Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

MILITIA MOVEMENT • 425MILITIA MOVEMENT. The militia movement is a loosely organizedmovement promoting the creation of nonstate armed paramilitarygroups, ostensibly to defend the Constitution and liberty of the Americanpeople against perceived internal and external enemies. It is alsoa highly diverse movement that includes “patriot” groups, “commonlawcourts,” Freemen (or “sovereign citizens”), survivalists, taxprotestors, constitutionalist groups, and Identity Christian and whitesupremacist groups, some of whose members have proven to be engagedin criminal and sometimes politically motivated violence.Such now-defunct groups as the Minutemen and Christian-PatriotsDefense League can be viewed as predecessors of the militia movementthat appeared to gain momentum after the Estes Park, Colorado,meeting of patriot and militia group members in late October 1992,which was convened to organize support for Randy Weaver, a whitesupremacist arrested after a shoot-out with U.S. marshals and FederalBureau of Investigation (FBI) agents at Ruby Ridge in northern Idaho.In this meeting, Louis Beam Jr., a former leader both of the Ku KluxKlan and the now-defunct Aryan Nations, urged that these right-winggroups organize themselves into loosely confederated, autonomousarmed cellular groups without a central command structure to be ableto resist oppression by the federal government through numerous attacksthat could not be stopped by arresting key leaders or smashinga central leadership cell. The militia movement gained more attentionafter the Oklahoma City bombing when it became known that TimothyMcVeigh had contacted and attempted to join such groups.Right-wing extremist groups in the United States, including thosethat escalate into terrorism, have had two advantages that anarchisticleftist groups there have lacked: First, the antigovernment sentimentsof these groups resonate with the distinctive antiauthoritarian andindividualist tenets of the exceptional political culture of the UnitedStates. Second, there is a ready-made ethnonationalist core of whitemales who feel estranged from the current political establishmentwho are ready to be recruited into the militia movement.According to the Militia Act of the United States Code (Title 10,Section 311, Subtitle A, Part I, Chapter 13), all able-bodied maleswho are not members of the armed forces are part of the “unorganizedmilitia.” Title 32 of the U.S. Code, section 109(c), provides forthe creation of “state defense forces” that were originally created duringWorld War I and World War II essentially as “home guard” units