Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 13:08:18 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: Bombings, Surveillance, and Free Societies (fwd)


> There should be
>tremendous potential appeal for a truly radical message among the
>population that people recklessly refer to as "The Militias." If there
>isn't, then we might as well give up on radical politics in America.

Doug, I just don't see how this follows.  It may be that people who have
made the choice to join the Militias are the least interested, perhaps most
hostile to radical politics, though they are of course militants (the same
could be said of the hard-core members of the *Nation of Islam*). Who is
throwing in the towel about the American working class?  Is the Militia the
working class?  What does most of the working class think of them?  

There have been two strikes in my neighborhood, one of grocery workers and
the other of school-teachers.  

I haven't met any striker who seems sympathetic to the Militias, and it is
probable that at a certain point these workers will be willing to engage in
very radical action, depsite the fact that many of them are religious.  By
the way, the churches have played a terribly reactionary role in the
teachers' strike, accusing the union of being white and unfairly protesting
the black administration of Oakland.  Again Adolph Reed is proven correct
over Cornel West.    

Both Sally and you have insinuated that the Militia critics are
middle-class high brows.  This is unfair: one could as easily say that you
are simply dismissing the working class which is as profoundly oppressed as
it is alienated from and distrustworthy of organizations such as the
Militias. For all of us who read  Nietzsche with delight in our youth and
been woken up by a Jehovah's Witness on a Saturday morning, it must be nice
to see a group which has finally risen from the dead of pacifist
Christianity and is now willing to take action. But I am really suggesting
that we should not be so excited about any and all groups that come along. 
 

Sally raised the very interesting question of the involvement of veterans
in the Militia and the effects civilian contempt has had on them.  I think
that this is all very complicated.  I certainly don't look down upon people
who have been subject to our system of class conscription; Paul Mattick
once wrote that the army offers people the social respect denied to them as
proletarians.  

 However, war does horrendous things to  veterans, and it is
well-recognized, I believe, that *some* declasse officers and soldiers have
been important parts of fascist movements. Anyways, does anyone have any
thoughts on how the veterans returning from the virtual war in the Gulf are
different from those who returned from the jungles of Indochina years ago? 
Except for the fact that they are being released into a much more depressed
economy.  

> But that isn't the whole story. Much of
>their ideology is profoundly anti-statist and anti-fascist -
>libertarian/individualist in the classic American mode, raised to a wild
>extreme. Confronting the profoundly individualistic nature of much American
>thought is a major problem for the non-populist left.

I understand that in a future *Progressive* Adolph Reed writes of how 
Herrenvolk democracy is coded in this seemingly neutral classic American
mode. At the same time, I am very open to rethinking the principles which
animate radical thought; I have expressed in one effort at rethinking
Marxism: Jacques Camatte's *This World We Must Leave and other essays*.   

But, yes, as usual, I think you have pointed to a very important topic--the
implications of the tradition of American individualism for radical
thought.   



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