I got an email from some Stalinist outfit about the continuing FBI raids against do-gooders and troublemakers around the country. The latest is an immigration activist named Carlos Montes.

http://www.stopfbi.net/2011/5/19/fbi-and-la-county-sheriff-raid-veteran-chicano-activist-carlos-montes

It's difficult to find anything about this except hackneyed clichés. Digging through the shrill denunciations, one can glean the fact that Carlos Montes is being charged with a firearms offence, and the FBI are handling it with their customary subtlety. Los Angeles has strict gun laws - where you might need a firearm, you're not allowed to have one.

But smashing up someone's house and carting off their computers is child's play compared with what they did to Randy Weaver and his family in Idaho. Randy was also wanted for a firearms technicality. Between March 1991 and August 1992, he was isolated in his rural cabin by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They murdered Randy's son and his wife, while she was holding her ten-month-old daughter in her arms. One of the family's friends fatally shot a cop, and he was later found to have acted in self-defence, and awarded $380,000. The FBI and the ATF murdered eighty-two people the next year in an assault on a religious community in Waco, Texas.

This in turn led to panic among right-wing conspiracy theorists, who thought the country was turning into a dictatorship. Believing they were acting in self-defence, they blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma in 1995.

Ramsey Clark represented the Waco survivors in a lawsuit. He is one of the few left-wingers who understands the need to defend white people against state repression.

Like most so-called 'white separatists', Randy Weaver is just an American who distrusts the government. That's why him and his like get worse treatment from the FBI, the ATF and the ADL than people like Carlos Montes.

The best summary of the Weaver tragedy online is this, by Alan Bock:

http://reason.com/archives/1993/10/01/ambush-at-ruby-ridge

"If you talked to some of the self-styled patriots who hung around the Boise courthouse, you would hear all kinds of scary theories. The Weaver operation was just a dress rehearsal for Waco, which was part of a government campaign to shut down, intimidate, or terrorize minority religious groups and political dissenters. Now and then, you’d hear that the real problem was Zionist control of the government."

Bock comments that the real explanation is more mundane: that the FBI are arrogant and vain. But this is a false dichotomy. The psychology of jackboot-lovers is a separate issue from the politics they are used to impose. In the nineteen-sixties and before, the FBI was used as a political weapon against advocates of black equality. But it reformed under pressure. By the nineteen-nineties, under president Clinton, it had turned against white Christian patriots.