Posted on 05/08/2005 9:55:53 PM PDT by lonewacko_dot_com
...The vigilantes are back.
In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen. In the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese. In the first decade of the 20th century, they murdered striking Wobblies. In the 1920s, they organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns, and in the 1930s, they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with teargas and buckshot...
The most publicized of today's vigilantes are the Minutemen, who began their armed patrol of the Arizona-Mexico border on -- appropriately enough - - April Fool's Day.
The Tombstone, Ariz., group is the latest incarnation of the anti- immigrant patrols that have plagued the borderlands for more than a decade. Vowing to defend national sovereignty against the Brown Peril, shadowy paramilitary groups, ordinarily led by racist ranchers and self-declared "Aryan warriors" and egged on by right-wing radio jocks, have harassed, illegally detained, beaten and perhaps killed immigrants crossing through the desert cauldrons of Arizona and California...
In the event, they turned out perhaps 150 sorry-ass gun freaks and sociopaths who spent a few days in lawn chairs cleaning their rifles and peering through binoculars at the cactus-covered mountains where several hundred immigrants perish each year from heatstroke and thirst...
Mike Davis is the author of "City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear," and most recently, "Dead Cities: and Other Tales." E-mail us at insight@sfchronicle.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Please also contact readerrep@sfchronicle.com
On Monday, call 415-777-1111
Actually, it doesn't sound a whole lot different from what some people post here.
It's stupid then, too.
One Minuteman
U.S. Constitution Article 1 Section 8 Clause 15:
"The Congress shall have Power to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
But there is good news.
Enough of this type of thing, and nothing will be credible coming out of "Sodom by the Bay" (with all due respect for Herb Caen, and my once beloved city).
Dear Mikey:
You're JEALOUS, aren't you? YOU want to be a real man, too, don't you?
Huh.
The fact that this clown writes this hysterical screed proves that the Minutemen are having a positive impact.
Earth to Mr. Davis: Those illegal border-crossers don't just break immigration laws. They break other laws as well. They don't care. And if you ever accidentally stumble into one of their drug deals, you'll be dead meat. They won't care what kiss-ass columns you wrote for them. They'll cut you up just like anybody else.
It's not Mexicans that are the problem. ILLEGALS are. That includes Hezbollah terrorists who go through the border.
What a jack@$$....
Thanks for the alert!
I think a "jack" is smarter than this guy... He seems to have the IQ of a Pet Rock. (And even that may be too high.)
There's a difference between what the militiamen are doing and what lynch mobs did in the past. Militia are protecting against illegal aliens entering this country. Lynch mobs killed legal immigrants or citizens.
To my knowledge, no militia men have killed anybody and are cooperating with law enforcement.
Post 9/11, the issue of our porous borders is a much more fundamental security issue than it was in the 18th and 19th century.
It's like they cut-and-pasted a Usenet rant from some college freshman who's about to change his major to sociology just to keep from failing out.
I thought rifles were disallowed. The author is a first rate distorter and that means liar.
He is a co-editor of The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook
"Vigilantes have always been to the American West what the Ku Klux Klan was to the South: vicious and cowardly bigotry organized into a self-righteous mob. Almost every decade, some sinister group of self-proclaimed patriots mobilizes to repel a new invasion from some subversive threat or other."
"Their wrath has almost always been directed against the poorest, most powerless, and hardest-working segment of the population"
Thus in Md, NJ, NY, Pa., and several other places, by the time a guy gets thrown in prison the first time, he'd have been killed several times over in any rational society.
Now, the exception to that rule, i.e. the one thing which will get you thrown in prison first time, every time on a guaranteed basis, is to do any sort of thing which seriously embarasses the cops and/or the powers that be.
Being a "vigilante" is almost always good enough. A vigilante is basically doing the job which cops are supposedly being paid to do and advertising to the world the fact that they (the cops) are not doing it.
After reading the article I did I search on this guy and it was interesting. He has a few critics of his work. In particular a man by the name of Brady Westwater who has found massive inaccuracies in his facts in a recent novel. Mike Davis is just a Marxist who will not let facts get in the way of a good rant. Truly a "Useful Idiot".
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