Patriotism Run Amok

 

by Pa Rock

Student of History

The Oklahoma City bombing in which a home-grown terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, parked a rental truck loaded with more than two tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and then set it off remotely, occurred thirty years ago today.    The blast which killed 168, several of whom were children, and injured 800 others, was, at the time, the deadliest act of terrorism on US soil in history.  Today Bill Clinton, who was President at the time, is in Oklahoma City attending a commemoration of the tragic event.

Timothy McVeigh was convicted in a federal trial on eleven counts of murder and was executed in 2001.  One of his co-conspirators, Terry Nichols, who helped McVeigh plan the bombing and later turned himself in to authorities, was convicted of conspiracy and eight counts of manslaughter and is currently serving a life sentence in a Supermax prison.

McVeigh tied the crime to the federal siege of a religious compound near Waco, Texas, which happened two years earlier - a siege in which the compound was surrounded by members of the FBI and Texas state law enforcement from February 28th through April 19th, 1993 (also during the Clinton presidency).  The group under siege, a religious assemblage calling itself the "Branch Davidians," and under the leadership of a man named David Koresh, had a massive store of supplies built up in the event of some catastrophe, such as an attack by the government.  On April 19th the FBI tired of waiting and pumped CS gas into the compound in order to drive the holdouts into the open, but a fire developed instead and 70 people died, including the leader, Koresh, and twenty to twenty-eight children.  While it looked as though the Branch Davidians had set the fire themselves, controversy remained.

By choosing April 19th as the date of his bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh was paying homage to the Waco tragedy which had occurred exactly two years earlier, as well as to the American Revolution against the British which had begun exactly 220 years earlier in Massachusetts.

McVeigh and Nichols regarded themselves as "patriots" and members of a patriotic movement which saw the government as an enemy to individual liberty.  Execution for McVeigh and life incarceration for Nichols seems to have only intensified that cancer of faux or misguided patriotism that has festered and grown more dangerous to society and democracy with each passing year.

It is not random individuals with brown skin and accents whom we need to fear, but rather it is often the native-born Americans who spend their waking hours in front of televisions or computer screens absorbing and regurgitating hate that fits into their preconceived notions of how and why they have been treated so "unfairly" in life.  Mix all of that with the influence of people who know better but are in it for their own personal or political gain, and we have the equivalent of even more rental trucks filled with explosives.

Encouraging people to attack and destroy the institutions of government isn't patriotism - it is patriotism run amok - it is tyranny.  The Oklahoma City bombing should have taught us that.