PAGE 2
THE
PROPAGANDA
OF THE DEED
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
"Rebellion is a duty when the nation is being led to
destruction."
-A D O LF HITLER, "Mein K am pf'
Out of Chaos came The Order Before Oklahoma City,
before Weaver and Waco, The Order undertook to start the
revolution to remake boisterous, heterogeneous and perverse
America into an early Nazi Germany. Its members regarded
themselves as Aryan warriors, dragons of God, and they
practiced what they called the propaganda of the deed. They
robbed, burned and murdered until they were killed or captured
by agents of the government they aspired to overthrow, whiich
they named ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government because,
they claimed, it was controlled along with the nation's wealth and
commerce by communist Jews They were in their own comic
book mythology spearheads of the White Revolutionary Army
which would eliminate Jews, Negroes and homosexuals, and
their brief bloody rampage was a definitive if premature revel
ation of a new strategy of domestic violence by the extreme
right wing. The Order, which considered itself a nativist SS
corps, showed what a small group of terrorists can do to a
society laid open to their violence. In particular, it raised the
specter of a fanatical group armed with a nuclear weapon
As the diverse populations of the world move increas
ingly toward a global civilization, elements in every society resist
and clamor violently for separation and for racial and cultural
purification. In country after country, fanatically reactionary
individuals and groups have assumed the power that brutality
and terrorism bestow The Order dramatically reflected the
resurgence of anti-Semitism, racial hatred and religious fratri
cide that is troubling most of the w rid
The ancient and atrocious issue of white supremacy and
dominance, the persecution of other races and of religions that
are not puritanically Christian, is once more a theme of Ameri
can politics Radical racist and ultranationalist groups are
receiving attention far out of proportion to their numbers as a
result of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19. It is the far
right that now talks of revolution, sets up paramilitary and wlder-
ness survival training camps, and patterns its concepts and
plans for white revolt on a fictional account of Aryan revolution
in the 1990s that was written by a disaffected Oregon State
University physics teacher.
It might appear contradictory for adherents of the far
right to plan the overthrow of a generally conservative and whiite
male dominated government that it accuses of seizing power
from the people But these people are serious. Rightwing militia
groups that are dedicated to overthrowing ZOG have sprung up
in as many as 47 states in the past few years.
The common thread that unites right wing hate groups
'Is an extreme hatred for the federal government," according to
Klanwatch director Danny Welch. "Members of the radical right
see a historic juncture in vtfiich their agenda - grounded in a
hatred for the federal government and vehement opposition to
taxes and gun control, vwth race as an important but less
conspicuous thread - has the potential to resonate with a large
portion of the American public," Peter Applebome wrote for the
N.Y. Times: 'To a degree unusual in the recent history of the
radical right, the obsessions of these extremists are overlapping
with elements of the nation's mainstream culture." Welch
agrees. He thinks vtfiite supremacists are "heartened by how
much mainstream citizens seem to be voicing the same thing
They feel this is their time It's their time to make hay." 'The real
danger is the cross fertilization going on between groups that are
not racist and anti-Semitic and those that are," Steve Gardiner
of the Portland based Coalition for Human Dignity said
Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance, said
a few days after the Oklahoma bombing, "I have told people for
years, at least since 1984 when The Order declared war on the
central government of the United States that the government of
this country - what we call the criminals - had better start
listening to the dispossessed white people, the dispossessed
majority."
The rabid right fixates on Waco Two years to the day
federal officers obliterated the Branch Dividian religious sect,
killing more than 80, many of them children, two rightwing militia
members (according to the FBI which has arrested one and not
identified the other) bombed the Alfred Murrah Federal Building
in Oklahoma City, which killed 167, many of them children.
Metzger, who thinks the federal building was a strategic military
target ('These are the kind of things that happen at war," he
says) said that it was "regrettable" that the ATF (Bureau of
Tobacco & Firearms), which he says is "one of the most hated
organizations in the United States," was "crazy" to have a
children's daycare center in the same building as its regional
office.
The day of the Oklahoma bombing white supremacist
Richard Wayne Snell was executed for murder in Arkansas.
"Look over your shoulder; justice is coming," he said before he
died.
The date of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, has
been much discussed for its Waco connection, but it was also
the 220th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolu
tion in 1775, which might also have inspired the bomb heard
around the world
Whatever its sympathies or intentions, whether ZOG or
Magog, the government so bitterly hated by the radical right
would have serious problems mounting either an armed coup or
holy war against its society despite the claims of extremists, and
although many top officials openly and often vigorously sympa
thize with the white supremacists, a great many other officials of
the large pluralistic government apparatus are blacks and Jews,
not to mention women, liberals, homosexuals and other undesir
ables wrfio are on the far right's menu of removal. Purging all of
these people would entail the largest bloodbath since the Civil
War and would rival Stalin's massive pogroms of the 1930s and
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A J O U R N A L O F A R T A N D O PIN IO N
P U B L IS H E D M O N T H L Y IN A S T O R IA ,
O R E G O N , 9 5 5 2 4 T H S T R E E T 9 71 03
M IC H A E L P A U L M cC U S K E R
E D IT O R & P U B L IS H E R
RACHEL WYNN
late 40s. The fanatical fringe has no patience with such subtle
ties. Its purpose is to "cleanse" the society in the same manner
the Nazis accomplished in Germany and much of Europe.
The far right feels betrayed by the conservatives in
power. Their wild expectations of mass and swift removal of
Jews, blacks and homosexuals that were inspired by the Reagan
era and rekindled vwth the so-called Republican revolution, has
not occurred and they feel identical contempt for the New Right
that the New Left once felt for old liberals. In somewhat the
manner that the radical left punished vacillating liberals during
the Vietnam era, the far right flails at conventional conservatives
with religious exhortation and genocidal rhetoric.
White supremacist groups are yet a fringe minority and
remain diffuse but, as Time magazine said in 1977, although
"the whole Nazi cult is politically impotent, its capacity for
stirring hatred and creating violence is high.” The Order was a
volatile collection of impatient individuals from several white
supremacy groups vtfio were tired of inactive dogma — they
wanted to ignite the race/religious war their peers only talked
about: the propaganda of the deed. 'Terrorism is a function of
weakness, frustration and fervor," Irwn Suall of the Anti-
Defamation League of B'nai Brith said of the chaos committed
by The Order: "And our friends in the Kians and the neo-Nazi
groups were very weak, very frustrated and very very fervid. We
anticipated the country would take a hit, perhaps several hits."
By the time The Order was brought to ground in late 1984 with
its leader dead and the rest imprisoned or hiding, its "Aryan
warriors" and associated sympathizers from other white
supremacist groups had murdered blacks, Jews and policemen
in several states, attacked synagogues and churches, robbed
banks and armored cars - and a large supply of cyanide was
discovered at one of The Order's hideouts, enough to poison a
city. The only complaint the far right had about The Order was
that it started too soon.
It might not be altogether surprising that these groups
who wish to seize control of the country are thinking of beginning
with the Pacific Northwest, a direct contrast to a vision of the
region as an "Ecotopia" of political, multicultural and environ
mental harmony Fostered by the leader of the Idaho-based
Aryan Nations, the plan is to make the Northwest an "Aryan
Homeland." This would roughly encompass an area stretching
from the Tehachapi Mountains of central California, north to
Homer, Alaska (although Canada might be allowed to keep
British Columbia), and from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky
Mountains.
The Pacific Northwest is an attractive area for a whites
only civilization for a number of reasons, among them its under
development and relatively sparse and scattered population,
which is overwhelmingly whiite and with notable exceptions,
generally conservative. Eastern Washington and northern Idaho
in particular are "one of the comers of the nation whiere the nuts
roll," L. J. Davis wrote in a Harper's magazine story about The
Order's founder, Robert Mathews, who died in a celebrated
shootout with federal agents on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound
in December, 1984 "Here a tolerance for the more baroque
forms of extremist politics is not merely commonplace, it is a
hallowed tradition," Davis wrote.
The Aryan Nations has its headquarters in a 20 acre
fortress compound near Hayden Lake, Idaho. Its leader Richard
Butler, an evangelical minister and former aeronautical engin
eer, has drawn up plans and strategies for assuming power in
the Northwest, wrfiich he and others call the "Northwest Impera
tive." "Every species has to have a territorial imperative to
survive," Butler told a Daily Astorian reporter in 1986, nine years
after he was the first white supremacist to migrate to the chosen
Aryan homeland. "All we're doing is taking advantage of a
natural force." David Duke, former Ku Klux Kian Grand Dragon
and founder of a group he calls the National Association for the
Advancement of White People (NAAWP), predicts that by the
year 2020 the United States wall be a nonwhite country "When
white people become a minority, how are we going to maintain