Word: militiaization
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...line. According to the town's police chief, Gary Krause, an officer found the car packed with weapons, including a .357-cal. revolver, three assault rifles, three 9-mm semiautomatic pistols and 700 rounds of ammunition. The three men identified themselves as bodyguards of Mark Koernke, the self-promoting militia propagandist. "They said they had just completed maneuvers," Krause recalls. While those three men didn't show up for their arraignment six days later, dozens of militia members did, turning out in camouflage fatigues and taunting police officers...
...everyone worries about the same things. Tom Metzger, who founded White Aryan Resistance in 1980 after breaking with the Ku Klux Klan, ridicules talk of a military invasion. "Ninety percent of that stuff is nonsense," he says. "We've got 10 million Mexicans flooding into this country, and the militias are worried about repainted helicopters." For their part, many militia groups aggressively weed out racists, and a few even have minority members. According to its leader, Fitzhugh MacCrae, New Hampshire's Hillsborough County Dragoons includes blacks, Latinos and Asians, and favors good works like shoveling snow for the elderly...
They do, however, have an unusually vigorous commitment to self-defense. "Within two years, I expect to see the Constitution suspended. We will be prepared to defend it," says Norman Olson, an independent Baptist minister who together with real estate salesman Ray Southwell founded the Michigan Militia. Toward that end, Olson has led army-style maneuvers on an 32-hectare tract of scrub pine and meadow dotted with obstacle courses and bunkers. Most of those who come for the training sessions are middle-aged, white, family men who must struggle to support their loved ones and struggle even harder...
Despite the popularity of these exercises, the militia stripped Olson of his command last Friday after he sent inflammatory faxes to the news media blaming the Oklahoma explosion on the Japanese government. When a Time reporter knocked on Olson's door later that day, Olson appeared in a blue bathrobe. "Why are you bothering me?" he asked. "Can't you see I'm trying to stop World War III?" The next day, both Olson and Southwell, who had helped prepare the fax, resigned under pressure from the militia...
...befits these go-it-aloners, militia members favor decentralization in their own ranks. The movement has "no national structure, no central command and no central leadership, either recognized from within the movement or without," says Jonathan Mozzochi, executive director of the Coalition for Human Dignity in Oregon. Partly, he believes, this is because it is a "grass-roots upsurge," but the lack of clear structure is intentional as well...