2008 Woodie Awards
The Minuteman Project: terrorists on the border
Lauren Fleer, International Socialist Club
Issue date: 11/6/06 Section: Opinions
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Two contrasting currents in the immigrants rights debate have been coursing through the veins of the country since spring. On one side you have a millions-strong, immigrant-led, grassroots civil rights movement. On the other side you have growing anti-immigrant hysteria perpetuated by the political establishment and mass media alike.
Migrant workers' struggles for better wages and conditions are often followed by the rise of violent and racist nativist movements. As historian Mike Davis explains, "The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, the organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with teargas and buckshot...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 threat or other."
The modern-day manifestation of this reactionary trend is the infamous Minuteman Project and its 60 or so spin-off groups. The Minutemen are an armed volunteer militia which patrols the US-Mexico border to prevent illegal crossings. The group's founder, Jim Gilchrist, seeking to legitimize the group in mainstream politics, has naturally told the press, "We are not racists. We don't endorse racism, and we're not a hate group."
The reality, however, obscured by the media, is that the Minutemen-advocates of gun-toting vigilantism-welcome into their ranks far-right fanatics, including KKK members and Neo-Nazis. "We're not going to show up as a group and say, 'Hi, we're the National Alliance,'" National Alliance spokesman Shawn Walker told Tucson's KVOA news before the April 2005 Minutemen border patrol. "But we have members of ours that participate."
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Migrant workers' struggles for better wages and conditions are often followed by the rise of violent and racist nativist movements. As historian Mike Davis explains, "The vigilantes are back. In the 1850s, they lynched Irishmen; in the 1870s, they terrorized the Chinese; in the first decade of the twentieth century, they murdered striking Wobblies; in the 1920s, the organized "Bash a Jap" campaigns; and in the 1930s they welcomed the Joads and other Dust Bowl refugees with teargas and buckshot...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 threat or other."
The modern-day manifestation of this reactionary trend is the infamous Minuteman Project and its 60 or so spin-off groups. The Minutemen are an armed volunteer militia which patrols the US-Mexico border to prevent illegal crossings. The group's founder, Jim Gilchrist, seeking to legitimize the group in mainstream politics, has naturally told the press, "We are not racists. We don't endorse racism, and we're not a hate group."
The reality, however, obscured by the media, is that the Minutemen-advocates of gun-toting vigilantism-welcome into their ranks far-right fanatics, including KKK members and Neo-Nazis. "We're not going to show up as a group and say, 'Hi, we're the National Alliance,'" National Alliance spokesman Shawn Walker told Tucson's KVOA news before the April 2005 Minutemen border patrol. "But we have members of ours that participate."
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