OK City! redux..?
OR: Turner Diaries of the dead-heads..?
Heard a couple of news items on the radio yesterday that didn't exactly increase my optimism about what's gonna happen after November 4th....
First, NPR's All Things Considered ran a story by Elsa Partan reporting that gun sales nationwide have increased by ten percent even with the tanking economy, supposedly due to fears of what an Obama presidency might mean for the Second Amendment; her story included the observation that the last time gun sales spiked this much was during the run-up to the 1992 presidential election -- which of course made me think of that one-day-early birthday jamboree for Adolf Hitler, the Oklahoma City bombing (19 April 1995).
Second, an interview with James Ridgeway, senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, special correspondent covering the U.S. presidential election for The Guardian, and author of the 1996 Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture, on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!, wherein Ridgeway specifically referenced the involvement of white supremacist movements with the Oklahoma City bombing, during the course of relating what a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, Steven Boswell, told him in the wake of the arrest of a couple of young, self-styled, dog-fearing skinheads for plotting to assassinate the Democratic Party's presidential candidate Barack Obama and kill a numerically significant number of black teenagers. Following is an excerpt from the transcript posted on Democracy Now!'s website:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of-you mentioned the Oklahoma City bombings. For those viewers and listeners who may not have been following this years back, what’s the connection between that and The Order and these right-wing groups?
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, the government, you know, has always claimed that there were only three people involved in this-you know, McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Fortier-and they have, you know, pooh-poohed the idea that there was a wider conspiracy. On the other hand, any number of journalists and others who have looked into this think there was a bigger conspiracy that possibly involved, you know, the Kansas Militia, that involved a group called Elohim City, which was a sort of a polygamist Christian identity compound in the Ozarks. And the thinking was that much of the Oklahoma City plot was actually developed in these places.
Now, the reason that this is to be taken seriously is that the ATF, which arrested these two guys, was the organization, was the agency, which actually had an informant at Elohim City, and this informant reported to her superiors in the ATF that she had overheard discussions of the Oklahoma City plot and, in fact, had actually accompanied members of Elohim City to the Oklahoma City environs, where they basically scoped out this building. And even though the ATF had this information, they did absolutely nothing. And in a subsequent trial where the informant was charged with other matters, the judge-and she related all this-the judge then took the step of basically sealing the evidence, because he didn’t want it to interfere with the Oklahoma City trial of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. So it’s always seemed to me and to other people that there’s plenty of grounds for reopening this investigation into Oklahoma City and take a look at the role of this far-right movement in it.
"Past history is no guarantee of future performance," sure; but I think we'd be idiots not to be concerned about what the lunatic fringe might try to set off this time....
Heard a couple of news items on the radio yesterday that didn't exactly increase my optimism about what's gonna happen after November 4th....
First, NPR's All Things Considered ran a story by Elsa Partan reporting that gun sales nationwide have increased by ten percent even with the tanking economy, supposedly due to fears of what an Obama presidency might mean for the Second Amendment; her story included the observation that the last time gun sales spiked this much was during the run-up to the 1992 presidential election -- which of course made me think of that one-day-early birthday jamboree for Adolf Hitler, the Oklahoma City bombing (19 April 1995).
Second, an interview with James Ridgeway, senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones, special correspondent covering the U.S. presidential election for The Guardian, and author of the 1996 Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture, on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!, wherein Ridgeway specifically referenced the involvement of white supremacist movements with the Oklahoma City bombing, during the course of relating what a member of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, Steven Boswell, told him in the wake of the arrest of a couple of young, self-styled, dog-fearing skinheads for plotting to assassinate the Democratic Party's presidential candidate Barack Obama and kill a numerically significant number of black teenagers. Following is an excerpt from the transcript posted on Democracy Now!'s website:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And in terms of-you mentioned the Oklahoma City bombings. For those viewers and listeners who may not have been following this years back, what’s the connection between that and The Order and these right-wing groups?
JAMES RIDGEWAY: Well, the government, you know, has always claimed that there were only three people involved in this-you know, McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Fortier-and they have, you know, pooh-poohed the idea that there was a wider conspiracy. On the other hand, any number of journalists and others who have looked into this think there was a bigger conspiracy that possibly involved, you know, the Kansas Militia, that involved a group called Elohim City, which was a sort of a polygamist Christian identity compound in the Ozarks. And the thinking was that much of the Oklahoma City plot was actually developed in these places.
Now, the reason that this is to be taken seriously is that the ATF, which arrested these two guys, was the organization, was the agency, which actually had an informant at Elohim City, and this informant reported to her superiors in the ATF that she had overheard discussions of the Oklahoma City plot and, in fact, had actually accompanied members of Elohim City to the Oklahoma City environs, where they basically scoped out this building. And even though the ATF had this information, they did absolutely nothing. And in a subsequent trial where the informant was charged with other matters, the judge-and she related all this-the judge then took the step of basically sealing the evidence, because he didn’t want it to interfere with the Oklahoma City trial of Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. So it’s always seemed to me and to other people that there’s plenty of grounds for reopening this investigation into Oklahoma City and take a look at the role of this far-right movement in it.
"Past history is no guarantee of future performance," sure; but I think we'd be idiots not to be concerned about what the lunatic fringe might try to set off this time....