 |
 |
words
latest musings
top ten
nasty past
contact sfh
facebook |
 Out of the millions upon millions of words that have been published about capital punishment - and a significant percentage of those millions, lately, have concerned the fate of one Timothy McVeigh - not enough of them deal with this question: why? As in, why was a particular offence committed - in Mr. McVeigh’s case, the mass murder of 168 people, 19 of them children - that has resulted in the imposition of the death penalty? Why did Mr. McVeigh do what he did? Why did he plan, and execute, what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has called the largest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States? In the journalism business, “why” is an important question. Quite a few years ago, for instance, I was a cops-and-courts reporter for this newspaper. As a Citizen correspondent, I sat at the back of plenty of courtrooms, or hovered at the periphery of just as many bloody crime scenes. After doing a lot of that sort of thing, I formed the conviction that it is not enough to merely offer up legal reporting that answers the who, what, when and where. Readers, I felt (and feel), want to know why. Here, then, is an attempt at answering why Timothy McVeigh - former decorated war veteran; former gifted student; former loving son, who regularly vacationed with his family in Toronto - slaughtered 168 men, women and children with the same amount of contemplation the rest of us reserve for a lane change. Mr. McVeigh killed because of a book. The book is called The Turner Diaries. It is illegal to bring The Turner Diaries across the border into Canada, but that is what I did a few years back - with no difficulty whatsoever - to assist me in a book I was writing about Canada’s extreme right. The Turner Diaries was written in 1978 by William Pierce, a former member of the American Nazi Party. Pierce’s book is a novel that tells the story of Earl Turner, a racist and anti-Semite who is opposed to gun control. The Diaries recount Turner’s involvement with a secretive far-right terrorist group called The Order. Here is a sampling of Pierce’s prose: “Our worries about the relatively small size of the bomb were unfounded; the damage is immense…The scene in the [FBI building’s] courtyard was one of utter devastation…Approximately 700 persons were killed…It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear, since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns…But there is no way to destroy the System [sic] without hurting many thousands of innocent people…If we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh, our whole race will die.” The “cancer” is made up of Jews, governments, and non-whites - along with journalists, clergy and race-mixers. There are many, many other similar passages that can be quoted - such as one which, in numbing detail, Turner describes how to create a bomb using ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel - but I will not. Contrary to what civil libertarians and free-speech advocates will tell you (often in the editorial pages of this newspaper), words do, in fact, have power. Words can kill and maim. Timothy McVeigh, after all, learned how to make his bomb by reading The Turner Diaries, which he carried with him everywhere he went. In blowing to bits the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, Mr. McVeigh scrupulously followed the blueprint of Earl Turner. Mr. McVeigh’s target was a federal building housing FBI offices; Earl Turner’s was the FBI headquarters. The latter’s ammonium nitrate bomb was “a little under 5,000 pounds;” Mr. McVeigh’s was the same. In The Turner Diaries, the bomb went off at 9:15 a.m.; Mr. McVeigh’s, at 9:02 a.m. Earl Turner placed his bomb in a delivery truck; so did Timothy McVeigh. And so on and so on. If you cling to the hope that the fascism of The Turner Diaries, and the immense crime of Mr. McVeigh, are somehow unrelated, consider this: prosecutions over a 20-year period have found William Pierce’s novel to be the motivating factor in a wave of violence and mayhem. In 1984, an Idaho-based group that called itself The Order murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg, and carried out a series of robberies and bombings across the Pacific Northwest. From 1992 to 1995, the Aryan Republican Army - a group that required new members to read the Diaries - committed 22 bank robberies and bombings in the U.S. Midwest. In 1995, two soldiers who (like Mr. McVeigh) carried Pierce’s novel everywhere they went, murdered an African-American couple in North Carolina. Most recently, one of the men convicted of dragging a black man to his death in Jasper, Texas, told his co-accused: “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early.” At the end of all of this, there is another question, of course. Does Timothy McVeigh, confessed mass-murderer, deserve to be executed at 7:00 a.m. today in Indiana? Does he deserve to die? That depends. If you believe that the state should never, ever kill - even in times of war - then the answer is no. If, however, you believe that the use of lethal force in World War Two was just and proper - to combat genocide, and to combat homicidal fascism of the type favoured by Timothy McVeigh - then the answer can only be yes. It certainly is for me.
All contents copyright 2006 warrenkinsella.com. No reproduction whatsoever, in any form, without permission. |
|