# American Terrorist

## Metadata
- Author: [[Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck]]
- Full Title: American Terrorist
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- collector on the New York State Thruway went unanswered. He returned to his old preservice job as a security guard, wrote letters to the editor complaining about a country out of touch with its citizens, and embraced doctrines of the Founding Fathers. ([Location 183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=183))
- A ruling class of professional politicians willing to do anything to increase their wealth through taxes and remain in office had seized control of the country. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=186))
- Timothy McVeigh was preparing to teach the government a lesson. He was preparing to strike back for Waco, for Ruby Ridge, for U.S. military actions against smaller nations, for no-knock search warrants. It was a list of grievances he’d been amassing for years: crooked politicians, overzealous government agents, high taxes, political correctness, gun laws. ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=388))
- Mothers and fathers may walk away from each other, but a grandfather was someone you could count on. ([Location 875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=875))
- History, he thought, certainly was written by the victors. ([Location 2705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=2705))
- Though he was horrified by McVeigh’s crime and his cold attitude, Smith did not see him as an evil man. Clinically, he saw him as an essentially decent person who had allowed rage to build up inside him to the point that he had lashed out in one terrible, violent act. “I’ve seen it many times,” Smith maintains. “Nice people do really terrible things.” ([Location 5407](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=5407))
- I pointed out that the word “right,” in the political sense, was originally associated with authoritarianism, and I raised the question of why certain radically anti-authoritarian groups (such as the Montana Freemen) were lumped together with authoritarian factions as the “right.” McVeigh explained that the American far right could be roughly divided into two branches, the fascist/racist branch, and the individualistic or freedom-loving branch which generally was not racist. He did not know why these two branches were lumped together as the “right,” but he did suggest a criterion that could be used to distinguish left from right: the left (in America today) generally dislikes firearms, while the right tends to be attracted to firearms. ([Location 7561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7561))
- My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of any likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need. ([Location 7572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7572))
- But McVeigh did not fit the stereotype of the extreme right-wingers. I’ve already indicated that he spoke of respect for other people’s cultures, and in doing so he sounded like a liberal. He certainly was not a mean or hostile person, and I wasn’t aware of any indication that he was super patriotic. I suspect that he is an adventurer by nature, and America since the closing of the frontier has had little room for adventurers. ([Location 7575](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7575))
- Moreover, our politicians and our military kill people in far larger numbers than was done at Oklahoma City, and they do so for motives that are far more cold blooded and calculating. On orders from the president, a general will kill some thousands of people (usually including many civilians regardless of efforts to avoid such losses) without bothering to ask himself whether the killing is justified. He has to follow orders because his only other alternative would be to resign his commission, and naturally he would rather kill a few thousand people than spoil his career. ([Location 7591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7591))
- The politicians and the media justify these actions with propaganda about “defending freedom.” However, even if America were a free society (which it is not), most U.S. military action during at least the last couple of decades has not been necessary for the survival of American society but has been designed to protect relatively narrow economic or political interests or to boost the president’s approval rating in the public-opinion polls. ([Location 7595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7595))
- It’s easy to see the reason for the difference: America’s little wars are designed to promote the interests of “the system,” but violence at home is dangerous to the system, so the system’s propaganda has to teach us the correspondingly correct attitudes toward such events. Yet I am much less repelled by powerless dissidents who kill a couple hundred because they think they have no other way to effectively state their protest, than I am by politicians and generals—people in positions of great power—who kill hundreds or thousands for the sake of cold calculated political and economic advantages. ([Location 7600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B019HNFSBG&location=7600))