Racist Terror in Oklahoma by Tom Barrett
ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FOUR people died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. This is the worst case of nongovernmental terrorism in U.S. history. (Massacres of Native Americans by U.S. military forces frequently had higher death tolls.) The victims were employees and clients of federal social service agencies — a cross-section of the city's working class. Nineteen were children in day care because their mothers needed to work to provide for them; the victims as a whole were disproportionately African American. In the initial hours after the blast media began began to speculate about the loyalty or propensity to terrorism of the entire Islamic population — Middle Eastern immigrants, non-Middle Eastern immigrants, and even the [African American] Nation of Islam. The scapegoating was so blatant and so racist that even President Clinton and Attorney General Reno had to caution
U.S.A. express or even feel about the Waco incident, the attention paid to it is a diversion from the real danger posed by ultraright paramilitary groups.
Those joining militia groups are hardly fighting their oppression in the same way that a small number of Arab militants drawn to terrorism are. U.S. paramilitary groups are not drawn from the communities of color or from the most poorly paid sectors of the working class. In fact, many of their leaders make their living as gun retailers. The greatest threat they face from the government is a loss of profits — not even being forced out of business - by restrictions on the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons, guns with which it is already illegal to hunt in all 50 states.
The white males who join militia groups may claim that "unqualified" people of color and against it.
In fact, the bombing seems to be the work of fanatical members of the "Michegan militia." These white
Photo AP/David Longstreath supremacists — and thousands like them in other organisations — gather Right wing extremist Thomas James McVeigh, arrested in for combat training on weekends — connection with the car bombing of the Alfred Murrah using real assault rifles, loaded with live ammunition. Their "officers" are often veterans of elite military units with links to the shadowy underworld euphemistically called the "intelligence community." Members of these groups claim that their enemy is the federal government; some may actually believe it. Their real targets, however, are the communities of color, the organized labor movement, and those struggling for sexual equality and freedom. Like-minded individuals carried out the murder of Dr. David Gunn and other abortion providers. Others are attempting to set up an exclusively "Aryan" homeland in the Rocky Mountains.
The more open reactionaries in the U.S government, from President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to House Speaker Newt Gingrich today have given varying degrees of encouragement to these forces. In comparison, government has turned its full repressive fury against those who pose no threat to public safety, but are an
Building in Oklahoma City. obstacle to ruling-class profits — striking Air Traffic Controllers in the early 1980s or African Americans protesting police violence today. It is remarkable how silent the "law-and-order" chorus has become since the arrest of a suspect with links with right-wing paramilitary groups. At present,
MeVeigh claims to be "prisoner of war" and is responding to FBI questions only with "name, rank, and serial number." Though he has not been convicted, political conclusions about the "militia movement's" responsibility for this terrorist act can justifiably be drawn.
The millionaire-owned media promotes the notion that this bombing was revenge for the government's attack on the Branch Davidian cult's compound in Waco, Texas. That confrontation ended in a fire (started at 3 locations inside the buildings) which destroyed the compound and killed nearly everyone inside. Whatever outrage individuals in the "militia movement" may women are taking jobs away from them, but few in fact are unemployed. They may claim that the U.S. government restricts their liberties, but few if any have ever been arrested for a crime they did not commit, let alone been the victims of police violence. They complain about feminists and homosexuals, about African Americans and Latinos, about Jews and socialists, but they would be hard pressed to demonstrate how any of those groups has had a directly negative impact on their lives.
In fact, the militia members tend to enjoy a far higher standard of living than those about whom they complain. If African Americans and Latinos are taking jobs away from white men, why is unemployment so high in the communities of color? Are the militia members concerned when cops gun down young African Americans in the street? Or do they cheer? Yet whose liberties are being threatened?
No, the militia movement is a collection of racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and labor haters, who kill people. Are they different from the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan? Are they "fascists"? Whatever precise classification one may give them, they are a physical threat to organized labor, to
19 International Viewpoint #267 June 1995
U.S.A.
Talk Radio
The past decade has seen a proliferation of radio stations on the AM band changing to a "talk" format, since they cannot compete with FM in quality of music broadcast. Talk show announcers editorialize about a news item and invite telephone calls from listeners. Many announcers respond rudely and sarcastically to those who dare disagree with them. They red-bait, queer-bait, call them any number of names, all for the entertainment of their listening audience.
The best known announcer, Rush
Limbaugh is now syndicated on radio and television accross the
U.S.A. Bad as he is, he is by no means the most hateful or reactionary. G.
Gordon Liddy, whose commitment to freedom was demonstrated by his participation in the
Watergate break-in, has a talk radio show, as does Iran-Contra scandal star Oliver North. Among the worst - and most widely heard - is Bob
Grant, who spews racist filth from WABC station
(New York).
President Clinton caused quite a stir among these bigots when he suggested that their inflammatory rhetoric could push an unstable individual to carry out an act of violence like the Oklahoma City bombing.
To be sure, this can be neither proved nor or disproved. And conceding the right of the government to suppress the most rightwing of the talk-radio announcers would give them a free hand to move against networks like Pacifica, which use radio to organize for progressive social change.
Nevertheless, Clinton has a point. Rightwing talk radio announcers have given racism and sexism a legitimacy which they had lost during the 1960s and 1970s.
When they say that people of color, feminists, homosexuals, and socialists are destroying the United
States of America and that the government has been taken over by
"left-wingers" like
Clinton, it must follow that the only possible way to save America - save it for the white man - is to take violent action. The announcers leave the conclusion unspoken, but there is no mistaking it.
Ultraright talk radio is a very real threat to the workers movement and to the communities of color, and we have every right to carry out strategies to counter that threat. We can have no faith in the capitalist govemment to do it for us. *
20
International Viewpoint #267 June 1995 people of color, to women, to homosexuals, and, as Oklahoma City shows, the government cannot be depended on to stop them. The Threat of Government Repression
The Clinton administration is using the cover of the ultraright to move against the civil liberties of the workers movement. Clinton is proposing legislation to Congress which will widen the powers of police agencies such as the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to spy on and repress organizations deemed to be "terrorist" - by the government's peculiar criteria. The Republican leadership in Congress is proposing its own set of new laws, with only minor differences from Clinton's. In fact, both parties are using the opportunity of a right-wing terrorist attack to enact repressive measures to be used against the left - and not necessarily against groups which engage in violence.
This is not paranoia, but the harsh lesson of experience. Racist paramilitary groups have functioned with virtually no interference from law enforcement agencies for over ten years now. What a contrast with the government's war of extermination against the Black Panther Party in1968-72.
True, the Panthers often used provocative slogans like "pick up the gun" and "off the pig" and postured as guerrilla fighters — a policy which was certainly misguided. However, at no time did they carry out acts which can even remotely be called "terrorist." They never advocated attacks on white people or anyone else because of their race or religion. And while they advocated armed struggle against the police - in response to daily police violence in Black communities throughout the United States - virtually every confrontation on record shows the Panthers defending themselves against police attack. They certainly never committed any violent act even remotely on the order of the Oklahoma bombing, which killed 164 people. Nevertheless, then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover targeted them as the number-one threat to domestic national security. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the FBI and local police in a number of U.S. cities harassed, spied on, and murdered Black Panther Party activists. They hired agents provocateurs to promote paranoia about police informers within the Panthers' ranks, a tactic which unfortunately proved successful. The Black Panther Party was eventually destroyed, by a combination of intimidation, imprisonment, and outright murder.
J. Edgar Hoover was also concerned with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance, which grew in strength and influence in the radical movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He and the capitalist media presented American Trotskyists as terrorists — despite the movement's rejection of individual terrorism in favor of mass action and an orientation to the working class. Newsweek magazine included the Fourth International in its list of terrorist organizations, and invented a quote from Erest Mandel to support its conclusions.
The government's different treatment of left and right radicals is hardly illogical. The Panthers were a revolutionary movement, and represented a genuine threat to ruling-class power and privilege. They could have inspired African Americans, Latinos, and other oppressed people — and ultimately all working people — to fight for their rights and living standards against the capitalist class and its government. That was the true "crime," for which they paid a terrible price. The "militia movement," like the anti-abortion terrorists, neo-Nazis, and skinheads, are reactionary, and ultimately defend the interests of the ruling class and its government. They are the enemies of people of color, of women, and of any working people who are unwilling to capitulate to the bosses' drive to lower living standards. It is irrelevant how many people they kill or maim; they will never be the victims of the kind of police onslaught which was directed against the Black Panther Party.
Ultimately the best defense against reactionary violence is a strong and militant labor movement and a revitalized struggle by the Black community and all the communities of color. We can all learn from the example of the feminist movement, which has stood its ground against Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion, anti-woman. A massive demonstration of strength and unity by working people can intimidate the purveyors of racism and sexism to the point where they no longer dare threaten the lives of oppressed people, in the streets or on the airwaves. * Reprinted from Bulletin in Defence of Marxism E-mail bidom@igc.apc.org