For McVeigh, however, the First Gulf War seems to have been as crucial in turning him against the American government as it was for Osama bin Laden. In fact, the impersonal, nearly abstract massacre of more than a hundred thousand Iraqis in 1990 determined his own murderous intent. As his biographers described McVeigh’s act of mimetic violence:
He needed to deliver a quantity of casualties the federal government would never forget. It was the same tactic the American government used in armed international conflicts, when it wanted to send a message to tyrants and despots. It was the United States government that had ushered in this new anything-goes mentality, McVeigh believed, and he intended to show the world what it would be like to fight a war under these new rules, right in the federal government’s own backyard.
Claiming that he did not know of the presence of children in the federal building, McVeigh accused the US government of bombing Iraqi targets in full awareness of the proximity of children:
The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb – saying that they cannot be held responsible if children die … When considering morality and ‘mens rea’ (criminal intent) in light of these facts, I ask: Who are the true barbarians?
émile Henry, the bourgeois anarchist who bombed a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1894, killing one person and wounding twenty, also protested that his accusers had no right to charge him for murdering innocent people:
Are they not innocent victims, these children, who in the faubourgs slowly die of anemia, because bread is rare at home; these women who in your workshops suffer exhaustion and are worn out in order to earn forty cents a day, happy that misery has not yet forced them into prostitution; these old men whom you have turned into machines so that they can produce their entire lives and whom you throw out into the street when they have been completely depleted.
Many over-educated terrorists have made similar claims against the ‘system’. Theodor Herzl, who witnessed a notorious criminal-turned-anarchist called Ravachol on trial in Paris in 1892, concluded that ‘he believes in himself and in his mission. He has become honest in his crimes. The ordinary murderer rushes into the brothel with his loot. Ravachol has discovered another voluptuousness: the voluptuousness of a great idea and of martyrdom.’
In seeing himself as a saviour of humanity from arrogant and brutal government, McVeigh has many more surprising precedents than Baader-Meinhof and the Weathermen. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man to call himself an anarchist, declared in Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849): ‘Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy.’ Proudhon, appalled by public support of imperial despotism and militarist adventurism in France, came to believe that:
To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, hoaxed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
It is also true that McVeigh’s arguments against the state are by no means unfamiliar or exotic today. In America, it was never a sign of extremism to believe that the government is the greatest enemy of individual freedom. Several generations of conservative politicians have asserted the same, and have been hailed for their wisdom. Today, left-leaning admirers of Edward Snowden and critics of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Guantanamo believe this to be true as much as the NRA, white militias and survivalist groups. The libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel blames big government on the enfranchisement of women, and he issues such grandiloquent Nietzscheanisms as ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’
But, as his own last months before his execution in 2001 by lethal injection reveal, McVeigh’s rhetoric of freedom from arbitrary and opaque authority has a much wider resonance and appeal outside as well as inside the United States. He outlined, long before the recent epidemic of mass killings, the temptations and perils of privatized violence against the powers that be. He also affirmed early a now widespread view of society as a war of all against all, which has turned politics in even democratic countries into an existential struggle, a zero-sum game of all or nothing with few moral restraints, while inciting disaffected individuals worldwide into copycat acts of extreme violence against their supposed enemies. The beliefs and practices of this ‘lone wolf’ connect him to apparently very disparate and incongruous people, including the sworn enemies of the United States.
A Meeting of Minds
In the most illuminating coincidence of our time, at a ‘Supermax’ prison in Colorado, McVeigh befriended Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Born to a Pakistani man and Palestinian woman, and educated in Kuwait and Wales, Yousef came from the first generation of jihadis not tied to specific countries or regions. These were people ‘globalized’, willy-nilly, by their failed, failing, or – in the case of Palestine – non-existent states.
Yousef was not a devout Muslim, like many other terrorists who followed in his blood-splattered wake, including most recently Omar Mateen, who killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando in June 2016. Yousef had learnt to make bombs in one of Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. In 1993 he placed his explosives under the World Trade Center’s North Tower, hoping that it would collapse spectacularly into the South Tower, bringing the twin buildings down and killing 250,000 people. He flew back disappointed to Pakistan, where he planned and tried out various other prodigal schemes of mass murder, as much aimed at television ratings as a high kill-rate.