The Arc of Hatred : NONFICTION : GATHERING STORM: America’s Militia Threat,<i> By Morris Dees with James Corcoran (HarperCollins: $24; 254 pp.)</i> : REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace,<i> By Leonard C. Lewin (Free Press: $20; 160 pp.)</i>

This silence is not golden. Old bouquets of flowers hang from cyclone fence encircling the vacant lot. Nearby, a battered building stands empty with a concrete skin that looks pitted by hostile fire. A long yellow banner hangs, requesting “STRENGTH, COMPASSION, LOVE, UNITED!” Until the morning of April 19, 1995, the federal building stood here in Oklahoma. Now the ruins have been bulldozed flat and tourists come with video cameras and look. No one speaks, not a single word. No one seems to know what to say.

In 1983, they burned his office. In 1984, they came to his home to shoot him. Two years later, they planned to blow him up with a rocket. By 1995, they were figuring they could do the job with a bomb patterned off the one used to gut the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The target of all this mayhem is Morris Dees, a Southern lawyer defending the poor and the powerless. And the folks who desire to send him to the next world are the ragtag new militias fueled by hatred, white supremacy and a very personal take on the Scriptures.

Dees is a man impossible not to respect since he has stood his Southern watch (through the Southern Poverty Law Center and Klanwatch) for the damned and the forgotten in the thin times and the fat times. His Alabama center holds 12,094 photographs and videos plus 65,891 entries on individuals and events--basically the archive of home-grown American wackos. Recently, he has returned to public notice because of his now eerie warnings to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and the Department of Justice before Oklahoma City that a bad moon was rising and serious violence was in the wind.

He is our expert on our lunatic kinfolk, and now he’s bundled his expertise into a book, “Gathering Storm,” coauthored with James Corcoran (whose previous work, “Bitter Harvest,” covered the bloody Gordon Kahl tax revolt case in North Dakota). It all has the feel of a rush to print and functions more as a position paper on right-wing violence than as a deep and probing study of character and motivation. But then Dees is a liberal man dedicated to changing things rather than producing an academic study of them.

His argument traces the events that constitute the stations of the cross for the militia folk: Gordon Kahl’s fight in North Dakota, Randy Weaver’s fight at Ruby Ridge, the Branch Davidians’ lethal face-off with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at Waco. And finally, the massacre in Oklahoma City, an event the more demented elements of the armed right see as federally instigated in order to create a market for more repressive laws. This arc of hatred is punctuated with various asides to the importance of certain national meetings and various people like William Pierce, creator of “The Turner Diaries,” Timothy McVeigh’s favorite reading, and one Louis Beam, Vietnam vet, violence junkie and in Dees’ eyes “far and away the most dangerous--and most radical--of the racist leaders.”

All these blue-eyed white people matter because Dees believes the militia movement “is a movement that already has led to the most destructive act [Oklahoma City] in our nation’s history. Unless checked, it could lead to widespread devastation or ruin.” This network of Jew-hating, homosexual-hating, black-hating, immigrant-hating, Asian-hating, Latino-hating people is represented by 311 known militias, about 150 racist organizations and a potential pool of 5 million devoutly Christian and riled folks.

And that’s the rub for Dees and anyone reading this book: Just how significant are these guys with well-read Bibles, AR-15s, camouflage clothing and women often kept barefoot and pregnant? Fear of change and hatred of foreigners is a recurrent American experience going back in conventional politics to the antebellum Know-Nothing Party and the Anti-Masonic Party. We like to forget that race politics are as old as our politics (a black American was deemed to be three-fifths of a man in our Constitution) and that the republic was bloodied at birth by Shays’ Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion.

I tend to see the bigoted and armed far right as a permanent and generally impotent part of our culture subject to periodic moments of virulence. Dees sees them more alarmingly and he certainly has the credentials to back up his position. This book is a perfect primer for anyone seeking a quick briefing on the new militias and their roots in the old cesspool of the Ku Klux Klan and race hating. Dees makes the undeniable point that if there were 311 militias of black Americans constantly practicing with military hardware and talking about the coming violent times when they’d have to kill all the white people, well, the federal government would have stomped them out long ago. We only have to look at the FBI’s secret war against the Black Panthers in the ‘60s to know this.

“Gathering Storm” is a field report from an honorable man who has paid attention to things the rest of us tend to ignore. His solutions--outlawing militias while guarding our civil liberties from government repression--are neither radical nor unreasonable. But I’ll have to know more before I’ll sign off on them or take the militias as the foreshadowing of a jack-booted horde. For now, Dees and his book provide a good place to begin thinking about the matter as we all wait, half-listening, for another federal building to go skyward in this uneasy nation of ours.

A toddler looks out from the cyclone fence at the site of the former federal building. Underneath the photograph of this 3-year-old is the legend: Zachary Chavez, March 23, 1992-April 19, 1995. The message says, “I wish you hadn’t gone away/ I wish you were here to play/ I miss you boy/ I miss you so/ I miss you more than you could know . . . . your Great Grandpa Hernandez & Great Grandma.”

In 1967, Leonard C. Lewin produced a hoax called “Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility And Desirability Of Peace.” The book pretended to be a suppressed government study and mimicked the strange tongue of policy wonks. The somber text concluded war was essential for the national health and entertained curious scenarios such as the viability of human slavery. Major media took the document for the real thing and the spoof was not revealed until 1972. By the 1980s bootleg editions of the book were circulating in the militia movement, where it was treated with the reverence of, say, “The Turner Diaries” as yet another blueprint of the evil of the federal government. Now the book has been reissued with an introduction of Victor Navasky and appendixes of the various articles that greeted its first publication.

This is a good thing since if the book were originally a joke, well, now the joke is on us. We have become paralyzed by the outbreak of peace. Almost 30 years after the original “Report from Iron Mountain,” we all sense some kind of connection between our inability to disarm, this paralysis of our imaginations, and the war that came to Oklahoma City. Much as we hate the thought, we know the militias are hideous characterizations of our own fears. They remind us painfully that our vaunted economy makes people feel insecure and our cybernetic fantasies fail to beat swords into plowshares. The report quotes Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asking the question, “What are we to expect . . . where mounting frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and extremism?” Part of the answer arrived last April 19.

A trucker calls the city government of Oklahoma City when he is 50 miles away and heading in. He “gots” an unsolicited 14-foot metal sculpture of that fireman carrying a baby and where, he wants to know, should he deliver it. Things like this keep happening since the morning of April 19, 1995. The folks who work for the city allow that they’ve got two warehouses full of teddy bears that they don’t know what to do with. People had a desperate need to send teddy bears to Oklahoma City. Everyone of us wanted to do something. But of course, no one really knew what to do. Then or now.