The Making of McVeigh.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Brief Article

The pundits haven't been lining up to eulogize America's homegrown neo-Nazi mass murderer, so let me offer a few words of praise for Tim McVeigh. He was not as deranged as many people like to imagine, and certainly not flat-out insane. On the contrary, he went out in a burst of rhetorical brilliance. First, before the FBI screw-up and stay of execution, he referred to the babies and children who died in the Murrah building as "collateral damage." This was taken as evidence of inhuman heartlessness, although there are few such objections when the Pentagon tosses the same phrase around. What did we think "collateral damage" means in a place like Serbia or Iraq, if not someone's adored child being dismembered by bombs?

He went on to explain, in measured and rational terms, that his attack on the Oklahoma City federal building was a response to an "increasingly militaristic and violent federal government," citing that government's inexplicable annihilation of the Branch Davidians at Waco. Again drawing the analogy to customary and acceptable military practice, he said that his own act was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations.

Analytically, McVeigh was exactly on target. Ours is an "increasingly militarisitic and violent" government, and not only at the federal level. In addition to the carnage at Waco, he might have mentioned the government bombing of MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia in 1986, the bizarre raid on the relatives of Elian Gonzales in Miami, and countless police shootings in New York, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, etc., or the fact that the United States now leads the world in the percentage of the citizenry incarcerated. As for the moral and strategic equivalence between the Oklahoma City bombing and recent publicly funded bombings in Serbia, Iraq, and other spots, McVeigh was, again, exactly right. Mass murder is mass murder, whether committed by a freelance killer or by the largest military bureaucracy in the world. Condemn the one and you risk your soul when you applaud the other.

So, while it might be comforting to dismiss McVeigh as a maniacal, one-of-a-kind deviant, he was, in fact, just a particularly apt student of the very government he hated. Recall his brief biography: Like so many other ill-educated, disadvantaged young people, he went straight from high school to the military, where he was painstakingly drilled in the art of killing efficiently and...