A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. - book reviews

Christian Century, June 19, 1996 by Jeffrey Kaplan

By Kenneth S. Stern. Simon & Schuster, 228 pp., $24.00.

WHY ARE Americans joining private armies to fight the American government, while defining their actions as patriotism?" Kenneth S. Stern asks. In the wake of Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, public officials and private citizens have pondered the sudden appearance of the citizen militias. Many wonder whether the rapid growth of militias across the American heartland could have taken place without some significant mainstream appeal. And many, especially in the Jewish community, note and fear the militias' potential for anti-Semitism.

Stern and Jess Walter tell much the same story, but from strikingly different perspectives. Taken together, the two books cast light on the appearance in the American public square of an antigovernment anger that once was the province of the most distant fringes of American politics.

Walter illuminates the cultic milieu in which the family of Randy and Vicky Weaver was first introduced to the esoteric doctrines of Identity Christianity. In this milieu of forgotten and forbidden knowledge, the earnest seeker is presented with a vast array of conspiratorial scenarios and religious visions which unfold against the backdrop of the timeless battle of good against evil. The Weavers gradually absorbed not only the racist religious doctrines of Christian Identity, but became familiar with the world of UFOs and alien intelligences, the supposed machinations of the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati and, most of all, the alleged conspiracies of those who were said to be the literal offspring of Satan, the Jews.

Fortified by their belief in biblical inerrancy and convinced by Identity hermeneutics of the imminence of the Apocalypse, the Weavers retreated to the isolation of a distant mountain cabin at Ruby Ridge in rural Idaho. There, Vicky Weaver could homeschool her children, and the family could to a degree live off the land. But the family found itself engaged in constant disputes with neighbors. Worse, their several visits to Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound drew the attentions of the federal government.

A government informant struck up a relationship with Randy Weaver, and this eventually resulted in Weaver's selling, at the informant's request, several illegally shotguns. Weaver's subsequent arrest on these gun charges was intended less to incarcerate him than to induce him to inform on others in the Identity movement. However, a circus of errors--first legal mistakes by a local part-time magistrate, and later the incorrect assignment of a court date for Weaver's case--convinced the family that a Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) plot was afoot. They retreated to their cabin to await the End.

This prompted a year of low-level surveillance by a local federal marshal, and then a shootout in which a federal marshal, the Weaver's young son Samuel, and the family dog were killed. The FBI's Hostage Rescue Unit then intervened, armed with rules of engagement that read like "shoot to kill" orders. Those orders led directly to the killing of Vicky Weaver as she stood behind the door of the cabin with her baby in her arms.

VICKY WEAVER'S death generated a rage throughout the radical right which has yet to abate. Then there was the matter of timing. The trial of Randy Weaver and his friend Kevin Harris took place against the backdrop of the events at Waco. Together, Waco and Ruby Ridge spurred the formation of the militia movement as a defense against a federal government that is seen as determined to destroy all vestiges of opposition.

The strength of Walter's presentation is his neutrality. The book resonates with compassion for all who were caught up in the events at Ruby Ridge, yet that compassion never overwhelms critical judgment. Randy Weaver, for example, emerges as a stubborn but weak man, who drew strength from his strong-willed wife. After her death, his oldest daughter, Sarah, assumed the role of the matriarch. Yet Walter does not focus solely on the Weavers. While condemning the bungled operation and the poorly executed cover-up which followed, Walter is able to draw sympathetic portraits of the federal agents involved at the scene and to mourn the loss of federal marshal William Degan no less than the deaths of Vicky and Samuel Weaver.

STERN, THE American Jewish Committee's watchdog on the radical right, also is vitally concerned with the impact of Waco and Ruby Ridge. But for Stern, the milieu of Identity Christianity and the militias is an undifferentiated realm of unreasoning hatred. Only the federal government, in Stern's view, has the resources and the moral authority to protect us from the violent enmity of the radical right. Thus, the FBI and to a lesser degree the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms emerge as the strong, if flawed, shield of the nation. Their vigilance is all that stands between us and the "millions of Americans" whom Stern posits as sympathetic to the militia message. His book expresses the American Jewish community's fear of an armed and active right wing--a fear which itself has become an important subtext in the militia movement.