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From: GroomWatch@aol.com Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 20:11:49 -0800 |
[This is a courtesy copy of an article posted to Usenet via Deja News]
From CHRONICLES, March 1996, on American Populism:
THE POPULIST RAINBOW - Black Nationalists and the Militia Movement,
by Jesse Walker:
(quoting):
It is June, 1994, and Anthony Hilder is attending a Southern California
gathering called "The New World Order". Two overhead projectors beam
book-covers alleging Masonic conspiracies onto the walls. Hilder, white
and middle-aged, is the host of two syndicated talk-radio shows, RADIO
FREE AMERICA and RADIO FREE WORLD. He has brought tapes to sell to other
attendees, and is doing a brisk business; quite a few people have
wandered through the smoke-filled room to peruse and purchase his wares.
Many might assume Hilder and his customers to be racists. They will be
surprised to discover that the event was a multiracial rap/rock concert
in downtown Los Angeles, featuring Ice T, Body Count, Fishbone and Ice
Cube, among others; that the gathering was organized not by a white man
donned in camouflage, but by a black record producer who calls himself
Afrika Islam; that the smoke thickening the air was not burning tobacco,
but burning marijuana. The popular stereotype of the militia movement
does not leave much room for cultural diversity. The media have had to
acknowledge one prominent African-American militiaman - James Johnson of
inner-city Columbus, Ohio - if only because of his high profile in the
movement. But he is treated as an aberration - or worse yet, a token.
More common are hysterical quotations from representatives of the
Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both of which
have accused the militia movement of fomenting bigotry. Their evidence
is about as solid as J. Edgar Hoover's was for claiming the civil rights
movement was controlled by communists; a handful of offenders on the
edges of the insurgency, whose association is considered enough to
presume everyone else's guilt. Bob Fletcher, a former leader of the
Militia of Montana, sums up the situation by reversing Sturgeon's Law:
"About 10 percent of America is racist, and I suppose that's true of the
militias, too. You get that in any organization". Once you ignore this
small klatch of Christian Identity bigots, the case for militia racism
dries up. Though predominantly white and Christian, militia groups
include blacks, Hispanics and Asians, nonbelievers, Muslims and Jews.
But what happened in Los Angeles in June '94 went beyond this. The New
World Order party was not in any sense a militia meeting - indeed,
organizer Islam says he does not "really have an opinion" about the
movement. The concert was a sign that men and women far removed from the
militia milieu not only share the patriots' basic concerns - a fear of
state repression, a populist demand for self-government - but are
recognizing that these "right-wingers" may be kindred spirits, political
labels be dammned. After all, blacks and white radicals have similar
reasons for distrusting the state. Both fear the government's increasing
police powers. Both resent the abuses of civil liberties that have come
with the war on drugs, and both accuse government officials of being
involved with the drug trade themselves. The firebombing of MOVE and the
beating of Rodney King catalyzed the same resentment among blacks that
Ruby Ridge standoff prompted among many whites. The Waco holocaust
brought the message home. Almost half the Branch Davidians killed at
Mount Carmel were minorities - 28 blacks, six Hispanics, and five
Asians. So there was a good reason for militants of different races to
start cooperating; more and more, they seemed to be fighting the same
fight. As Fletcher put it, "As things get worse, blacks and whites will
be thrown into the same trashpail". To avoid that fate, the black
nationalists and militia movements began to fuse along their edges. As
of yet, no media have covered this story. Tracking it down meant
following a labyrinthine phone tree, and often calling people who were at
first too suspicious to talk. Consequently, it is hard to say just how
widespread the crossover is. It is clear, though, that the intersection
is real and growing. Two organizations figure prominently in the tale:
Zulu Nation and the Nation of Islam. Zulu Nation was born in the early
days of hip hop. Afrika Bambaataa has been a DJ and community organizer
in New York City since the 1970's, along with Grandmaster Flash, Cool
Here, and others, he was one of the founding fathers of rap. Zulu Nation
was his creation. Meant as an alternative to gangs, the group invited
ghetto youth to concentrate on rappping, breakdancing, and graffiti, and
not on criminal violence. Todya, the Zulu Nation includes musicians,
filmmakers and others around the world - a quarter-million, claims Islam,
himself a member. One of the "primary functions of getting in", he adds,
is sharing and spreading interest in theories about the New World Order.
In 1994, Islam's friend Hilder appeared on THE FRONT PAGE, a popular talk
show on KJLH, a black-oriented radio station in Los Angeles owned by
Steve Wonder. There, Hilder mixed the conspiracy theories popular in the
militia movement with appeals specifically targeted to a black community
ruptured by unemployment and crime. One listener who tuned in that day
was Rasul Al-Ikhlas, host of THE STORY OF SOUL, a wide-ranging
public-access telelvision program. Al-Iklas invited Hilder onto his show
- and, at his guest's suggestion, had Fletcher come along as well. News
of the newcomers traveled fast, thanks largely to the Zulu Nation
network. Hilder's black girlfriend had the amusing experience of
visiting a village in Belize, only to be recognized by a native who had
heard a tape of her speaking on the radio. Soon, Islam introduced Hilder
to Michael Moor, a reporter for the Nation of Islam's newspaper, THE
FINAL CALL, and shortly afterward Moor appeared on Hilder's radio show.
There they argued that the powers-that-be are driving America toward a
race war, and that men and women of all ethnicities should work together
to defuse the battle before it starts. Other Muslims, such as Cedric
Welch of THE FINAL CALL, also began to show an interest in the
militia/patriot worldview. Many readers, learing that elements of the
militia and Black Muslim communities have begun to cooperate, will assume
that the common ground is bigotry. Both groups, after all, have been
plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism. There is indeed anti-Jewish
sentiment among many Black Muslims - Hilder recounts an unpleasant
confrontation with the infamous Khallid Mohammed, when he describes as a
"crazy" who wants to kill all whites, especially the Jewish ones - but
it does not play much of a role, if any, in the black-white crossover.
"The blacks that are anti-Semitic won't have anything to do with me",
Hilder explains, "because they're also anti-white". (Hilder did once
share a microphone with Steve Cokely, a black militant I have witnessed
citing THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and casually using the word
"Jewboy", but the pairing didn't work out: after the program, Hilder was
snubbed by Cokely and his companions because of his race). As for the
other side of the equation, Fletcher's wife is part Jewish and Hilder,
though a Christian, is a former member of the Jewish Defense League. The
patriot movement as a whole includes many Jews, including half the
directorship of the San Diego Militia. More troublesome is the extent to
which the new overlap is based not on a commmon political agenda but on
dubious conspiracy theories. Hilder and company's power analysis, alas,
owes more to Gary Allen than to C. Wright Mills. It is one thing to
expose corruption in high places, or the growing power of executive
agencies, or the rapidly globalizing corporate state. It is quite
another matter to assert that a single cabal of Illuminati stand behind
it all. Even leaving credibility-of-evidence issues aside, the sheer
resilience of the power elite indicates that such a conspiracy could not
be true, for much the same reason that centrally planned economies fail
while free-market systems succeed. But below the surface one finds a
concern with issues more concrete than the quest for a Grand Unified
Conspiracy Theory. As Mack Tanner put it in REASON Magazine, people
"aren't scared because they believe in conspracy theories. They believe
conspiracy theories becasue they're scared". The militiamen want to
preserve gun rights, free speech, national sovereignty, and privacy and
to prevent any more incidents like Waco or Rudby Ridge. Those many not
be the black militants' chief concerns, but that does not mean they
disagree with the militia's agenda. Al-Ikhlas says, "I don't like guns,
period", but then adds that he supports the Second Amendment. Islam
agrees that gun control is not an essential issue, but he believes that
guns represent power and control and that this is why the state wants to
seize them. For their part, the blacks are mostly concerned with local
issues - Al-Ikhlas, for example, is now involved in an effort to turn an
empty, government-owned building over to a volunteer drug treatment
program. And behind both the conspiracy talk and the single-issue
concerns, there is common political ground. The militiamen want to make
America a decentralized, constitutional republic; the black nationalists
are calling for neighborhood power - which, in practice, is pretty much
the same thing. "I would like the government, the police and councilmen,
to live right here in the community", concludes Al-Ikhlas. Moor goes
further, striking an almost Tolstoyan note: "If we're all following and
submitting to the will of God....then you don't need government".
Hilder, a philosophical anarchist, is quick to agree. This is not to say
that any of this will last. Moor, for one, has cooled to the idea of
black-white cooperation. When I called him to discuss this story, he was
unenthusiastic. "I don't talk to the white media no more", he told me
gruffly. "Every time we talk to Whitey, something happens". The
militias "seem sincere", he continued, "but you have to wonder what their
hidden agenda is, who's pulling their strings". There's always the
chance that "behind closed doors, we're all still niggers to them. I'm
not necessarily talking about Anthony Hilder, but sometimes I don't even
know where he's coming from". After all, "They're getting too much pub'
from the white media........After they overthrow the overlords, maybe
they'll start lording it over people of color". Al-Ikhlas - a black and
a Muslim, but not a Black Muslim - remains tolerant, but even he has his
doubts. "When militia people talk about "the good old days", I want to
ask them, "How far does the militia want to go back?" Despite this, he
rejects the popular image of a movement dominated by white supremacists.
"The media portray it differently than what it really is", he says. The
alliance that remains is determined to stick it out, and to propagate its
message as far as it can. Islam has been busy producing an album on
Warner Brothers for a rap/rock supergroup called the Bubbleheads, a CD he
promises will include a trove of conspiracy lore. In the meantime,
Hilder has recorded a rap of his own, a catchy number called "Ordo Ab
Chao". And if the vision it expresses seems a little, er,
apocalyptic...... "Masonic mind manipulation Inciting riots, it's crisis
creation Biochip implantation Vaccinate your kid for U.N. identification
.......the wake-up message behind the X-Files motifs is still loud and
clear:
"They've numbed us down and dumbed us down
With TV, drugs, the NEA, and public schools.
They've taken your brightest and our best
And made them public fools."
Cast the tired old labels aside. From here
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Created: Nov 29, 1997