1/9/00
10:55 pm GMT

USA under foreign occupation

James Heartfield asks why many Americans support the right to take up arms against the government

The bomb blast at the government buildings in Oklahoma that killed 164 people invited an immediate and forthright response from the president: 'Make no mistake, this was an attack on the United States, our way of life, everything we believe in.' Bill Clinton warned that 'nobody can hide any place in the world from the terrible consequences'. The FBI immediately launched an investigation into links between Oklahoma and the Muslims accused of bombing the World Trade Center in February 1993.

Within days, however, the picture had changed dramatically. All the suspects arrested were not foreign agents, but patriotic, white Americans. As attention shifted from Islamic militants to home-grown far-right groups, like the Michigan Militia, supported by prime suspect Timothy McVeigh, the president's attitude towards the bombing changed.

Breaking with tradition, Clinton chose not to address the nation about the bombing, but to address the nation's children. It is true that 19 children were killed in the blast, but it seemed to be a peculiar affectation nonetheless. After all more than 100 adults were killed too. Still the president pressed on, pleading with the studio audience of nose-picking and yawning children not to be frightened of all adults. A variety of ribbons are available to wear as mourning, and Clinton has chosen the white one, 'for the innocent children'.

Perhaps some sentimentality is understandable. But the striking thing about the president's response was the lack of a confident message for America's adults. In the past attacks on American servicemen abroad have been the occasion for a strident assertion of America's power and mission. After the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, the White House again adopted the self-righteousness of the injured party. But after Oklahoma, once the finger of suspicion was pointed at patriotic Americans, there was no reassertion of the sanctity of the American way of life, only affected innocence. Clinton's broadcast invited adult Americans to imagine that they too were children, innocent of blame for the events in Oklahoma, and in need of a guiding hand from their president - politics Oprah-style.

Behind the president's reaction to the bombing is an understanding that there is little agreement about what America stands for these days, and that large parts of American society are beyond the reach of the policy-making elite. Concentrating on the children killed in the bomb blast is an attempt to find something that everyone can agree on. For, while few people would support the bombing, many Americans now share the hostility to big government that seems to have been behind it. The truth is that it is easier to win a consensus behind the idea that it is bad to kill children than that it is bad to bomb government buildings.

Reagan's militia

The main suspects in the bombing are supporters of America's far-right militia movement. These people support the right to bear arms in 'well-organised militias' enshrined in the Second Amendment to the American constitution. Militia literature is fervently anti-government, some even describing Washington as the 'Zionist Occupation Government'. Less openly anti-Semitic tracts, like Pat Robertson's book New WorldOrder, warn that the federal government has been taken over by the United Nations, in a conspiracy against Americans. On the ground, the militias are preparing for an invasion force made up of Los Angeles gangs like the mythical 'Crips' and 'Bloods', as well as Chinese and Russian troops that will join them in occupying America.

The militias are in reality a minority of sad and lonely misfits who play war games in the forests. But unfortunately for the US administration, the hostility to government that they embody stretches far wider. Americans do not have to share the crazy conspiracy theories of the militias to share their hatred of federal government. Throughout the country more and more people are willing to believe that, even if the administration is not literally an occupation force, it behaves like a foreign power. As the police rounded up suspects post-Oklahoma, they were amazed to find the militiamen's neighbours more interested in criticising their 'heavy-handed' arrest tactics than condemning the bombing. In every US election the candidate that makes the most aggressive attack on government is the most likely victor.

Supporters of the militias point out that their right to bear arms is enshrined in the US constitution, and protest that the president's recent restrictions on firearms are an attack on their ancient liberties. It is true that America's constitution enshrines the right of the citizen to take up arms against oppressive government. However, the current anti-government mood is of a more recent origin.

All of the revolutionary rhetoric of the far-right militias has an eerily familiar ring. Policies that today mark out the far-right militias as beyond the pale were only a few years ago part of the American mainstream. The opinions that seem outlandish today were core beliefs of the Cold War politics which, for half a century, the American authorities used against 'Soviet-inspired' subversion abroad and un-American activities at home.

Denouncing big government has been the stock-in-trade of America's mainstream Republican Party since the seventies, and the sentiment has often been echoed by spokesmen for Clinton's Democratic Party. California's anti-tax revolt in the late seventies - Proposition 13--was the model for the right's campaign against 'big government'. Ever since, the right has been campaigning for and often winning government office on an anti-government platform.

In the 1980s, president Ronald Reagan was a staunch supporter of the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby that defends the right to bear arms, as well as a believer in the literal interpretation of Armageddon - never something that was seen to stand in the way of his control of America's nuclear firepower.

Pat Robertson's book New World Order might look extreme today, but Robertson is still a powerful figure in the Republican Party who, as leader of the moral majority, was a central figure in Ronald Reagan's power base. The denunciations of the United Nations as a foreign power on American soil were also commonplace among mainstream Congressmen in the eighties, when the UN was a whipping boy for American Cold Warriors. Only four years ago, bomb-suspect and Michigan Militia supporter Timothy McVeigh was a hero, a sergeant in the US forces that undertook Operation Desert Storm against Iraq - where children's lives were not considered sufficient reason to hold back American firepower.

Indeed the new leader of the US Congress, Newt Gingrich, while being a long way from the rednecks in the Michigan Militia, was elected on a platform of anti-big government, including opposition to gun control. His Democrat critics have accused Gingrich of flirting with the violent rhetoric of the 'shock-jocks', radio hosts who have given support to the militias.

Today, however, all of the policies that used to indicate patriotism and loyalty are seen as dangerous and extreme. The thing that has changed is not the policies themselves, so much as the context in which they are put forward. The old Republican programme no longer fits the times. The Republican majority was organised around the clear project of the Cold War: free market at home and militarism abroad. Loyalty to the state was consolidated through hostility to foreigners and to supposedly foreign elements at home, like communists and America's blacks.

Five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American patriotism no longer has a clear focus. For Timothy McVeigh the Gulf War was nothing to be proud of. Instead of pressing on towards Baghdad, the US had stopped short, under pressure, it seemed to McVeigh, from the United Nations. Americans were willing to support the government when it meant America walking tall in the world. But increasingly it is government itself that looks like the enemy. And despite electing politicians who promise to cut taxes, taxes just keep on rising.

'I'm the bad guy?'

Gun control, as well as the high-profile assaults on far-right and religious sects like the Branch Davidians at Waco, only confirm the sense that loyal America is under siege. Like the Michael Douglas character inFalling Down, America's right-wing patriots are now being told that they are the bad guys, and they do not like it.

To supporters of the Clinton administration, it seems that whole tracts of America are under the sway of a burgeoning army of extremists. In fact these are people whose ideas have not changed much at all. Instead they have been left behind by the collapse of the Cold War politics of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The old Moral Majority contained all the anti-government rhetoric within a package of anti-communist patriotism. Now that patriotism has been undermined only the hostility to government remains.

Over the years Republican and Democrat administrations have dismantled the traditional mechanisms through which the American people were integrated into society and government. Various politicians from Reagan, through Ross Perot to Newt Gingrich have tried to ride the anti-political mood, only further reinforcing it. The decline in America's world standing has also helped break the ties between the electorate and the government.

No wonder then that the US president feels happiest talking to children. At least their hopes have not been dashed yet. If only, he wishes, all Americans were like this: innocent, undemanding - and willing to be cared for by Uncle Bill.

Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 80, June 1995

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