There is a great deal of truth in the proverb saying “As you sow so you shall reap”. At the moment, we witness the U.S. fall victim to this inescapable law, which, in the realm of history, typically materializes within the cycle of 70 years. In a remotely congenial example, Russia’s Bolsheviks degenerated over the seven decades of their undivided rule into a corrupt elite which ultimately betrayed the Soviet Union in the late 1980ies. The present-day America's patriots, a group planted by the U.S. Administration as a grassroots anticommunist movement, in the long run has morphed into a threat to the elite which authored the project…
The constellation of over 800 groups bracketed within the Patriot Movement includes organizations like the League of the South, Americans for Legal Immigration, the Michigan militia, the John Birch Society, and the Constitution Party. The Oath Keepers, a swelling relatively new group, is of special interest in the context – it recruits former army, police, and security servicemen eager to rise to the defense of the constitution in case the U.S. government oversteps the limits it prescribes. The above groups exercise virtually no coordination and are fairly heterogeneous ideologically, but their members share certain core beliefs which altogether combine into what can be described as the contemporary U.S. “patriotic doctrine”. U.S. patriots hold that the U.S. culture is based on an array of fundamental values which every citizen of the country must respect and defend as necessary.
One of the values, it must be noted, is the American exceptionalism. According to patriots’ world view, the U.S. was founded as the first ever country of free and equal citizens, with a constitution which imposes strict constraints of the government’s right to intervene in their private existence. Being the first to adopt the principles, the U.S. is entitled to the mission of spreading liberty worldwide.
At the same time, in contrast to both republicans and democrats, the majority of the Patriot Movement groups oppose the idea that the U.S. should in any way enforce democracy abroad. They criticize the U.S. government for meddling in other countries’ affairs or attacking them under the pretext of backing democracy and maintain that the U.S. should lead exclusively by example. The emphasis on individual rights and the resultant rights of the nation as a whole typically translates into the rejection of all kinds of state stewardship and into the aversion to the existing U.S. tax system. The patriots suspect that U.S. citizens lack control over how the government uses the money it collects in the form of taxes. They charge that those are largely absorbed by projects invented by the military-industrial complex and by overseas military campaigns, thus benefiting the chosen few. On top of that, the U.S. patriots are worried that the wars the U.S. fights in various parts of the world antagonize other nations and provoke retaliation strikes like the one which took place on September 11. In response, the U.S. government clips the citizens’ rights in the name of national security, though liberty has been the nation’s main value since the foundation of the country. In fact, quite a few in the ranks of the Patriot Movement buy into the conspiracy theory asserting that the September 11 attack was masterminded by a part of the U.S. ruling elite in an attempt to pass control to the world government which the financial oligarchy plans to install. Part of the package is that the patriots slam the U.S. Federal Reserve as a body no longer accountable to the U.S. government or Congress. They feel that the Federal Reserve represents a group of major banks owned by Jewish tycoons who are thus given a grip on the whole country. To many – likely, to the majority – of the patriots, the U.S. overseas military campaigns appear to be waged under the influence of the Jewish lobby in the interests of Israel rather than of the U.S., with the American nation having to pick up the tab.
The Patriot Movement cherishes the first ten amendments to the Constitution which are known as the Bill of Rights. Thomas Jefferson who inspired it famously wrote in 1787: “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth”, but implicitly it is common for the patriots to continue to assume that the U.S. Constitution actually pledges equal rights to “propertied white men” [1]. The amendments which made equal rights uniformly available to the U.S. population were passed a century after the Constitution was adopted and, as the patriots tend to believe, under the influence exerted by the forces which did not share – nor currently share – the traditional U.S. values such as the European culture, work ethics (as distinct from the financial and stock markets gamble), and strictly heterosexual marriage.
The U.S. sovereignty occupies a key line on the patriots’ agenda. They are deeply convinced that no other country, international organization, or nation may be allowed to dictate to the U.S.. In line with a creed, they are critical of the U.S. involvement with the UN, the WTO, the IMF, etc., which constrain the U.S. Administration’s decision-making and seem to give external forces a measure of control over the country. Concerned, the Patriot Movement constantly presses the demand that the U.S. Administration stay immune to outside influences from potentially hostile actors. In the past, the list of those was topped by the Soviet Union and the international communist movement (which explained the witch hunt in the epoch of McCarthyism), and these days suspicions are directed towards Israel, the politicized Islam, the centers of financial might, and the proponents of globalization and multiculturalism. Mistrust of Russia and China persists in the Patriot Movement and fears of the possible Russian-Chinese alliance run high, though it is not unusual for Americans to think of Moscow and Beijing as victims of the same conspiracy spearheaded by “the world government” and, consequently, potential partners of the U.S. patriots, in case Russia and China demonstrate readiness to safeguard their sovereignty and national identities.
The Patriot Movement has a lot in common with white supremacists and national socialists, a conglomerate currently counting around 600 groups like the National Alliance, the American Resurrection Party, Aryan Nations, the American Front, and the American Nazi Party. Their membership – almost one million people – believe in innate intellectual superiority of the descendants of white Europeans, citing research which was conducted in the U.S. and allegedly showed that the IQ demonstrated by whites tends to be 10% higher than among representatives of other nations. The claims may sound highly controversial, but it is a fact that many of the white parents across the U.S. do not want their children to attend the same schools as black and Hispanic kids. The motivation is not necessarily racial – simply, the curricula in U.S. schools are geared towards the development levels of nonwhite children, meaning that the white children have to shed a part of their competitive advantage in gaining admission to prestigious universities or competing for jobs. Higher education levels along with the traditional work ethic and the motivation to study used to make the descendants of Europeans top achievers, and the schools’ tendency to even out the development levels of whites and nonwhites will certainly hurt the white children’s prospects, especially considering that the official policy is to disadvantage them in the run for jobs.
No doubt, the relatively widespread underperformance and antisocial conduct of nonwhite children can be explained away with a reference to the disparity in starting conditions offered by families, but, in any case, it is clear that the decline of the U.S. educational standards has reached the point at which the security of the U.S. – and of the rest of the world – is at risk. As jobs in the U.S. Administration are being filled in by grossly uneducated individuals, the level of the U.S. governance obviously plummets. Z. Brzeziński wrote in 2010 in a paper titled From Hope to Audacity: “How can a public unfamiliar with geography or foreign history have even an elementary grasp of, say, the geopolitical dilemmas that the United States faces… In that context, demagogically formulated solutions tend to become more appealing, especially in critical moments” [2]. Consequently, the concerns of the Patriot Movement members and white supremacists over the impact of the U.S. departure from its original European character on the future of their children is not groundless. The white population in the U.S. could tolerate the liberal multicultural exploits only as long as it retained the majority status, but now that the melting pot no longer works and the racial and ethnic minorities across the U.S. (as well as in Europe) show little interest in learning the language and borrowing the lifestyle of the majority, the radicalization of the whites is imminent. The U.S. Christian communities contribute to the debate, perceiving the march of atheism and Islam as a threat not only to their churches but also to the U.S. culture as a whole.
It is logical to expect that, due to the above, the Patriot Movement will increasingly drift towards white supremacism, while its alliance with national socialists who see state interventionism as a universal cure is unlikely. The U.S. Nazi similarly oppose the policy of giving various advantages to people of color, want stronger barriers in the way of illegal immigration, and call for an end to the U.S. overseas military campaigns. Like patriots, they suspect that the U.S. Administration has been short-leashed by the forces planning to establish a “world government” and, with the purpose in mind, seeking to undermine the cultural and racial self-awareness of the U.S. whites. The key difference is that the Nazi hope to reverse the process with the help of what they call the White Power, a brand of racial dictatorship which the patriots who attach great importance to individual and communal liberties and rebel against state interventionism will never embrace.
It is by all means up to Americans to decide what shape interracial and interethnic relations in their country should take and how to balance the roles of the government and individuals, but it is impossible to deny that serious questions arise in the context. The Patriot Movement and the white supremacists disapprove of the new world order which is being delivered by globalization and promises the U.S. the position of a global policeman. They hate the idea that their children would be drafted to missions scattered around the globe while the threat of interracial conflict hangs over the U.S. proper. They are angered that Washington starts wars and uses the U.S. military might internationally in the interests of big money, as they believe, of the Jewish lobby. It must be taken into account that the views held by the U.S. patriots fit neatly with the perceptions of the forces around the world which attempt to defy the global elite’s control. With their perspectives far from coinciding, the former and the latter have overlapping interests, and throwing some support behind the U.S. patriots – via the social media or by other means – is a sound tactic for their peers in other countries. The strengthening of the Patriot Movement’s sway over the white American community and the U.S. patriots’ growing mistrust of the U.S. government may, to an extent, force it to refocus on domestic issues and tame its military and political interventionism internationally. That would certainly benefit the American nation as well as the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, or any of the post-Soviet republics and hold a promise of an inclusive international coordination. “As you sow so you shall reap” is a paradigm that applies without exceptions – and clearly holds true in the case of the U.S.
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1. “The “consent of the governed“ meant propertied white men only“ (http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice_prisoners-rights_drug-law-reform_immigrants-rights/bill-rights-brief-history)
2. http://www.globalaffairs.ru/number/n_14571
