Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 357-58
Abstract
Nine days before the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Stern, an expert on hate groups for the American Jewish Committee (AJC), warned of just such an attack. In a Washington, D.C., press conference, Stern and other AJC professionals presented a six hundred page report entitled Militias: A Growing Danger warning of the "cauldron of disaffection, hate, conspiracy and violence brewing" around the country. They documented murders of federal workers and "anyone perceived as opposing the militia and therefore seen as doing 'the work of the government.'" Moreover, they suggested that the anniversary of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, would be a prime opportunity for a militia-style assault. Stern was thus among the few Americans who never thought that Middle Eastern terrorists had parked a truck bomb outside the Murrah Building. Hard as it was to fathom, he suspected that home-grown Americans were most likely to blame.
A Force upon the Plain, originally published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster, and now with a new foreword by the author, tells us a great deal about the militia movements of the early and mid-1990s. Its strengths are its immediacy, its forceful, serious, no-sweet-talking tone, and most of all its detail. Rather than the vague account of militia activity often provided in the media, Stern supplies concrete information: where major cells of militia activity are located, who the best-known leaders are, what their ideology-from the New World Order and black helicopters to anti-Semitism and other virulent hatreds-entails. For example, he draws clear connections between the incident at Ruby Ridge and the growth of the militia movement in the middle 1990s. Likewise, in the brief concluding chapters on the Oklahoma City bombing, he ties the ideologies of McVeigh and Nichols to those he has already examined.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln