The New York Times has story about the government’s plans to murder Tim McVeigh on Monday. Anyway the interesting part (to me at least) is Rick Bragg’s description of McVeigh’s claim that the kids he murdered in the Oklahoma City bombing were “collateral damage.”
According to Bragg, McVeigh is doing nothing but rationalizing here, which is completely true, but Bragg can’t be bothered to wonder where McVeigh mastred the fine the art of rationalization. I don’t remember the NYT claiming that NATO commanders were “rationalizing” when they described dead civilian train commuters and reporters in Yugoslavia as “collateral damage.” In fact when the Pentagon starts throwing around such euphemisms for dead civilians, reporters typically eat it up.
Nor can the NYT even begin to consider the possibility that the government’s execution of McVeigh will only reaffirm the basic principle that McVeigh acted on — namely that as long as you think you’ve got a good enough reason, it is okay to kill defenseless civilians.
These sort of problems converge with the absurd but commonplace claim that McVeigh’s murderous act was the worst act of terrorism ever in the United States. This is true only if you pretend that the 18th and 19th centuries simply never happened.
For example, in 1864 Colonel John Chivington’s men managed to surround a group of Cheyenne — two-thirds of whom were women and children — at Sand Creek in what was then the Colorado Territory. Although the Indians tried to surrender, Chivington’s troops along with some citizen militia killed every single man, woman and child, and scalped and mutilated the bodies. Chivington estimated there were as many as 700 people were thusly murdered (though his figure was highly inflated).
There were official investigations of course, but only one major punishment — Chivington was forced to resign his commission.
And if you expand the list of terrorist acts to include those committed by the U.S. government internationally, McVeigh’s act likely doesn’t even make it into the top 10 incidents of the last century.