An impassioned and articulate, but not entirely convincing,
examination of the militia movement and related phenomena by a
veteran investigative reporter. Dyer ascribes the rise of radical
antigovernment activity to the farm crisis that began in the late
'70s with the Federal Reserve Board's harsh anti-inflationary
policies and has proceeded through the relentless conglomeration of
agriculture. He argues that farmers, unlike urban workers, are so
psychologically tied to their occupation that when they lose that,
they lose their identity. So many families have been driven off the
land in the past generation, he says, that the rural culture has
developed a sort of group psychosis that leads people to turn
violent toward either themselves or others; he notes that suicide
has overtaken accidents as the leading cause of unnatural death in
rural areas and that domestic violence there has risen
dramatically. Throw Christian fundamentalism, fear of gun control,
and more than a trace of white supremacist ideology into the pot,
and America faces the threat of civil war in the heartland, with
the Oklahoma City bombing merely an early warning signal. Dyer has
spent a great deal of time talking to the militants and trying to
understand their writings, and his exegeses of their bizarre legal
and political theories bring as much lucidity to them as one could
expect. He diminishes his credibility, however, by relying on very
few sources to support either his psychological theories or his
apocalyptic predictions, and his left-populist political analysis
is scarcely more sophisticated (even if far more rational) than the
conspiracy theories he ridicules. He persistently speaks of "the
government" as if it were a fairy-tale king that could make the
poor folks' lives better by fiat, if only it would listen to their
plaint. Despite its faults, this look at unrest in the heartland is
valuable and often perceptive. (Kirkus Reviews)
An investigative journalist and editor of the "Boulder Weekly"
presents an expose of today's growing antigovernment movement and
the connection between the farm crisis of the 1980s and the massive
buildup of militia groups in the United States. "Harvest of Rage"
also exposes the underlying economic policies that helped trigger
the current heartland revolt.
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