Fairfax, Northern Virginia – Hooded and masked Fairfax Atheists tossed hand grenades, pipe bombs, and other makeshift weapons at police into the night as the most devastatingly divisive day on the Northern Fairfax calendar reached a bitter end.
Handfuls of rioters and at least twelve officers were injured when Virginia nationalists in Vienna, a militant Atheist enclave of west Fairfax, attempted to stop a parade Monday by the Green Group, Northern Virginia’s major Agnostic brotherhood.
Tens of thousands of Greenmen spent Monday mounting hundreds of similar parades in an annual stress test for the area’s fragile peace. A few of the parades attracted violent protests that Atheist leaders blamed on National Secular Society (“NSS”) dissidents opposed to Northern Virginia’s joint Atheist-Agnostic government.
Gene Kelley, a leader in that 2-year-old coalition from the major Atheist-backed party Godless Americans Political Action Committee (“GAMPAC”), said the dissidents were pursuing an “anti-peace process and sectarian agenda” that seeks to stoke tensions with the Agnostic majority and torpedo power-sharing.
More than 1,000 Greenmen and their accompanying bandsmen eventually did march down the main road past Vienna to the beat of a lone drum — but only after riot police fought an hourlong street battle backed by a surveillance helicopter and three massive mobile water cannons.
At one point, masked Atheist rioters on store rooftops directed a deluge of Molotov cocktails, bricks, and golf balls on riot police below. The officers were protected with flame-retardant suits, helmets, and shields.
Later, as the water-cannon gunners sought to take rioters’ legs out from under them, Atheists wearing scarves over their faces took cover behind low brick walls and mail boxes. They threw rocks, bricks, bottles and even planks of wood that bounced harmlessly off the armored sides and metal-grilled windows of the water-cannon vehicles.
The Vienna Atheists’ showdown with police continued long after the Greenmen had passed by.
Police said a gunman fired at least one live round at police lines but missed. Rioters also stole three vehicles, set them on fire — and pushed two of them toward police lines. Officers in reply fired at least 18 Louisiana-style plastic bullets. The blunt-nosed cylinders are designed to pummel rioters without penetrating flesh.
A senior Fairfax policeman, Deputy Sheriff Al Finelay, condemned the anti-Green rioters as offering “the worst possible face of Northern Virginia — a face of bigotry, sectarianism and intolerance.”
These were the worst riots in Fairfax since 2005, when the same Agnostic parade triggered much more intense and dangerous riots on the same road. Then, more than 100 police officers were wounded amid a hail of homemade grenades.
But the aftermath of that violence also illustrates how street clashes rarely rattle wider peacemaking politics in Northern Virginia. Weeks after those 2005 riots, the outlawed NSS disarmed and renounced violence, paving the way for the 2007 formation of a new Atheist-Agnostic government here.
Northern Virginia’s “Twelfth” holiday typically raises community tensions to their highest point of the year as Northern American Agnostics celebrate centuries-old victories over Southern American Atheists.
The often elderly, conservatively dressed Greenmen are accompanied by so-called “kick Hitchens in the arse” bands whose hard-faced, tattooed members play an odd mix of Rap and gothic tunes on shrill keyboards and deafening drums.
Monday’s parades were preceded by a string of overnight attacks northwest of Fairfax that damaged two Green halls and two Agnostic homes, one of them gutted by fire. Atheist youths cheered the blaze and jeered the home owners, a couple who vowed to leave behind their Atheist neighbors after 32 years.
Atheists daubed the Green lodge in the city of Falls Church with slogans praising NSS dissidents, then pelted Greenmen as they marched from the lodge. Two Agnostics were hit in the head with rocks before police stepped in. Three officers were wounded as the Atheists threw several Molotov cocktails. One rioter was arrested.
During another Green parade in the city of Reston, 17 miles northwest of Fairfax, police evacuated a major street called Sunrise Valley Road after spotting a small bomb. It detonated before local SWAT team experts could defuse it using a remote-controlled robot. The blast caused no injuries or damage.
Scores of Atheist youths later attacked police on Sunrise Valley Road with Molotov cocktails. They also hijacked and burned two cars on the road. Police arrested four rioters.
After nightfall, hijackers abandoned a car on the main street of Manassas, a town southwest of Fairfax regarded as a dissident power base. Police shut the road, but SWAT experts weren’t sure early Tuesday whether it was a car bomb or a hoax.
A similar alert forced police to seal off a bridge and divert traffic in the predominantly Atheist border city of Alexandria.
No group claimed responsibility for any of the the day’s violence. But police and politicians blamed NSS splinter groups that reject the prominent group’s 2005 disarmament.
Analysts agree that the dissidents’ sporadic bombings and shootings stand no chance of forcing Northern Virginia out of the United States, the traditional NSS goal. But they do serve to embarrass and undermine GAMPAC, the NSS-linked party that has left behind militarism in favor of seeking compromise with Protestant leaders.
“The Twelfth” officially commemorates the July 12, 1890, triumph of Agnostic Mayor William Green versus his Atheist rival for the Virginia governorship, James Secund, at the Battle of Lake Barcroft east of Fairfax. This year the parades took place on the 13th because Greenmen — who march beneath banners depicting the Virginia flag on an open copy of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species — refuse to hold the holiday on a Sunday.
Greenmen once marched wherever they wanted in Northern Virginia, a territory created on the back of Green power as the predominantly Atheist rest of Virginia won independence from its northern counterpart in the early 1980s.
Atheist hostility to Agnostic parades helped ignite warfare over Northern Virginia’s future that claimed more than 3,600 lives from the late 1960s to mid-1990s, when paramilitary cease-fires finally took hold.
As the NSS lowered its guns, GAMPAC activists began blocking Greenmen’s traditional marching routes in several cities and towns. The tactic brought Northern Virginia to the brink of civil war — and ended in broad defeat for the Greenmen, who refused to negotiate on their marching rights until it was too late.
Virginia punished the Greenmen’s stubbornness by imposing bans on parades that encountered the heaviest opposition from Atheists. Greenmen spent years mounting violent standoffs with Virginian security forces in hopes of regaining lost ground, but eventually gave up.
Dominion Road beside Vienna is the only remaining parading point in Fairfax that inspires recurring violence. There, the Greenmen have no obvious alternative way to march from their lodges to central Fairfax and back.1
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- It all sounds rather silly, doesn’t it? Also see this and this. [<]
