The United States of America.
The words evoke strong images of freedom, liberty, opportunity; their venues are such places as Yorktown, Plymouth Rock, and Philadelphia. It is a nation built not around one national identity but around many. Wave after wave of foreigners, starting with the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English, came to this New World, overwhelmed the sparse native tribes, and claimed it as their own.
Swells of immigrants shaped the spirit of the new land, integrating into society after a period of ghettoizing. Slavs moved among Saxons; Catholics among Protestants; Jews among Gentiles. The process was not without struggle, and it isn't yet finished as the newest wave, the Indochinese, seeks the same.
The classic picture of America is as a melting pot, the land where people seeking personal freedom came from their oppressive homelands to join a nation built around common humanity, not ethnicity. Anybody can be an American.
But beneath the surface there are a significant number of people to whom it's not a melting pot at all. To them, it's a boiling cauldron; not beautiful, spacious skies, but acid rain destroying the land; not amber waves of grain, but the fallow fields of a foreclosed family farmer. It's no longer a land of opportunity, but one of stifling regulation that robs the common folk and is headed toward a centralized economic, if not political, dictatorship.
That's what America was to Robert Jay Mathews, a product of its heartland and its hard-working immigrant stock. As his view of America was honed sharper, he lost sight of the hope, dreams, and compassion that form the popular image. In their stead he saw greed, despair, and conspiracy. It was a conspiracy he believed was aimed at his white race. And he blamed it on the Jews.
In September 1983, in a barnlike shed on his farm in the northeast corner of Washington state, Mathews formed a group he later named the Silent Brotherhood. Over fifteen months, it became the most dangerous right-wing underground group since the Ku Klux Klan first rode more than a century earlier. Mathews was not content, as were other extremists, to play soldier in the woods or cheerleader from the sidelines. Nor was the random, unorganized racial violence that often bubbles to the surface of American society to be his hallmark.
Amid a resurgence of white racial activism in America since the late 1970s, he saw the line racist leaders wouldn't cross, and he vaulted over it. He had no use for white sheets, burning crosses, or other
anachronisms in his new Order. His was a white underground with an ambitious plan: funding the far right's victory through robberies, battling its enemies with assassinations, and establishing its presence through a guerrilla force bent on domestic terrorism and sabotage.
Its aim: a separate white nation on U.S. soil. Mathews didn't fit the stereotype of a racist. He never smoked and didn't curse or swill beer at the taverns night after night. He was a generous, hard-working man with an ingratiating smile and a penchant for physical fitness who emerged from an ordinary American family where a person's race was never raised as a topic of concern. He did not come from a Klan family, wasn't abused as a
youngster, and didn't grow up around guns. Racism wasn't drammed into his head.
Yet he went on to stir among his friends a militant hunger for something elders of the radical right merely preached from the safety of their pulpits: a white homeland. Their hidden anger became a horrifying reality.
Most of Mathews's followers were not unlike him. Few possessed the emotional characteristics outsiders attribute to racists. There was a drifter here, an embittered loner filled with hate there. But they were outnumbered by people who abandoned careers, families, and lives filled with promise to follow the cause. Only one of Mathews's followers had done prison time. Most of the others were law-abiding folk who, as their frustration with America's course grew harder to handle, gradually, almost casually, slipped into the world of extremism.
They met informally and talked of family, their hopes for the future, the struggle to make a better and happier life. Then, inflamed by Mathews's call to arms and inspired by his fervor, they joined him in a conspiracy they believed, with stupefying confidence, would deliver Armageddon to America's doorstep.
Mathews once proudly announced to an assembly that he wished to rewrite Ralph Waldo Emerson's stirring poem about the rude bridge at Concord and "the shot heard 'round the world":
Out of the valleys, out of the fields pour the Aryan yeoman horde, their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Thence the Aryan farmers came and removed the Jew forever, forever from this world.
Instead, the Silent Brotherhood became the object of one of the most massive and expensive criminal investigations since the Patty Hearst-Symbionese Liberation Army case. In this and offshoot cases between 1983 and 1987, there were more than seventy-five arrests. In the Silent Brotherhood case, five people were killed. Counting the related cases, five more deaths occurred. Authorities were alarmed at the harrowing plans the group laid—sabotage against dams, water supplies, utility and communications lines—all designed to transform American cities into Beirut. They stopped Mathews only four months short of attempting the shutdown of a major U.S. city through terrorism.
Mathews followed the lead of leftist gangs of the 1960s and 1970s, snubbing the old right's predilection for goosestepping, nifty uniforms, and fancy weaponry. Mathews substituted stealth, the secret bomb, and the bullet. He wanted to become the Robin Hood of the radical right. In his Sherwood Forest, filled with destitute "racialist groups," as he called them, he would rob from the Jews and give to the Aryans. He wanted to cement the fragmented right wing, with stolen money as mortar, and link Klansmen, neo-Nazis, survivalists, tax protesters, militant farmers, Identity churches, and other groups whose unifying characteristic is distrust of the government.
They go over these events in the book, and something I was unaware of prior to reading it is that David Lane worked for a small newspaper that catered to farmers. The owner of the paper ran a series about the Protocols of Zion and later went on Berg's show. After the show, (((they))) pressured the papers advertisers (sounds familiar...) and the paper was forced to close.
