Dissident Veteran For Peace

The one basic attitude which all of these people [i.e. "self-identified patriots"] have in common is a deep distrust of government. After much inquiry, I have formulated the following statements which, I believe, accurately reflect the beliefs and concerns shared by most Americans who consider themselves "patriots":

1. Both the federal and state governments are violating their constitutions in numerous major and dangerous ways, particularly regarding the individual rights guaranteed to all Americans in the Bill of Rights.
2. These documents are contracts between government and its citizens with the primary purpose of limiting government power, scope, and functions. As a result of these violations of the rights of the people, we no longer have the same government; government will do whatever it can get away with; government can be manipulated to the advantage of those wielding the reins of power and their cohorts, associates, and financiers.
3. This type of government and social order is contrary to everything the founders of our country tried to create.
4. The average American worker now pays over 50 percent of his or her earnings in taxes--income tax, excise tax, sales tax, property tax, and so forth, and the huge hidden tax of government. Given the size of the federal budget and our rapidly decreasing standard of living, many Americans wonder where their hard-earned dollars are going. 
5. People within the U.S. government and power elites are trying to subsume our country under a United Nations-controlled one-world government, endangering the sovereignty of the United States and the validity of its constitution. 
6. Beneath all the rhetoric, the New World Order is simply the concentration of power into a few hands and a global monopoly over the sources of wealth.
7. The mainstream media, both print and electronic, is controlled by the same big-money monopolies working hand-in-glove with the government, resulting in a public overwhelmed by trivia and dangerously uninformed about the issues that affect them most.
8. America's founders warned that, somewhere down the road, citizens might have to defend their free form of government from usurpers—whether within or without the country's borders—and such a time may be close at hand.

If you sympathize to any extent with these statements, you share some of the grievances of the patriot movement. Perhaps you even find yourself, as I do, in strong agreement with many of them. Clark McCauley, professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College, states: "If you think these people are crazy, you have to ask [if] there [is] anything the federal government could do that would make you willing to take up arms against it. If you can answer no, then you're entitled to think these people are crazy. But if you say yes, then you'd better hazard a thought that [militia members] are human beings just like you."

Source: Barbara Dority. "Is the extremist right entirely wrong?" The Humanist. 21 Nov. 1995.

Labels: politics, quotations, resistance, United States