FEAR itself

Here's an astonishing story: An allegedly "anarchist" cell of Army men at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, planned a number of anti-government attacks. They called themselves FEAR -- Forever Enduring, Always Ready.

Although the AP doesn't emphasize the ultimate target, they hoped to kill Obama. The group was arrested after authorities investigated the murders of a former soldier named Michael Roark (19) and his girlfriend Tiffany York (17). Apparently, they were killed because they knew about FEAR and threatened to snitch.

The leader of the gang was a private with the unusual name of Isaac Aguigui. He funded the plot to the tune of half a million dollars; the money came from an insurance policy he had taken out on his deceased wife. The AP story strongly hints (without stating outright) that Aguigui may have murdered his wife.

Aguigui attended the 2008 Republican convention as a page. He was also home-schooled within a religious family.

One of the soldiers has made a plea deal to turn evidence against the others.

The prosecutor said the militia group had big plans. It plotted to take over Fort Stewart by seizing its ammunition control point and talked of bombing the Forsyth Park fountain in nearby Savannah, she said. In Washington state, she added, the group plotted to bomb a dam and poison the state's apple crop. Ultimately, prosecutors said, the militia's goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.

Four guys hoped to do all this. I'm reminded of the small revolutionary group in The Life of Brian, making plans to destroy the entire Roman Empire within twelve months: "Yeah, twelve months. And let's face it -- as empires go, this is the big one!"

The A.P. story may have misled its readers by calling these people "anarchists." So far, nothing indicates that traditional anarchist philosophy -- of the kind that prevailed in Catalonia in 1936 -- motivated these soldiers. In fact, I doubt that such a philosophy motivates anyone to do anything nowadays: Anarchism is, at best, the psychic plaything of a handful of pseudo-intellectual talk-talk-talkers wasting their lives in coffee houses. Although there are quite a few in this country who (secretly or publicly) harbor dreams of a revolutionary overthrow, I doubt that any of them are actual anarchists.

(Granted, one can argue that anarchism and classical Libertarianism overlap to a large degree. That's a subject for another post.)

The "anarchist" misnomer will allow right-wing bloggers to link this assassination plot to the Occupy movement. Of course, the very idea is absurd. In the first place, I don't consider the Occupiers to be genuine anarchists, although some ignorant young protesters may have embraced that label. In the second place, we're dealing with a scheme directed against Obama, concocted by four military men in Georgia who were led by an avowed Republican. Nothing in the previous sentence says "Occupy" -- while every word of it reminds us of the Tea Party.

Nevertheless, I have no doubt that Rush Limbaugh will find a way to blame this plot on the Democrats. After all, he blames Hurricane Isaac on Obama. As this left-leaning blogger puts it:

To recap:  Guy supposedly running this plot to assassinate the President, was a page at the GOP Convention in 2008.  If the shoe had somehow been on the other foot, this would be the top news story in America for the next week.

Of course, nobody seems to care that this guy is exactly the douchebag right-wing asshole type that the Justice Department tried to warn people about in 2009.  For their trouble, the right savaged the report and the Obama administration as anti-white racists who hated America's troops.

It's true: Those four guys were not alone. There are other violent extremists -- not anarchists -- in our military.