In 1987 I wrote a book, “Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right,” that focused on the mayhem threatened by America’s bizarre, racist and anti-Semitic underground movement.
Last week I got a phone call from my editors at the Chicago Tribune who had been alerted to a breaking New York Times story disclosing that “Armed and Dangerous” was found on Oklahoma City bombing suspect Terry Nichols’ coffee table when he was arrested.
The Times reported that Timothy McVeigh, allegedly the leader of the attack, had given my book to his pal Nichols “to reinspire faith in the plot,” to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that would kill 167 people including 19 children.
It was a stunning development. This is my response.
My book is a non-fiction effort charting the landscape and the vileness of what I chose to call the Survivalist Right, the now well-known clots of bigots in militaristic movements ranging from the militias to neo-Nazis.
Federal prosecutors charge that McVeigh boasted to numerous acquaintances that the “Turner Diaries,” a piece of racist trash by William Pierce, was his inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing. In the novel, a band of racist warriors destroys FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., with a bomb made of fertilizer and diesel oil.
But Nichols, apparently, lost his zeal for acting out the “Turner Diaries.” And when he did, McVeigh reportedly showed him the second chapter of “Armed and Dangerous,” which deals with another band of racists called The Order.
The Order launched what, at the time, was the most vicious series of attacks ever carried out in the United States in support of the extremist ideologies espoused by those with whom Nichols and McVeigh clearly allied themselves.
The Order crime wave by roughly 25 men associated with the Church of Jesus Christ Christian-Aryan Nations near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, included the 1984 machine-gun assassination of Denver talk show host Alan Berg; a series of synagogue bombings; armored car robberies; and massive counterfeiting projects that netted the group more than $4 million.
I spent nearly 10 years as a national correspondent for this newspaper following this stench of hatred.
It extended from Berg’s driveway in Denver to a cabin on Ruby Ridge in Idaho where another tragedy claimed the lives of a U.S. marshal and the wife and son of white separatist and Survivalist Randy Weaver in August of 1992.
The assignments took me to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri to a group of anti-Semitic “Identity Christians” called the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, which was overrun by a heavily armed federal task force in 1985.
I attended cross burnings in Idaho where I was tolerated by mean-eyed men with swastika armbands and rifles who had actually invited the “Jewsmedia” onto their grounds for a press tour.
I covered the trial in 1987 in Ft. Smith, Ark., of 10 top hate group leaders who were acquitted on seditious conspiracy charges.
In that trial, FBI agents attempted to document how the various suspects planned to assassinate federal judges and FBI agents; set an explosion on the major natural gas pipeline linking Chicago with southwestern oilfields; pollute the water supplies of several unnamed small cities; and finance it all with bank robberies and armored car attacks.
The case collapsed because the government, which had proved in other courts that many of the crimes had occurred or had been planned, didn’t prove that doing these deeds amounted to a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.
The defendants included the late Robert Miles, a venomous Klan leader from the Detroit suburbs who tried to bomb children in school buses two decades before the children of Oklahoma City died, and Richard Girnt Butler, the aging but still hate-ridden “pastor” of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian-Aryan Nations.
Also on trial was Richard Wayne Snell, a neo-Nazi from the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord who was in prison even then on charges of murdering an Arkansas state trooper in a racially charged confrontation.
Snell was executed by lethal injection on the morning of April 19, 1995, at almost the exact hour that the bomb exploded in front of the federal building.
I found people like Snell, Weaver, Butler and Miles, who operate as lone wolves or gather in groups with names like neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Posse Comitatus, Freemen, Skinheads, Identity Christians, Aryan Nations, White Aryan Resistance and sundry militias, to be despicable.
They were and are a sorry collection of the undereducated and marginally employable who seize upon conspiracy theories and hatred of blacks and Jews to justify their own weaknesses and failures.
My book traced how The Order, which carried out the killing, bombing and robbing spree in the mid-1980s, found ready shelter and moral support from enclaves of hatemongers across the nation.
These support groups remain even though Berg’s murderers and the criminals who executed the armored-car robberies and other crimes had been killed or arrested.
Other monsters might rise up in the future, I warned with the 1987 publication of the book.
I wish that McVeigh and Nichols had read beyond Chapter 2, but I doubt it.
The rest of the book explains how people like McVeigh and Nichols found comfort for their own failings in a demented ideology that a cabal of Jewish conspirators are running the world’s governments, media and businesses according to a master plan that will encourage white people to interbreed with other races, thus creating a weakened “mudpeople.”
This is the infamous Hidden Hand concept that has fueled so many acts of anti-Semitism, from the Spanish Inquisition to Czarist pogroms and, of course, Hitler’s genocidal madness.
The book’s purpose was to sound a warning to many segments of the population who are susceptible to buying into this ideological dung and ruining their lives following it.
The core warning was to beware of the background noise of hatred in American life-the talk radio venom, the strange pamphlets warning of bankers in back rooms, the Klan rallies in suburban parks, the guys at the bar whose speech is laced with epithets.
Its unmistakable message: Don’t let the equivalent of some backwater stump speaker explain that you are stuck in a dead-end job and saddled with debt because there is a government conspiracy to tax white people in order to finance affirmative action programs.
Don’t listen to preachers with the message that the biblical accounts of the lost tribes of Israel prove that God’s real chosen people are not the people known today as Jews but rather the tribe of white Aryans who migrated across the Caucasus Mountains in biblical times to become the Caucasians.
This spiritually laced swill is promoted by what are called Christian Identity churches, a small but vocal gathering of people claiming status as clergy and preaching the vilest of anti-Semitism and racism as God’s own commandments.
It was bad enough, of course, when the hatred was espoused by people wearing sheets and burning crosses, but, in the wake of Oklahoma City, the hate has been cloaked in respectability.
Reporters and broadcasters focused much of their early coverage on militia groups that ranted about United Nations troops using black helicopters to direct troop movements in the Texas hinterlands.
These militias have taken to telling outsiders that they are “angry at the government,” a phrase that has become a dangerous cliche in today’s dangerous world.
In efforts to explore the motivation behind the Murrah building catastrophe, journalists on deadlines note that McVeigh and Nichols had ties to the American militia movement and various anti-tax zealots who are to be found in virtually every nook and cranny of this country.
The result has been unrelenting attention to the thoughts and antics of a ludicrous aggregation of frustrated white men decked out in military camouflage shirts with the buttons popping at their middle-aged girth.
We have listened to squadrons of dingbats prattling about how tax laws allow “worthy white males” to avoid paying tribute to any governmental body higher than the county sheriff.
Each of these people, we are told, are angry with the government, as if that common symptom explained the carnage in Oklahoma City.
Most horrific of all, the coverage suggests that these assorted extremists-McVeigh and Nichols included-are mere extensions of the Gingrich Revolution. It’s as though they were some form of Republicans, far out there on the ultraright wing, to be sure, but Republicans nevertheless. Guys right of Newt.
No.
These people are not political, they are pathological. They are armed and dangerous.
