---a swastika on the cross. |
What we call "Jews" today are in fact an evil racial subgroup that resulted from Eve having sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The result of this was Cain, who murdered his brother Abel---who then went on to father the Jewish race. (This is called the "serpent seed" doctrine.)
- Hill of the Ravens, 2003
- A Distant Thunder, 2004
- A Mighty Fortress, 2005
- The Brigade, 2008
- Freedom's Sons, 2013
Lest you ask why Harold Covington is important, I might want to point you towards this Guardian article that suggests that Dylan Roof was at least partially inspired by his writings. If you don't remember, Roof massacred nine black people at a prayer meeting at a predominately black church in Charleston South Carolina in 2015.
Here we are again. The omicron variant is raging through the community and all we can do is try to slow down the spread and hope that the vaccines keep us out of the hospital. It certainly looks like a lot of folks are going to get sick before this is over. Just remember that pandemics always end, and no matter how awful all of this is, it's not like the Black Death. So be nice to each other and do what the experts tell us to do.
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