A book on the militia movement

Few people would accuse the University of Michigan Press as being radically conservative. Quite the opposite, the University of Michigan is known to be at the other end of the spectrum. For instance, the entire university is due to go smoke-free by 2011, anywhere on campus, even outside. They are also known for the annual Hash Bash and the city of Ann Arbor is known for some of the most lenient marijuana laws in all of the USA. What is the Hash Bash?

Hash Bash is an annual event held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the first Saturday of April at high noon on the University of Michigan Diag. A collection of speeches, live music, street vending and occasional civil disobedience are centered on the goal of reforming federal, state, and local marijuana laws. The first Hash Bash was held on Saturday, April 1 1972 . . . The 2009 Hash Bash on April 4 celebrated Medical Marijuana’s victory in Michigan and was the largest gathering that the event has seen in years, with an estimated 1600 participants. . . .

Thus, when a fellow blogger, whom Father Orthoduck has debated strongly points him to a book about the militia which is published by the University of Michigan Press, it tends to draw the attention of Father Orthoduck. Like most Americans, Father Orthoduck tends to look at the militia movement as a scary right-wing expression just waiting to explode into violence. But, my fellow blogger insists that it was never like that in his experience and further presents the book as evidence, particularly since it is published by a known educational publisher.

So, in the interests of fair analysis, Father Orthoduck copies below the book blurb from the University of Michigan Press.

After the bombings of Oklahoma City in 1995, most Americans were shocked to discover that tens of thousands of their fellow citizens had banded together in homegrown militias. Within the next few years, numerous studies and media reports appeared revealing the unseen world of the American militia movement, a loose alliance of groups with widely divergent views. Not surprisingly, it was the movement’s most extreme voices that attracted the lion’s share of attention.

In reality the militia movement was neither as irrational nor as new as it was portrayed in the press, Robert Churchill writes. What bound the movement together was the shared belief that citizens have a right, even a duty, to take up arms against wanton exercise of unconstitutional power by the federal government. Many were motivated to join the movement by what they saw as a rise in state violence, illustrated by the government assaults at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992, and Waco, Texas in 1993. It was this perception and the determination to deter future state violence, Churchill argues, that played the greatest role in the growth of the American militia movement.

Churchill uses three case studies to illustrate the origin of some of the core values of the modern militia movement: Fries’ Rebellion in Pennsylvania at the end of the eighteenth century, the Sons of Liberty Conspiracy in Civil War-era Indiana and Illinois, and the Black Legion in Michigan and Ohio during the Depression. Building on extensive interviews with militia members, the author places the contemporary militia movement in the context of these earlier insurrectionary movements that, animated by a libertarian interpretation of the American Revolution, used force to resist the authority of the federal government. . .