In 1996, Max, a Usenet poster from Texas, forwarded to me and my
girlfriend link to a website that
contained a fictional account of a post-apocalyptic survivalist
community. It started with a survivalist group building a hideout
in the woods and proceeded, after the civilization collapsed, through
all kinds of trials and tribulations. We read it, and we found it
interesting, until it ended in a ridiculous scenario of the
aforementioned survivalists finding some old F-15s and fighting the
new government that some people, described as being villainous, were
trying to establish.

I found it an interesting piece of writing. Given that the writers
were right-wingers, I give them credit for two things they did right,
and that many of their predecessors had not done: Reach out to Jewish
people and recognize the positive role that women can play as
peacemakers.

What's wrong with that piece? Where do I start. First of all, it saw
the civilization as being about to collapse, with destruction of most
of its hardware and most of its population. While this scenario may
appeal to the apocalyptic thinking of Generation X (and of many in
places like Texas), it is something that shows complete ignorance of
the forces that shape the world and the principles on which the Western
civilization is based. It is the kind of sky-is-falling silliness that
people envision when they feel disenfranchised from the destiny of the
civilization and do not know how it works. And for a large section of
American population to not know how their country works is frankly
abominable and indeed dangerous to the fate of the country. As a woman
I know from Spain said, it is very dangerous when there are many
ignorant people in a country as powerful as the United States.

Secondly, it referred to people from Boulder as Maoist cannibals. Now
I've spent over two months in Boulder - in a youth hostel, no less -
and out of all the people I met there only one described himself as a
Communist. Most others were adventurers, scientists, students, skiers.
writers, followers of Castaneda, Wiccans, New Agers and free-thinkers
of all stripes and colors. And most certainly none of them was a baby-
eater.

Third, it recommended a militaristic community as the form of social
organization. This, indeed, is the most un-American concept to have
probably ever been invented by so-called American patriots. One of the
greatest contributions of America to the history of the world was the
insistence of its founders on keeping military subordinate to civilian
control. The record of military states everywhere in the world is
abominable, in just about everything, from human and civil rights to
economic progress and livable social conditions. The military thinks in
terms of how things can be killed. That is not the frame of mind that
protects people's liberties, nor the frame of mind that creates
prosperity, nor the frame of mind that provides creative solutions
required for progress or - most importantly - the benign, wise,
compassionate dynamics that are necessary to provide people a social
and political climate in which can flourish life, liberty and
happiness by any standard. The military sees everyone as soldiers to
command. That is not a recipe for a habitable or free civilization. And
it most certainly constitutes a hideous degradation and not improvement
upon America's status quo; a degradation that seeks to take away from
people everything worthwhile that those true to America's actual
founding principles have laboriously over centuries achieved, and with
which they inspired the bulk of the world toward capitalism and
democracy.

Finally, what they wanted was, essentially, feudalism. What they
wanted, was to destroy the principled, checked-and-balanced American
government that made it its business to defend people's rights against
depredations by entities both governmental and private, and to replace
it with a patchwork of communitarian regimes that exercised absolute
power over the lives of the people inside them and violated their life
and liberty (not to mention all other things that go with that) in a
far, far worse manner than the American government has done to its
citizens in a long time. The liberty they wanted, was that to keep
everyone in their communities under a noose - under an informational
blockade, an economic blockade, and ultimately a political blockade -
and to keep away the organs of power erected deliberately to defend
people's rights against, well, them. They wanted a regression to Europe
in 13th Century or Afghanistan under Taliban and claimed it to
represent liberty. It did not; it represented the worst form of
slavery - the slavery in which people are kept in perpetual fear and
perpetual paranoia and disinformation, with the oppressive militaristic
communities controlling all aspects of their existence and information
that they were to receive, and exercising life-and-death power over
everyone in their communities and everything around them.

The 1990s were to the Right what 1960s were to the Left: A case of the
nation moving so far in one direction that it essentially went insane.
By what measure do I mean insane? By the measure that they ended up
wanting to destroy the civilization. The militias and survivalist
communities of the 1990s was the right-wing version of 1960s hippie
communities. The ideology differed, and the character of settlements
differed; but their shared belief - that the civilization was evil and
that retreating into communities, whether with sex and marijuana and
meditation or with bunkers and AK-47's and Bible study, was the right
thing to do - was shared by both sets of extremists.

The two sets of madmen indeed shared the same apocalyptic outlook. The
hippies believed that the nuclear war was at hand, and that, in words
of Jim Morrison, "I will get my kicks before this sh*thouse goes down
in flames." The survivalists believed that the Western civilization was
to come to a crashing hault as a result of failure of its political and
economic system. And while the hippies' position is understandable,
given the fact that both USA and USSR possessed enough nukes to destroy
the world several times over, the survivalists' position can only be
ascribed to ignorance of the world in which they lived - an ignorance
particularly of the man's ability to come up with creative solutions
that solve problems and move the world forward; which ignorance
followed directly from their oppressive, militaristic, prissy, anal-
retentive attitude that destroyed all seeds of creativity wherever
they happened to be.

The central claim of the Right throughout 60s and 70s, and also 80s,
was that they were preserving the civilization from people who wanted
to destroy it. And in 1990s, they wanted to destroy it themselves. It
is necessary for historical benefit that the people who used the most
cruel and malicious tactics to prosecute people they thought
irrational and irresponsible be reminded of and made to account for
their own irrationality and irresponsibility. Anything else would be
hypocrisy and failure to account for their sins.

Ilya Shambat.



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