INSIGHT Weekly commentary
October 8 , 2006
Why does all Terrorism come from the Right?
The worldwide terrorist "threat" takes many shapes. It can be religiously inspired. It can be defensive—the poor man's F-16, as one wag puts it. It can be part of a larger project of the state, as paramilitaries in Turkey and Colombia have been. But one thing seems now to unite almost all acts of terrorism—they emanate from the right-wing extremists in each place. And this includes the United States.
Terrorism on American soil has mainly come from anti-abortion fanatics shooting doctors and blowing up clinics; Miami Cubans intolerant of modulated approaches toward Castro; the private militias that bred Timothy McVeigh and other mass killers; the homophobes who brutally attack gays, and their counterparts among the xenophobic "minutemen" and their ilk. In August, it was reported that threats to federal judges are up 400% from ten years ago---not surprising when the Republican majority leader in the House insults the court and a right-wing darling proposes the poisoning of a Supreme Court justice.
In Europe, it's skinhead culture, also driven by anti-foreigner hysteria. Among some Islamic communities, the violent actors tend to be those who wish to reclaim lost virtues, renew the caliphate, express racist hatred of Israel, and so on. Much violence against women—the most prevalent personal violence worldwide—comes from men who cannot cope with even modest expressions of independence.
In America, the numbers of right-wing hate groups---neo-Nazis, KKK, skinheads, anti-Semites, neo-Confederate, and Christian Identity, among others---remain strong and virulent, even after the fiasco of Oklahoma City and 9/11. Recent reports suggest how powerful Aryan Nation-like groups are controlling prison populations, and how similar types are infiltrating the U.S. military. The Minutemen xenophobes work in the long tradition of KKK border patrols. The Klan itself has 179 chapters across the United States. "Fueled by belligerent tactics and attention-getting publicity stunts, the number of hate groups in America rose 5% in 2005, capping a 33% rise over five years," reports the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading monitoring group.
That there is such a rise is paradoxical in some ways. The period of left-wing political violence has subsided to virtually nothing (apart from the Unibomber, who was a lone wolf). Notably, left-wing extremism---the Baeder-Meinhof Gang, the Weather Underground, the Brigate Rosse---occurred when liberalism was flush and the right largely in retreat. Now, and since Reagan's election in 1980, the right is dominant in America and stronger in Europe than at any time since Hitler and Mussolini, and right-wing extremism has grown apace.
But this seeming paradox is explainable. The ascendency of the right in America has been accompanied by a coarsening of politics and the potency of right-wing media, especially in cable "news," and this provides a veneer of legitimacy to extremist rhetoric and conspiracies. When the cable talk shows obsess about illegal aliens or Terry Schiavo or Muslim sentiments---when we are told by a former House speaker, for example, that we are in World War III (or is it IV?)---the hate can boil up quickly into action.
When the U.S. Government itself is torturing detainees, kipnapping suspects, and killing civilians in faraway lands, the message is also clear: violence is the answer to the complexities of the modern world.
In fact, the right-wing extremists in the United States and those of Islamist militancy have far more in common than either would like to admit. One such extremist on the "O'Reilly Factor" referred to her counterparts on the Arab street as supporters of "Jihad du jour," as if that isn't precisely what goes on with her cohort here. Both support violence as the solution to global problems, and reject diplomacy and political bargaining; both disparage modern institutions of science, governance, and education; both claim religion as their moral justification for violence; both entertain imperialist and racialist fantasies. There is nearly complete symmetry in this, and symbiosis---they need each other and nourish each other.
As the catastrophe in Iraq continues to rankle the violent right, as the frenetic search for scapegoats for this and other foreign-policy debacles intensifies, as anti-immigration hysteria is whipped up for electioneering, we can expect terrorism to rise. That it is home grown and ugly and destructive is a sad comment on the conservative movement today.
-- John Tirman
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