Originally Posted by roachboy

the minutemen are a militia group--just have a look at their webpage.

if you looked into these groups at all during their last public heyday (late 1980s-oklahoma city bombing), you may know about them: extreme right wing, xenophobic paramilitaries that are in the main convinced that one or another version of zog (the "zionist occupation government")--which in back in the day when groups like this would actually spell out their politics was usually routed through some loopy "protocols of the elders of zion"-driven interpretation of the united nations to group the federal government, the un and some fantasy world jewish conspiracy together---was trying to invade the united states, one way or another---the central fear that drove the ideologies of many of these groups was that this phantasm was acting to deprive folk of their guns and by doing that reduce them to slavery.

in this you have the entire logic behind posts from the dunedan and dk in the various repetitions of gunthreads that have appeared of late in this forum.

from this followed the 1990s obsession with black helicopters.
[[which i used to enjoy reading or hearing about, actually, because the various attempts to "prove" the presence and by extension the activities of this phantasmatic persecuting Other usually amount to a strange american rural camo-clad repetition of the film "blow-up"]]

you have the same curious obsession with an amalgm of tidbits drawn arbitrarily from american history---the minutemen working to defend the constitution understood in the narrowest possible sense---the sense that makes a problem of jury trials for example---the sense that rationalizes a xenophobia that all too often spills over into racism---etc etc etc. so these folks present themselves as revolutionaries, their actions as a potential repeat of the american revolution, the outcome to be a repeat of a reduced and sanitized version of the outcomes of the revolution (articles of confederation anyone?)

what is annoying about these groups is not their extreme right politics--extreme in the sense that they manage, somehow, to make mainstream conservative ideology appear moderate---because generally once the actual politics are outlined, the delegitimation of them is nearly a matter of course....

what is annoying is the basic dishonesty in the presentation of their politics.

these folk act as though the possession of guns is in itself an entire politics.

the arguments that you see here on this score presuppose that there is one and only one political correlate of gun ownershp and that this political correlate is articulated by militia groups themselves.

except you erase the term "militia groups" and replace it with "citizens" or "armed citizens".

they buttress this with fantasies of directionless, politics-free armed insurrection---fantasies that outstrip the most surreal trotskyist variants in that the trotskyists at least understood that revolutionary action was political and that if a revolution was to be coherent it would be so on the basis of the political line that ordered it--not on the basis of whether the people who might participate in it were or were not armed.

revolution--insurrection---is an act that presupposes political orientation.
having a gun is not a political orientation.
the rest of milita group ideology is a political orientation, however.

if folk are going to make arguments from that position, they could at least be honest about it and make the political arguments--stop pretending that there is something magic about a gun that translates automatically into a series of political statements.

for most militia groups, gun possession is a mode of demarcating "real americans"---for militia groups, "real americans" are under assault by globalizing capitalism, by transnational institutions, by federal institutions, by immigrants, by everyone and anyone who has any degree of ambivalence about gun ownership. this is the narcissistic fantasy world of many tniy revolutionary groups, which try to generate confirmation of their politics from a sense of being-persecuted---the correlate is that their significance politically is demonstrated by the elaborate attention being paid to them or to their political line by the forces of Order. once again, this functions to bypass thinking about the actual content of the line itself, a kind of flip of anarchist direct action politics that tries to substitute the number and violence of confrontations with police for judgements about the content of their politics.

i do not see a single positive aspect of allowing this kind of group to assume (for itself) any kind of function.
they should stick to organizing paintball sessions and fantasizing about restoring an 18th century white america in the taverns friendly to boys in camo.