Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-1995

Oklahoma City:
A bomb for the nation

Smack in the middle of the USA, an attack on what’s so nicely called the “peaceful heartland” of America; an attack targeting not enemies of the American nation, but righteous American citizens; not a CIA operation against Gaddafi, not a military strike against Saddam, not a law and order operation by Marines against Somali gangs; this violence comes not from the American state, but is aimed against it. The nation’s soul, which knows how to accurately distinguish when to make sense of dead “women and children” and when to express on every channel its enormous dismay at a “treacherous, cowardly attack,” is correspondingly agitated. America demonstrates its double consternation: full of righteous indignation at the attack on the American state; and full of genuine horror at the origin and character of the perpetrators.

“An attack on America”

That’s the president’s tone, and the whole nation echoes him. The terrible thing about the attack is not the deaths, but the anti-government significance of the act. The real target of the attack is the American state in all its power and glory; that’s how the act was intended, and that’s how it is interpreted. True, the local police were not incapacitated for even a minute, but that’s not the point. The violated goodness is located on the higher level of state principles, to which nations react all the more sensitively the more powerful they are. The will to oppose the USA, which was put into practice with the bomb, exposes and insults the nation: the unquestioning recognition of its sovereignty and the unconditional respect for legitimate state authority has been violated, and state authority is discredited when enemies of the state roam freely in the middle of its territory outside its absolute control.[1] According to this view, Oklahoma is less revealing of the FBI’s perfectionism in its searches and arrests – although this too is highly praised – than, on the contrary, “America’s vulnerability.” “Enemies” have penetrated the heart of the nation and achieved what even the Russians could never do; a “sense of powerlessness,” we hear, has gripped the nation in the face of this atrocity; its “self-confidence” has been shaken, its sense of being an unassailable bastion of security and peace for its citizens deeply wounded.

This idyllic picture of everyday life in the USA before and without “terrorism” may rightly seem rather delusional to more detached people. Americans, on the other hand, know exactly what kind of violence can be considered “normal” and which “atrocities” warrant collective hysteria[2]: namely, when people become victims of violence in their capacity as Americans. The dead in Oklahoma meet this criterion in an exemplary manner. They died as representatives of the nation, as its proxies; and what’s more – this ennobles them particularly from the standpoint of national morality – in their capacity as “ordinary citizens.” As such ordinary little national flags, they are promoted to perfect symbolic figures for the reprehensible nature of the crime committed here. Their deaths prove that any attack on the US state is also an attack on all the American people. Together with their rulers, they can then celebrate their shock at this act of violence in a moment of national ceremony and exaltation.[3]

And they can scream out for revenge! For the dismay over the “powerlessness” of the state leads inexorably to a single cry for the power of the state, which should defend its right to inviolability, accept the “challenge,” and respond with its superior force. This is what is meant by “impotent rage,” and this is what America, above and below, agrees on: America’s enemies must be punished. The national desire for retribution corresponds to the severity of the crime. First, in regard to the problem to be dealt with. Every schoolchild knows who America’s enemies are: they are Arab terrorists, Muslim fundamentalists, supported and abetted by enemy states that stand in the way of American law and American freedom. No one really knows why they chose to strike in Oklahoma of all places, but ultimately that doesn’t matter. Secondly, it is immediately clear what must be done in response to this “cowardly attack.” Clinton officially promises his people, before any trials, the complete destruction of the perpetrators: nothing less than their physical annihilation can satisfy the desire to avenge the wounded national honor. In editorial offices, plans are hatched to bomb Iran and other hotbeds of terrorism, explicitly including “women and children.” A few Lebanese are arrested as a precautionary measure; their American neighbors confirm that they always found them “suspicious.” Assessed and defined in this way, the Oklahoma bombing fits perfectly into the prevailing American worldview. The nation sees itself surrounded by a world of states that wish evil upon it and which it must defend itself against. How dire this situation is can be seen from the fact that they have already wreaked havoc inside America itself. That the “enemies of America” are not states with diverging interests, but rather unlawful, i.e. “terrorist regimes,” goes without saying for the state that defines its interests as the standard of behavior applicable to the entire world of states. US policy already claims the right to attack such states; for that, it doesn’t need any “shock” to be generated in its own country in the form of a bombing that it then has to respond to. It’s the other way around: because the nation already sees the world situation in this way and has long since subsumed the activities of the rest of the world’s nations, from tax policy to the nuclear weapons issue, under suspicion of having only “un-American activities” in mind, it’s easy for it to put Oklahoma in the same category. Thus, the bomb serves to confirm and encourage its current political course, which means: America can only defend itself against threats to its rights and freedoms by striking harder and more vigorously against its enemies.

They were the wrong ones!

For any good American, the world would have been back to normal in no time had it not turned out that Arabs had nothing to do with it. It was real Americans.[4] How is that possible? the nation asks itself, and is only now truly shocked. With this in mind, the press investigates their “background.” One learn from this all sorts of things about what’s long been going on in America’s peaceful everyday life.

The perpetrators, one reads, come from a “milieu” that is widespread throughout rural America, a scene of “paramilitary militias” and “gun nuts” with “right-wing extremist ideas.” The press openly admits that this does not in any way make them “un-American”; on the contrary. The fact that such armed gangs not only exist, but are also legally allowed to exist is ultimately a result of the cherished prerogative of free Americans to bear arms which they will not allow a bunch of liberals in Washington to take away from them. It is well known that good Americans do not exercise this right solely for their own private amusement: vigilante groups that supplement and sometimes replace the local sheriff are normal in the US. The question as to who is responsible for maintaining and enforcing the state’s monopoly on the use of violence is not taken as narrowly by the US state as is customary in other countries. It does not consider it necessary to make a clear distinction between state appointed, armed officials and private individuals who are in principle unarmed, nor does it make such a distinction; it even leaves this up partly to the legal and regulatory fanaticism of its free citizens who decide on the local level what is to be enforced as law and who is allowed and supposed to ensure its execution. Its citizens thank it by acting as righteous guardians of domestic peace, which is why the transition from actual justice to lynch law is more or less fluid depending on local circumstances. It goes without saying that such militias also feel responsible not only for maintaining order against blacks and other elements, but also for defending the nation against its enemies as a “home guard” in case of doubt. The sophisticated Yank finds it somewhat peculiar, at best, that his fellow patriots are stockpiling weapons and spending their weekends doing private military drills – “gun nuts,” in other words. But then again, you never know what that might be good for.

– The good America

These honorable citizens, who organize themselves into rural gun-toting gangs, see themselves as the epitome and personification of what constitutes “America,” as the true subjects of the national will and of the state as its executive organs. The other side of this self-confidence, of this representation of the society’s morality and law, is, as one reads, a “deep-rooted” distrust of the federal government, something that is widely recognized as part of the American national character. The average American faces “Washington” with a habitual suspicion that it will deviate from the mandate it has received from the citizens and instead interfere with their rights on the basis of irrelevant considerations. The federal government arouses suspicion in the eyes of its constituents at the local level simply from the fact that it extracts so much money in taxes from the good American; and this is especially the case when it also fails in its duty to make the nation richer and more powerful. This leads to the obvious conclusion that the money is being squandered on the wrong people or disappearing into shady channels. However, the most intense hostility arises when “someone in Washington” attacks the natural hierarchy that divides the inhabitants of God’s own country into successful and inferior types. Good white Americans, for example, have never really understood why “nigger” children should even go to school, let alone with their children; accordingly, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society got a boost after the federal government deployed National Guard troops to enforce this program on the state level. Otherwise, that what these organizations pursue and preach is a question of “right wing extremist ideology” wouldn’t have been particularly noticed by anybody; both organizations continue to enjoy the best of health. Incidentally, the standpoint that not everything can be practiced on the local level that the federal government prescribes in terms of racial issues is by no means unique to the Klan and the Birchers, but constitutes everyday police work. And the violent attacks and death threats that rural ranchers are currently making against Forest Service officials because they do not understand why nature conservation should be more important than livestock grazing is by no means classified as “terrorism” in the USA, but considered a form of asserting a legitimate interest that should ultimately be stopped, but merely because it goes too far. What ultimately unites the Ku Klux Klan and the rebel ranchers with all the other patriotic citizens is their unreserved enthusiasm for everything the rulers in Washington do to fight America’s enemies, as well as their conviction that those at the top are always far too lenient with un-American elements. In any case, there is nothing about this that is “radically right wing.”

– Fans of the conservative revolution

The state is perfectly content with its citizens. Under the appealing title of “public spirit,” American politicians value and promote active patriotism at the local level, readily invoking mistrust of “Washington” to portray themselves and their respective programs as the true will of the people, and promise to act powerfully and energetically toward the outside world. That this involves a nasty tone toward the administration currently in office is a necessity of election campaigning: it requires portraying the opponent as an amoral traitor to American values in order to be elected as a morally strict, nationally conscious politician. In this spirit, the local patriotic team has been hearing terrible things for a few years now about the state of the nation and the crimes of Washington DC. What is ailing America, and what are the reasons for its widely lamented “decline,” according to the official view represented by the congressional majority? The government squanders taxpayer money on parasites and gives it away to Wall Street, builds too few prisons, runs up too much debt, elevates Negroes to positions they do not deserve, capitulates to the enemies of the nation, and hands over military power to the UN instead of using it vigorously to enforce American interests. In short: instead of providing the American people with national power, wealth, and order, the government promotes impoverishment, immorality, and a general disrespect for the law – this is the effective diagnosis of official malfeasance. And who are the recognized victims of this policy? The good Americans, those who support the nation and are stinted by “Washington” in an unsupportable way.

These are the taxpayers, oppressed and plundered by the federal government, the epitome of the patriots who demand their right to a strong America both at home and abroad, that Gingrich and Co. concluded their “pact with America” with, thereby explicitly justifying their anger toward “Washington.” They have declared a national emergency and called on Americans to engage in a fundamentalist criticism of everything and everyone who is corrupt and immoral in national life, explicitly including the Clinton administration, that “left wing regime.” Instructed in this way about the condition of their beloved homeland and embittered by the federal government’s inability and unwillingness to enforce the good America, the patriots in Oklahoma took action – and it can’t be said that they misunderstood their leaders much on this matter. These Americans who went rogue simply listened a little too closely to what their leaders have been telling them; and they took this message in a practical way that the Republicans surely did not intend. All they had to do was add a “conclusion” to the moral picture of government policy proclaimed from above, one which does not serve “America” but allows it to degenerate, and that has also long been inherent in American racism. Those who order such things and are responsible for them are – as Jesse Helms said! – traitors to America; therefore, they cannot be Americans.[5] If America’s honor is shamefully damaged under the command of the UN, doesn’t this prove that it is not incompetent representatives of America’s responsibility for world power, but rather the anti-American UN itself that has long been in command in Washington? Clinton tried to ban free Americans from carrying weapons; the FBI carried out a bloodbath in Waco to force a religious civic association to pay taxes and take away their weapons.[6] Who else but politicians could come up with such a thing as undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, and who else but agents of a hostile power could want to harm America? The obvious foreign beneficiaries of American weakness must also be the puppet masters who are playing into the hands of unpatriotic politicians. And Wall Street, which, according to Republicans, speculates with American money and then takes pay offs from a compliant government – mustn’t it be controlled by anti-American elements? If the leaders of the nation refuse to fulfill their duty to secure the citizens’ right to a truly powerful and sovereign America, then they must be a gang of criminals controlled by outside forces. But if that’s the case, then patriots can’t be content with electing the right people and helplessly watching the spectacle in Washington; then resistance is a duty. In this sense, good Americans call their own government the “Zionist Occupation Government” and step up to liberate their country from its rule. Paranoid? But of course! That’s just how agitated nationalists are when they see their country and its values in danger.

The shock and how the state copes with it to benefit itself

It was not foreseeable that the universally esteemed and courted private state fanaticism would get serious in practice about the view that the federal government is to blame for every inconvenience that happens to the good American and his nation and feel called upon to take matters into his own hands to restore a good and powerful America. The good, decent America, convinced of the righteousness of its nation, finds itself confronted with its own image in this “shameful act”; it is brutally confronted with what its patriotic morality is capable of, where and how far the fascist need for order and decency can go. Those who who have acted like enemies of the nation are, in terms of their origins, motives, and behavior, entirely committed to the moral principles that are sacred to it. And in all their convictions and habits, they correspond so completely to the image that every good American has of himself and should have – except for the fact that they planted a bomb against the state. When puzzling over the “motives” that may have “guided” the criminals, it is impossible to overlook that this is exactly what they meant: America is in danger, so we must act. An American, even with the best will in the world, cannot object to the “motive”; on the other hand, however, granting “extenuating circumstances” to the perpetrators for this act is really out of the question, as the public and the state are otherwise happy to do when claiming to have discovered noble intentions behind a crime. What’s new about this attack is really not the fact that good Americans resorted to violence on their own private account against people they have identified as violators of some national honorary title or valid moral principle; otherwise, rather, this is acceptable as a commitment to morality and order, at least in principle; or at least it can be expected that it will meet with a certain degree of understanding as a misguided good intention because it is not directed against the state itself, but against citizens who are privately eliminated for the state’s dereliction of duty. People who murder doctors in abortion clinics can certainly expect their moral cause to be given its due on a massive scale, even if they are held accountable for their actions. Such cases are at least morally controversial, no matter how clear-cut they may be from a legal standpoint. And in other cases of private crackdowns, the state sees no need whatsoever to treat such activities as an attack on itself and its legal system and to punish them with the full force of the law. However, this distinction should certainly not apply in this case: anyone who directly attacks the highest authority of the nation, the state itself, could never, ever have had good intentions.

This means that the good America is essentially finished with its mirror image; this is how the nation copes with the shock that crazed patriots have dealt to patriotism: it simply does not recognize itself in them. The growing suspicion that this could be a fundamentally decent American attitude is quickly dispelled: if a decent American is characterized by always turning – more or less violently – against the right people, namely those who attack the American order and violate America’s good principles, then it can’t be a good Americanism that is involved here when the violence is aimed against America itself. So the bloody patriotism brings upon itself the accusation that it wanted to execute against the government: it is the enemy of the nation. A “stunned” America separates the act from the intention, no matter how obviously ultra-nationalistic and highly moral it may have been, by referring to the morally unassailable object of the bloody deed – and thus comes to terms with itself and its reflection.

On the one hand, it is said: They were crazy. The honorable motives that they and their “milieu” themselves put forward can – in view of such an act – never have been such a thing, so they had no reasonable or morally commendable motives whatsoever, but are simply evil and not of sound mind, not even normal. This has created a problem for the nation’s soul searchers: to what extent should they limit the diagnosis of “paranoid” to the perpetrators, and to what extent should they extend it to the “paramilitary militias”? After all, this widespread bastion of the American ethos should not be declared without further ado to be the “mire” of the attack and criticized wholesale. Here, too, the logic of disconnection proves its worth: the perpetrators completely misunderstood the essentially decent citizens’ movements for law and order, distorting and exaggerating “it.” With such explanations, what they are said to have exaggerated remains unscathed and beyond doubt.

On the other hand, perhaps they were also a little misguided. So the unmistakable parallels to the demeanor and demonstrative radicalism of the conservative revolution’s politicians comes up – not as a political morality taken seriously by the assassins, but quite the opposite, as a question of political style. People like Gingrich and Helms in particular are accused of showing too little solidarity with the ruling Democrats, of damaging the culture of political debate with “hate speech” and thereby contributing to a “climate” in which such madmen, with no respect for state authority, lose their last inhibitions. With this accusation, one thing is explicitly not meant: that the political message presented by the national leadership to its people has a hate-inciting character and murderous consequences. On the contrary: when the public now unanimously urges politicians to convey national necessities to their people with more feelings of responsibility and less mutual insults, it is merely insisting that government leaders should assert their responsibility for law, order, and national morality against the usurpation of authority from below, that it should lead the nation in unity and with dignity rather than dividing it. With the expert assessment of the extent to which Clinton will succeed in indirectly blaming the conservatives for the attack in this sense, the nation then finally returns to the routine of political competition.

So America is at peace with itself again: “Crazy and perhaps even incited against their will by radical slogans that damage the unity of the nation!” – This leads to a clear conclusion: these were not good Americans, but profoundly evil un-Americans! It is mutually confirmed that, as Americans, they will not be deterred by “something like that” in their firm will to act together for the good of the nation. The nation examines its conscience, finds it to be pure except for a few lapses, and continues as before. The question whether “someone” should change something, maybe on the weapons issue, is briefly raised and rejected. Clinton uses the opportunity to give the FBI more powers; but that was planned anyway. And for the Iran embargo one certainly doesn’t need bomb-planting Arabs anyway. After all, the “monstrous” can also be understood from a historical-philosophical perspective with references to the number of bombings and presidential assassinations in the nation’s history. And – did that ultimately dishearten the nation? Exactly! So the bombers could be content. They head to death row, vindicating the spirit in which they acted.

Footnotes

[1] Every democratic state power still adheres to this totalitarian morality; even the Red Army Faction is said to have killed not one or two leaders, but to have shaken the foundations of the Federal Republic.

[2] Of course, this is nothing new. When the Iranians took American embassy staff hostage in Tehran during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, American citizens demonstrated in front of the Iranian consulate with placards reading “Nuke Iran!” The fact that the hostages were ultimately only worth a failed violent rescue operation on Iranian soil and not Iran’s successful military punishment was deeply resented by voters.

[3] The decision of the mayor of Oklahoma City to not rebuild the building but leave it standing as a memorial and create a park around it is very fitting with this point of view. At least those affected will then know what they died for.

[4] When asked why he had rented the truck to the bombers without seeing a driver’s license, the car rental agent replied: “I trusted them. They looked just like the guys from the nearby army barracks.”

[5] It is no coincidence that subversive activities in the US are also called “un-American activities”!

[6] In the course of the explanation for the attack, it was casually revealed that the view of the events in Waco, which had been circulated in other countries, namely that it was the insane act of a crazy and dangerous sect, is by no means the unanimous view in America: The fact that the civic association refused to pay taxes to the state makes it a role model in the eyes of many upstanding Americans, just as does its organization as a religious community that creates its own order – with weapons, or course – and its resistance to control by the federal government. So many upright Americans do not view the actions of the state authorities and its bloody ending as an inevitable enforcement of law and order, but rather as a beacon in the fight of the good America against the un-American machinations of the highest state authorities, i.e., against injustice and impending chaos.