The scenes from Boston feel depressingly familiar. Violence in a crowded public space, blood, screams, panic and the wail of police sirens. This latest American tragedy has taken three lives and left dozens injured and it only adds to the fear and paranoia that already pervade US politics. Twelve years after the 9/11 attacks, America still feels vulnerable. As it has every right to, for the country finds itself under attack from without and within, locking it into a terrible cycle of violence.
The external threat is easy to account for: The US is caught in a dirty war with an enemy — Al Qaida — that is willing to treat US citizens like legitimate targets. The 9/11 attacks challenged the historical perception that America is impregnable. Hitherto, the republic had been somewhere that foreigners fled to for safety. Now, it was a place where foreigners came to fight. America was drawn into an ill-defined “war on terror” that forced the administration of George W. Bush to scour the world for enemies. First, Al Qaida had to be blown out of the caves of Afghanistan, then Saddam Hussain had to be driven from power in Iraq. At home, in defence of liberty, liberty was curtailed.
The conflict did not really abate under President Barack Obama. He might have taken the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he expanded the field of battle to include Libya and targeted countries hiding suspects with unmanned drone strikes. The drone is supposed to make Americans feel more secure because it distances them from the physical realities of war: No boots on the ground, no coffins returning home. However, the reality for the targets is quite different: 4,700 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, of which 176 were children. One was a US citizen, which tied the White House up in legal knots while it tried to decide whether it had the legal right to kill a fellow American without putting him or her before a jury first.
Obama may have a very different domestic agenda from Bush, but his foreign policy is based on the same desperate principle: Kill the bad guys over there before they come over here and kill us. The problem is that the strategy has not delivered the degree of security that Americans yearn for. It has militarised everyday life in a way that quickens the pulse of libertarian-minded Americans. The dreaded Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which pats down passengers in airports, has gained a reputation as a part authoritarian goon squad and part crime syndicate. Pythias Brown, a former TSA agent, admitted last year to stealing more than $800,000 (Dh2.94 million) of cash, clothing and electronics while working at Newark Liberty International Airport. More importantly, although we shall never know how many terrorist attacks have been prevented on US soil, some have still taken place. In December 2001, passengers aboard Flight 63 from Paris to Miami got lucky when a shoe bomb plot went awry. Alas, another plot succeeded in 2009 when Nidal Malek Hassan, a 39-year-old US Army major, shot dead 13 and injured 30 at the Fort Hood military base. Hassan’s motives lay somewhere between calculated criminality and mental illness and the fact that he probably acted alone is a reminder that terrorism can be effective precisely because it is so improvisational and hard to predict.
In theory, anyone with access to a gun or explosives can carry out an attack — regardless of how many bombs the US drops on the villages of Pakistan. Hassan’s case is especially notable because he was born in Arlington, Virginia, and was essentially a home-grown terrorist. His use of violence fits with an equally home-grown American tradition — political, “performative” violence. Political in the sense that it often has a manifesto, albeit a deranged one; performative in the sense that it is an attempt to articulate a grievance as publicly as possible. This is what terrorises America from within — the strange need of some radicals to act out their hatred on a public stage. Two examples. In 1995, a former US soldier, Timothy McVeigh, planted a bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people and injured more than 800. McVeigh had convinced himself that the US Government was waging a war on its own citizens. By blowing up the Murrah building, he patiently explained to journalists, he was taking revenge against the federal government for its own assaults on survivalists and Christian fundamentalists; the children who were butchered in the nursery in the basement were “collateral damage”. McVeigh appropriated the language of the US military to justify cold-blooded murder.
Surprisingly, the two schoolboys who committed the Columbine Massacre four years later were students of McVeigh’s work — although they felt that he had not gone far enough. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are best remembered for having shot and killed 12 students and a teacher at the Columbine High School in Colorado, but they also encased the school in explosives with the goal of creating a grand fireworks display that would bring their anger to the world’s attention. In the aftermath of the shootings, the media spun a cliche by portraying them as sad loners bullied by the school’s brightest and best.
In reality, Harris and Klebold saw themselves as unrecognised geniuses with the potential to expose the creeping evil of the New World Order. They wanted to “go out in style”, like Bonnie and Clyde in a hail of bullets. Their crimes spoke to a worrying glamorisation of violence in a culture saturated by movie myths of noble outlaws and righteous vigilantes.
In both stories, the killers’ actions reflected the sense of America being at war with itself. It is a theme that runs throughout US history. In the 1960s, racial conflict and Vietnam sparked assassinations, kidnappings, bomb threats and mass civil disobedience. The recent wave of violence is informed by the extreme Right’s fear that control of their country is slipping from their fingers — that immigration, sexual liberation, the liberalism of the young and outright fraud have made it impossible to win a presidential election fairly and so have de-legitimised democratic politics. They see themselves as American revolutionaries, fighting to liberate the nation from that vast Left-wing conspiracy that so irritated McVeigh. Barack Obama’s presidency has only added to this sense of alienation. His domestic policy — expanded health care benefits and gun control — has confirmed a drift towards big government, while his foreign policy has increased anxiety about civil liberties. The geography and timing of the Boston bombings fuelled suspicions of a domestic terrorist attack because they touched upon the typical concerns of the extreme Right.
The marathon’s final mile was dedicated to the memory of the victims of the recent Newtown shootings, which could imply a protest against gun control. The marathon occurred on Tax Day — when individual income tax returns have to be submitted to the government — which would imply a protest at the growing power of the federal leviathan.
Such is the sad state of American political culture that Left and Right both immediately looked for clues as to the other’s involvement in the Boston bombings. None of this is to suggest that America is innately violent. Violent crime is actually falling across the country, along with the rate of gun ownership. But it is a society deeply uneasy with itself — a society that often feels trapped in cycles of violent crime and violent response that poison its politics.
Of course, being a nation of extreme contrast, it is also possible to find great wisdom in the midst of tragedy. When three black children were killed in a racist bombing of a church in Alabama in 1963, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr spoke at their funeral of the potential for such violence to act “as a redemptive force” that forces people to challenge their prejudices and change their ways.
“In spite of the darkness of this hour,” he said, “we must not despair. We must not become bitter, nor must we harbour the desire to retaliate with violence.” Never underestimate America — for a country that is capable of producing men of war like McVeigh is equally capable of producing men of peace like King.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2013
Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the US. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now.
