How did a mass murderer become an american hero?

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 13, 2001 | by Neil Mackay

YOU can't have a Christ without a crucifixion. And Terre Haute Federal Prison and its death house in rural Indiana hardly make for a modern-day Calvary or Golgotha.

It is here that the unthinkable is happening. It is here, in this ugly jail, that a gun fanatic, racist and self-confessed mass killer of men, women and children has been transformed from a bestial criminal into a saviour of the American way of life - a patriot, a hero, a martyr.

To the American far right, even its more moderate wings, the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who is sentenced to die for killing 168 people at the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, is being sacrificed by the corrupt Washington federal government which wants to rob true Americans of their freedoms - namely their right to hate Jews and blacks, own guns and not pay taxes.

The events of the last few days, however, may rob the likes of Dr William Pierce, the leader of America's largest neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, of their martyr. Pierce literally wrote the book on stateside terrorism. His novel The Turner Diaries, a racist anti- federalist diatribe, inspired McVeigh's crimes. If the far right sees McVeigh as a Christ-like figure, then Pierce is the fascist equivalent of John the Baptist.

The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, ordered that McVeigh's execution be rescheduled from this Wednesday to June 11 following the discovery of more than 3000 pages of FBI documents which were not handed to the defence team. Nobody believes their discovery will do anything to prove McVeigh's innocence. He did after all confess, without a whisper of remorse, to carrying out the bombing. What the government may well have done, however, is save itself from the curse of a far-right anti-government movement motivated by the memory of a martyr. Ask Britain about Irish martyrs or Israel about the Intifada martyrs and you'll find out just how terrifying the prospect is. Martyrs inspire fanatics, and you cannot beat fanatics.

The delay in the execution by lethal injection is, according to the US government, simply to give the documents a legal once-over and assure the US people that even the most heinous killers are afforded the full measure of the law. But the hiatus has triggered a massive change in McVeigh. On Friday, his lawyer, Robert Nigh, said his client may now choose to fight the execution. Until now McVeigh was clamouring for his own death with one eye firmly on the history books.

The sight of the life melting away on McVeigh's handsome, yet geeky, college-boy face might well be a welcome release for the likes of Aren Almon-Kok, who lost her daughter in Oklahoma. It was the photograph of her baby, charred and in the arms of a crying firefighter, that became the defining image of the bombing. But such a seemingly "brave" death for McVeigh at the hands of a seemingly brutal government would confirm his place as the first in the pantheon of the right who fought and died for America.

If McVeigh tries to fight the needle, he will not die such a hero. No-one wants a cowardly martyr. What revolution could be ignited by a man who snivelled and struggled his way onto the hospital gurney? Yet if he goes to his death as he planned, McVeigh will become a hero to many - not a majority of the American population, but a significant minority. Even the gurney he is to die on is shaped like a cross, and the words he is choosing as his last, two lines from the verse Invictus by William Ernest Henley, have the poetry of defiance about them: "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."

So who are these people who sympathise with, if not adore, McVeigh? The smallest but most frightening group are the New World Order brigade, the countless Americans in organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan who believe their President, our Prime Minister and every other Western leader is out to turn us all into mindless slaves drugged on consumerism and blind to their multi-cultural liberal agenda. These people believe in ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government, which they think is secretly running the world's free market democracies in order to further a global Jewish conspiracy. They really do exist, and to them their conspiracy theories are merely a self-evident truth that the rest of us are too blind to see. They are McVeigh's evangelists and to them he is a visionary, if not a messiah.

Don't write these people off simply because their philosophy sounds insane. The FBI treat the anti-government far right as we treat the IRA - a constant domestic terror threat that is placed under unceasing surveillance. Yesterday afternoon William Pierce, in his American Dissident Voices Radio Broadcast, said: "Timothy did what he did for an impersonal reason, for an ideal He has acted as a man of principle, a soldier he was at war against a government that is at war against his people."

If we pull back from this extremist clique, even though it is at least a million strong in the USA, there remains a mass of ordinary working Joes, high school kids and grandparents across the 50 states who, while revolted by McVeigh's tactics, believe in his message. To them there is something rotten in the States and McVeigh is a symbol of misguided, if true, patriotism.