All The Rage
American millennialists contemplate an agenda of destruction
By Jack Levin
Millennium Rage: Survivalists, White Supremacists, and the Doomsday Prophecy, by Philip Lamy, Plenum Press, 295 pages, $25.95
During the 1980s, when Phil Lamy was a graduate student in the sociology department, he and I shared an interest in American countercultures, especially alternative youth movements such as beats, hippies, and punks. To shed some light on the values of the punk movement, we worked together on a study of punk magazines. One of our conclusions was that the punk movement, unlike its hippie predecessor of the 1960s, did not have an alternative plan for America.
In his fascinating and insightful new book, Millennium Rage, Lamy examines an important and vastly more terrifying countercultural influence in American life: contemporary apocalyptic movements such as militias, white supremacists, survivalists, and doomsday cults. Lamy discovers that some counterculturists of the 1990s do have an alternative plan for the country-an agenda of destruction. And he suggests that the Oklahoma City bombing, the tragedies at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and the appeal of the Patriot movement may be interconnected; all arise from a growing disillusionment with conventional American institutions.
America has always harbored utopians and individualists, Lamy points out; the Puritans are an early example. What distinguishes modern-day millennialists-those who believe the apocalypse is imminent-is their melding of Christian theology and prophecy with new forms of hatred. Many millennialists, Lamy writes, adhere to the bigoted religious teachings of the Christian Identity Church. At Sunday services, Identity leaders preach that white Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites depicted in the Old Testament, while Jews are actually the children of Satan. They maintain that Jesus was not a Jew, but an ancestor of the white northern European peoples. They consider African Americans "pre-Adamic"-a species lower than whites. The Identity Church believes in the inevitability of a global race war that only white people will survive. According to a recent Identity directory, there are Identity churches in thirty-three states, Canada, England, South Africa, and Australia.
Lamy asserts that the Christian Identity Church provides the religious and ideological underpinnings for various white supremacist organizations whose thinking is both conspiratorial and apocalyptic. For example, members of Posse Comitatus (Latin for "power of the county") argue that all government power should be focused at the county, not the federal, level. From this perspective, Internal Revenue Service agents and federal judges are mortal enemies of the white race, and the county sheriff constitutes the only form of legitimate government. Many Posse members refuse to pay taxes.
Not all, or even most, of millennial activists in the United States are members of the Identity Church or Posse Comitatus, nor are they white supremacists. They may believe instead in a conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights and in the inevitability of a coming conflagration initiated by federal agencies, but they don't blame blacks and Jews. They typically band together to defend themselves against what they regard as the tyranny of the "communist" federal government. They listen to militia-run shortwave radio broadcasts, share information on the Patriot Fax Network and the Internet, and meet to listen to a parade of speakers castigate the federal government for its unconstitutional policies and programs. Punks of the 1980s hardly went beyond slam dancing in mocking the violence of American institutions; millennialists of the 1990s stockpile food and semiautomatic weapons for "the big one."
Many modern millennialists are not waiting for God to destroy the old system and usher in the new, Lamy writes. Their reading of the portents that foretell apocalypse encompasses political and economic developments. For them, a declining rate of economic growth since 1970 is the result not of abstract forces such as global competition and automation, but of covert manipulation by people and institutions that benefit at the expense of the average American: one-world-order types, international bankers, the United Nations, the Federal Reserve system.
Lamy traces the "millennial myth" that we have reached the end of human history to the biblical Book of Revelation. Though inspired by mainstream religion, however, contemporary versions of apocalyptic activity are rooted as well in economic decline and rapid social change. Depressed conditions in rural America since the early 1980s have provided fertile ground for apocalyptic thinking. The corollary, Lamy says, is that many members of millennialist groups are more interested in butter than in guns-at least for now.
Lamy's final point should serve as a wake-up call for concerned Americans: today's millennial groups represent more than merely a fringe element in American society. Increasingly, middle-of-the-road Americans agree with many of the tenets of millennialism, even if they would not go into the woods with AK-47s on a Sunday afternoon to prepare for a coming crisis.
Growing numbers of Americans no longer trust conventional institutions. They may not believe that communists have taken over the White House and Congress, but they are convinced the federal government no longer works in the interest of average citizens. They may not believe that blacks should be sent back to Africa and Jews exterminated, but they feel somehow personally disadvantaged by affirmative action legislation, violent crime, and the burden of federal expenditures that do not seem to make a difference.
For these people, the credibility of American institutions is seriously in need of repair. Let us hope Millennium Rage will awaken concerned citizens to a dangerous threat-one that extends to the margins of our society but originates in the heart and soul of America.
Jack Levin is a professor of sociology at Northeastern.
Humanity amid abhorrent evil
Auschwitz-A Doctor's Story, by Lucie Adelsberger, Northeastern University Press, 150 pages, $19.95
In 1943, Dr. Lucie Adelsberger was an internationally prominent specialist in immunology and allergies and a star of the Berlin medical community. But as was true for millions of other Jews, her life changed forever when she was swept up in the madness of Nazi Germany. Selected for "relocation," she was jammed into a crowded railroad car and shipped to Auschwitz.
Upon arrival, Adelsberger was assigned to the Gypsy barracks as a doctor-a cruel irony in the face of the terrible conditions that the commandants inflicted on the inmates. "The wind blew with all its fury through the broad crevices in the wooden walls; cold and heat penetrated unobstructed, and the rain streamed through the holes and cracks in the inadequately tarred roof, soaking the dirt floor as well as the patients' bunks," she recalls.
What's more, the camp was in the throes of a typhus epidemic, and new arrivals were given blankets "stickily encrusted with spittle and excrement." Despite Adelsberger's pleas, Auschwitz undertook no disinfection program to prevent the spread of typhus. In the words of one camp staffer, "You're going to get it anyway."
Life-if it could be called that-in the camp was horrific. There were roll calls in which prisoners would stand "twenty-four and forty-eight hours in the broiling sun, in pouring rain, in frigid, subzero weather with howling winds . . . in threadbare shreds of garments . . . " There were camp guards who, for a "joke," would send a new prisoner on some imaginary errand beyond the fences encircling the camp. The oblivious victim, once beyond the sentry fence, would be "shot down in flight."
And there was the grim specter that loomed above them all at Auschwitz: the crematorium chimney. Adelsberger writes, "The chimney was the alpha and omega of all conversation. It was spread on dry bread at breakfast and dished up for dessert after every meal."
But she also recalls moments of grace that stood out in sharp relief from the daily horrors of camp life: people who pulled their friends from the lines of those fated for the crematorium and took their places; the two teenage girls who befriended Adelsberger and saved up their rations for two full weeks, threw a party, and invited her for a cheese and sausage sandwich that she calls "without exception the most precious gift I have ever received in my life."
Adelsberger wrote A Doctor's Story as a series of vignettes-snapshots of her time in the camp that are by turns horrific, bleakly ironic, and inspiring. There's nothing sensationalistic about her prose; in fact, given the subject matter, her writing seems amazingly restrained and understated. She says she tells her story not for shock value, but "as a lesson for future generations."
For many who read this memoir, it will remain forever a mystery how people could do such terrible things to one another. Yet a second, equally pro-found mystery emerges from A Doctor's Story: how could kindness and humanity exist-even flourish-among inmates in the presence of what was arguably the most abhorrent evil the world has ever known?
- Charles Coe
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