I'm sure there are people out there somewhere who consider this an example of
good treason. I trust that you are not among them.
I confess to a certain ambivalence. In principle I abhor violence, and even if violence were called for, the Murrah Building was a bad target. You get nowhere by attacking government workers who are not at all involved in the evils you are opposing, and just inflame people by killing children.
OTOH, although I am far from a conspiracy theorist, don't belong to any militias, don't even (and never have) own a gun, I think the government is getting out of hand in its exercise of power over the citizenry. Some of the tactics used in prosecution of the "war on drugs" are totally out of hand. Many law enforcement agencies have simply lost their marbles over fighting drugs. Up here in our little county we had an example of this with the feds coming in and enlisting our local Sheriff (who has a well known history of marijuana use, though probably not a current user) in a raid on an outer island in which they trampled civil rights, and were finally slapped down by the state Supreme Court, but only after they had destroyed buildings, trashed civil rights, and cost subsistence level people enormous amounts of money to defend their rights. And that's just up here in our remote corner of the world. My son, who is in the Air Force special forces, was detained at the border when he wanted to visit Canada, searched, his truck gone over by drug sniffing dogs. Of course they found nothing, and they had no information that would indicate he was a drug user other than, presumably, some form of profiling of a truck with four young people (all Air Force, btw) and not much cash money (they live in the lifestyle of debit cards, not cash), one of them black.
And despite the court cases, we do not know the whole truth about Waco yet. But what we do know ain't pretty. I'm persuaded that the ATF initiated the first raid purely for political gain, to get a high-profile arrest at budget time. They could have arrested Koresh downtown any time they had wanted with no fuss and no bother. Instead, 80 people died. We don't call that an act of treason, though I think we should -- if the govt had just left those people alone to live their lives, there would have been no problem. But this government isn't willing to let people live their lives.
The government has virtually absolute power, and are exercising it, IMO, to the serious detriment of freedom. If you're looking for traitors, I think there are a lot in the government service. Keeping in mind that the people ARE the government (we the people, remember?) an act against the liberty of the people is an act of treason against the government.
McVeigh chose the wrong target. If he had blown up a DEA office or an FBI office (particularly the one out of which the Waco siege was run), or even the Department of Justice, and killed only employees of those agencies, I might be willing to say that it was "good" treason, if it was treason at all.
I still don't approve of violence. But I'm gradually coming to the view that maybe with this government (I don't mean Bush, after all Ruby Ridge and Waco were under Clinton, the government is really run by the agencies and lower level employees and changes in the top really mean very little) violence is the only weapon to re-secure lost freedoms. That was the case in 1775. It may be the case again today. |
