Costs of War: Bombers and Tea Parties
By Shaun Waterman for ISN
The external pagedramatic release of previously unheard external pageaudiotapes of McVeigh explaining his motivation for the bombing - which killed 168 people, including 19 children in a day care center, and injured another 500 - has refocused attention on the ideology of the 1990s militia movement, an angry and violent mélange of constitutional fundamentalism, conspiratorial populism and race hatred.
Although McVeigh and his two confederates were not card-carrying militia members, external pageaccording to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit civil rights project that monitors hate groups, they were “deeply influenced by the ideas of these paramilitary groups and the larger anti-government ‘Patriot’ movement.”
The external pagetapes, 40 hours of interviews McVeigh gave external pageLou Michel and Dan Herbeck of the Buffalo Daily News - and which were the basis for their book, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing - have never been heard before. Excerpts were broadcast on MSNBC Monday in a two-hour special presented by anchor external pageRachel Maddow.
McVeigh speaks with chilling detachment, convinced that history will absolve him, and expressing no remorse.
He explains that he chose 19 April because it was the anniversary of the FBI assault on the Branch Dravidian compound in Waco, Texas - and because it was the anniversary of “The shot heard round the world, April 19 1775,” an incident of resistance to British tyranny, “The spark that started the American Revolution.”
The touchstones, in other words, of conspiratorial anti-government populism (Waco) and a twisted constitutional fundamentalism - a yearning to return to the cleansing violence in which the nation was born.
As former US president external pageBill Clinton wrote this week, McVeigh and his confederates “took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.”
McVeigh was disowned by the people whose ideas he espoused, but those ideas - and many of the same vocal leaders - are alive and well today.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented the external pageresurgence of the Patriot movement, “people who generally believe that the federal government is an evil entity that is engaged in a external pagesecret conspiracy to impose martial law, herd those who resist into concentration camps, and force the United States into a socialistic ‘New World Order.’”
Fostering conspiracy theory
The Center says these ideas continue to flourish in part because they are not challenged by mainstream right-wing leaders.
“Republican members of Congress have helped foster […] popularize and validate many of these baseless conspiracy theories which are at the heart of Patriot movement ideology,” center Public Affairs Director Booth Gunter told ISN Security Watch.
Gunter said he was referring to theories questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship and allegations that the Democrats health care reform plan would set up “death panels” to euthanize the elderly and infirm.
“Responsible leaders […] would try to tamp down some of the more violent language,” Gunter said
external pageMaddow reported last week on links between self-proclaimed right-wing extremists employing the violent rhetoric of war and martyrdom and figures in the mainstream Republican right like Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli.
And in introducing her documentary, Maddow frets that “McVeigh's voice from the grave echoes in the new rising tide of American anti-government extremism."
That is a little bit strong, frankly.
But others have gone further, claiming the Tea Party is incubating potential terrorists. Veteran political journalist Al Eisele wrote in a external pagecommentary for The Huffington Post: “I hear the expressions of rage and hatred directed towards Washington and the Obama administration from the Tea Partiers[…] And I see those who insist on carrying loaded weapons to public rallies […] and I wonder if there are more Oklahoma Cities in our future. I certainly hope not, but I suspect there are more Timothy McVeighs out there, waiting to imitate his crazed impulses.”
Even external pageClinton pitched in, urging politicians to “remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedom and public servants who enforce our laws."
“We must all assume responsibility for our words and actions,” Clinton continued, “before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged."
Partisan scaremongering?
For their part, conservative external pagecommentators have accused Clinton and others of exploiting the attack for partisan gain and of scaremongering.
And, partisan considerations aside, the link between Patriot movement ideology and terrorism is not as simple - even in McVeigh’s own case - as it is painted. As any student of the subject will tell you, radicalization is a tough process to explain even in retrospect. Establishing any simple link between a set of ideas and a given terrorist act has proved an intellectual will-o-the wisp.
In other words, just because McVeigh was inspired by a particular set of ideas, it does not necessarily follow that the more widespread those ideas are, the more likely is another McVeigh.
As external pageMaddow’s documentary itself makes clear, McVeigh was a kind of perfect lone-wolf storm: a self-radicalized revolutionary who used training he got in the US military to improvise a fertilizer-diesel oil bomb that blew the front off the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building and left a 30-foot crater.
McVeigh himself claims the events at Waco - when a botched raid and siege by federal agents on a compound occupied by an armed religious extremist community left 76 dead, including 20 children - were a tipping point for him.
From his point of view, the Oklahoma City bombing was the culmination of an escalating confrontation between the militia movement and the federal government.
“One of the chief intentions of it,” McVeigh said of the bombing, “was the same as dropping the bomb on Hiroshima: Hit ‘em hard, by surprise and say, ‘Listen, If you don’t knock it off, there’s more of this to come.’”
One element common to many efforts to understand radicalization is the idea that it is a response to violent events, whether experienced directly or not. McVeigh was actually at Waco during the siege.
The rhetoric of the contemporary Tea Party movement may be just as violent and angry as that of the militia movement in the 1990s. But it is important to note that its touchstones are constitutional outrages - health insurance reform, the president’s citizenship - not violent ones.