05.24.10
Mapping anti-government violence in the US
I began the Right Wing Violence map shortly after the signing of the 2010 Health Care Reform act when the threatening behavior of protesters at the Capitol began to be reflected around the country.** The first incident reported on March 18th was the remark by House Minority Leader John Boehrner that a fellow Ohio congressman would be a ‘dead man’ if he didn’t vote a certain way. This was followed by spittle, epithets and threats from protesters towards Congressmen and women as they headed to the Capitol building to vote.
Well after too much coffee on the drive back from San Antonio, I sat down to catch up and update the map with a terrible story from West Memphis, Arkansas where two police officers were killed during a traffic stop.
More than a year ago, shortly after the Obama Justice Department released the report on right-wing terrorism in this country—you know, the one that they ended up apologizing for having done, after outrage from Congress that they had no right to investigate right wingers who were armed and planning to overthrow the gubmint—I published a diary on DailyKos.
My point, of course, was that given the American character and the blanketing of our media by hate propaganda, violence by small groups and individual extremists is what we are going to see. Americans do not join an umbrella terrorist group, train, strap a bomb to themselves, and blow themselves up in a crowded public place. They plan to get away (well, they expect to, though their plans may be seriously deficient), and as a commenter put, they only decide to go out as martyrs in a blaze of glory when they are clearly trapped with no way out.
We call Muslims “terrorists”, when right wingers are out murdering their fellow citizens, including law enforcement officers, and these incidents are passed off as isolated cases. It’s like it’s not terrorism if they aren’t being directed by a foreign political-religious movement.
Violence by people who belong to an anti-government movement and insist they have the right to kill anyone they please? Not terrorism, it wasn’t directed by
al-Qaeda.
The “sovereign citizen” movement is a bunch of anti-law anarchists: they want you and me to fund the government to provide the services they love, and they figure that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes and are exempt from all laws.
This just means that there are a whole lot of unlicensed crazies out there driving unregistered vehicles on taxpayer-funded roads, ready, like the Kanes, to kill any law officer who tries to stop them.
This is the form that right wing terrorism continues to take in America.
But as Susan Collins says, we can’t stop real Americans who are known terrorists from buying guns. That would be interfering with their Constitutional right to one massacre per person I guess.
