Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.politics.white-power
Subject: Paranoia as Patriotism: Louis R. Beam

Archive/File: pub/orgs/american/adl/paranoia-as-patriotism/louis-r-beam
Last-Modified: 1995/08/25

                     Louis R. Beam

Sometime Klansman and neo-Nazi Louis R. Beam has been a
leading advocate of anti-government sedition and various forms
of "Aryan" violence for more than a quarter of a century.

In 1968, Beam joined Robert Shelton's United Klans of America
(UKA) and in 1976 switched to David Duke's Knights of the KKK.
His chief responsibility in the Klans was to instruct the
"knights" in guerrilla warfare.

In 1981, Beam became "Ambassador-at-Large" for Aryan Nations,
a violence-prone, Nazi-like hate group headquartered in Idaho.
Beam has been touted as a possible successor to the
organizations 77-year-old leader, Richard Butler. He has built
a computer network for the group, featuring an  assassination
"point system" through which a participant could be designated
an "Aryan Warrior" based on the importance of the politician,
civil rights leader, police officer, or minority group member
that he managed to kill.

In 1983, Beam told a crowd: "I'm here to tell you that if we
can't have this country, as far as I'm concerned, no one gets
it. The guns are cocked, the bullets are in the chamber. ...
We're going to fight and live or we're going to die soon." His
philosophical watchword, reported stated in a 1970s terror
campaign against Vietnamese fisherman [sic] in Texas, is
"Where ballots fail, bullets will prevail."

In April 1987, Beam and 11 other extremists were indicted in
Arkansas on charges involving conspiracy to overthrow the
government. Before the indictment was issued, Beam fled to
Mexico, where he was arrested after a shootout and returned
for trial. A jury later acquitted Beam and his codefendants on
all charges.

In February 1992, Beam issued in his quarterly publication,
_The Seditionist_, an appeal for a concept called "leaderless
resistance," described as an alternative to the "leadership"
structure in "underground" groups. In this alternative,
activity is autonomous, organized around ideology rather than
leaders. It is explained as a system for keeping secret the
plans of terrorist assaults against the Government, known only
to a few individuals in small leaderless cells in order to
prevent leaks or infiltration. The concept was fathered in
1962 by Col. Ulius Amoss, the founder of an anti-Communist
organization, International Services of Information, Inc., who
feared a Communist takeover of America. (Interestingly, this
is also the organizational pattern employed by some foreign
terrorist groups.)

With Soviet Communism no longer a threat, Beam wrote that "the
purpose of Leaderless Resistance is to defeat state tyranny."
He added: "Like the fog which forms when conditions are right
and disappears when they are not, so must the resistance to
tyranny be."

Beam recently attended a gun rights rally whose sponsoring
group, according to the Spokane _Spokesman-Review_, includes
militia members and sympathizers. He also attended the most
recent Aryan Nations World Congress, and in 1995 purchased
property not far from that organization's northern Idaho
compound.(Anti-Defamation League, 33-34)

                       Work Cited

Anti-Defamation League. [Special Report] Paranoia as Patriotism:
Far-Right Influences on the Militia Movement. 1995.

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