The Blast That Finished Off Militia Culture

When the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exploded on April 19, 1995, Americans tensed with the expectation that the kind of deadly terrorist assaults confined in their worldview to places like Beirut had finally reached our country. Once Timothy J. McVeigh was identified both as the perpetrator and as a far-right paramilitary extremist, fears grew, fanned by the media, that he was the point man for an army on the march. There were, we were told, legions of angry men out there in the heartland, dressed in camouflage and armed with military-style combat weapons, all prepared to do battle with the U.S. government. No telling how many more ordinary Americans might die in the coming war.

But today, as McVeigh’s case is being reevaluated, one thing is obvious: The apocalypse never materialized. In truth, there was no army of terrorists ready to attack in 1995. McVeigh wasn’t the first wave of a rising paramilitary movement. Instead, he represented a culture in decline.

Modern paramilitary culture emerged in the early and mid-1970s at the same time that a series of social changes shook the foundations of American society. First, we lost the Vietnam War, creating something of an identity crisis for men who had been shaped by our country’s long history of victory in warfare. These men felt further besieged by the changing roles of women, increased opportunities for ethnic and racial minorities and the beginnings of deindustrialization, all of which they perceived as decreasing opportunities for white men.

Threatened by these changes, many men began to dream, to fantasize about remaking the world and returning to a time before Vietnam, before women’s roles changed, before the races started to become more equal. A new hero emerged, a warrior who fought outside the chain of military or police command, outside the “self-imposed restraints” liberal politicians were thought to have forced on fighting men, and which conservative critics contended led to defeat in Vietnam and rampant crime at home. Freed from bureaucracy, the paramilitary hero fought all of America’s enemies--terrorists, drug dealers, mobsters and, above all, communists who organized these villains into a vast demonic network.

Paramilitary culture celebrated man as warrior and combat as the only life worth living. Its members embraced film heroes like Dirty Harry and Rambo. They read Soldier of Fortune, a magazine filled with ads for military semiautomatic rifles, shotguns and combat schools for civilians.

The culture thrived and grew stronger through much of the 1980s. Then the world changed. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in 1989 eliminated the warrior’s primary devil, and in the spring of 1991 the United States and its allies fought what seemed at the time to be a highly successful military campaign against Iraq. It was no secret that one crucial reason for fighting the war was overcoming the traumatic legacy of defeat in Vietnam. Then-President George Bush explicitly said, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

Inevitably, paramilitary culture began to fade. The market for action-adventure pulp novels and movies dropped significantly, Soldier of Fortune’s sales plummeted, and the few remaining would-be warriors had to frantically search for new evil against which they could struggle. Ironically, they found it in the aftermath of our victory over Iraq. President Bush had explained that the allied coalition had as its objective not just the mission of liberating Kuwait, but also of helping to establish a “new world order.” This “order” wasn’t well-defined, but referred to a system of international relations that would be less antagonistic than the Cold War bifurcation of the world.

To paramilitarists (and other right-wing extremists), though, the phrase was seen as a confession that Bush favored the establishment of a powerful world government led by the United Nations, which would, by their twisted logic, lead inevitably to a worldwide Jewish cabal.

McVeigh found the idea of such a conspiracy intriguing. He had grown up during the heyday of paramilitary culture and embraced it thoroughly. When he joined the Army in May 1988, his long-range goal was to be accepted into one of the Army’s special operations units. Eventually, he was asked to try out for the U.S. Army Special Forces. But, still exhausted from his Gulf War duty, McVeigh withdrew from the course. Not long afterward, he quit the Army.

By 1993, McVeigh was deeply disaffected, making a marginal living selling military-surplus duffel bags and other paramilitary accoutrements at gun shows. He believed avidly that the government no longer served the people and was deeply affected by what he saw as an unwarranted attack by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas.

When Congress passed the Brady Bill that fall, which imposed a waiting period on handgun purchases, and a separate ban on some assault rifles, McVeigh took this as a sign that the federal government would soon begin confiscating all guns. Believing it was only a matter of time before the far-right paramilitary movement rose up, McVeigh began to plot the Oklahoma City bombing. He desperately sought to trigger a white revolution by trying to make Americans recall both the horror of Waco--the bombing was two years after the Waco conflagration--and the glory of fighting against tyranny; April 19, 1995, was the 220th anniversary of the American minutemen’s battles against the British at Lexington and Concord.

But killing Social Security clerks and children wasn’t the same thing as manly face-to-face fights with armed villains. The bombing brought disgrace and humiliation to the radical paramilitary movement. Although a few individual incidents of terrorism occurred after 1995, such as the 1999 assault on a Jewish day-care center in the San Fernando Valley, the movement as a whole unraveled.

In 1998-99, paramilitarists tried to reinvent themselves yet again by appealing to fears that American society would collapse at the millennium. Gun sales, which had been in decline, rose considerably in the last months of 1999. But no Y2K disasters occurred. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization often accused by critics of overstating militia activity, acknowledges that paramilitarism is in deep decline. The group recently estimated that fewer than 200 “patriot” groups remain active, only a quarter of what their research showed in 1996. As long as the United States remains relatively stable and masculinity continues to lose its connection to the warrior ideal, the decline will likely continue.

Ironically, if McVeigh is ultimately executed, the U.S. government will be giving him a victory that Oklahoma City did not. The T-shirt he wore that day quoted from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It’s clear that McVeigh sees his execution as a blood sacrifice. And the danger is that although he is being executed at a time when the movement and culture he advocates are the weakest they’ve ever been, this “martyrdom” will always be there as a possible inspiration to men like him in the future.