LETTERS
LETTERS to the Editor Militia Roundup Regarding your latest issue in which the militia movement is dissected ("Militia Nation," June issue), I would like to raise some points. The irony is that...
...And I sat and talked with people who had been friends of Randy Weaver and his family, since their home had been just outside of Bonner's Ferry...
...And who will they do it to next...
...warped dispensation of justice is really what the empire is all about at heart...
...She was my friend," a woman said to me, "and they shot her to death with her baby in her arms, after they'd killed her only son...
...it haunts me still...
...One mentioned the ATF office in the building...
...You might consider linking together minority complaints of police abuses with gun-owner complaints of BATF violations...
...Joseph Miranda Northridge, California Your writers are grossly misrepresenting the militia movement...
...In the 1980s, I stood with the farm people in the protests and rallies, and I took pictures of the state troopers on the rooftops with riot guns, who were sent by the governor to control the people and make sure the banks got their land and machinery and livestock...
...Robert Waddingham Billings, Montana The editors welcome correspondence from readers on all topics, but prefer to publish letters that comment directly on material previously published in The Progressive...
...What the militia has been able to do is mobilize a considerable segment of the American middle class...
...indeed, even from Milwaukee...
...The problem is that much of the left has made peace with the state, and looks with longing to Washington, D.C., for enactment of the latest round of regulations and tax hikes...
...The racism, bigotry, and hate was appalling...
...The war on drugs is the same as the war on guns: both are assaults against individual rights and, ultimately, attacks on the people as a whole...
...The U.S...
...I wish there might be a Mary Sheridan Award for new or seasoned writers...
...I look forward to each refreshing issue and eagerly read it cover to cover...
...Many of the fears of the militia are well-founded...
...My friend had intended to go to one of the Militia of Montana's meetings and I convinced her to stay away, since she had left one job and was interviewing for another, and didn't need to be on any FBI list of possible white-supremacist supporters...
...I told her, "No, you watch, I'd bet anything it's white supremacists...
...And that is what is so eerie and what makes them so dangerous, the mixture of truth and lies, of what is real and what is only imagined...
...The Progressive has been the greatest help to me in the last while, along with some other of the "alternative" media...
...People on both the extreme left and right in this country have a common interest in countering the growing assault on our civil liberties...
...armed forces have been used against the American people—witness Operation Green Sweep, the 1990 Army attack on suspected marijuana growers in northern California...
...I have kept track of these people as best I could in the ensuing years, warning and educating where and how I could...
...Thanks again for a great job...
...All her (tactful) editorial suggestions were splendid...
...Richard Fairchild Madison, Wisconsin Fan Mail Thank you for a wonderful magazine, filled with meaningful articles that touch my soul...
...Compare this with the erosion of the working-class alliance, which was once the base for the left...
...She suggested that I adapt some NS pieces for The Progressive, and for me that became a most happy arrangement...
...After all these years of the left promoting radical and even revolutionary action, the people who are taking up arms against the government are of the right...
...It will certainly receive more of them until this monster we live in is made to unburden itself of its dirty little secrets and is replaced with governmental approximations scrupulously respectful of the individual boundaries and rights of all human beings and other creatures...
...But a lot of what they say makes sense," she argued with me...
...But you all have failed to note the presence of men and women of diverse races, religions, sexual orientations, and politics in armed peoples' groups...
...John A. Hickam Eugene, Oregon We're small family farmers, and I work night shift in the local TORO lawn-mower factory and take care of my two-year-old and eight-month-old grandbabies during the day...
...Rosemary Schaff er Windom, Minnesota A Caring Editor I'm terrifically sad to learn that we've lost Mary Sheridan (Editor's Note, June issue), and I want to send my special sympathies to The Progressive family...
...I feel so fortunate to have known her and worked with her...
...He told us the farm crisis was God's punishment on us all for the legalization of abortion...
...Your hostility to the militia seems to be motivated more by a competitor's envy of success than by any love for radical action...
...I hadn't paid any attention to the news the day of the Oklahoma bombing, since my daughter and I both agree that these babies should watch little or no TV and then only PBS...
...Consider forming a united front with the militia...
...Bo Gritz seems to applaud the Oklahoma bombing when he calls it a masterpiece of science and art, but his remark, so far as it is given out of context, asks to be best understood as itself a masterpiece of irony, indicating that our well-crafted little artifact was in this case administered by the subject/patient rather than the doctors or technicians of the superstate overlords...
...Durst proves that something good can come from Wisconsin...
...the globalization of the economy and its deleterious effects on the middle class...
...As I wrote about her and Morris in 1973, "their concern for writers is unique...
...None of them believed me, but my gut told me it was so...
...I did what I could, wrote letters, donated food, stood with the P-9ers in Austin, Minnesota, when the governor sent troops to control the strikers and defend Hormel...
...attacks on innocent citizens by law-enforcement agencies...
...You bring a needed voice of reason and a joyful attitude of disbelief about the actions of our leaders...
...The Oklahoma bombing was done in prime payback time...
...Instead, we have the ludicrous spectacle of environmental "radicals" working alongside the federal government to imprison citizens and seize their land over regulatory violations...
...In regard to trespasses past and present, don't forget the transgressions of the American empire...
...Nora Sayre New York, New York Pay Raise for Durst In an issue dominated by dire warnings of the growing audacity and shamelessness of the far right, Will Durst's column ("Witness to Terror," June issue) stood out from the grim gloom...
...The militia movement presents the left with a unique opportunity...
...But I had a marvelous time with her on the phone and through the mails...
...In their paranoia, they find a white supremacist under every camo cap...
...All letters may be edited for clarity and conciseness...
...How can you respect or trust a government that would order such a thing...
...The empire has well earned the messengers of vengeance it has provoked against itself and its unknowing innocents as well as its guilty or merely silent complicitors...
...I live in a state led backwards by a rightwing governor who nearly every day proves to be an embarrassment to it, yet national Republicans think he has something profound to offer...
...she said it was Muslims or Arab terrorists...
...I attended several meetings held by a Baptist preacher from the South who said he had a way the farmers could keep their land...
...For the first time in memory, the far right has lost its faith in the establishment...
...The current crop of anti-crime, anti-terrorism, and communications-control acts will turn this country into a de-facto police state...
...The white supremacists held meetings and rallies and the Posse Comitatus was in the area also...
...I went for a visit to another dear friend in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, and landed smack in the middle of the Militia of Montana holding meetings spewing out exactly the same kind of bigotry, racism, and hate which so disgusted me ten years before...
...I was stunned, and certainly had no answers to her questions, only more questions...
...Through the whole series of meetings, we were told that we must stop abortions, because it was the white women who had them, and if it wasn't stopped, the "mud people" would take over the United States and murder all of us...
...It is willing to listen to stories of police brutality against the underclass...
...This is quite on a par once more with what some tabloids and other sensationalist crusaders in the anti-people's-arms campaign have said...
...the alliance between politicians, media, and major corporations...
...Insofar as there have been confrontations between the militia members and government officials, these have been in the nature of farmers/ranchers protecting what they believe to be their constitutional rights to bear arms and own property...
...While progressives will support Third World peasants defending their lands, this protection does not seem to apply to Americans...
...As I walked into work and sat down to visit before our shift came on, my coworkers told me about what had happened...
...Mary first got in touch with me in 1965, when I had newly begun a five-year stint as New York correspondent of the New Statesman...
...There are concentration camps in this country—known as "boot camps"—where "rehabilitation" along the style of the gulag is the order of the day...
...I expect better from The Progressive...
...The irony is that the militia seems to recognize the very problems that the left has claimed for the last several decades...
...These include: government violations of the Bill of Rights...
...Pay him whatever he wants...
...What I heard had no relationship to the information I'd read in the media or seen on TV at the time the incident happened...
...Consider your graphic depiction of a militia member wearing a gas mask and swastika-emblazoned shirt—this is right out of the Rush Lim-baugh school of invective, calling those who oppose you Nazis (e.g., feminazis...
...Nowhere did you give a reasoned description of the militia movement's concerns...
...In a strange twist of fate, last summer I was in Idaho, riding along with my friend of four decades, helping her drive her granddaughters back from a visit at her farm in South Dakota...
...I've encountered few editors who cared about prose as much as Mary did...
...We had a tough discussion about the militias and what their message really is...
...At these meetings I saw huge pictures of supposed bodies of aborted babies...
...We didn't see each other often because she rarely came to New York, and the first time we tried to meet, the town was paralyzed by a papal visit, to Mary's exasperation...
...and the consequent distancing of politics from popular needs...
...we should keep her name as well as her ideas alive...
...On our television news, we all can see the spectacle of paramilitary police units kicking in doors and hauling off citizens for trivial offenses...
...And how well she understood one's need for editorial freedom—and that it was often scarce elsewhere...
Vol. 59 • August 1995 • No. 8
