A White Day for Terror

Recently a number of white Americans have been arrested in connection to last year’s bombings in Mumbai. This has led certain media outlets to refer to the “changing face of terrorism” on US soil. It is true to say that white Americans, unlike white Brits, are relative newcomers to the forbidden delights of Salafist jihadism, but pre-9/11, terrorists in the US were almost all honkies who didn’t give a shit about Allah or wearing turbans.

American politicians like the dark and evil “other”, because they fill us with racist terror. But they’re missing a trick, because there’s a whole bunch of fear to be reaped from terrorists who could easily be your neighbour. Surely, some secret CIA committee has realised that spreading the terror net wide enough to implicate everyone would create a sweet mood of fear handing the nation into their hands.

It’s weird, (and racist?) that they haven’t, because there have been loads of terrorist whities. Before 9/11, the threat was from home grown groups made up of disaffected, right-wing white guys; or from lonely psychos. Now it looks as though Christian terrorism is making a comeback, so here’s a little look back at some of America’s finest white terror merchants.

Timothy McVeigh
The Oklahoma Bomber

Before 9/11 shat all over his crown, McVeigh was the face of American terrorism. Withdrawn, blond, hillbilly-ish, loner, bullied at school, ugly enough to be labelled inbred; his box ticking knew no bounds. He was also beloved by Gore Vidal, who admired the reasoning behind McVeigh’s attacks, if not the fact that he’d actually gone ahead and done it. The Oklahoma bomber had “gone to war on his own”, said Vidal, and he had done it in retaliation for FBI raids which had left 80 people dead in Texas in the early 90s. Vidal has spent his life going to war, of course, but the war was a war of words, and the opponent was Norman Mailer. And William Buckley. And David Dimbleby.

John Wilkes Booth
Assassin

Abraham Lincoln’s killer was a member of a prominent theatrical family, so imagine Jake Gyllenhaal killing Barack Obama you’ve got yourself a useful equivalent. He was motivated by a classic Civil War era cause: the right to own slaves. His garden needed tending and he was damned if some stovepipe hat-wearing lawyer from the mid-west was going to take his pretty Negroes away.

The McNamara brothers
Los Angeles Times bombers

James and John McNamara are the kind of terrorists it is hard to imagine existing today. They were committed trade unionists who bombed the LA newspaper because it didn’t want its employees to be unionised. That’s socialist commitment, Ken Livingstone.

The Unabomber
Mail bombings

Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, who later became known as the Unabomber. People got turned on by him because he was an intellectual prodigy who disappeared into the wilderness to teach himself how to build cabins and live off bracken, berries, and wolves. While in the wilderness (Montana), Kaczynski witnessed the destruction of areas of natural beauty and started a mail-bombing campaign to draw attention to it. As a young man he had participated in a CIA-sponsored test that put participants under a huge amount of emotional stress as a way of determining how people reacted in such situations, so there’s also a Jason Bourne element to his story.

The Ku Klux Klan
Racist hood guys

You know you don’t have the rep you used to when you’ve got a rubbish Facebook page with only 17 members. The KKK used to get all the attention but now it’s all about the Muslims. Klan members aren’t burning people in the forest anymore, they’re hanging around outside Wal-Mart moaning about you can’t get a good pointy hat because of the immigrants. They’ve passed over into the realm of the quaint and the laughable, their small dicks and hatred no longer feared, but mocked.