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I wouldn’t call the public discussion that we’ve been subjected to about McVeigh and his motivations debate. Not many facts informed the words that have been said about the whole affair. Mostly people talked past each other. The media carefully avoided acknowledging some things that actually made him look more like a monster.
As an anti-fascist, anarchist, leftist, revolutionary, respecter of human life, and generally nice guy, I’m supposed to be against capital punishment. Generally I am. As much as I am politically against state-murder, the case of Tim McVeigh strains my beliefs. Knowledge of his death came to me like a dirty pleasure.
Despite my secret pleasure of not having to share the planet with one more murdering bigot, I can’t help but feel short changed. In spite of my private forbidden joy, it seems that my enemies have gained Tim McVeigh was a neo-nazi soldier who committed a war crime. He was not a mere “anti-government extremist.” According to his fellow servicemen, he slept with neo-nazi literature under his pillow while in the army. The first organization he joined when he was discharged as a war hero was the KKK, and not the Michigan Militia. The Militia expelled him because he was crazy. Between his discharge and his capture he crisscrossed the country, building bombs, hawking neo-nazi propaganda at gun shows, and even living on a neo-nazi compound with other people later convicted of terrorist acts in pursuit of a race war.
He elected to get his execution over with. I heard some echoes of the old fascist cry “Long Live Death” in the way he faced the survivors of his attack with cold detachment. He managed to die without naming the rest of his support network and fellow fascist guerrillas. He was cold enough a killer to not give the years of imprisonment a chance to wear down on him. He took some control back by giving up his appeals. He chose to go to death sneering at his victims. He sneered at every one of us as the light went out of his eyes. Even in death he won and he knew it.
The state, the cruel blind monster that it is killed him. Coldly, efficiently, emotionlessly it simply turned him off. Then again killing is all the state really does. Sure, it builds and maintains highways, constructs universities, hands out crumbs (fewer and smaller these days) and regulates trade somewhat. The state’s only real job, however, is to dispense death. It does our killing for us. Often, it kills us too. The state needs to kill on its own behalf to survive. In the case of Tim McVeigh, the state was seeing to its own needs.
Tim McVeigh was convicted on 11 capital counts: conspiracy to manufacture a weapon of mass destruction, manufacture of a weapon of mass destruction, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of a weapon of mass destruction, and the murder of seven federal police officers. Another 161 people died from his bomb. None of their lives mattered. The state killed him only for crimes he committed against it, not against the people.
By planning, constructing and deploying his bomb Tim McVeigh broke the state’s monopoly on weapons of mass destruction and their use. Business needed to be protected. In detonating it where it killed the majority of the federal agents who were not late to work that morning, he attacked it. Dogs that bite their masters get put down. Despite the fact that image of a distraught fireman carrying a dead infant is the image from the day of the bombing that will stick in many people’s minds, Tim McVeigh will never be charged with that child’s death. The state did not care about her. 161 lives will never be answered for. The state acknowledged what Tim McVeigh himself said. Those lives were “collateral damage.” The state used his act to make Americans very afraid of people who are anti-government. Tim McVeigh was a lot more than anti-government. He was a Nazi. Somehow, demonizing Nazis was not on the state’s agenda.
Tim McVeigh’s death will cause the nation to ignore the continued murder by the state of the developmentally disabled, the insane, the very young, and the provably innocent. The struggle against capital punishment may have been set back years. Just after Illinois imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, Tim McVeigh has given our new president, Boy George, a chance to do with the federal system what he did with Texas. In a time when the first person to face the federal death chamber could have challenged it, he opened the doors for many others to die needlessly. Bush should have shown his gratitude by pinning a medal on McVeigh’s I-V.
Tim McVeigh will wind up supporting the system in death. His death sanitizes capital punishment. The state gets to demonstrate that it does in fact kill people who “deserve” it. Tim McVeigh is really morally no different than any other pilot or tank gunner of the gulf war era. His real crime was practicing without a license. We find his skills distasteful when they are used on us.
In the end, all my enemies have won. The Nazis won: as a whole they live to fight quietly on. The state has won: it has grown stronger and more unquestioned. Tim McVeigh won: he died stoically and lives on as a hero in the diabolical minds of would be race warriors. All the actors on the sad stage that have gained in this tragedy are actors that I abhor.
I can’t say that killing fascists and/or war criminals is wrong. Two generations ago many people did it for survival. Others did it late and half-heartedly to build the power of their nations. Several of my great uncles did it because they were drafted.
I can say that the survivors and families of the victims of the bombing do deserve justice. I can say that every fascist does deserve a horrid fate. Perhaps the most just fate in my mind is Mussolini’s. He was torn to pieces by a vengeful mob. I support community empowerment. What happened to Tim McVeigh certainly wasn’t that.
Jerry Bellow is a local activist in many social justice organizations.