The men wear camouflage, their khaki backpacks are heavily loaded and they’re all armed with automatic weapons. They belly-crawl through the woods in full assault regalia, rush through a clearing in combat posture, set off explosive charges and open fire on an imaginary enemy.
When it’s all over, we see the blue United Nations flag in flames and the warriors raising their own flag: a small brown cross on a dark green and black background — the flag of the Colonial Christian Republic (CCR). The whole thing is accented by the singing of a somber anthem with a rhythmic, pounding bass line.
The video of this event is viewable on YouTube and it looks much like a recruiting film for the army. But there’s no such country as the CCR and the men wearing the camouflage battle dress uniforms aren’t actors. They belong to a paramilitary Christian group known as the Hutaree — a made-up name that supposedly means “Christian warrior.”
350 MySpace Friends
The militia members have posted several such videos on the Internet, designed to attract new recruits and to mobilize their cause. These rabid Christians obviously have supporters: the Hutaree MySpace site has over 350 “friends.”
The accusations brought against Hutaree by Detroit prosecutors give an insight into their intentions. They are charged with plotting the murder of a police officer and then bombing his funeral cortege hoping to foment an anti-government uprising. Among those charged are the 45-year-old militia’s commander, David Brian Stone, his wife and their two sons.
Hutaree’s homepage openly presents the group’s beliefs and its goal of establishing a new world order. They display their flag and crest and give an insight into their organizational structure; they say they hope to “reach out to those who have not the word of God and those who are lost in there (sic) ideas of Christ.”
Preparing for the End Times Battles
Above everything stands the motto “Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.” The paramilitary group adheres to a doctrine larded with biblical references; there’s hardly a sentence on the website that doesn’t contain the word Christian or the name Jesus. But their conspiracy theories have nothing to do with Christian virtues: “We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ.” And the duty of combating him and driving him out falls to the Hutaree.
According to Chip Berlet of the Political Research Associates organization, the Hutaree take conspiracy theories one step further. He says the Hutaree fear one-world government and they even see Europe as a threat, believing at one time that former High Representative of European Union Foreign Policy Javier Solana was the anti-Christ.
Hutaree now says the Satanic enemy is in their own country; more specifically, he sits in the White House and goes by the name Barack Obama. Michael Barkun, extremism expert on the faculty of Syracuse University, told the Detroit Free Press that Stone and his followers see the anti-Christ embodied in American government and believe it is their duty to destroy it.
“It Started out as a Christian Thing”
“All christians (sic) must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded,” the Hutaree homepage warns, designating Jesus as commander-in-chief. “The Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God (sic) wills it.”
Donna Stone, Hutaree leader Brian Stone’s ex-wife, recently spoke out about the cause, trying to explain how the group became increasingly radicalized. “It started out as a Christian thing,” she told the Christian Science Monitor in an interview. “You go to church. You pray. You take care of your family,” she said, adding that at some point her husband began arming himself, going “from handguns to big guns” and talking constantly of Judgment Day as it’s described in the Bible.
That was the last straw for wife Donna; the marriage broke up. Militia leader Stone legally adopted Donna’s son, Joshua, and included him in his world of weapons and doom; now they’re all behind bars.
America, the new Promised Land
The Hutaree militia is only one of many right-wing extremist militant groups in the United States; the civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center lists 127 other groups. Most of them claim to be defenders of the American heritage intended by the founding fathers that, according to their crude perceptions, means white Christians fighting against immorality, blacks, leftists, liberals, Muslims, the American government and the rest of the world.
It was the puritanical “pilgrim fathers” who sowed the seeds for America’s holy war. In the 17th century, pious English people immigrated to the New World. Here, far from a decadent Europe, the new settlers hoped to lead strict and godly lives, a virtue that didn’t prevent them from brutally dealing with the indigenous native population. They called their prosperous Christian colony God’s Own Country, a term many Americans still find synonymous with America.
Good Against Evil; Colonialists against the British Monarchy
The War of Independence (1775 – 1783) fought by the American patriots was styled as an apocalyptic war of good against evil, the virtuous colonialists versus the Satan on the British throne.
The United States became the new promised land, the new Israel. The political right in America refers over and over to this picture despite the separation of church and state and freedom of religion enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. When Sarah Palin speaks of “the shining city on a hill,” it’s a conscious reference to the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel according to St. Matthew.
The concept of a chosen people promotes a distrust of anything coming from without: progressive Europeans, the United Nations, liberal philosophy.
The Oklahoma Bombing Was an Act of Revenge
These concepts became extreme within the Hutaree militia and their belief that the end of the world was quickly approaching. This incident had bloody precedent in the recent past: the Branch Davidian sect similarly went off the deep end in 1993 when security police stormed their compound in Waco, Texas. Over 80 sect members were killed, among them women and children, after the hypocritical leaders had shot several policemen to death when they attempted to search the Branch Davidian headquarters.
The incident worked as a beacon for ultra-right militants. Two years after the Waco events, ex-soldier Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of a government building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people. McVeigh later said that the act was done as “revenge for Waco.”
Ed Kalnins, pastor of the Assembly of God church in Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, proved that belief in the “End Times” philosophy isn’t just a backwoods phenomenon when he announced, “I believe that Alaska is one of the refuge states… in the Last Days, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to this state to seek refuge.”
Sarah Palin was a member of that church until 2002. In the meantime, archconservatives agitate strongly against the Obama administration and migrate toward the Tea Party movement, a sort of individual rights shadow government.
The pious Sarah Palin recently spread more of her anti-Obama health care reform poison and showed just how close she was to opening fire when she wrote to her fans on Facebook saying, “Commonsense conservatives & lovers of America: ‘don’t retreat, instead ⎯ RELOAD!'”
It was advice apparently taken to heart by the Hutaree folks.
You are trying to disemble here. Sarah Palin is not the issue, it is overzelous government. Basing assault on the testamony of snitches and “undercover” whatever is tantamount to a police state.
This article is too short and tries to cover too much history to make much sense. Get over it and try again.