by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a quite good PBS American Experience episode on the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19,
1995, in which a disaffected U.S. Army veteran named Tim McVeigh drove a Ryder
rental truck filled with bomb components — fertilizer, auto racing fuel,
blasting caps and Tovex sticks — into the side of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building in Oklahoma City (with all that’s been written about the attack, no
one seems to have mentioned who Alfred P. Murrah was and why he got a federal
building in Oklahoma City named after him) and blew it up, taking out one-third
of the entire building and killing at least 168 people (that number is from the
Wikipedia page on the incident and the show suggests there may have been up to
500 victims), the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil until the 9/11
attacks six years later. The show’s writer/director, Barak Goodman, steered a
careful line between reporting on the attacks themselves (including a lot of
sorrowful plaints from parents who lost their kids in the building’s in-house
day-care center) and showing the evolution of the extreme Right-wing mindset
that generated them, and in particular three benchmark incidents that convinced
a lot of hard-Right American white supremacists that the government was out to
get them: the gunfights that took down Bob Mathews in 1984 and the wife and
child of Randy Weaver in 1992, and the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco
on April 19, 1993 — McVeigh seems to have done the Oklahoma City massacre when
he did because it was the second anniversary of the fall of the Branch Davidian
compound at Waco. (As the Wikipedia page on Oklahoma City notes, it was also
the 220th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord that
kicked off the American Revolution.) The story is pretty well known by now, but
just to recap: in the late 1970’s a number of white supremacists in the U.S.
became convinced that the U.S. government was controlled by an international
conspiracy led by Jews (indeed they started referring to the U.S. as the
“Zionist-Occupied Government,” or ZOG) that was working to put the U.S. under
the direct rule of the United Nations (if you’ve heard the phrase “black
helicopters” as a metaphor for conspiracy theories in general, it has its
origins in the paranoid fantasy of these people that the United Nations
occupation forces would fly into the U.S. unannounced in unmarked black
helicopters).
A man named William Butler Pierce wrote a novel called The
Turner Diaries, first published as a serial
in a National Alliance-published newspaper called Attack! and then printed as a stand-alone paperback in 1978,
whose plot was the story of an attempted takeover of the U.S. by Zionists and
internationalists that begins with the U.S. passing gun-control legislation
that results in people’s firearms being confiscated. A Right-wing resistance
movement called “the Organization” springs up and successfully challenges the
government by arming itself with nuclear weapons it is able to steal from the
U.S. military. Along the way to the final triumph of the white resistance,
which according to an epilogue soon becomes international and leads to the
extermination of all non-white humans, quite a lot of things happen, including
domestic terror attacks with bombs similar to the one McVeigh and his real-life
co-conspirators, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier (who got much lighter
sentences than he did because they bailed on the plot before the attack took
place), used in Oklahoma City. Indeed, McVeigh and company actually got the
bomb design from The Turner Diaries,
though they also referenced The Anarchist Cookbook (a publication that’s likewise been around at least
since the 1970’s — my understanding is no one currently sells it in print form
but facsimiles are still available online) and made one “improvement” that made
their bomb more effective and lethal: instead of using fuel oil in the mix they
put in highly volatile auto racing fuel (they actually wanted jet fuel but they
couldn’t afford any). By intercutting between the story of the Oklahoma City
bombing itself and the confrontations between the U.S. government and Mathews,
Weaver and the Branch Davidians (who weren’t white supremacists but were
“adopted” by the ultra-radical Right because they were survivalists and had
stockpiled large quantities of guns, some of which they were remodeling into
illegal automatic weapons — indeed, the government’s first action against them
was a botched raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms which set up
the two-month “siege” of the Davidians’ property and ultimately their
incineration when the FBI attacked, though Goodman blames the carnage on the
Davidians themselves and suggests that their leader, David Koresh, had planned
and primed them for a Jim Jones-style mass suicide), Goodman creates a chilling
tale that’s even more chilling now that America’s white supremacists are no
longer opposing the government, but hailing it. It’s well known that the
election of Donald Trump as President was considered a godsend by the
ultra-Right movement, not only because it replaced a Black man in power with a
white man but because Trump’s views on race and especially on immigration hew
frighteningly close to the ultra-racist line of the U.S. far-Right.
Trump’s
latest public meltdown over the “so-called judge” James Robart in Seattle, who
issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s ban on refugee immigration
and its singling out of seven specific countries — Somalia, Libya, Yemen,
Syria, Sudan, Iraq and Iran — whose nationals are barred for 90 days (in
Syria’s case, indefinitely) is a case in point. It’s been widely reported that neither the 9/11
attackers nor anyone who’s committed a terror crime inside the U.S. since
actually comes from any of those countries, though I just downloaded an article
from the Washington Examiner (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-judge-robarts-national-security-expertise/article/2614043#)
that argues that the U.S. Justice Department has a list of 580 people arrested
and convicted of terror offenses between September 11, 2001 and December 31,
2014, of which at least 60 come from countries on Trump’s list. What’s hard to
doubt, though, is that in the last Presidential election a Democratic nominee
whose campaign slogan was “Stronger Together” was beaten by one who openly and
unashamedly appealed to prejudice against “Others” — Mexicans, Muslims, the
media and coastal elitists — and honed the pitch the Republican Party has been
making at least since the 1960’s (when Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond cooked
up the “Southern Strategy” that flipped the GOP’s historical position on civil
rights from the “Party of Lincoln” to the party of racism and reaction). The
racist far-Right in the U.S. has carefully avoided claiming Trump as one of
their own, but they’ve hailed his election as the best political news they’ve
had in decades, even going so far as to hold a rally at which far-Right white
supremacist leader Richard Spencer led a crowd in the Nazi salute and chanted,
“Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Spencer said the Nazi salute was
given in a spirit of “irony and exuberance,” but he’s also called Trump’s win
“the victory of will” — an allusion to Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Nazi
propaganda film Triumph of the Will
— and supported Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon, architect of the Muslim
ban, as chief political strategist and said Bannon would be in “the best
possible position” to influence Trump’s policies in a white-supremacist
direction. The really chilling
thing about watching the Oklahoma City documentary now is the realization that
these people no longer need to launch terror attacks against the U.S.
government because, for all practical purposes, they now are the U.S. government.
