http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20090703/OPINION0101/907030305/1006/OPINION
July 3, 2009
By Brandt Ayers
Some of my more liberal colleagues are warning about a wave of
right-wing extremism so scary it makes you want to pull the covers
over your head.
Cause of the liberal alarm is a Department of Homeland Security
report cautioning that tough economic times and the election of a
black president create a climate that could nurture domestic terrorism.
Predictably, right-wing bloggers are tarring the DHS report as a
"liberal-Commie-Democrat" plot to discredit conservatives and their candidates.
Around and around the merry-go-round goes in its same static circle:
a generation ago, the right wing sparked furious debate about what
they saw, with some justification, as the threat of left-wing terrorism.
The DHS report, "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political
Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," was
prepared in coordination with the FBI and was distributed to federal,
state and local law enforcement officials.
It is the product of enough lawyers and research assistants to
satisfy the litigious needs of a mid-sized city; it deserves to be
taken seriously.
Another reason for us here to have a heightened sense of alert is a
fact of history: the South and Alabama itself have been frightened
and hurt by, call it what it is, terrorism that came from far-right groups.
During the civil rights movement, the Anniston Star was called
"Communist" for its stance in favor of the legal and moral objectives
of the movement, but neither the paper nor the NAACP or SCLC set off
bombs, fired into residences and committed a nightrider murder.
Those acts came from the farther shores of the American right: the Ku
Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party, neo-Nazis, skinheads,
super patriots and the like.
America and the American South have never been good breeding grounds
for liberal or progressive causes; for left-wing movements, the
national and regional soil is so toxic that their first, green shoots
soon wither and die.
The radical left even when organized has been pretty tame, with one exception.
A poignant personal example of the wimpy left was an intern at the
paper in 1969. She was a recent Harvard graduate, bright, pretty and
excited, because her boyfriend was an organizer of the anti-Vietnam
War group, Students for a Democratic Society, and she was going to
their national convention.
With visions of a youth movement that would purge the nation of
hatred, militarism and partisan bickering, ushering in a new dawn of
peace and good will, she went to the June 18 convention in Chicago.
When labor progressives tried to take over and tame the radical
youth, the convention descended to tumult, which tore SDS apart, one
of whose splinters became the activist Weather Underground.
My sweet young intern returned disillusioned. "They're no different
than any other political party," she said dismissively.
But the determined anti-war Weathermen, who included Mark Rudd,
Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (no kin), would make their views known
with a loud bang -- a series of bombings through the 1970s triggered
by escalations in the war.
Compared to KKK Birmingham bombers who eviscerated Sunday School
girls without warning, the Weathermen were perfect ladies and gentlemen.
A Rand Corporation study found the bombings were "planned to avoid
inflicting casualties or widespread destruction; they are announced
ahead of time to allow the evacuation of the target area."
One murderous subgroup planned a horrifying demonstration, setting up
ironically in what might be considered an "establishment" shrine, the
Greenwich Village address where the founder of Merrill Lynch, Charles
Merrill and his son the poet James Merrill, had lived.
Among the radicals' targets for an explosion packed with
flesh-lacerating nails was an officers' club dance at Fort Dix, N.J.
Fortunately, the conspirators were inept. They set off their own
device, killing two of the plotters.
Had their plan been carried through, the Weathermen would have
enshrined the American left wing in the first rank of violence.
A chapter in the long, doleful anthology of violence in America,
which shows there is more to fear from right than left, belongs here
in the South. The Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory contains the
names of 2,400 among the more than 6,000 victims between 1865 and 1965.
The single worst example of domestic violence was committed on April
19, 1995, by a super patriot of the right, Timothy McVeigh, who
killed 168 and maimed many among the 680 injured when he blew up the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
As shocking as they are, the recent murder of a guard at the
Holocaust Memorial Museum and a doctor who performed abortions being
gunned down in church do not augur an organized wave of right-wing
terror. The dots do not connect.
But when fevered views combine with bottled frustration and the
perceived advantage of hated groups, even banal lives can explode.
That is what we fear, violence that comes unprovoked, anywhere, in
church or at work.
--
Brandt Ayers is publisher of the Anniston Star.
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