Forum Post: From "Operation Wetback" to Newtown: Tracing the Hick Fascism of the NRA

By Mark Ames

Las Vegas, Nevada - I've been writing about these rampage murders for about a decade now, but Friday’s rampage massacre was Different. So I’m going to approach this piece somewhat Differently than I usually do — I'm going to look at what's most obvious.

For one thing, this massacre had pathos, and I’ve never really dealt with pathos like this in all my years researching and writing about these rampage killings. I’m used to digging into a story that has no pathos, and finding it where no one bothers looking, usually hidden in all the obvious places.

But there’s no point in being clever here. The slaughter of so may little children means approaching this from a more "obvious" angle. Also, this isn’t the sort of rampage massacre I studied for "Going Postal," my book that examined workplace massacres in which employees massacre supervisors and/or coworkers, and "middle America" school shootings where middle-class students attack their schools and fellow students.

Until relatively recently, those types of mass-murder were freakishly rare in America; they only appeared at the end of the Reagan Era. First they happened in the workplace, concurrent with the destruction of labor unions and the transfer of wealth and workplace power into few hands. Then, by the late 1990s, the workplace massacres had seeped down into the employees’ children’s schoolyards.

The dead Newtown killer, Adam Lanza, wasn’t a student at the school he shot up, nor did he work there. He apparently suffered from mental illness — no shit he did -- and his mother was reportedly a gun enthusiast, a "prepper" who stored up weapons for the end of the world. There’ve been other massacres like Newtown in the past — where the killer has no direct relationship or grievance to the victims or the site of the shooting, a lone and severely mentally ill adult for some reason chooses to massacre school children in their school. They’re rare and often spectacular. It happened in Stockton in 1989, leading to California’s assault weapons ban; it happened in Britain in '96, leading to a total handgun ban; it happens in China more and more lately, the adult attacker always uses a knife rather than a gun, meaning lower to nil death counts, and astronomical numbers of wounded.

Until now, I have largely avoided getting dragged down into the gun control debate, in part because gun proliferation doesn’t explain why "going postal" first exploded into the culture in the late 1980s, and has worked its way into the American DNA ever since. Gun control or lack thereof doesn’t explain why these kinds of rampage shootings only appeared in the late Reagan era and spread ever since then. And there must have been my own personal prejudices too — I grew up with guns, and despite a couple of bad episodes involving guns and a drunken violent stepfather, I have a reflexive contempt for people who haven’t gone shooting and tell you that gun control laws are the answer. Well, guess what? Their knee-jerk solution is more right than mine. Passing gun restrictions today probably wouldn’t do much to slow down rampage massacres, at least not for awhile — but the politics of sweeping gun control laws could have a huge transformative effect over time. It’s no longer impossible for me to ignore that fact.

Which means it’s also no longer possible for me to ignore the National Rifle Association, and its hick fascism politics that’ve been poisoning our culture ever since the NRA’s infamous "coup" in 1977, when the NRA was taken over by far-right fanatics led by a convicted murderer and onetime US Border Guards chief named Harlon Carter — whose previous claim to fame was when he led a massive crackdown on Mexican immigrant laborers called "Operation Wetback." That’s not a typo by the way.

Two decades before Harlon Carter led "Operation Wetback" he was convicted of murdering a 15-year-old Mexican American boy, sentenced to a three-year prison term (Harlon was under-age himself), before being inexplicably acquitted of all charges and allowed to walk free as if it had never happened. It probably didn’t hurt that Harlon Carter’s daddy was himself a ranking Border Guards official, and that his fate was in the hands of the Texas "justice" system.

Also, his victim was Mexican-American.

Two decades after murdering a Mexican-American boy and getting off scot-free, here is how the official Mormon newspaper, the Deseret News, described Harlon’s "Operation Wetback" scam, in 1954:

Border Patrol Hits Wetbacks For Fare Home McALLEN, Texas (UP) — The border patrol is taking "fare" from 11,000 wetbacks it has rounded up in the lower Rio Grande Valley to take them to El Paso — 800 miles away — for deportation. Most of the wetbacks live on the Mexican side of the lower Rio Grande Valley, only a few miles from where they were rounded up. But the border patrol is taking them 600 miles to deport them and is charging them "fare" for the bus trip.

One farmer told a valley newspaper that border patrolmen took all but $1 from one wetback who was working on his farm to pay his "fare" for the 600-mile ride to El Paso.

Harlon Carter, chief of the border patrol... said it is coming out of the wages they made in the United States.

A few years before that, Harlon was in the news bragging about how he’d protected America from half a million alleged illegal immigrants at the border, doubling his deportation total year-on-year. Piggybacking on McCarthyism hysteria, Harlon Carter — nicknamed "Bullethead" because of the shape of his head — oversaw a huge expansion of his border force, which he said was necessary to keep out "subversives" and "undesirables...’inimicable’ [sic] to the best interests of the country" — singling out "Southern Europeans" in particular, meaning presumably Italians. Like his fellow Texan Vance Muse, it seems Harlan Cater didn’t like Catholics much.

It wasn’t until 1981 that a Texas journalist found the records of NRA chief Harlon Carter’s murder conviction. By then of course that information wasn’t worth much except maybe to confirm that yet another violent hick fascist was in charge of a right-wing pillar in the Reagan Revolution, but there was no way to stop it now.

The thing is, Harlon Carter didn't seem possible if you were awake at all in 1979-80. Most people assumed his type had been driven into extinction, that Harlon Carters only existed in Hollywood caricatures or black-and-white reels from pre-1967... but as Dr. Dolan once put it, "The Coelacanth lives." Without any irony, the convicted murder-turned-NRA chief announced, "You don't stop crime by attacking guns -- you stop crime by stopping criminals."

When Harlon Carter seized control of the NRA in 1977 from the more moderate leader, a Mormon named Maxwell Rich, it wasn’t so obvious that these resurrected Coelocanth monsters were anything more than a grotesque yet passing curiosity, a stark reminder of how rancid America might’ve been without the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s. Little did they know.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13457-from-operation-wetback-to-newtown-tracing-the-hick-fascism-of-the-nra