Word: patriotism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...groups composed primarily of white men are signing up new members, stockpiling weapons and preparing for the worst. The groups, all privately run, tend to classify themselves as "citizen militias." They are the armed, militarized edge of a broader group of disgruntled citizenry that go by the label of "patriots." The members of the larger patriot movement are usually family men and women who feel strangled by the economy, abandoned by the government and have a distrust for those in power that goes well beyond that of the typical angry voter. Patriots join the militias out of fear and frustration...
...Patriots also fear that foreign powers, working through organizations like the United Nations and treaties like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, are eroding the power of America as a sovereign nation. On a home video promoting patriot ideas, a man who gives his name only as Mark from Michigan says he fears that America will be subsumed into "one big, fuzzy, warm planet where nobody has any borders." Samuel Sherwood, head of the United States Militia Association in Blackfoot, Idaho, tells followers, absurdly, that the Clinton Administration is planning to import 100,000 Chinese policemen to take guns...
...studies militias for Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts think tank, says militia units exist in 30 states, including large organizations in Michigan, Montana and Ohio, and he suspects there may be units in 10 other states. Although there may be hundreds of thousands of people who identify with the patriot movement, Berlet estimates that only about 10,000 people have actually joined the armed militias...
When it comes to organization, however, the troops go high-tech. The militia movement, says Berlet, "is probably the first national movement organized and directed on the information highway." Patriot talk shows, such as The Informed Citizen, a half-hour program broadcast on public-access TV in Northern California, spread the word that American values are under attack from within and without. Militias also communicate via the Patriot Network, a system of linked computer bulletin boards, and through postings in news groups on the Internet. One recent posting by a group calling itself the Pennsylvania Militia, more specifically...
...patriot movement was galvanized by two events: the bloody face-off in rural Idaho between white separatist Randy Weaver and law-enforcement officials in 1992 and the fiery siege of the Waco, Texas, compound of cult leader David Koresh in 1993. The violent confrontations helped convince many would-be militia members that the U.S. government was repressive as well as violently antigun and untrustworthy. "The Waco thing really woke me up," says Frank Swan, 36, a trucker who is a member of a militia in Montana. "They went in there and killed women and children...