Fears of an anti-Obama far-right resurgence are fantasy
Hysteria about the 'rise' of far-right groups under Democratic presidents have become almost traditional in the United States
It is not only within the European Union that people are nervous about political extremism. In America, too, a panic is spreading about the rise of the Far Right.
Last week's attack on Washington DC's Holocaust Memorial Museum by a crazed 89-year-old gunman, and the murder, ten days earlier in Kansas, of abortionist George Tiller, have prompted a surge of anxiety about a coming wave of militant violence in the Age of Obama.
Media pundits have rushed to the airwaves to declare that conditions are ripe for a groundswell of racist radicalism. The president, after all, is a black man whose middle name is Hussein. Unemployment is at its highest in 25 years. Scariest of all, firearms sales have rocketed as conservative gun-owners react to reports that the new administration is going to take away their rights.
America is apparently a ‘fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists’
Even before last year's election, authorities in Tennessee had arrested two neo-Nazi youths who were allegedly plotting to kill the Democratic nominee and 88 black children. In April the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a document warning that the current state of the country made for a "fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists". The report was promptly shelved after Republicans denounced it as anti-conservative scaremongering.
After the latest atrocities, angry liberal voices are demanding that the DHS's warnings be heeded. But two or three shootings - no matter how horrifying - hardly indicate a broad trend.
It should be remembered that the United States experienced similar bouts of hysteria about the rise of a fanatical ultra-right under popular Democratic presidents of the 20th century. There was the infamous Brown scare about American fascists who opposed FDR; the popular outcry against the anti-Communist Minutemen during the presidency of JFK; and the widespread alarm about ultra-right militias in the Bill Clinton years.
Yet, however real the threat from far-right fanatics, the public and media responses have tended to be wildly disproportionate, even dangerous. In 1995, after the disgruntled loner 
Filed under: America, Barack Obama, Racism, Far-right, Extremism
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Seats/shmeets - they have guns & explosives and few functioning neurones. This is a classic piece of rabble-soothing, not actually mendacious but highly tendentious. McVeigh was no loner - his brief, heavily drugged up court appearances, to plead "Guilty"meant NO cross examination nor enquiry into where/how such a loser obtained the wherewithal for his outrage. 'Go figure' as they say in the land of the free (of thought).
Posted by allan kessing at 11:56am on June 18, 2009
I would just like to take issue with one point in the article: it IS quite fair to draw the analogy of the "jihad" with Bill O'Reilly's use of the description "Tiller the baby killer". It is not as suggested "as ridiculous as right-wing windbags calling every Muslim a terrorist". It would rather be comparable to using the term terrorist in referring to a particular Muslim who was KNOWN to have bombed and killed civilians. Dr Tiller was after all known to have carried out abortions. To any anti-abortion fanatic, pointing the finger at a "baby killer" is very akin to a jihad.
Posted by Danny O'Connell at 5:14pm on June 18, 2009
Nonsense. Bill O'Reilly is openly incendiary and pursued a campaign that encouraged "direct action" against Tiller which a yankee gun-nut eventually pursued. Nor are these neonazis harmless, as the murder at the Holocaust Museum recently proved. But if we extrapolate further, you could say that the Iraq War propagated by right-wing extremist nut Donald Rumsfeld represents the reality of far-right activism in the United States - genocidal murder of civilians, concentration camps, and all the trappings of a fascist state.
Posted by neil mcgowan at 9:13pm on June 18, 2009
Why do people continue to repeat the Republican lie that Clinton "didn't pay adequate attention to ... al-Qaeda"? Short memories, I guess. Clinton bombed an al-Qaeda meeting place, missing Bin Laden by less than an hour (if I recall correctly). At the time, the Republicans/media claimed he was trying to distract us from the Lewinsky affair! How quickly we forget.
Posted by bobk at 6:14am on June 19, 2009
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