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Thread: Gore Vidal on Waco, Tim McVeigh, and the US government's open declaration of war on us.

  1. #1

    Exclamation Gore Vidal on Waco, Tim McVeigh, and the US government's open declaration of war on us.

    I remember reading this when it came out and how powerful it was. Of course, one look at the publish date and you understand how quickly this was lost in the background static.

    It is long, in depth, angry and spot on. Too long for me to copypasta it all here.

    Out of respect for the loss of a man who was a tireless advocate of individual liberty, and for a clear understanding of just when and how the USG came to be at a 24/7 war footing against every one of us, please, go and read the entire piece.

    H/T to Lew Rockwell for posting a link and reminding me of this.



    The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh

    September 2001

    http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/f.../mcveigh200109

    Americans were fed the story of Timothy McVeigh’s trial and execution as a simple, unquestionable narrative: he was guilty, he was evil, and he acted largely alone. Gore Vidal’s 1998 Vanity Fair essay on the erosion of the U.S. Bill of Rights caused McVeigh to begin a three-year correspondence with Vidal, prompting an examination of certain evidence that points to darker truths—a conspiracy willfully ignored by F.B.I. investigators, and a possible cover-up by a government waging a secret war on the liberty of its citizens.

    by Gore Vidal

    Toward the end of the last century but one, Richard Wagner made a visit to the southern Italian town of Ravello, where he was shown the gardens of the thousand-year-old Villa Rufolo. “Maestro,” asked the head gardener, “do not these fantastic gardens ’neath yonder azure sky that blends in such perfect harmony with yonder azure sea closely resemble those fabled gardens of Klingsor where you have set so much of your latest interminable opera, Parsifal? Is not this vision of loveliness your inspiration for Klingsor?” Wagner muttered something in German. “He say,” said a nearby translator, “‘How about that?’”

    How about that indeed, I thought, as I made my way toward a corner of those fabled gardens, where ABC-TV’s Good Morning America and CBS’s Early Show had set up their cameras so that I could appear “live” to viewers back home in God’s country.

    This was last May. In a week’s time “the Oklahoma City Bomber,” a decorated hero of the Gulf War, one of Nature’s Eagle Scouts, Timothy McVeigh, was due to be executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, for being, as he himself insisted, the sole maker and detonator of a bomb that blew up a federal building in which died 168 men, women, and children. This was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians, as the cultists called themselves, were a peaceful group of men, women, and children living and praying together in anticipation of the end of the world, which started to come their way on February 28, 1993. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, exercising its mandate to “regulate” firearms, refused all invitations from cult leader David Koresh to inspect his licensed firearms. The A.T.F. instead opted for fun. More than 100 A.T.F. agents, without proper warrants, attacked the church’s compound while, overhead, at least one A.T.F. helicopter fired at the roof of the main building. Six Branch Davidians were killed that day. Four A.T.F. agents were shot dead, by friendly fire, it was thought.

    There was a standoff. Followed by a 51-day siege in which loud music was played 24 hours a day outside the compound. Then electricity was turned off. Food was denied the children. Meanwhile, the Media were briefed regularly on the evils of David Koresh. Apparently, he was making and selling crystal meth; he was also—what else in these sick times?—not a Man of God but a Pedophile. The new attorney general, Janet Reno, then got tough. On April 19 she ordered the F.B.I. to finish up what the A.T.F. had begun. In defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act (a basic bulwark of our fragile liberties that forbids the use of the military against civilians), tanks of the Texas National Guard and the army’s Joint Task Force Six attacked the compound with a gas deadly to children and not too healthy for adults while ramming holes in the building. Some Davidians escaped. Others were shot by F.B.I. snipers. In an investigation six years later, the F.B.I. denied ever shooting off anything much more than a pyrotechnic tear-gas cannister. Finally, during a six-hour assault, the building was set fire to and then bulldozed by Bradley armored vehicles. God saw to it that no F.B.I. man was hurt while more than 80 cult members were killed, of whom 27 were children. It was a great victory for Uncle Sam, as intended by the F.B.I., whose code name for the assault was Show Time.

    It wasn’t until May 14, 1995, that Janet Reno, on 60 Minutes, confessed to second thoughts. “I saw what happened, and knowing what happened, I would not do it again.” Plainly, a learning experience for the Florida daughter of a champion lady alligator rassler.

    The April 19, 1993, show at Waco proved to be the largest massacre of Americans by their own government since 1890, when a number of Native Americans were slaughtered at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Thus the ante keeps upping.

    Although McVeigh was soon to indicate that he had acted in retaliation for what had happened at Waco (he had even picked the second anniversary of the slaughter, April 19, for his act of retribution), our government’s secret police, together with its allies in the Media, put, as it were, a heavy fist upon the scales. There was to be only one story: one man of incredible innate evil wanted to destroy innocent lives for no reason other than a spontaneous joy in evildoing. From the beginning, it was ordained that McVeigh was to have no coherent motive for what he had done other than a Shakespearean motiveless malignity. Iago is now back in town, with a bomb, not a handkerchief. More to the point, he and the prosecution agreed that he had no serious accomplices.

    I sat on an uncomfortable chair, facing a camera. Generators hummed amid the delphiniums. Good Morning America was first. I had been told that Diane Sawyer would be questioning me from New York, but ABC has a McVeigh “expert,” one Charles Gibson, and he would do the honors. Our interview would be something like four minutes. Yes, I was to be interviewed In Depth. This means that only every other question starts with “Now, tell us, briefly … ” Dutifully, I told, briefly, how it was that McVeigh, whom I had never met, happened to invite me to be one of the five chosen witnesses to his execution.

    Briefly, it all began in the November 1998 issue of Vanity Fair. I had written a piece about “the shredding of our Bill of Rights.” I cited examples of I.R.S. seizures of property without due process of law, warrantless raids and murders committed against innocent people by various drug-enforcement groups, government collusion with agribusiness’s successful attempts to drive small farmers out of business, and so on. (For those who would like further evidence of a government running amok, turn to page 397 of my The Last Empire.) Then, as a coda, I discussed the illegal but unpunished murders at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (a mother and child and dog had been killed in cold blood by the F.B.I.); then, the next year, Waco. The Media expressed little outrage in either case. Apparently, the trigger words had not been spoken. Trigger words? Remember The Manchurian Candidate? George Axelrod’s splendid 1962 film, where the brainwashed (by North Koreans) protagonist can only be set in murderous motion when the gracious garden-club lady, played by Angela Lansbury, says, “Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

    Since we had been told for weeks that the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, was not only a drug dealer but the sexual abuser of the 27 children in his compound, the maternal Ms. Reno in essence decreed: Better that they all be dead than defiled. Hence, the attack. Later, 11 members of the Branch Davidian Church were put on trial for the “conspiracy to commit murder” of the federal agents who had attacked them. The jury found all 11 innocent on that charge. But after stating that the defendants were guilty of attempted murder—the very charge of which they had just been acquitted—the judge sentenced eight innocent church members up to 40 years on lesser charges. One disgusted juror said, “The wrong people were on trial.” Show Time!
    Last edited by Anti Federalist; 08-01-2012 at 07:36 PM.



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  3. #2
    The world is a lesser place today.

  4. #3
    Clicked on the link for a read-through later. Thanks
    Those who want liberty must organize as effectively as those who want tyranny. -- Iyad el Baghdadi

  5. #4
    I just finished. What a mind. I did not realize he was dead. Saw it when searching for one of his essays. I missed Donnays post. We are down one truth teller. RIP.
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by kathy88 View Post
    I just finished. What a mind. I did not realize he was dead. Saw it when searching for one of his essays. I missed Donnays post. We are down one truth teller. RIP.
    Yes, yes we are.


  7. #6
    Too many interesting things to quote, but here's one:

    McVeigh quotes again from Justice Brandeis: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example.” He stops there. But Brandeis goes on to write in his dissent, “Crime is contagious. If the government becomes the law breaker, it breeds contempt for laws; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.” Thus the straight-arrow model soldier unleashed his terrible swift sword and the innocent died. But then a lawless government, Brandeis writes, “invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means—to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal—would bring terrible retribution.”
    Those who want liberty must organize as effectively as those who want tyranny. -- Iyad el Baghdadi

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by amy31416 View Post
    Too many interesting things to quote, but here's one:
    That quote jumped out at me as well.
    "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
    —Charles Mackay

    "god i fucking wanna rip his balls off and offer them to the gods"
    -Anonymous

  9. #8
    Until the People at large realize that our government has, indeed, declared war on its citizenry, we will not be able to develop a proper response.

    History will see this plainly, but we in the present are condemned to not seeing the forest for the trees.
    "The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form"..... Jefferson Davis

    "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle".
    .....Edmund Burke

    "A corrupt electoral process can only lead to corrupt Government."
    ......jay_dub



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by jay_dub View Post
    but we in the present are condemned to not seeing the forest for the trees.
    Some of us do, (not enough yet)
    Some of us are walking among the trees.
    Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.
    Ron Paul 2004

    Registered Ron Paul supporter # 2202
    It's all about Freedom

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  13. #11
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    Pat Buchanan and Gore were close I heard. So much for the all ridiculous hyperbole that Pat hates gays.

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by AuH20 View Post
    Pat Buchanan and Gore were close I heard. So much for the all ridiculous hyperbole that Pat hates gays.
    I completely forgot, or never knew, that Gore Vidal was gay.
    Well, I got Rand started on his campaign (just search around here to see). I advised Thomas Massie before he ran for Congress. I am currently advising 2 liberty campaigns for the state legislature. I ran the war-room and won Minnesota for Ron Paul a few weeks back. There are other things I'm probably forgetting.
    Yet I can't afford $200 to go to a seminar--Matt Collins

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Kluge View Post
    I completely forgot, or never knew, that Gore Vidal was gay.
    One of the reasons I respected him - he kept his private life private, and weighed in on important public issues basing his opinions on reason and logic.
    Out of every one hundred men they send us, ten should not even be here. Eighty will do nothing but serve as targets for the enemy. Nine are real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, upon them depends our success in battle. But one, ah the one, he is a real warrior, and he will bring the others back from battle alive.

    Duty is the most sublime word in the English language. Do your duty in all things. You can not do more than your duty. You should never wish to do less than your duty.

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Pericles View Post
    One of the reasons I respected him - he kept his private life private, and weighed in on important public issues basing his opinions on reason and logic.
    I definitely respect that--whether you're gay, straight or whatever.
    Well, I got Rand started on his campaign (just search around here to see). I advised Thomas Massie before he ran for Congress. I am currently advising 2 liberty campaigns for the state legislature. I ran the war-room and won Minnesota for Ron Paul a few weeks back. There are other things I'm probably forgetting.
    Yet I can't afford $200 to go to a seminar--Matt Collins

  17. #15
    This article was a damn good read.

  18. #16
    Gore Vidal: The Last Jeffersonian

    His enemies knew why they hated him

    by Justin Raimondo, August 03, 2012

    http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2...-jeffersonian/

    The obituaries are coming in, and as usual they are filled with the trite things Americans are obsessed with: Gore Vidal’s sexuality, his "coldness," his feuds, his quips. Andrew Sullivan is typical – and isn’t that typical – in ascribing what he views as Vidal’s flaws to his lack of support for gay marriage and his "anti-American" utterances. Commentary magazine celebrated the great man’s death by posting Norman Podhoretz’s interminable rant, first published in 1986, accusing Vidal of … yes, you guessed it: anti-Semitism. The evidence? Describing Podhoretz and his wife Midge as "Israeli fifth columnists," a charge that, in retrospect, seems more like an undeserved compliment: after all, a "fifth columnist" is something like a spy, a profession that hinges on the clandestine, but Poddy’s big mouth – which he opens at every opportunity – has hardly made a secret of his allegiances.

    Aside from Vidal’s disdain for the kind of identity politics that gives a nonentity a hook on which to hang his bonnet, Sullivan is appalled by what is perhaps Vidal’s most interesting book. The Golden Age dramatizes the fascinating historical research published in Thomas E. Mahl’s Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44. Mahl’s 1998 book is based on declassified documents that tell some of the story of how British intelligence agents permeated the political and social elites in Washington and New York, pushed a reluctant "isolationist" America into war – and put us on the road to empire.

    Sullivan, still the loyal subject of Her Majesty the Queen, is horrified by this, but it’s not just the British angle that sets Andy’s skirts aflame – it’s the very idea that anyone in their right mind would question the official history of our entry into World War II. In Sullivan’s world, this makes him a "Pearl Harbor truther." To the historian, however, who isn’t just a court historian – and to the serious person, as opposed to court jesters of Sullivan’s ilk – this makes him that most exotic of creatures: a truth-seeker. Rarer than unicorns in our media-driven propaganda-drenched Twitterverse, the loss of this one marks a turning point in American intellectual history – a downturn, to be sure. As I put it in my 2001 review of The Golden Age:

    "Gore Vidal is a member of what seems to be a nearly extinct fraternity: the American novelists of ideas. When he goes, who is left – and what hope is there that someone will breach the walls of political correctness meant to keep his kind out forever?"
    His enemies understood him, which is why they hated him – and couldn’t help admiring him. The neocons hated him because he was a formidable opponent of their imperial project: they never forgave him when he called them out for their treasonous tribalism. The liberals, who thought he was one of them, were made increasingly uneasy by his public utterances, as detailed in this very perceptive account of Vidal’s career by Michael Lind, who describes his attendance at a speech by Vidal given at the Woodrow Wilson Center in the late 1990s:

    "Soon I found myself as uncomfortable as the other members of the auditorium audience, when, during his speech, Vidal launched into what sounded like a defense of Timothy McVeigh, the far-right would-be revolutionary whose bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil before the al-Qaeda attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. While not exactly condoning McVeigh, Vidal told us that a violent reaction was inevitable, given the way that the federal government was oppressing American farmers.

    "I could sense that others in the audience shared my disquiet. The farmers? What the hell is he talking about?"
    To the Washingtonian patricians who grace such events, farmers and other ordinary Americans are alien creatures whose fate is of little if any concern. The farmers? Who the $#@! cares about them? To statist ideologues and other creatures of Washington’s black lagoon, the very idea of individual farmers is "reactionary," to use one of Lind’s favorite epithets.

    Yet to be as fair to Lind as he is to Vidal, he is quite correct when, in a eureka moment, he divines that "Gore Vidal has turned into his grandfather."

    "Vidal," writes Lind, "had always insisted that to understand him it was helpful to understand his grandfather, Thomas Gore (1870-1949). Blind from an early age, Thomas Gore served as Democratic senator from Oklahoma twice, from 1907-1921 and again from 1931-1937. A populist in the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, Sen. Gore was a maverick who did not hesitate to take on his own party. He voted against President Woodrow Wilson’s call for U.S. entry into World War I and he voted against President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. In the light of Jeffersonian ideology, each of these votes made sense as efforts to preserve the American republic from the evils of empire and the welfare state."
    Unfortunately, Lind insists on mounting his ideological hobbyhorse, and brings in a totally irrelevant comparison to Ignatius Donnelly, and none other than William Hope Harvey, whose didactic and excruciatingly boring "novels" on monetary theory were a late nineteenth century populist phenomenon. Donnelly was a minor Populist party politician of the same era, whose most notable work is Atlantis: the Antediluvian World. Lind’s condescending tone throughout the review is typical of what one might overhear at a Georgetown cocktail party: he isn’t quite sure Vidal’s fiction output is really all that "literary," or if it’s really literature at all but rather a series of didactic manifestos in the style of Coin’s Financial School.

    Once he dismounts his various hobbyhorses, however, Lind can be penetratingly perceptive:

    "The academic literati do not hold either Vidal or Solzhenitsyn in high esteem — but neither wrote to be read by what Vidal described as ‘the scholar-squirrels.’ If you think that the political and journalistic establishments are corrupt and that fiction provides you with a way to bring your message directly to the public, you are going to write your didactic fiction in a traditional, accessible style that ordinary citizens can understand, not in an avant-garde style that only graduate students in literature can decipher. Other Nation columnists wrote about the masses. Gore Vidal wrote for them.

    "And they loved him for it. Growing up in Texas, I marveled at the way that suburban conservatives who would not read any other fiction would buy the latest Gore Vidal novel. But if you think of Vidal as a populist, it makes sense. He was giving them the inside scoop about American history, the scandalous true story, not the patriotic pablum they were taught in school. The fact that he had grown up as a member of the Washington establishment (as he never ceased reminding his readers and viewers) gave him credibility as he carried out his revisionist project of exposing the secret history of the United States. What Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are to libertarians, Vidal’s historical novels have been to middlebrow Middle America."
    Us poor middlebrows, doomed to live in the Great Middle of the country amid the fast-disintegrating middle class: will we never disabuse ourselves of our middlebrowed prejudices against neo-royalist empire-builders who don’t believe in the existence of farmers and think they can rule the world? Against all the strictures of patrician good taste and political correctness, we read Gore Vidal and keep our "reactionary" faith in the Jeffersonian vision Lind deplores.

    As a novelist, Vidal’s great achievement was his "Narratives of Empire" series, which dramatizes what Lind calls a "revisionist" view of American history and I would simply describe as clear-eyed. The overarching theme of this heptalogy is the long, slow degeneration of what had been the world’s freest republic into a vast and corrupted empire. His portraits of historical figures – the grasping, manipulative FDR, the bullying Churchill, the syphilitic Lincoln – constitute a veritable shooting gallery of the Vital Center’s pantheon of heroes. This earned him the enmity of both left and right.

    Unlike Lind, I don’t marvel at the way us "middlebrows" snatched up the latest Gore Vidal novel, and I won’t be surprised to see his posthumously published works shoot to the top of the bestseller list. That’s because the power of what Vidal represented – not the "ranting" of a Southern populist, as Lind would have it, but the sharp dissent of an American original and a literary giant, whose oeuvre will be remembered – and read – long after the journalistic twitterings of his critics are justly forgotten.



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  20. #17
    Gore Vidal stated fact that, "Fascism never left Italy". I disagree, it is on steroids in the US today.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOW2hhdz7DU
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  21. #18
    Great article,thanks for posting.It is worth the time to read
    I had never read any of Vidal's opinion pieces before,but I love his historical fiction.

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by pcosmar View Post
    Some of us do, (not enough yet)
    Some of us are walking among the trees.
    Bump for The Trees:
    No one here wanted to be the Billionaire.

  23. #20
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