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TIMOTHY MCVEIGH'S TEACHERS
Oklahoma City Bomber Took a Lesson from U.S. 'Foreign Policy'
Howard Zinn is an historian and author of A
People's History of the United States.
Now that Timothy McVeigh has been put to
death, and some people's need for revenge or punishment may be
satisfied, we can begin to think calmly of how he learned his
twisted sense of right and wrong from the government that
executed him.
No one with an ounce of moral understanding can justify the
bombing of a building which resulted in the deaths of 168
people. But McVeigh didn't have to look far to find that the
United States government had done just that, but on a larger
scale.
In the war against Iraq, of which McVeigh was a decorated
veteran, on February 15, 1991, the U.S. Air Force dropped a bomb
on an air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing over 600 people, many
of them women and children. There had been many bombings, of
buses, trains, highways, hospitals, neighborhoods, in which
civilians were killed, and where the government described them
as accidents. Of course, they were not quite accidents, because
if you drop huge numbers of bombs on a city, it is inevitable
that innocent people will die.
However, in the case of the air raid shelter, the United States
conceded that the bombing was deliberate. and justified this by
the claim that the air raid shelter was a
"communications" site. Reporters going into the rubble
immediately after the bombing found not the slightest evidence
of that. And even if it were, would that justify a massacre
(there's no other name for it) of hundreds of men, women and
children? If McVeigh had not been in the infantry but in the Air
Force, and had dropped that bomb, killing more than twice the
number he killed in Oklahoma, he would be alive and perhaps have
another medal pinned to his chest.
In defending his bombing of the federal building, with all those
dead and wounded, McVeigh used the term "collateral
damage", exactly the words used by our government to
describe the deaths of civilians in our bombing of various
countries, whether Iraq or Panama or Yugoslavia. My Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary defines "collateral" as
"accompanying or related, but secondary or
subordinate". Both McVeigh and the leaders of the United
States government considered the toll of human life secondary to
whatever else was destroyed, and therefore acceptable.
McVeigh is no longer able to let his demented notion of morality
lead to any more deaths. The United States government, on the
other hand, is very much alive, and capable of more and more
bombings -- like the ones taking place almost every day in Iraq
-- and the civilian deaths will be justified once more as
"collateral" damage.
The day after Timothy McVeigh's execution, the Boston Herald
ran a banner headline on its front page: "IT'S OVER!"
But it is not over. Terrorism is the killing of innocent people
in order "to send a message" (those are McVeigh's
words and also the words of government spokesmen when our planes
have bombed some foreign city). So long as our government
engages in terrorism, claiming always that it is done for
"democracy" or "freedom" or "to send a
message" to some other government, there will be more
Timothy McVeighs, following the example.
No, it is not over. Individual acts of terrorism will continue,
and that will be called -- rightly -- fanaticism. Government
terrorism, on a much larger scale, will continue, and will be
called "foreign policy". That is the perverted sense
of morality which now rules and will go on ruling, until
Americans decide that all terrorism is wrong and will not be
tolerated.
Originally
published at:
http://www.tompaine.com/history/2001/06/13/index.html
© 1999-2001 The Florence Fund |
