Fear is an emotion induced by a perceived threat or risk to health or life, status and power, security, or in the case of human beings, anything held valuable. Republicans have made political careers out of inducing fear in the population that became a valuable tool in their crusade against Islam they couched as a war on terror. Although the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were becoming extremely unpopular at the end of Bush’s reign of terror in 2008, Republicans duly picked up the “Muslim threat” mantle with the election of Barack Obama as President by claiming that the President is a Muslim sympathizer at least, and a likely “jihadist” according to many neo-conservatives in the teabagger movement.
It is no secret Republicans love sending Americans to war, particularly after 2001 when they lumped all Muslims together as an existential threat to this country and embarked on a fear-mongering crusade that America’s greatest enemy was Islam. However, Americans will never hear a Republican, or teabagger, issue even a tepid warning about a very real threat to America; heavily-armed and disgruntled neo-confederates and white supremacists who harbor as intense a hatred for people of color as they do being part of the United States of America. Coupled with a growing religious extremist and anti-government militia movement, the biggest threat to America is not radical Islamists or a foreign power, but homegrown extremists intent on creating an Aryan nation founded on biblical principles.
Last week the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) revealed that a white supremacist neo-confederate group, the League of the South (LOS), is in the process of training a uniformed, paramilitary unit tasked with advancing a second southern secession by any means necessary after years of “only threatening violence against the United States of America.” According to leaked internal documents and anonymous sources within the LOS, as well as leaked internal communications, the LOS secret paramilitary unit has been dubbed “The Indomitables” replete with white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members, and neo-Nazis.
The SPLC reports that “the Indomitables” were “conceptualized” at a LOS national meeting earlier in the year and apparently is growing quickly with a U.S. Army and Navy veteran in charge of training for the coming race war to create an Aryan nation. The ‘veteran’ often boasts about “earning his red bootlaces; an award in skinhead culture for “drawing blood for the movement.” He also dreams of the coming day he can throw “boot parties for enemies” (African Americans) of the LOS. The white supremacist’s signature photo is an image of himself holding an assault rifle next to a confederate flag.
The League of the South advocates for a new secession and an Aryan society dominated by “European Americans” with a stated goal of creating a “godly” nation ruled by “Anglo-Celtic” (white) elites who establish a Christian theocratic state and dominate African Americans and other minorities. The group’s leader, Michael Hill, believes that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery,” and that returning to a “political and social system based on kith and kin rather than the idea of the universal rights of man. At its core is a European population.” According to Hill, “If the scenario of America being overrun by hordes of non-whites does not appeal to you, then how is this disaster to be averted? By the people who oppose it rising up against their traitorous elite masters and their misanthropic rule. This is both healthy and Biblical.”
Hill claimed last month that the Second Amendment extends to weapons systems, guerrilla warfare applications, and listed the “primary targets” in the fight for an Aryan nation. Hill wrote in an essay that “The primary targets will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.” He ended his white supremacist screed by citing the Christian bible; “Blessed be the Lord my strength who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.”
Now, every time there is even a mention of the growing threat of white supremacists pushing a race war, which is what the LOS is proposing in creating an Aryan nation, there is a tendency to minimize the threat as a small group of isolated extremists; nothing could be farther from the truth. If Americans have been paying attention to events across the nation, they know there is a simmering hatred for people of color among a larger segment of the population than they want to admit. The events in Ferguson Missouri where a white police officer brutally murdered an unarmed African American teenager, and the subsequent military response to equally unarmed African American protestors should give Americans a clue there is a deep-seated hatred of people of color in America. Don’t believe it?
In New York police are given free rein to stop and frisk African Americans for no other reason than they are not white. In Arizona, Republicans passed a law giving law enforcement the right to demand brown-skinned people prove they are American, and police across the nation are regularly gunning down unarmed African Americans with impunity. In Southern states Republicans are crusading to disenfranchise African Americans by restricting their right to vote, including recently in Georgia where a Republican state senator is livid that voting rights advocates made it easier for African Americans to cast ballots and wants to shut down the Black vote. Throughout the 2012 general election campaign and ongoing, Republicans demonized African Americans as takers stealing real American’s (read white people) assets. It was no coincidence that Cliven Bundy is a racist that attracted equally racist militias to wage war against the federal government with an African American man as President.
Many Americans errantly assume that the white supremacists threatening a race war, or advocating for an Aryan nation, are restricted to the former Confederacy and that is a gross error. Every state in the Union has neo-Nazi white supremacist sympathizers who cannot accept, and are furious, that America is a diverse and all-inclusive nation. Subsequently, they are more than willing to engage in a race war to create what the League of the South refers to as “a godly nation ruled by Anglo-Celtic elites to dominate African Americans and people of color.” This is what teabaggers, Republicans, and their ilk refer to when they scream they want to “take America back;” back to a time before the civil rights movement when people of color “knew their place,” were restricted from voting, and were legally forced into subjection to the will of the white Christian elite.
The greatest threat to the security of this country is not from outside its borders, it is from within. There is a good reason Republicans and their conservative cohorts never warn Americans of the threat from white supremacists and it is because they would expose their base as the greatest threat to America. Remember, it was Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who said “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term,” but it is not for lack of trying. Obviously, his words were a rallying cry for white supremacists to stop dreaming of a race war and begin paramilitary training to wage a race war and create a nation ruled by “angry white guys.”
Many Americans think there are pockets of racists in different parts of the country and although that may be true, it is a safe bet that every person in America knows at least one angry white person. They are the people who hate immigrants, support law enforcement targeting and killing African Americans, refer to every young Black male as a “thug,” or decry people of color “taking their stuff.” They are predominately conservatives, teabaggers, and more than likely any Republican yearning to take America back to the era when Anglo-Celtic elites dominated African Americans, and since they can hardly accomplish their mission legislatively, they are in training to accomplish it militarily. Tragically, few Americans are paying attention or fear the real threat to national security; angry white guys posing as “real conservatives” whether they are teabaggers, Republicans, or members of the League of the South.
Born in the South, raised in the Mid-West and California for a well-rounded view of America; it doesn't look good.
Former minister, lifelong musician, Mahayana Zen-Buddhist.
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