Today, as Tengrain and M. Bouffant noted, is the twentieth anniversary of the Bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The bombing was perpetrated by a right-wing whit supremacist extremist named Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001, and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, who is serving a life sentence in prison.
I don't believe in the death penalty, and I have a suspicion that McVeigh's death prevented a more comprehensive investigation into the right-wing extremist terrorism that plagued the United States during the Clinton Administration (there were a string of bombings throughout the South, perpetrated by right-wing extremist Eric Rudolph, with a bombing during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics being the most infamous of these bombings). McVeigh (and Rudolph) were involved in a broader white power, right-wing extremist movement. The violent attacks perpetrated by home-grown right wingers (as opposed to the Muslim right-wingers who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks) largely went on hiatus during the George W. Bush maladministration, and, thankfully, right-wing terrorism has been spotty and incompetently carried out during the Obama Administration.
The real horror of the Murrah Building bombing was the callous, almost clinical, nature of the attack- perpetrator McVeigh described the children killed in the bombing as collateral damage, a DoD euphemism for dead civilians. McVeigh was radicalized, but his rhetoric had a chillingly bureaucratic "flavor". McVeigh was a monster, but he was also a product of a monstrous system, a system which reduces dead innocents to cold equations, mere "collateral damage" to be tallied up by so many bean counters.
Learn the lesson on offer. Understand that for all their husterical panic about radical Islamic terrorists, they lack any signifificant ability to to inflict harm on the US.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, as citizens with valid ID, you and I have the ability to assemble everything we need to drop a bridge or tear the heart out of a city.
And as long as you keep insisting that we have some kind of 'right' to keep and bear arms, that means the wherewithal to launch a destructive attack against US Infrastructure is a available to any disgrunteled US Citizen.
And it's worth noting that there are 350 million of us...
The people with all the money are more concerned about lefties.
ReplyDeleteRight-wing terrorists are products of the propaganda (FAUX Nooze, hate radio) that the TPTB pay for.
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Yes, McVeigh learned at the knee of Uncle Sam about "collateral damage". But America overall doesn't seem to learn that lesson in obverse -- possibly because white citizens are called "crazy" when they do terrorizing murderous things. It is only terrorism when a non-white (preferably non-Christian) sort of person does it.
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