Another, albeit anonymous, country heard from . . . "'Waco Jim' Cavanaugh, is that you?"

Folks,

I get at least one of these reactions a day from just about anything I write:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Reaction to the Telegraph article in the blogosper...":

If the government carried out "another Waco" – the 1993 storming of a cult's Texas ranch, in which 76 occupants died – "you'd see a reaction bloody beyond belief", he added.

no, you won't. you'll see a bunch of redneck blow-hards sitting on the couch complaining to one another with their thumbs up their asses just like last time. dream on, rambo. you won't do shit next time just as you didn't do shit last time.

Now, this, uh, gentleman, denigrates us while not having the gonads to use his own name. So, a coward denounces us as cowards. What shall we make of that? And who, then, does he serve? This is perhaps merely wishful thinking on the subject by somebody on the other side, don't you think?

I would also enter the factual objection, were this a court of law, that actually people did get off their couches following Waco and prevented another one by organizing into militias and carrying out a cold war with the Clintonistas. Insofar as "Rambo" goes, I offer this snippet from Churchill's To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face.

The impulse toward proactive violence was present in the millennial wing of the movement. It did not, however, characterize the movement as a whole. Most militia members recognized that proactive violence would undermine the twin goals of rebuilding civil society and establishing a credible deterrent against state violence. Moreover, few in the movement looked upon violence as a desirable outcome.

Violence lay at the core of militia identity, but there was very little celebration of violence when militiamen imagined performing the martial functions of citizenship. The significant presence of combat veterans within the movement lent a sober tone to most militia discussions of violence. Necessary Force, the newsletter of the Missouri 51st, reprinted an essay called "Rambo Wasn't There" in 1995. The author, who identified himself as "Danang, 1968," wrote of "lying on my face in a rice paddy, bullets tearing at my clothes, my pectoral muscles trying to dig me in deeper, thinking I was going to vomit and defecate at the same time." . . .

In rejecting the glorification of violence for its own sake that lay at the core of the new war fantasy, militiamen forged a masculine identity in which adherents of the warrior dream served as a powerful NEGATIVE referent (emphasis supplied, MBV). The hostility between constitutional militiamen and the white supremacist Right stemmed largely from the militia movement's disgust at the genocidal fantasies in white supremacist discourse. . .

Mike Vanderboegh also denounced Linstedt's incessant calls for a genocidal civil war: "Fires in the night, screams in the dark, bloated bodies of children on the road -- there is no reluctance here. No sense of horror at what is about to be unleashed upon the innocents of his own nation. No 'Don't fire unless fired upon' of the Founders. Impatience to strike, impatience to kill."

Revulsion at the warrior dream on display at Waco was a powerful stimulant to militia organization. When Harold Sheil (51st Missouri) ridiculed paramilitary police officers for wanting to "play Rambo," he spoke from an identity for which Rambo was a negative referent." -- pp. 261-265.

So, in summation, in the 90s we did not sit on our couches, organized as credible deterrent as we could to government violence and, far from being Rambo-wannabes -- which we viewed the militarization of the police as an example of -- we were the anti-Rambos in promoting citizenship and a collective, measured response to that state violence.

So, our anonymous critic is merely engaging in the same behavior he accuses us of. "Waco Jim" Cavanaugh, is that you?

Mike
III