Until a few months ago, Perry County Judge-Executive Carroll C. Fugate used to ride around town in a shiny white Cadillac, decked out in a white hat and suit and chomping on a huge cigar—the spittin’ image of Boss Hogg. Last April, however, Fugate was indicted with two other men on 41 charges—including mail fraud and arson—for allegedly burning down the county’s maintenance garage for insurance, while filing scads of suspicious claims for state and federal government revenues.
That is scarily close to my home town (village), although Lahoma is actually a wee bit whiter (didn’t think that was possible).
As of the census[3] of 2010, there were 603 people, 229 households, and 172 families residing in the village. The population density was 50.7 inhabitants per square mile (19.6/km2). There were 254 housing units at an average density of 21.3 per square mile (8.2/km2). The racial makeup of the village was 94.5% White, 0.3% African American, 1.7% Native American, 1.2% Asian, 0.2% from other races, and 2.2% from two or more races.
Lahoma’s population density is almost 40x higher – might as well move to a real city.
I would like to think that we wouldn’t see that sort of behavior back home, but I recall my sister telling me about an African-American truck driver that came to her restaurant about 10 yrs ago – he said that he had stopped at some other place and they told him that they didn’t serve his kind. (I think that it was quite a ways away toward MI’s Upper Peninsula, because I didn’t recognize the name – also, my sister didn’t go hunt them down).
The KKK’s quality and discipline varied pretty widely(and the various revivals substantially after reconstruction was over were not infrequently little more than scams); but at least among the immediate postwar Klan members, especially the ones who retained some military structure despite the nominal dissolution of the confederate armed forces(a certain Mr. Nathaniel Bedford Forrest being particularly known for his leadership roles in both groups) really shouldn’t be underestimated.
They mostly avoided stand-up fights with US troops; but were able; and brutally willing, to employ terror tactics against anything not being actively guarded at the time; and were largely successful in stalling or rolling back much of the ‘reconstruction’ program and preserving existing power structures.
If we were dealing with them today; we’d probably call them ‘insurgents’. Weaker bomb-making skills; but same devilishly-hard-to-eradicate upwelling of reactionary violence aimed at soft targets, perceived collaborators, and the various changes that the winners of the conventional conflict are attempting to enact in the postwar period; with sufficient local knowledge and support as to be capable of opportunistic strikes almost anywhere, despite limited ability to wage further conventional war.
Some of the later trademark-squatters were(and are) pretty pathetic; but the postwar ones are not to be underestimated… They lost the war; but they carved out a pretty solid chunk of the peace.
Why not stick with “terrorists”? We have so many laws and prisons already set up to deal with those sort of people, and unlike almost everyone at Gitmo they really are “those sort of people”.
Most of the racism I see in the news of late has been coming from well-off people wearing suits. There’s a tendency among liberal yuppies to mock racism by adopting a Southern accent and acting like a “redneck,” which tells me that they don’t really understand racism as well as they think they do.
I’m all for caution in the proliferation of assorted-jargon-for-the-myriad-flavors-of-enemies; but I’d argue that ‘insurgent’ conveys the valuable information that the person in question is operating in limited rebellion against the nominal local authority; but enjoys at least strong minority support, sometimes at least tacit support from the majority; and tends to have relatively strong local or regional ties to the area where they are operating.
A ‘terrorist’, by contrast, is a much broader category of basically anyone using terror tactics without enough state support to earn a polite euphemism(eg. ‘saturation bombing’ vs. ‘terror bombing’ in WWII). Insurgents are often terrorists; or use terrorists as an element of their strategy; but many terrorists are not insurgents.
