United States lawyer Linda Thompson is a worried woman. She is worried that the US government is a totalitarian regime, and that it is run by criminals who reject the American Constitution. Worried that one night agents of the US government will come and beat down her door and send her to a concentration camp. Her fears, and her proposed course of action to combat them, were examined in Sheena MacDonald’s The Vision Thing (Channel Four, 7 September, 8pm).
Linda Thompson is one of a growing band of Americans who have formed militias to safeguard themselves from the Federal government. Current estimates are that about 50,000 US citizens are in such armed militias, waiting to wage a civil war on Washington and all its works. Their reasons for doing this range from the understandable to the downright paranoid. Thompson was apparently chosen for this interview because of her willingness to die—and kill—for the cause. But on the paranoia scale she rated comparatively low by current standards, even if she admitted to being a conspiracy theorist. In America today the militias are full of people who believe that the United Nations is run by Communists intent on subverting the sovereignty of the US. Others claim that an international leadership cabal called the illuminati is working to introduce a totalitarian one world government. Others—neo-Nazis—secretly hope that somebody will, but are along for the ride in the militias anyway.
Unfortunately, the grounds for Thompson’s fears were not examined in detail. However, while the US is very far from being a totalitarian state in the traditional sense of the term, her fears are not totally baseless. The US government is corrupt. It has been run by many people who have later been proved to be criminals. And though some way from an authoritarian regime, the provision has been made for it should the need arise. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was set up some years ago to co-ordinate Federal edicts in the case of an unspecified "national emergency”, when it will be given powers to intern dissidents, set up forced labour camps (which are ready and waiting) and nationalise or regulate everything that moves (and plenty that doesn’t).
This is all a far cry from the bourgeois republicanism of the US Constitution, and it is this that worries Thompson and her ilk so much. What has not occurred to them, though, is that they are fighting a losing battle. A freedom-loving private property society is their goal, but private property society produces the state and government to regulate it And as things get more complex, as the state steps in to cushion the fall caused by market failures, as nation manoeuvres against nation, as government manoeuvres against its citizens to keep them in line and prevent too much dissension, the powers of government grow big. Very big. The state—despite the best efforts of the right-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus—begins to commandeer more and more of the national income.
Because of their political background and indoctrination (by the US state, naturally) the Linda Thompsons of this world are unable to separate cause from effect. They cannot yet see that it is the private property society they love so much that produces such monstrous regulation and interference, and the frightening provisions for a "national emergency" state take-over. No capitalist society in the world has ever existed without a repressive state to snoop on dissidents, imprison people, indoctrinate them and send them to war. Class society and repression go hand-in-hand, but Linda Thompson is blissfully unaware of this, seeking some golden free-market nirvana that has never existed, and which in all probability, will never exist.
Civil war madness
When it comes to trying to establish her free-market heaven through confronting the might of the American state machine with semi-automatic guns and outdoor drills in the forests of Indiana, Thompson is on another loser. The militias could stage a civil war for the free market, but they shouldn’t kid themselves for a moment that they would win it. Linda Thompson stated in the programme that she didn’t expect to live long. Given all this, it might turn out to be a self- fulfilling prophesy.
She and those like her see only part of the problem, not the whole of it. Society does seem to be rotting on its feet, the powers of government are frightening, and the more traditional remedies haven’t worked. New solutions are needed, and not the ones generally on offer.
Nowhere is the scale of the problem more evident than the very heart of bourgeois society, the United States. In Britain the new wave of capitalist reformers join the Shadow Cabinet. In America they buy semi-automatics and start up militias.
Dave Perrin
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