WSJ

McVeigh's Politics
He declared war on civilization. Yesterday, civilization won.

Tuesday, June 12, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

The saga of Timothy McVeigh calls to mind a warning that the novelist V.S. Naipaul has made across his life's work. Naipaul believes that one of the great, constant struggles of the civilized world is to protect against the persistent encroachment of "the bush." By the bush, Naipaul means the world of disorder that was the norm before we learned the worth of civil society.

Timothy McVeigh decided that civil society in the United States, with its many layers of political recourse, was not enough for him. So he chose to express himself, as we say, by blowing up a building, a political act that killed 168 innocents. For that, the government yesterday executed him. Asked by the press afterward whether the death penalty was a deterrent, victim relative and witness Anthony Scott said, "It's a deterrent for Timothy McVeigh."

Deterrence, we suppose, is as good a word as any to sum up what a civilized society tries to achieve in the interests of its own survival. Here in the United States, from its inception as a nation, we have tried to accord citizens the greatest degree of personal and political freedom possible, as put in the Bill of Rights, while ensuring that a framework of laws and sanctions deterred the worst among us from taking advantage of a liberal system to spread ruin.

Timothy McVeigh, pledging allegiance to political demons, turned away from the freedoms and jumped over all of our deterrents. And he got caught. President Bush rightly described what happened to him yesterday as "not vengeance, but justice."

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Justice is a much more complicated idea than vengeance. Vengeance, as we have seen, survives as the dominant political system in many parts of the world, such as the Balkans, Rwanda or Afghanistan. It seems quick and efficient. When someone offends your person or politics, you personally beat him up or kill him. You win through extermination.

Instead of vengeance, men and women have tried for some 400 years to base a civilized society on the more arduous idea of justice. This is hard work, because the idea of what exactly constitutes justice is always under challenge. Your "rights" look like "privilege" to me, and I plan to take it away from you, if I can. And so it was that our own country's Founding Fathers evolved a system of politics that would entitle everyone to an opinion, and the right to publish those opinions and to organize around them. And the Founders, in lieu of attempting to discover whose ideas constituted absolute truth, a notion that history suggests engenders homicidal rages, developed an alternative to the absolute truth. It's called elections under the rule of law.

The United States did not discover democracy. It did, however, make it better than it ever had been before, and it succeeded magnificently in realizing the social and economic fruits of a system that allows all ideas to come forward, so long as those ideas agree, ultimately, to exist inside a framework of civilized political discourse. ***

Political fanatics, such as Timothy McVeigh or the abortion-clinic bombers or the Earth First arsonists who blow up biotech labs, have no patience with the complications of representative politics. But so many more people do in fact revere and respect what went into the slow construction of such a system of politics. We in the United States are the fortunate ones to have it, as today are virtually all the millions who live in Europe, and a world away, those who have joined this same political community--Japan and such quickly emerging nations as South Korea and Taiwan. When a Timothy McVeigh emerges in systems such as these, he attracts as much attention as this homicidal twerp has received the past few days precisely because he is not the norm. He is a freak.

Less fortunate for sure are people living in such places as Colombia, the Philippines, the Middle East, Macedonia or Sudan where whole populations subscribe to the idea that the best way to build a society is to blow up or burn down the one you've got. And the mobs who rioted against global trade in Seattle and Quebec City give the impression of having decided that Timothy McVeigh's politics are more attractive than the system already in place.

What has been learned here, it seems to us, is that in our time the road chosen by a political or social outlaw such as Timothy McVeigh in the end inevitably arrives at nihilism. It is, perhaps, a paradox of our age that so many political nihilists come to believe that the path to victory lies through the destruction of civilian innocents. Simply, these are attacks on the idea of a civilized world. We have had, these past days, to revisit one such attack in the awful pictures of Oklahoma City's rubble. It remains a sign of this nation's hard-earned strength that in a country of some 260 million people, virtually every last one of them believes that Timothy McVeigh's act of political protest accomplished absolutely nothing.

-- Anonymous, June 13, 2001