Waco and the New Brown Scare By Anthony Gregory
(2010-04-30 at 14:22:54 )

Waco and the New Brown Scare By Anthony Gregory

Seventeen years ago, on April 19, 1993, the FBI finished off its siege of
the Branch Davidians home just outside Waco, Texas, by pumping poisonous
and flammable CS gas into a room filled with women and children, driving
a tank through the wall, throwing incendiary devices at the survivors
and, most likely, spraying them with machinegun fire. The Conflagration
that engulfed the lives of Seventy-Six People Of Diverse International
And Ethnic Backgrounds And Of All Ages, who had been brought together
under the fringe but peaceful religious separatism of David Koresh, came
at the end of a 51-day standoff that began when the ATF bungled a Public-
Relations Stunt in the Form of an Aggressive raid of the Davidian home,
which had been practiced on life-size model buildings and whose planning
began in the lame-duck years of the first Bush administration.

Koresh could have easily been arrested without all this fanfare and
violence - he was an integrated member of the town, and law enforcement
had visited the Davidian home and even fired weapons with him at their
shooting range - but the ATF had made sure the press would be there to
witness their Chivalrous Swooping In And Capture of this Menace of Mt.
Carmel. Meth lab! Weapons stockpiles! Child molesters! The excuses for
this federal militarism in the heart of Texas were numerous and shifting.

But When It Was All Done, A Peaceful American Community Had Been Utterly
Destroyed By The United States Government.

It was an event that crystallized and radicalized populist rightwing
anger at the Clinton administration. The left, for the most part, stood
by the federal government, swallowed its propaganda about how the
Davidians killed themselves, had been a threat to the community, were
stockpiling illegal weapons and harboring child abuse. At the White House
press conference, journalists applauded the regime. Liberals mocked the
religious nuts and began stoking fears that such extremists were not the
last. They were thankful to be -Protected- by the FBI. Only the most anti
-establishment leftists joined the populist right and radical
libertarians in their Denunciation of this Act of Governmental Mass
Murder.

As bad as mainstream attitudes toward Waco were in the immediate
aftermath, the popular meaning of the massacre was fully inverted through
the Oklahoma City incident exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995.

This act of mass murder was blamed on rightwing and anti-government
extremism, and even on the more moderate anti-Clintonianism of Rush
Limbaugh, who himself declared publicly his solidarity with Clinton in
bringing the Oklahoma killers to justice. (Just recently, Slick Willy
raised concerns that the Tea Parties would breed more Timothy McVeighs.)

As for the facts that McVeigh was trained by the government, served the
U.S. in the Gulf War, and described the Oklahoma attack as revenge for
Waco - this was twisted into a retroactive vindication of the governments
behavior at Waco. As with the blowback explanation of 9/11, the blowback
explanation of Oklahoma City with the corollary that U.S. government
violence leads to violence at home never got a serious hearing. On the
contrary, post-Oklahoma, sympathy for the Branch Davidians became
increasingly perceived as sympathy for McVeighs cause.

What emerged in the mid- and late-nineties was a narrative of hysteria
and paranoia that the populist right, the patriot movement, anti-New
World Order types, so-called -Hate Groups, and the nations diffuse array
of militia were all part of a rightwing conspiracy to bring down the U.S.
government, and only federal police agencies, the rigorous liberal
domestic interventionism of the Democratic Party, and a new era of
political correctness engineered by our socially balanced rulers stood
between order and chaos. This narrative worked in dampening the rights
dissent. While the Contract with America was a Republican scam whose
failure could be pinned on the GOP, the anti-Clinton radicalism behind
the 1993 resistance to Hillarycare and anger about Waco were most
completely neutralized by the militia hysteria that conflated David
Koresh with Timothy McVeigh and conservative dissent with anti-American
Terrorism.

This narrative was suspended during the Bush II era, when the main
terrorist threat was seen as coming from abroad, and the Republican
administration was busy erecting a 21st Century National Security State
and launching two aggressive wars of occupation purportedly to keep
Americans safe from a boogeyman even worse than McVeigh - a boogeyman
with an alien culture, plans to conquer America in the name of Islam or
kill thousands or more in the attempt to do so, and turn back the clock
a millennium.

For a few years the left dissented, at times heroically, viewing the
conservative wing of America as a danger insofar as it wielded power, not
insofar as it protested government. This meant the lefts critiques were
far more trenchant and correct than in the 1990s, but at the same time
Bushian violence was mostly opposed in the context of respectable public
policy disagreements. Most left-liberals saw Bushs Iraq war as a disaster,
but would not dare put U.S. wars on the same moral plane as the acts of
9/11 or Oklahoma City.

There were exceptions. On the fringes of the left, there were grand
denunciations of Bush as a fascist, a Nazi, a war criminal. Images at
antiwar protests depicted the president with a Hitler mustache. Those on
the far left compared Bush to the most despised of all totalitarians, and
the center left brushed off this radical rhetoric as harmless and in the
spirit of dissent, the highest form of patriotism.

But these radicals were exceptions. In any event, most of the left failed
to be permanently radicalized in the Bush years. Waco had been mostly
forgotten, and progressives could not be bothered to rethink what they
thought they knew about their beloved federal government. They knew they
hated Bush, but most Democratic voters would never come to revise their
understanding of Clintons wars and domestic depredations, or see the Bush
term as just a particularly egregious installment in a long series of
Murderous And Authoritarian Presidencies - a line of would-be dictators
that included most of the lefts favorite modern statesmen from Harry
Truman to Lyndon Johnson.

In September 2005, the Bush administrations response to Katrina taught
the leftwing dissidents all the wrong lessons. Instead of reacting in
horror to the martial law, the gun confiscations, the use of FEMA and
military personnel back from Iraq to tame the people of New Orleans,
seeing these as dangerous precedents for the creation of a police state,
the respectable left adopted the universal critique that Bush was not
doing enough. The government was too laissez-faire. As always, the
problem with Republican rule was that it was insufficiently activist -
even at the height of an administration that amassed so much power in
Washington, unleashed terror upon two Muslim societies, murdered hundreds
of thousands of people, and penetrated one traditional constraint upon
government after another, we were all supposed to hate Bush mostly
because he was too anti-government.

The failure of the left to learn the obvious lessons from the Bush
experience - the Actonian axiom that power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely - has contributed to the peculiar political dynamic
and maddening hypocrisy we see now that the Brown Scare is coming back,
perhaps worse than it was in Clintons time or even in FDRs, when the
president had a long list of political enemies compiled for purposes of
imprisoning them if the right circumstances arose.

It is increasingly often that one mainstream news outlet or another
builds on the narrative that the fabric of America is being threatened
by out-of-power rightwing extremists. This narrative thrives through the
conflation of varying strains of anti-establishment thought and activity,
all bundled together to paint a picture of American Brown Shirts
conspiring not to erect the modern activist central state, as the Nazis
had done, but to tear it down.

This hysteria is partisan, and so it is directed against relatively
mainstream Republicans, the odd loose-cannon killer motivated by
extremism or racism, normal Americans who fear for their countrys
economic health under a conspicuously active presidency, and everyone
in between who is not ecstatic about Obamas policies.

How is the conflation of anti-government sentiment and actual violence,
including against the innocent, achieved? A contribution from Salon.com
to the new Brown Scare, entitled -A history of anti-government rage and
violence- and providing an eerie slideshow of anti-government extremism,
is fairly typical. Opposition to Obamas health care plan is shown to be
part of a menacing historical pattern of resistance to the U.S.
Government - the slideshow includes the Whiskey Rebellion; the New York
Draft Riots; opposition to Reconstruction, Integration and Social
Security; anti-JFK animosity and the Davidians resistance at Waco. Some
of these events involved violence, others simply peaceful political
opposition, but all of it is missing its crucial context - a government
at least as belligerent as those standing in dissent. Not that all of it
is benign: the Draft Riots, for example, involved violence against the
innocent - but so did the draft itself and the way Lincoln militarily
pacified the rioters. This part of the story is dropped. In portraying
the government in these conflicts as the embodiment of social order,
progress, racial harmony, economic fairness and national unity, critics
of a government takeover of medicine are practically called out as
enemies of all that is good in modern society.

Quite tellingly, the Vietnam war protesters are also included in this
picturesque story of nefarious anti-government agitation. Even the
progressive lefts greatest anti-government cause of the last several
generations, the 1960s antiwar movement, is in the crosshairs of the
liberal medias pro-government depiction of American history as a
struggle between the mainstream state and the Peripheral Americans who
oppose it.

It is again gauche to suggest that the U.S. government is a serious
threat to our liberty. While the left at times appropriately condemned
Bushs warmaking, warrantless wiretapping, violations of habeas corpus and
flouting of due process, the left has now become resigned to the precise
policies being carried out by their hero Barack Obama. Just as important,
they have forgotten what it meant to be more afraid of their government
than of their fellow Americans upset about that government. All this Bush
-era despotism continues unabated, but now it is seen as unseemly,
unpatriotic, hateful, and even criminal to suggest that the U.S.
Government Has Authoritarian Practices And Totalitarian Designs.

When Sarah Palin was taken to the woodshed for suggesting that the
government might create -Death Panels- to ration health care to the
elderly, the implication was that the mere concern about such a
possibility was motivated by hatred or dishonesty. But we all knew that
in the quasi-private health care sector, decisions of life and death are
already decided by medical boards at hospital boards and insurance
companies. If the government becomes even more involved in determining
the allocation of resources, of course something like government death
panels will be a likely result.

But more strikingly, the very same institution that massacred the Branch
Davidians under Clinton, slaughtered innocent Iraqis and Afghans under
Bush, and now, under Obama, claims the prerogative to execute American
Citizens By Fiat, is somehow seen on the left as such an unambiguous
guardian of health and American well-being so that to insinuate its
propensity to let Americans die is an act of sedition.

Sarah Palins sins go beyond her concern about Obamacare - and for the
most part, they are not her unmitigated neocon warmongering, corporatist
economic prescriptions or disregard for the Bill of Rights. What she is
most attacked for is not being sufficiently in love with leviathan.
During the presidential election, she was lambasted for her foreign
policy ignorance but she was feared more for her husbands connection to
Secessionists. Had her partisan opponents ever genuinely wanted to rein
in the American Empire, surely secessionist sentiment would be welcomed,
or at least tolerated, as an acceptable disposition.

And in the hatred of secessionism, of the ideas of nullification and
political decentralism, we see the ugly nationalism of the politically
correct left. Even constitutional talk of the Tenth Amendment makes one a
-Tenther- on par with a 9/11 Truther or Birther - as though the notion
that the Tenth Amendment has some teeth and might, by some reasonable
interpretation, preclude at least some of the left-liberal program, is
not worth seriously refuting - as though there is something cultish and
insidious about believing that the federalism of the Framers is not the
national supremacism of today. The federal government is an eternal
institution, apparently, and Sarah Palin has associated with too many
folks who question its legitimacy.

Glenn Beck, too, is primarily hated for his questioning the authority of
the federal government - not his many past calls for foreign war and
nationalism, but for his current failure to accept governments slow war
on the American people. For most of the left, the palatable Republican
personality is someone like Lindsey Graham, who despite being a neocon
on war is also pro-Cap and Trade and in favor of moderate domestic
socialism. Graham has not been accused of hatemongering or threatening
the tranquility of our great land, even as he pushes for new executive
powers to detain American citizens indefinitely. Hating welfare, global
warming alarmism, gun control and ACORN are the worst transgressions
against respectability. You can crazily favor war with Iran - as
increasing numbers of progressives seem to - and still be in the
community of official opinion, but if you harbor too much fear and
distrust toward FEMA, you might as well be locked up in an asylum.

The Tea Parties have been dragged through the mud because some of their
members dress up like colonial-era Americans, protest the census and go
so far as to compare Obama to Hitler. But I was at several antiwar
marches in 2003, and the radicalism on the left was just as ostentatious
and, from my point of view, appreciated. Leftist radicals would perform
street theater, covering themselves with fake blood, holding up images of
Bush in precisely the unflattering light in which discontented populists
now portray Obama, and in some heroic cases even pleading their fellow
Americans to protest war taxes.

But now it is considered insane, if not dangerous, to question the
census, the Department of Homeland Security or other worshipped secular
institutions. On the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a number of census
opponents were brought on a panel and ridiculed. One of them was an Arab
American concerned with the privacy rights of his people, and his
concerns were brushed off in a rude joke - despite the collusion between
the Census Bureau and Homeland Security post-9/11 to share data on Arab
Americans. The conservatives were mocked for talking like middle-
Americans. The fact that the census was used to round up Japanese-
Americans was brought up and met with laughter by the audience. I bet at
least a few were thinking, -Obama would never round people up like the
U.S. did to the Japanese - he is a good progressive Democrat, like
Franklin Roosevelt!

Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Republican talk radio, the Tea Party movement
and other relatively mainstream voices of Obama opposition do not
comprise all the targets in the establishments new Brown Scare. They,
especially the Tea Parties, are meant to be chilled into silence and
complacency or marginalized - but the ammunition used by the new war on
right-wing dissent comes from the weaving together of a narrative that
depicts the right-wing as most perilous when it is out of power.

Since the release of the M I A C report last year and a number of
unrelated incidents, the liberal media have been thrilled to create an
image of disenfranchised rightwing anti-government hatred on the brink
of boiling over and doing great harm to our country.

When abortionist George Tiller was murdered and then James von Brunn
murdered a guard at the Holocaust museum, a hysterical Rachel Maddow went
on the air and tried to create a connection where there was none. Like
Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and the Pakistani who runs the nearby
convenience store, all menacing figures are brought together in an
imagined conspiracy against the established order. The Hutaree militia
set-up, wherein a group of people too small for two poker tables was
accused of planning violence against police and using -Weapons of Mass
Destruction- to bring down the U.S. government, was met not with
suspicion or even laughter, but serious concern on NPR, on Rachel Maddow,
in the center-left imagination of a future in which police and social
workers protect us from the chaotic violence of nine people in Michigan.

Such journalists scrambled to show a connection with racist groups, only
to determine there was none. But the idea of anti-government racists
killing police is at the center of their worries now - not the police
tasing and arresting innocent Americans every day and occasionally
killing people, much less foreign policy. Just as rap songs about killing
cops scared conservatives out of their wits in the 1990s, the ravings of
some marginal Americans in the woods who had been infiltrated by the FBI
are the new social epidemic worrying the left, worthy of censorship and
a stern government response. The government is now the most persecuted
victim group - worthy of far more advocates in journalism than the Muslim
children being liquidated by U.S. remote-control robots every day.

A new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which under Democratic
regimes becomes a virtual arm of the state, targets the new -Patriots-
and enablers of the -Anti-government- extremist movement. Much of the
list is predictably absurd. Michelle Bachman is attacked for opposing
the census, telling the truth about how it was used in World War II, and
having skepticism toward AmeriCorp. -Somewhere, Joseph McCarthy must be
smiling,- the document says, and I agree. His spirit is smiling at the
efforts to malign all in political life who subscribe to something even
more subversive than Communism - any notion that U.S. political power
Ought To Be Limited. Glenn Beck is also targeted, and the criticisms are
not even coherent - for example, He delivered the keynote address to
10,000 right-wing activists who attended the Conservative Political
Action Conference.- Oh No!!!!!!!!!

Joseph Farah is smeared because he questioned the official story behind
Vince Fosters death. The president of the John Birch Society is attacked
because, like all good Birchers, he hates socialism and fears it is in
Americas future. Libertarian and other anti-government activists are
targeted in the new SPLC blacklist, including a man who legally carried a
rifle to some political protest (and who unsettlingly points out that
Obama has killed more people than he has), and Sheriff Mack, who dares
to say law enforcers should not enforce unjust, illegal laws and that
the IRS should be abolished.

But most absurd of all is the SPLCs attacks on Judge Andrew Napolitano
and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. The judge, a principled libertarian who
opposed all of Bushs lawless power-grabs and acts of foreign empire-
building and who consistently applies the same critiques to Obama, is
targeted for believing the federal government should be at least 2/3
smaller than it is now and supporting the rights of states to secede.

The most substantive criticism of Ron Paul, the most principled, least
partisan and most dedicated to non-violence and tolerance of all the
members of Congress, is that he believes that taxation is immoral, the
U.S. should withdraw from the UN and the Fed is crooked.

The only thing most, although not all, of the people branded as enablers
of or participants in rightwing extremism agree on is that they oppose
the current U.S. government and believe tyranny is possible and perhaps
impending in America. For this they are smeared and all attempts are
made to chill their dissent. Some would call the fear of crackdowns on
dissent itself a form of rightwing paranoia, but when establishment
liberals happily talk about prosecuting people for -Seditious conspiracy-
and creating speech codes, there is plenty to be legitimately concerned
about.

Further, many of the concerns of the extremist rightwing, the patriots,
the anti-government populist movement, the Tea Parties and even
inconsistent statists like Glenn Beck are not off-base. And the most
disenfranchised and least respectable of the voices are often the ones
who stumble upon something resembling the truth.

Seventeen years ago in 1993, the federal government did in fact murder
dozens of Americans who were no threat to anyone. The same government
has in fact violated the rights of American citizens, rounded people
into concentration camps, silenced and infiltrated politically peaceful
groups, conspired against the people in numerous ways, drugged, poisoned
and withheld medicine from Americans without their knowing, lied
repeatedly about war and serious law enforcement matters, jailed people
without due process, imposed martial law on segments of the domestic
population, seized guns from law-abiding gunowners, broken down American
doors and held scared children at gunpoint, planned the creation of
extralegal judicial institutions to process American citizens, targeted
political enemies with the IRS and other police agencies, forced
Americans to labor and even kill and die under threat of imprisonment,
overseen the largest prison system in the world, shoveled trillions of
borrowed dollars to corrupt financial institutions and killed millions of
civilians abroad - All in the lifetime of many who are still alive. The
U.S. Police State has in fact been growing since 9/11 and even before -
and Obama has done nothing to stem its growth. On the Contrary, he has
continued the mix of economic fascism, imperialism, surveillance and
lawless detention policy that characterized the Bush years.

Indeed, the most dangerous rightwing extremist in my lifetime was George
W. Bush. Obama is following in his footsteps. That so many Americans are
more frightened of rightwingers out of power than in power - more
bothered by conservatives who hate Washington than those who control or
want to control it - and more offended by anti-government rhetoric than
the Democratic President continuing the policies they claimed to hate
under Republican rule - shows how little they have learned from Waco
And All That Has Happened Since.

April 19, 2010

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute.
He lives in Oakland, California. See his webpage for more articles and
personal information.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.