McVeigh Acted As A Government of One

Timothy McVeigh A Government of One

Ludwig Von Mises, in his seminal opus magnum on economics, titled “Human Action”, proffers that governments, states, commissions, and groups do not act as they are a fictional entities.  Only individuals can act.  He states that it is only an individual that carries out an act while people may recognize that action as being ”governmental”.  Governments do not kill, it is an individual who pulls a trigger.  Yet, there can be no better description of McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building than it being described as ”governmental”. 

In a documentary on television, survivors and family of the dead all spoke of the evil of McVeigh.  They felt that McVeigh turned his hatred on them as a way of coping with what he had done.  Others felt he was a soulless individual who hated the world.  They all described how they were victimized by McVeigh and what an amoral and detached monster he was, not having any feeling for the innocent he killed.  Yet, let us examine government, those people who were victims, and their relationship to government.

When the Vietnamese decided they wanted to try to order their economic system on an idea that went against the interests of the U.S.’s power elite, the U.S. government (again, a fictitious entity made up of individual actors) decided it was okay to lie about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and thereby begin a war that would kill over three million people.  The very same type of people who all describe their amazement, horror, disgust, and anger that McVeigh could perpetrate his act without any sorrow or remorse, and steel himself from recognizing and accepting the horror that he has perpetrated, are the very same people who justify every horror committed by government without giving a second thought to the five hundred thousand innocent children the U.S. caused to die in a decade-long embargo that Albright said was “worth it” because this genocide put pressure on Saddam Hussein.

These same people who are unconcerned as to what actions their government has carried out in their name, were quite content to remain ignorant of the truth.  These people managed to personally and morally disconnect from themselves any sense of remorse, guilt, or sorrow, to the point of even failing to investigate what our government does to its own people.  American war crimes and genocide never factor in to their thinking at even the most elemental level.  Most people who work for government feel vindicated regardless of the actions carried out by this fictitious entity called government.  These people, who felt unaccountable because of their ignorance and apathy, hold some responsibiity for the actions of their government. 

Their government, or rather the individual actors who act as government, are subconsciously deified by those who bow down and idolize power.  However, as Noam Chomsky said, “There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws. These are simply decisions made within institutions that are subject to human will and that must face the test of legitimacy. And if they do not meet the test, they can be replaced by other institutions that are more free and more just, as has happened often in the past.”

Yet, everyone of these people failed to recognize that over and over again, individual actors, calling themselves government, decided to live by the sword.  Our government, or rather the people we allow to call themselves government, decided they held no moral responsibility to any action they perpetrated so long as it was “decisions made within institutions”.  These people all detach themselves from responsibility by believing that they and events are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

These people, all of them, felt that McVeigh displayed the height of vanity for feeling clinically detached from the horror he perpetrated, much like the pilots on Wikileaks felt while they were laughing while they slaughtered an unarmed news crew, and then slaughtered unarmed rescuers, and the children of the rescuers.  I am sure the vanity McVeigh displayed was much like the vanity the ATF, FBI, and military personnel felt while they slaughtered the Branch Davidians, or the vanity, justification, and irresponsibility people felt at what “government” perpetrated and then covered up at Ruby Ridge. 

After what the ATF, FBI, and military personnel did to the innocents at Waco, these same adults, who were made victims by McVeigh, could not even take the time to watch “Waco: Rules of Engagement” and “Waco: A New Revelation”.  But, while these people worked for and were apathetic and ignorant of the actions taken by a fictitious entity called government which lives by the sword and operates on the principle that “Might makes right.”, were upset when that same sword drew blood from them. 

When this fictitious entity calling itself government decides it needs to kill a million more people to meet its political, economic, or military goals, we feel no personal accountability.  People are placed on the battlefield to slaughter others.  If no military is there to slaughter, like the situation in Iraq, we begin to slaughter non-combatants to show we can, and to show those who oppose us, even if it is only political oppositional, that we can do whatever we want, whenever we want, to whoever we want. We then install a group of indiginous people there who will call themselves government and will slaughter their own people, or allow the slaughter of their people, at our discretion, in order for us to meet our political and war aims.

This fictitious organization made up of individual actors calling itself “the military” then begins occupying, starving, torturing, and murdering its opponents. These acts are carried out in the aggragate, but yet are the sum of the crimes committed by individual actors who hide behind a fictional abstraction calling itself government. If this fictitious organization, made up of individuals, decides it needs to kill another million people to pacify the indigenous population, it tells the ficticious organization called “the military” to carry out “military operations”. Then, that million people become less than an abstraction to the military, those who sent them, and those whom that government claims to serve.

Hans Herman Hoppe states that “a government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.”  More importantly, government claims a monopoly on the use of violence within that territory.  McVeigh was not going to abide by a monopoly and allow that monopoly to dictate or determine what he regarded as just retribution that needed to be placed upon government.  Since in the United States we claim the people are the government, then it makes perfect sense that “the people” and “the government” are one in the same. 

Hoppe goes on to say about government that, “ Rather, an institution such as government would normally, and from the outset, be regarded as an illegitimate and indeed criminal protection racket. And as a protection racket, this institution would tend to be brought down quickly. It is only possible for such an institution to survive for any length of time if and insofar as it succeeds in instilling in the “protected” public a myth, i.e., a false yet generally held, and hence effective, belief. In order to make the public accept, i.e., not to resist, the protection racket, it must be persuaded that without a monopoly of jurisdiction and taxation (that is, in what has been called a “state of nature”) constant warfare among individual property owners would exist. I have called this belief the Hobbesian myth and identified it as the most powerful and widespread myth of the modern world.”

Regarded as one of, the greatest living American writers and essayists, Gore Vidal wrote of McVeigh: 

“For Timothy McVeigh [Waco and Ruby Ridge] became the symbol of [federal] oppression and murder. Since he was suffering from an exaggerated sense of justice, not a common American trait, he went to war pretty much on his own and ended up slaughtering more innocents than the Feds had at Waco. Did he know what he was doing when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it contained the hated [Feds]? McVeigh remained silent throughout his trial. Finally, as he was about to be sentenced, the court asked him if he would like to speak. He did. He rose and said, “I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’” Then McVeigh was sentenced to death by the government.

Those present were deeply confused by McVeigh’s quotation. How could the Devil quote so saintly a justice? I suspect that he did it in the same spirit that Iago answered Othello when asked why he had done what he had done. “Demand me nothing, what you know you know, from this time forth I never will speak word.” Now we know, too: or as my grandfather used to say back in Oklahoma, “Every pancake has two sides.”

 Timothy McVeigh went on to make the following quotes:

-“Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile.”

-“Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option.”

-“When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operations, it is sound military strategy to take the flight to the enemy.”

McVeigh went on to write, “Although I have many observations that I’d like to throw at you, I must keep this letter to a practical length – so I will mention just one: if federal agents are like “so many Jacobins at war” with the citizens of this country, and if federal agencies “daily wage war: against those citizens, then should not the OKC bombing be considered a “counter-attack” rather than a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor? (I’m sure the Japanese were just as shocked and surprised at Hiroshima – in fact, was that anticipated effect not part and parcel of the overall strategy of that bombing?)”

Our government, or rather individual actors who call themselves government, have become violent, arbitary, abusive, punitive, dishonest, power-hungry, malevolent, and domineering.  They refuse to be bound by any laws.  They accept no limit on their behavior and often do harm to show citizens that their rule is almost absolute.  They operate, more often than not, on the principle that their might makes them right.  Well, sometimes patriots stand up and decide that, on this piece of ground, and at this time, I will claim the right to use force.  I will violate that monopoly on the use of violence because this government is acting in a criminal manner and I am determined to wage war back. 

Gore Vidal then wrote:  “McVeigh quotes again from Justice Brandeis; “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example.” He stops there. But Brandeis goes on to write in his dissent, “Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the law breaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.” Thus the straight-arrow model soldier unleashed his terrible swift sword and the innocent died. But then a lawless government, Brandeis writes, “invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.”

If there were more Timothy McVeighs there would certainly be much less tyranny. There certainly would have been no Murrah Bombing if there was no Waco slaughter.  Imagine if McVeigh was able to get next to Hitler, or Stalin.  Both killed tens of millions of people and yet the tens of thousands of people who could have killed these two failed to take any action for fearing for their own life.  McVeigh valued certain principles more than his life.  Treating government like God was not one of them.

I do not justify the actions of McVeigh, I merely seek to point out that inside each of us are aspects of Timothy McVeigh.  That we feel blameless, detached, and sometimes enthusiastic when our government kills innocents should make us recognize that the murder committed by McVeigh, which pales in comparison to the number of victims of our government, makes us display the same lack of moral responsibility that McVeigh claimed.   We should understand that we are morally culpable to some extent because we allow mass murder to happen through purposeful ignorance and apathy.  We should consider this when individual actors decide to hide behind the title of “government” to perpetrate crimes against humanity or other lesser tyrannical or criminal acts.

If McVeigh had planned and executed his attack by bomber against Iraq, a country that had no nuclear program, no chemical program, no yellow cake uranium, no centrifuges, no connection to bin Laden, 9/11, or al Qaeda, and he hit a mosque and killed many hundreds of children, not only would his mistake have never come to the public’s mind, but he would also be considered a hero.