In Memory: 19 April 1995

Today is Monday, 19 April 2010.

On this date in 1995, 168 persons were assassinated and some 700 injured in an extreme-right-wing terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

While the immediate motivation of Timothy McVeigh seems to have been revenge for the 76 persons killed by ATF in an incompetent terror assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas on 19 April 1993, the roots go much deeper.

McVeigh believed that the USA/USE was controlled by the Zionist Occupation Government, an instrument of “World Jewry”. The ZOG terminology seems to have originated in American extreme-right circles in the early 1970s. It was simply a new coinage for an idea which had begun to gain real traction about a century before in Europe: that the world was secretly controlled by “The Jew”, acting through their control of global financial institutions, thus enabling them to command all governments.

While Jewish conspiracies had always bulked large in much of Christendom, they were originally limited to such things as allegations that Jews killed Christian babies and used their blood in celebrating Passover. It wasn’t really until about 1880, in Austria, that the idea of a global Jewish financial-political plot took hold, when the interconnections of global finance began to exist on a serious level and be obvious in their effects to the general public.

After the Russian Revolutions of 1917, the terms “Jew Communism” and “Communism is Jewish” began to gain currency. The ideas behind them entered the USA/USE during the First Great Red Scare of 1919-1920, and really took off when the Great Depression commenced. (E.g., many believed that the original name of the Roosevelt family in Holland was “Rosenfelt”.) After World War Two and the Holocaust, overt anti-Semitism on the political level in the USA/USE became less acceptable, and mutated into McCarthyism, the Second Great Red Scare.

McCarthyism was, in essence, classic political anti-Semitism scrubbed of the actual words “Jew” and “Jewry”. The core remained the same: a vast, sinister, hidden force of evil which controlled much of the world, and was waging a covert battle for complete domination. In the words of Joe McCarthy: “… a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man”. In many circles, until ca. 1960, it was still acceptable to note publicly the ethnic Jewish nature of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders, thus implying that “Communism is Jewish”. Such frankness then largely disappeared, save for very marginalized groups and individuals.

Unfortunately, vast numbers of gullible Americans fell for the larger fraud. McCarthy had cleverly employed Hitler’s technique: there’s so little actual evidence of this conspiracy because the Jew/Commie conspiracy is so powerful it expunges almost all traces of itself. In other words, the lack of proof is the perfect proof. McCarthy was assisted by a general atmosphere of fear-mongering and falsehoods, portraying the USA/USE as a pitiful giant threatened by the world-historical colossus of Communism.

In truth, from 1950 to 1991, the core Soviet bloc (the USSR and Eastern Europe) was steadily only 20% as economically powerful as the core USA/USE bloc (USA/USE, UK, Western Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand). Some pitiful giant! (I made this calculation as early as 1968, after wondering how Khrushchev could boast that the Soviet Union was producing missiles “like sausages”, when it couldn’t even produce enough sausages!)

And then along came, in 1964, the white supremacist Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, then the “Mr. Con-servative”, then the “Great White Hope”. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”.

Did McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Senator Robert Taft, Goldwater, and other Republican leaders actually believe in such a conspiracy, or was it simply a vicious, cynical, and dangerous strategy for monopolizing political power? I believe the evidence fits the latter. As Taft once said to McCarthy, “Just keep slinging mud. Someday some of it will stick”.

I doubt any of those Republican leaders meant for a Murrah bombing to happen. However, the ethical Law of Unintended Consequences is ironclad: who plays with fire is responsible for those who are burned.

McVeigh issued from the militia movement. The militia movement was McCarthyism militarized, frequently with the overt anti-Semitism restored.

In a very true sense, McVeigh was as much a victim of the ideology of McCarthyism and its mutations as were those who died that day. And paid with his life for the sins of McCarthy, Nixon, Taft, Goldwater, etc., a price they didn't pay. "Extremism is no vice."

The Tea Party movement exhibits many parallels to the militia movement: rabid suspicion of and hatred for “outsiders”, a nihilistic hatred of government and all but the most primitive social structures (cf. Margaret Thatcher: “There are men, and women, and families. There is no such thing as society”), a fetishistic appetite for weaponry of all kinds, violent longings for an idealized nativist past that never existed, the preening “victimhood” of relatively well-off white folks, grandiose and morbidly narcissistic rhetoric, and the Second Amendment belief (cf. Mao!) that “political power flows from the gun barrel”.

Despite the "patriotic" veneer on its rhetoric, the Tea Party movement is essentially anti-American.

I fear we’ve not seen the last of extreme-right violence, cynically aided and abetted by allegedly “more responsible” con-servative elements who lust after riding the Tea Party movement into power.

The Museum of the Bourgeois remembers with great sorrow those who died on this day, and hopes those who love them have found comfort.