OUR
FRIENDS IN WASHINGTON
A
complex view of McVeigh is the height of political incorrectness,
for we aren't supposed to question the legitimacy of our
government, as McVeigh did; it is not our enemy but our
friend, not to mention the benefactor of all the
world's peoples. If you don't go along with the program,
then you're an "America-hater," and you must be ritually
denounced and forever shunned. That's what the neocons
– of the left and the right – believe, and we'd
all better believe it, too, if we know what's good for
us. And why, pray tell, is that? A look at the evolution
of a right-wing terrorist provides a few clues. . . .
MADDENED
BY WAR
McVeigh
was a normal, all-American, corn-fed boy, patriotic to
a fault: but it was the Gulf War that turned him around.
As Vidal points out in the
Vanity Fair piece that got him in trouble with
the neocons to begin with,
"In
Bush's Gulf War he was much decorated as an infantryman,
a born soldier. But the war itself was an eye-opener,
as wars tend to be for those who must fight them. Later,
he wrote a journalist how "we were falsely hyped up."
The ritual media demonizing of Saddam, Arabs, Iraqis had
been so exaggerated that when McVeigh got to Iraq he was
startled to 'find out they are normal like me and you.
They hype you to take these people out. They told us we
were to defend Kuwait where the people had been raped
and slaughtered. War woke me up.'"
THE
DIRTY DISH
It
isn't McVeigh's actions they abhor so much as his mindset.
If only he'd been some other kind of right-wing
fanatic: say, an anti-abortion crusader, or an extreme
Zionist demanding the freedom of Jonathan Pollard. Then,
perhaps, they could understand if not forgive. In McVeigh's
case, however, they do understand – which
is precisely why they'll never forgive. For McVeigh is
an ex-soldier who denounces interventionism, a patriot
whose very devotion led him to rebellion, one of their
centurions who dared to question the legitimacy of the
Empire – a deadly weapon that turned against its
creators. This, it turns out, is what has got Sullivan
all in a tizzy over Vidal: the foreign policy angle. After
much mulling over the question of "exactly why Gore Vidal
has such a crush on Timothy McVeigh," the "out" neocon
who delightedly gay-baits his elders (and betters) writes,
"I had a bit of a eureka moment." Yes, readers of Sullivan's
endless stream of self-promoting commentary, the "Daily
Dish," are often treated to verbatim accounts of these
"eureka moments." But, then, a genius like Sullivan, who
compares himself to George Orwell, has a lot of these.
"Vidal has long been motivated," we are told,
"by
a slightly loopy romanticization of America as a republic,
of America never really being involved in wars. (Vidal
is queasy about the Second World War, let alone Vietnam
or Desert Storm), and maintaining her pre-imperial virginity.
Along with McVeigh's paranoid fantasies about American
power at home, he is also, it turns out, an anti-interventionist
abroad."
VIRGIN
AMERICA
It
is not surprising that Sullivan, a foreigner – is
he even a citizen? – sneers at the quaintness of
the idea that America is a republic, not an empire, looking
down his snooty British nose at the sheer silliness
of anyone who imagines that a country as powerful as the
US could maintain "her pre-imperial virginity." Such ideas
are "loopy" to the power-worshipping sophisticates of
Europe, who know better than to imagine that virginity
or purity of any kind could long survive in this world.
Sullivan, being an adherent of the "lookit this!" school
of writing, smugly offers large chunks of quotations with
minimal commentary – with the subtext being "can
you believe they actually said that?" Sullivan
cites the London Observer as his source (sorry,
can't find a link), and the quote is worth reproducing
if only because I agree with McVeigh when he says:
"What
occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans
rain on the heads of others all the time, and subsequently,
my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The
bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more
than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb
or launch cruise missiles against government installations
and their personnel). I hope that this clarification amply
addresses all questions."
A
SENSE OF DETACHMENT
Well,
uh, it doesn't amply address all questions, Tim,
but who can disagree with that first sentence? Didn't
those who survived the Oklahoma City blast feel very much
like those who lived through the bombing of Belgrade?
Each will claim their own special agony, but the differences
are purely geographical. McVeigh, the soldier, had been
trained to distance himself from the suffering of the
"enemy," and once he decided that all federal employees
– indeed, all those who set foot in the Alfred P.
Murrah federal building that fateful day – were "enemies,"
then he went into soldier mode. Just like those soldier-pilots
who, following Truman's orders, dropped atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No doubt they did it with "clinical
detachment."
SUBVERSIVE
THOUGHTS
Sullivan
– a lazy writer, albeit a good one –
is content to dismiss McVeigh's self-evidently correct
argument (which, simply stated, is that death is everywhere
the same) in a single snippy sentence: "It certainly addresses
the question of why Vidal loves McVeigh so much." Yes,
but who can explain why Sullivan hates McVeigh with such
an unnatural passion – a hatred that demands all
portraits of this devil must be painted in shades of darkness?
Yes, his horrible act was ineffably evil, but does this
mean that he couldn't also be highly intelligent? Yet
Sullivan is shocked – shocked! – that
Vidal could so describe his "chum." Does his evil act
rule out the validity of any and all of his views? To
the very prim and proper Sullivan, who prides himself
as a seeker after truth but is always careful to go along
with the conventional wisdom – especially now that
he has moved to Washington – the idea that someone
might have been driven mad by the madness of his own government
is so subversive that it cannot even be entertained.
FORBIDDEN
ISSUES
To
Sullivan and the liberals (and I mean to include in that
designation all the "ex"-liberal "neoconservatives" who
have infiltrated the Republican party), this is the essential
issue. For McVeigh's great crime, in their eyes –
quite aside from the heinous act he committed – was
to utter the forbidden words: Waco and Ruby Ridge. While
neocons of the right and those of the left allow a certain
amount of debate over a limited variety of issues –
Should Social Security be partially privatized? How much
should the military budget be increased? – whole
areas are off-limits. Anyone who mentions Waco or Ruby
Ridge is automatically ruled out of order, especially
someone with as much of a public platform as Vidal, who
is, after all, American's most celebrated literary expatriate.
Yet a few dissidents, not all of them necessarily on right,
such as Vidal, have dared to raise these issues in the
context of the decline of civil liberties in America,
and they see McVeigh differently. As Vidal put it in his
Vanity Fair piece:
"The
bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City was not unlike Pearl Harbor, a great shock to an
entire nation and, one hopes, a sort of wake-up call to
the American people that all is not well with us. As usual,
the media responded in the only way they know how. Overnight,
one Timothy McVeigh became the personification of evil.
Of motiveless malice. There was the usual speculation
about confederates. Grassy knollsters. But only one other
maniac was named, Terry Nichols; he was found guilty of
"conspiring" with McVeigh, but he was not in on the slaughter
itself."
WHO
IS ANDY STRASSMEIR?
Previously
unknown – or, I should say, little known – facts
are coming out about the Oklahoma City bombing that suggest
a wider involvement than McVeigh is willing to admit.
A
fascinating article in the [London] Guardian
reveals connections with the shadowy figure of Andy
Strassmeier, seen with McVeigh and Nichols. Strassmeir
is a purported neo-Nazi who regularly travels between
the US and Germany: he also just happens to be the son
of Gunther Strassmeir, says the Guardian, "Helmut
Kohl's Secretary of State, a man known as the 'architect
of German reunification.' Andy Strassmeir received military
intelligence training at the Bundeswehr Academy
in Hanover." German officials reportedly refused to allow
Strassmeir to be questioned by the Justice Department,
and Reno did not seem too interested in pursuing the matter.
Strassmeir took refuge in Germany, after the Oklahoma
City bombing, at the home of his parents, but moved out
when his presence attracted unwelcome publicity: his father
is still a leading figure in the Christian Democratic
Union. Why did the Justice Department not pursue the matter?
As the leader above the Guardian article puts it:
"On May 16, Timothy McVeigh is due to be executed for
his part in the Oklahoma City bombing. He claims the blast
was all his own work. But, Jon Ronson discovers, there
were probably others, government agents even, who knew
what was afoot." Check it out.
A
BITTER RADOSH
As
you may have noticed, the neocons never take on their
enemies mano a mano – like any pack of jackals,
they attack in a group. Following swiftly on the heels
of Sullivan's smear-job, Ronald Radosh, writing in Frontpage
(David Horowitz's online magazine), displays
the characteristic nastiness of the species. Entitled
"Gore Vidal Reaches a New Low," Radosh's bitter screed
is such a farrago of falsehood mixed with sheer bile that
its dishonesty is palpable from the very first paragraph:
"For
a long time, the novelist and essayist Gore Vidal has
presented himself as an anti-American, anti-Semitic, hard-nosed
Leftist, whose sneer and arrogance endear him to few,
aside from the New York literati and The Nation
magazine crowd. But now, Vidal has hit the bottom."
THE
ART OF SMEARING
Vidal
has "presented himself" as an anti-Semite? As "anti-American"?
The neocon method is invariably the same, whether we are
talking about Sullivan or Radosh or any of their confreres
in the "second thoughts" crowd: they attribute the smears
originating with them to … their victims! Vidal
was attacked for "anti-Semitism" by Norman Podhoretz for
daring to say what everyone knows: that if Israel decided
to invade, say, Brooklyn's Crown Heights, Podhoretz and
the Commentary crowd would claim it was a act of
self-defense. As for "anti-American" – how anyone
could so describe a novelist who has made American history
his primary subject, and the object of his celebration
as well as his trenchant critique, is beyond knowing.
As for being a "hard-nosed Leftist," this, again, is way
off base: for, if Radosh is correct, then how do we account
for Vidal's sympathy with several hard-nosed right-wing
stances, such as outrage over Waco and Ruby Ridge, the
ubiquitous power of the IRS, and, indeed, his whole interest
in McVeigh – the symbol of right-wing "extremism"
in America – not only as a symbol but as a person?
AND
YOUR POINT IS?
Radosh
admonishes Vidal for his remark about McVeigh's "exaggerated
sense of justice" by declaring that "in other words, Vidal
thinks that in bombing the Murrah Federal Building, McVeigh
went too far, but that his motivation was good." Vidal
is saying no such thing, of course, but the real question
is: what is Radosh saying? Radosh writes regularly for
the conservative website Frontpage, and his new
book, Commies,
is sure to be marketed to conservatives (I, for one, can't
wait to read it: Radosh knows a lot about the Left,
having been in it for so long, and his book is going to
be a fascinating read). Is he telling conservatives that
he thinks Waco and Ruby Ridge were no big deal? Is he
telling us that the litany of issues raised by McVeigh
– the growth of the federal leviathan at home, and
its increasingly troublesome interventions abroad –
are really not valid concerns for the Right?
MOTIVE
& METHOD
What
was McVeigh's motivation? The word "motivation"
can and does have multiple meanings in this context. While
there are those who say methamphetamine, rather than ideology,
may have been the chief impetus behind McVeigh's mad act,
it is undeniable that his ideological concerns are shared
by millions of Americans who were horrified by the bombing
and would never even think of trying to justify it. While
neocon policy wonks ensconced inside the Beltway are not
too concerned about gun control – and, of course,
they never question the globalist orthodoxy shared by
both "right" and "left" wings of Respectable Opinion –
it's a very different world out there in the conservative
heartland.
APRIL
19 – DAY OF DECEIT?
Does
this mean that, in their eyes, McVeigh is a hero? No way:
but it does mean that they are more than willing
to entertain the thought that McVeigh, far from acting
alone, was helped along by at least one agency of the
federal government. The story of Herr Strassmeir is very
interesting, and this fascinating lead needs to be followed
up before the trail grows cold. What was the son of a
high-ranking German official doing hanging out with Tim
McVeigh? The Guardian article also talks about
how a government agent infiltrated a group of Midwest
separatists close to McVeigh, which raises the question:
how many government agents knew about plans for the Oklahoma
bombing in advance? Vidal compares the Oklahoma City blast
with Pearl Harbor, and, if you read his recent novel,
The
Golden Age, you can see just what he really means
by this comment. For in that novel Vidal dramatized the
revelations in Robert Stinnett's Day
of Deceit, a devastating exposure of FDR's foreknowledge
of the Japanese attack.
A
CONSPIRACY THEORY
What
did the feds know and when did they know it? This should
become the battle-cry of the revisionist school on the
question of who and what was behind the Oklahoma City
bombing. Tim McVeigh will die, but questions about who
or what was manipulating this soldier-patriot turned speed-crazed
pawn will linger as long as the memory of his murderous
act endures. Of course, it is naturally impossible
that the law-abiding and completely open and above-board
Clinton administration could have been involved. Sure,
it was an enormous political benefit to them: it stemmed,
for a while, the rightist tide that seemed to be rising,
and Clinton did demagogically link McVeigh to those
nasty old "right-wing extremists" in the GOP – you
know, like Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott! Oh, but course,
it would never occur to the most corrupt administration
in modern times to play such a "dirty trick" – it's
completely implausible. Yes, I do remember the
bombing of that "terrorist" factory in the Sudan. Yeah,
I know, those "weapons of mass destruction" turned
out to be aspirins, and I did hear that a few people
were killed, but, gee whiz, we're talking about Americans
here. Surely the Clinton administration, as bad as it
was, couldn't have had a hand in the single most destructive
act of terrorism in American history – could they?
BACK
TO RADOSH
But
I digress. Radosh latches on to the same sentence from
Vidal as Sullivan, about how McVeigh is "a junkie of the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights" and avers:
"I
guess this means that to Vidal, understanding our Constitution
means knowing that our own government is the enemy of
the world's peoples; perhaps before he dies, Vidal will
convince McVeigh to announce that he too is now a man
of the Left, who, had he another chance, would have shifted
his anger to more appropriate targets, such as Israel
or perhaps the Pentagon. At any rate, Vidal is certain
of one thing: McVeigh 'is a very superior sort of young
man.' I may not be as intelligent as Gore Vidal, but I
propose one immediate action: a boycott of all books written
by Gore Vidal. It is about time that he learns what many
people actually think of him."
HE'S
NO DUMMY
Surely
it is possible for "a very superior sort of person" to
commit a horrible crime: a person of superior intelligence,
whose intellectual drives are frustrated or somehow limited,
is indeed far more likely to commit some spectacular crime
than some ordinary dullard bereft of obsessions. Certainly
McVeigh is not the first intelligent mass murderer to
be executed, nor will he be the last. But it would be
wrong to attribute this oddly unconvincing idea –
that McVeigh, being the epitome of human evil, cannot
be superior in any way – to plain old stupidity.
Radosh may be right in saying that he is not as intelligent
as Vidal, at least in a certain sense, but it is important
to understand that Radosh is a very intelligent man –
just not a very honest one. For in smearing Vidal with
the brush of "anti-Semitism" and "anti-Americanism," he
does so knowing that it is a lie.
KNAVES
AND HEROES
I
am absolutely sure of this, because I have read –
many times – Radosh's wonderful and truly knowledgeable
book on the Old Right and the noninterventionist movement
in America, Prophets
on the Right: Conservative Critics of American Globalism.
It is so wonderful that we have been offering it
here, as a premium to those who contribute to Antiwar.com,
almost since our inception. In it, Radosh sympathetically
recounts the history of the much-maligned opponents of
US entry into World War II, men such as John T. Flynn
and the "fascist" Lawrence Dennis, both of whom were smeared
as pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic during the war years (Dennis
was indicted for treason). Radosh knows perfectly well
that if his book were to be updated to include contemporary
heirs of the Old Right, Vidal would constitute a whole
chapter all by himself. Prophets on the Right came
out in 1975 – is it so long ago that Radosh has forgotten
what he wrote? Back then, he held that the charges against
the anti-interventionist America First movement made by
the pro-war Left were "a smear." Vidal's stance on the
proper foreign policy for a republic must seem awfully
familiar to Radosh: it is the same republican (small-'r')
anti-imperialism that animated Flynn and his fellow America
Firsters in their crusade against FDR's war plans. So,
why is Flynn – whose views on these matters
are quite consistent with Vidal's – a hero, and Vidal
a knave?
STRANGE
PARALLELS
This
parallel between Vidal and Flynn goes a bit further, however,
even beyond their mutual opposition to the corporate state
and US military intervention in Vietnam, especially when
we really take a good look at Radosh's excellent
book, where, on pages 204 and 205 we read the tale of
FDR's revenge on Flynn, his most biting and persistent
liberal critic:
"It
is no wonder that after reading an attack by Flynn on
the President and his aide Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt protested
to the Yale Review's editor, Wilbur L. Cross, that Flynn
had become 'a destructive rather than a constructive force.'
Flynn, the President urged, 'should be barred hereafter
from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly
magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review."
AGAINST
ALL ODDS
With
his proposed "boycott" of Vidal's writings, Radosh echoes
the evil FDR, who smeared his opponents as he sought to
get them "barred" from the media – for the most part
successfully. He would have Vidal share Flynn's sad fate,
an outcome eloquently described by a younger (and, perhaps,
wiser) Radosh in Prophets on the Right. After explaining
how William F. Buckley rejected an article submitted to
National Review, and wrote Flynn a patronizing
note, instructing this grand old man of the Right in the
cruel necessities of the cold war, Radosh trenchantly
summarizes Flynn's place in history:
"Flynn
ended his public career in 1960, isolated from the radicals
of the left and from those who, in the name of conservatism,
were propagating globalism and perpetual intervention
abroad. The old globalist alliance had captured one more
component [the conservative movement] for the consensus.
Against all odds, Flynn insisted that the only threat
was domestic militarism and fascism."
THE
WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF
Fortunately,
Vidal is too famous, and too successful, to be pulled
down by any organized boycott: and I somehow have the
feeling that this one is unlikely to gather much momentum.
Those who are boycotting Vidal are already boycotting
him: he has not only survived but prospered. This drives
the boycotters crazy, as one can tell from the tone of
Radosh's screed. Sheer malice seems to jump off the page
at the reader, and it is shocking to see this in a writer
I previously respected. The iconoclastic novelist –
who is politically unclassifiable, at least by modern
lights – is like a red flag to the neoconservative
bulls. Why is that? I wrote at length about that topic
in
my review of Vidal's The Golden Age, and so
I won't repeat that material here: I'll just say that,
like the Kosovo war and the confederate flag, the Gore
Vidal question is one that separates the wheat from the
chaff, the paleos from the neos, the authentic conservatives
from the chasers after the main chance – in short,
this question separates the real right-wingers from those
neocons who have attached themselves to the Right out
of pure opportunism.
HOW
LOW CAN HE GO?
Radosh's
article was shockingly dishonest – and, unlike his
usual stuff, completely unconvincing. While not necessarily
agreeing with everything in his previous columns for Frontpage,
Radosh's contributions to that often very uneven online
journal were the highlight, well worth a trip to
the site. His latest, however, can only be called the
lowlight, as in "how low can you go?" The point
is that a man like Radosh, the author of Prophets on
the Right, knows better. Of course, unlike the neocons
– whose characteristic method, as conservative scholar
Paul Gottfried reminds us, is suppression of competing
ideas – I am not urging you to boycott Radosh,
or even the hysteria-prone (and often unintentionally
funny) Frontpage. By all means read Radosh: he
is entertaining, knowledgeable, and usually reasonable
– except when it comes to the subject of Gore Vidal.
A
NEW FEATURE!
I
want to draw your attention to the addition of a new feature
here at Antiwar.com: we've added "Backtalk,"
a letters page. The heroic Sam Koritz, a good friend whom
I met during the Kosovo war when we were both involved
in a leftist-led antiwar coalition, is conscientious and
hardworking: thanks to him, we will now be posting the
best of the letters that stream in on a daily basis. We
receive a veritable flood of comments, twenty-four hours
a day, from all corners of the world, and we can't post
it all: but Sam (whose fairness is legendary: after all,
he managed to mediate between me and a bunch of Commies
quite successfully) is up to the job of culling the best
and the most interesting. In addition, I am planning a
future column answering the ones that don't get posted:
so don't complain that your 5,000-word refutation of one
of my columns hasn't been posted ("because you're afraid
of the truth!") – because it could, after
all, be receiving special attention in the near future.
