The April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing has been called the work of a “crazed loner,” Timothy McVeigh, with the
assistance of another “crackpot," Terry Nichols. That’s just the way the Clinton
Justice Department, the media and Republicans preferred it to be. It didn’t
matter that The Turner Diaries was
McVeigh’s “blue print” for an anti-government race war, or that a heavily
redacted FBI investigation revealed that McVeigh sought assistance from
neo-Nazis like Andreas Strassmeir and others at the white supremacist and
paramilitary compound Elohim City in Oklahoma. The FBI reportedly intended to
raid the compound before the bombing, but did not; is that where McVeigh hid his explosive-laden truck? The connection between
McVeigh and the compound is real, and an informer reported that McVeigh was
regarded as a “hero” and a “martyr” to the “cause” there. And what “cause” is
that—as if we don’t know?
And yet any connection between
the residents of Elohim City and the bombing is considered merely a “conspiracy
theory” by most commentators. Why does this country put its head in the sand
when it comes to right-wing domestic terrorism? We are finding out that
far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys had in fact forged
plans before January 6 to carry out a violent assault on the Capitol building
to overturn the election. Yet despite this, Democrats in the House of
Representatives are suddenly getting “cold feet” in conducting an independent
investigation of the events leading up to the insurrection, which of course
suits Republican lawmakers who may have “unknowingly” had a “hand” in assisting
in the provision of useful information to some of these people in regard to the
layout of the building and the location of suitable targets.
Of course the U.S. isn’t the only
country with its head in the sand in regard to the far-right threat to democracy.
Take Germany, for example, where many neo-Nazis feel the country is being
threatened by those of “impure” blood. Nazi symbolism is “technically” banned
in Germany, but that hasn’t stopped people from engaging in a close approximation
of it, which most Germans—including law enforcement—believe is nothing more
than the actions of a few “crackpots” despite the fact that neo-Nazis have been
blamed for a number of racially-inspired killings in the country. The one that
has received the most attention was the Hanau mass shooting last year, where 11
people were killed by a far-right extremist named Tobias Rathjen, who believed
that Germans who supported allowing immigrants into the country were also fair
game for death—such as prominent politician Walter Lubcke, who was assassinated
by a neo-Nazi named Stephan Ernst in 2019; Rathjen had been known to complain
about how Donald Trump was “stealing” his political and racist eugenics
slogans.
The concerning thing about the
Hanau massacre was how law enforcement reflected the failure of the country to
take the far-right terrorist threat seriously. Rathjen had actually contacted
authorities before his attack with manifestos that clearly revealed him as the
kind of psychologically-warped individual who was a likely candidate for mass
violence, yet no inquiries into his activities was done. The BBC reported that the
neo-Nazi cell National Socialist Underground has been under the law enforcement
radar for decades, failing to “connect” nearly a dozen racially-inspired
murders to the group over the years. Germany’s main opposition party is now the
far-right Alternative for Germany, which makes little effort to hide its
racialist, “pure-Aryan” vision; one of its most prominent leaders, Bjorn Hocke,
has repeatedly made statements that recall Nazi propaganda of yore—including a call
for “remigration,” forcing all non-Europeans out of the country.
Is this country taking the
far-right threat any more seriously? Not when you have an unabashed fascist who
attracted 74 million votes in the last election. There was some noise in the
media last week when the usual suspects, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul
Gosar, announced that they were establishing a new “caucus” that was even
further to the right than the Freedom Caucus—the “America First Caucus,” whose
intent is to enshrine “Anglo-Saxon” culture into cement, and work to return the
country to the way it “looked” back in the “founding fathers” time. For some
Republicans this was a bridge too far—but only after the revelation of the
“America First Caucus Platform,” which received widespread condemnation, and Greene
and Gosar rather hypocritically disowned it. The “platform” contains the
following nuggets:
Mail-in voting, long recognized as subject to fraud, has become
normalized. We will work towards an end to mail-in voting, implementation of
national voter ID and substantive investigations into mass voter fraud
perpetrated during the 2020 election.
We will work to divest power from the federal government and give it
back to the states and the people to restore the balance of federalism. We
believe in, and fight for, the principles of federalism and decentralization of
political power; the government closest to the people is the best equipped to
handle their concerns. At the federal level, this means exposing deep state
actors, shrinking the regulatory state, and eliminating thousands of
regulations and indeed entire bureaucracies.
At this point we should point out
an example of the massive hypocrisy of the right. These people had no trouble
with Trump acting like a fascist dictator who was above any law so long as he
imposed their far-right and racist agenda on the country; the right only cites
“federalism” and “decentralization” when it comes to laws they don’t like.
The manifesto continues with
ideas on “infrastructure” that come straight out of Nazi Germany:
The America First Caucus will work towards an infrastructure that
reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the
progeny of European architecture, whereby public infrastructure must be utilitarian
as well as stunningly, classically beautiful, befitting a world power and
source of freedom.
For some of us that is only
worthy of eye-rolls, but apparently there are people who are all for that. The
manifesto goes on to call for an end to all foreign aid, supports a foreign
isolationist policy, end all future pandemic responses that “harm” American
freedoms, end global trade and bring all manufacturing “back home,” “conserve”
the environment only for the purpose of best economic and recreational use,
promotes destruction of the environment in search of fossil fuels while ending
“wasteful” green energy projects, save for radioactive nuclear energy. The
manifesto also promotes “education” that opposes “progressive indoctrination
and enrichment of an out-of-control elite oligarchy.” But of course most of the
manifesto’s breath is spent on immigration:
America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a
common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown
that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens
are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional
support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should
they fail to contribute positively to the country. While certain economic and
financial interest groups benefit immensely from mass immigration, legal as
well as illegal, and the aggregate output of the country increases, the reality
of large segments of our society as well as the long-term existential future of
America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity being
put at unnecessary risk is something our leaders can afford to ignore no
longer.
As such, America’s legal immigration system should be curtailed to
those that can contribute not only economically, but have demonstrated respect
for this nation’s culture and rule of law. America’s borders must be defended,
and illegal immigration must be stopped without exception.
I suspect that people like Greene
and Gosar actually do, deep down, support all these ideas, but coming right out
with something like this that is clearly straight out of the most paranoid racist's fantasies may be something that the country isn’t quite ready to confess even exists. Sure, some politicians might disown such Nazi talk, but what about "the people," especially those who support Trump? Frankly, how dare these Nazis presume to know the “cultural” adaptability of
nonwhites who come to this country, looking for the “promise” of equality and
freedom, and finding instead bonehead beliefs like this. Especially in regard
to people from Mexico and Central America, whose “culture” has been infused
with American “culture” and consumerism. Let’s be honest: it’s about how “pretty”
one looks.
We need to call things by their
right names. There has been plenty of publicity about the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about prejudice
against Asians in regard to “blame” for the COVID-19 and the massage parlor
shootings, but nobody ever talks about racism and prejudice against Hispanics—in fact making
demeaning and dehumanizing claims about them is an “acceptable” way to
talk about them. I have mentioned an incident at a place I worked briefly where
a white male was telling ugly jokes about “Mexicans” in a mixed company of
whites and blacks; when I told him his “jokes” were racist, he asserted that
nobody there (other than me) thought that
what he was saying was racist.
That shows us a country—both right-wing
and “liberals”—that can’t face the fact of their own darkness, and demonstrates that for many, their
attitudes toward certain “ethnic” groups is little differentiated from how the
Nazis viewed the Jews, and those who can’t accept the fact that it was one of their
own (Stephen Miller) who is the one has made that an undeniable fact are simply those
who are self-serving hypocrites.
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