THE WEST'S DARKEST HOUR

by William Pierce

 
There is hardly an issue which more sharply divides White Americans than “gun control.” There is hardly a more significant difference than that which exists between the people who want gun control and those who don’t. For there is a great temperamental and ideological divide between those who believe in self-defense and those who believe in surrendering and begging for mercy.

Looking at this from the standpoint of temperament: It may seem unfair to women to categorize the tendency to surrender as feminine and the tendency to defend oneself as masculine, but at a very fundamental level this categorization corresponds to real differences between feminine and masculine natures. Every person has some of the feminine nature and some of the masculine nature in his character. What we see today is a much greater than normal manifestation of feminine traits in men. It is not a pretty sight.

And we can look at this divide from the standpoint of ideology: Except for a relatively small minority of very sick persons who actually relish the idea of surrender and fantasize about being victimized, those who choose to give up their arms are hoping to be protected by the government. They trust the government. They believe the government has their best interests at heart. They think of the government as a friend and generally approve of the government’s policies.

This divide becomes deeper and wider by the day. A Black with an uncontrollable hatred of Whites opens fire on a crowded subway train in New York, killing five Whites and injuring 17 more. Gun control advocates see this massacre as support for their position. “A gun killed and wounded those people,” they say. “If we get rid of all the guns, then Blacks and Whites will not be able to kill each other.” And people on their side of the divide believe them and clamor for the confiscation of guns. At the same time people on the other side of the divide rush to gun stores, determined that they will be prepared to defend themselves if any White-hating Black ever threatens them or their families.

Now, this divide certainly didn’t exist a century ago. Then every White man was armed, and every woman expected him to be. In that more civilized age violent crime was a minute fraction of what it is today. People could walk the streets of their cities at night and, in most places, leave their doors unlocked without fear. The government interfered relatively little in people’s lives. Most communities had police, but a man’s right to defend himself, his family, and his property was absolute.


What caused people’s attitudes to change so radically?

Well, there are a number of reasons: A century ago the country was substantially less urban than it is now. People living in small towns and rural areas always are more self-reliant and independent, on the average, than city dwellers. Rural people live a little more naturally, a little closer to Nature. They do not depend on the elaborate infrastructure of the city, which provides garbage collection, public transportation, shelters for the homeless, and a thousand other protections and shields against the natural world. Even little things, like drawing water from one’s own well and chopping one’s own firewood for winter warmth, give one a sense of reality and self-sufficiency that most urbanites and suburbanites lack. As the nation’s population became more urban during the past century it also became less self-reliant.

Another reason is that until 1920 only men voted in the United States. To the extent that politicians and government are responsive to the feelings of the electorate, the government was much less inclined before 1920 to assume the role of a protective mother than it was after women began to vote. Although women voters are by no means uniform in their sentiments or their voting preferences, they are on the average substantially more “wet,” in the ideological sense, than men. At the most basic, instinctive level, self-defense is an alien concept to women, and since 1920 their votes have helped to shift the burden of personal protection from the individual to the government.

Then there is the fact that in the early years of North American settlement the flow of immigrants was not only entirely White (not counting the slaves imported from Africa, of course), but it consisted of a tougher, more independent breed than in recent years. People came to America from Europe seeking freedom, adventure, or opportunity; but certainly no one came looking for a handout, because everyone understood that there were no handouts available. As the country became more urban, however, the stream of immigrants began to include more of the wretched refuse of various teeming shores yearning to receive welfare checks, and the politicians began looking to the public treasury as a source of funds for buying votes. The consequence has been the growth of an urban underclass of citizens dependent on the government in one way or another: citizens who always are ready to increase their dependency on the government and to trade freedom for the promise of more security.


The mass media hate guns: here’s why

All three of the factors above have to do with the changing character of the U.S. electorate, and they are important reasons for the declining fortunes of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They are dwarfed to insignificance by a fourth factor, however, and that factor is the growth in the degree of influence on public opinion of the Jews through their control of the mass media of information and entertainment.

Both the Jewish control of the media and the media bias against the citizen’s right to keep and bear arms are generally recognized but seldom discussed publicly, for fear of the charge of “anti-Semitism.” Also manifest but inadequately publicized is the Jewish leadership of the legislative drive to restrict or abolish the private ownership of firearms. The names of the principal anti-Second Amendment legislators—Feinstein, Metzenbaum, Schumer—tell part of the story, and the anti-gun lobbying organizations, of which the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—the ADL—is the most powerful, tell the rest.

When a “group of concerned citizens” or an association of mayors or chiefs of police issues a statement to the press calling for the banning of firearms as a way of reducing violence in America’s cities, a close examination nearly always will reveal the hidden hand of the ADL. Especially insidious has been the ADL’s use of local, state, and federal police agencies as front groups. For the past two decades the ADL has been lobbying actively for a group of what it calls “model statutes” restricting firearms ownership and penalizing what it deems to be “hate crimes” perpetrated by Whites against members of minority groups. Typically the ADL will have a police official or two in tow when it shows up at a state legislature to lobby for one of these politically oriented laws.

The ADL’s program to subvert police departments was revealed in late 1992 when a San Francisco police inspector, Thomas Gerard, was arrested for illegally selling confidential police investigative files to the ADL. Police searches of ADL offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles in April of last year turned up evidence of widespread corruption of police agencies around the country by the ADL. Brave indeed is the local police chief who will turn away an ADL emissary who visits his office with a couple of the community’s leading Jewish businessmen and requests the chief’s endorsement of a “model statute” banning semiautomatic firearms.

Now, far less obvious than the fact of Jewish leadership of the drive to ban the private ownership of firearms is the reason for this Jewish activity. The reason is the so-called “New World Order,” a subject I’ve spoken about several times before on American Dissident Voices. To put it very briefly, the New World Order is a utopian system in which the U.S. economy will be “globalized,” the wage levels of U.S. workers will be brought down to those of workers in the Third World, national boundaries will for all practical purposes cease to exist, an increased flow of Third World immigrants into the United States will have produced a non-White majority in the country, and United Nations “peace keeping” forces will be used to keep anyone from opting out of the system.

To be sure, Jews are not the only ones behind this scheme for a New World Order. It appeals to egalitarians, many of them Christians, who are tormented by the fact that most of the population of the Third World lives in a state of perpetual squalor and poverty. They really believe that the unfavorable condition of these non-White masses is not due to any innate inferiority. They really believe that these masses can and should be lifted up to a White level, and that it’s worth pulling the White living standard down in order to equalize everyone. And, of course, it appeals to many people in the upper echelons of Big Business, who are entranced by the prospect of paying lower wages and exporting their goods to a bigger market. It was considerations of this sort which gave us the unholy alliance of egalitarian ideologues and international capitalists who backed the recently adopted North American Free Trade Agreement.

Equality and so-called “free trade” aside, one salient feature of the New World Order is a greatly increased degree of centralization of power and of governmental control over the lives of ordinary citizens. This means a greatly increased importance for the mass media of news and entertainment. Whoever controls the mass media and is therefore able to manipulate the attitudes and opinions of the great masses of people will, for all practical purposes, be able to steer the course taken by the New World Order. This helps us to understand the virtually unanimous enthusiasm of the Jews for the New World Order.


New World Order = A disarmed America

There are two prerequisites for safely bringing in the New World Order. First, the people who are not convinced that surrendering national sovereignty and permitting themselves to be “equalized” with China’s coolies and Mexico’s peons are good things must be silenced with “hate” laws designed to criminalize any expression of fact or opinion which can be considered “racist.” Second, the same people must be disarmed, so that they have no recourse but to obey the laws and remain silent.

In the United States the number of people likely to take up arms against an oppressive government is not large at this time. We live in an age when comfort and safety are valued more highly than freedom. If economic conditions worsen substantially, however, those few willing to fight for freedom may persuade many others who are more concerned with their pocketbooks than their honor to take up arms as well, and if that happens the New World Order will be in serious trouble.

What all the foregoing means is that the present drive to disarm American citizens is motivated by a fear of rebellion, not by a fear of crime.

The people in the media and the government beating the drums for the New World Order understand that as the program of “globalization” proceeds, millions of newly dispossessed citizens will be angry and desperate. If these citizens still have firearms in their possession, they may strike at their despoilers.

Patriots need to understand this fact as well as their enemies do, and they must not be bashful about stating it plainly and forcefully. They need to drop the pretense that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the rights of hunters, target shooters, and collectors of antique firearms. When Congressman Schumer or Senator Metzenbaum holds a semiautomatic rifle or pistol up for the television cameras and says that “no legitimate sportsman needs a weapon like this,” he is laughing up his sleeve at the same time.

The needs of sportsmen and hobbyists are utterly without importance or significance when compared with the two serious needs served by the private ownership of firearms: the need of the individual for weapons with which to protect his person, his family, and his property against the growing hordes of criminals in our disintegrating society; and the need of the patriot for weapons with which to keep governmental tyranny in check.


America’s problem: race, not guns

There is another very important dimension to the change which has brought Americans to the point that so many of them are eager to surrender and beg for mercy. That is the racial dimension and its relationship to the enormous increase in crime and violence in America. Those who are able to remember America as it was three or four decades ago remember a life as different from that of today as day is from night. There were no drugs or gang violence in the schools. There were no drive-by shootings. Burglary and armed robbery were so rare that when such a crime did occur it was the talk of the town for months afterward. Listeners who find it difficult to believe that such an America ever existed need only view a few motion pictures from the 1940s or early 1950s: Look at the crowds on the streets that you see in those films. Look at the students on the university campuses. Look at the faces in the offices and factories. It was a White America.

America prior to the 1960s was a vastly gentler and kinder country than it is today. The drugs and violence endemic in the non-White community had not been permitted to spread to the White community. White children still could play in fields or vacant lots near their homes without fear. No one ever was killed or raped on a school playground. But then the planners of the New World Order decided that the time had come to begin transforming America, to begin getting it ready to fit into their scheme of things. Blacks and Whites must be integrated, without regard for the consequences!

It is astonishing how easily White Americans permitted themselves to be dispossessed in their own land. It is disgusting how many of them collaborated in the campaign of genocide against their own people—and still do. Of course, the New World Order boys had an immensely powerful weapon in their hands by the 1960s, and they used it with deadly skill: television. Americans let themselves be persuaded by the puppeteers manipulating the images on their television screens that racial integration was fashionable. And when the changes of the 1960s brought nothing but evil, White Americans let themselves be persuaded that the cure for the evil was more change of the same sort! If there is a just God in heaven, he must laugh in scorn when he hears White Americans whining now about drugs and crime and violence and how they are afraid for the future.

Crime and violence came to America as a direct and immediate consequence of the loss of racial homogeneity in American society. When Blacks and other non-Whites were released from their ghettos and came flooding into the White world they brought their life-style of drugs, crime, and violence with them. And the attitudes and behavior of Whites—especially young Whites—also changed. With the loss of racial and cultural homogeneity went the loss of a sense of community. The world in which White boys and girls were growing up became more alien, more hostile. It was no longer their world. They no longer had a sense of family, of belonging. They no longer had clear standards and models, no longer a clear image of what was expected of them. When young Whites lost their sense of belonging in the chaotic, racially mixed world into which they suddenly were thrust in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them also lost their sense of responsibility to that world. Immorality, crime, and violence increased among young Whites as among Blacks. It was a natural and inevitable consequence of the loss of homogeneity.

So what do we do about this horrible increase in crime and violence which so frightens people? Well, we might think about restoring the homogeneity and the sense of community White Americans used to have. We might think about that, except that if we said anything about it we would be immediately denounced by the controlled media as “racists.” Now to the average TV-bred citizen, to be considered a racist is a fate worse than death. He cannot blame the decline in the quality of American life on a loss of homogeneity. He cannot blame racial mixing. Powerful taboos forbid it. And so he is easily enough persuaded by the manipulators behind his television screen to blame firearms instead.

The manipulators understand this psychology all too well, and they are exploiting it fully in their campaign to disarm Americans. They are using the fear of soaring crime and violence to stampede the frightened, unthinking voters into letting their only means of protection from this crime and violence be taken away from them—into giving up their only means of settling scores with the manipulators of the media and their collaborators in the government who have made such a cesspool of America.

Crime and violence can only increase, of course, because almost no one has the courage and honesty to discuss their real causes, much less to do anything realistic about cleaning up the mess that has been made of America. Therefore, the stampede will continue until White Americans—that is, the ones who obey all the laws—have been completely disarmed. I’ll repeat that: The present campaign to disarm Americans will not abate. Neither the controlled media nor the government will back away from a goal of total disarmament of the civilian population. They won’t reach this goal in a single step, but they’ll continue taking steps until they do reach it. The target now is semiautomatic rifles. Later it will be all semiautomatic pistols. Then it will be other types of handguns. After that it will be all firearms which hold more than three cartridges. “That’s all a sportsman really needs,” they’ll say. Then it will be all firearms except muzzle-loaders. Somewhere along the line, various types of ammunition will be banned. “Only a criminal would want a cartridge like this,” they’ll say. Before too many steps have been taken there will be compulsory registration of all firearms and firearm owners, in order to facilitate confiscation later.

This bleak prospect has a silver lining, and it’s this: a very substantial portion of gun owners will defy the government and become outlaws rather than give up their weapons, if the populations of California and New Jersey are at all representative of the country as a whole. When bans on so-called “assault rifles” were enacted in those two states fewer than 10% of the people owning such weapons turned them in.

Bans of the California and New Jersey sort have a marvelously salutary effect on the attitude of the people who refuse to comply with the bans. Relatively few of these people are militant patriots or committed revolutionaries. The great majority are simply people who have enough character, enough backbone and common sense, to refuse to let themselves be stampeded along with the sheep into giving up their only effective means of self-defense in a time of civil disorder. Most of them have been law-abiding citizens all of their lives, and it is not an easy decision for them to consciously disobey the law—especially a law which could send them to prison for years. They are not happy about being forced to become outlaws. Once they have crossed that bridge, however, they should have a much healthier attitude toward the government. Most will see it thenceforth as their enemy. Many will be ready to fight it when the time comes for fighting.

They have passed the first test of manhood in the new world of repression and revolution we are entering now. The more such armed, angry outlaws the government makes, the better it will be for all of us in the long run.

I’ll leave you with this word: Don’t do anything violent or foolish. Don’t do anything prematurely. We are in a very serious situation, a situation of extreme danger for the future of our race, and we must use the utmost prudence in dealing with it.

Keep your firearms out of sight, but within reach. The day will come for using them. The day for a great cleansing of this land will come. Until that day, keep your powder dry.
 
—January 29, 1994

by William Pierce

 
Today I want to share with you my very deep concern, my worry about the crime problem in America. I don’t mean the sort of crime we hear about and see every night on the television news: the drive-by shootings by drug gangs, and the muggings and robberies, and the rapes and the burglaries, and the murder of some tourist who made the mistake of stopping her car in the wrong neighborhood. All of that is just part of the price we pay for multiculturalism. It comes with the diversity we’re told we’re so lucky to have.

No, that crime problem is bad enough, but it’s a different crime problem and a different type of criminal I want to talk about today, a much more dangerous type of criminal.

I’m sure that everyone listening today has heard about what happened in Waco, Texas, earlier this year when the government wiped out a bunch of religious cultists. Let me just briefly review the facts of that matter. A group of 140 or so people—men, women, and children—were living a few miles outside Waco in a little community they called Mount Carmel. They were members of a church which had split off from the Seventh Day Adventists back in the 1930s. They called themselves Branch Davidians. The church group had been at Mount Carmel for more than 30 years, on land they owned and in buildings they had built with their own hands. Occasionally they had internal squabbles, but they never caused any trouble for their neighbors. They believed in keeping to themselves.

Sophisticated people might sneer at the beliefs of the Branch Davidians, but their ideas really were no stranger or more irrational than those of many other churches, including some quite large ones, which base their beliefs on literal interpretations of the Bible. The Davidians put an especially heavy emphasis on the Book of Revelation and believed that the collapse of civilization was at hand. They believed that they should separate themselves from society and prepare for Judgment Day. For this reason they had stocked up on food, fuel, and other necessities—including, apparently, a few guns.

Now, there’s no law against stocking up on guns, even if you take the Bible seriously. But the government is pretty nervous these days about anyone who isn’t Politically Correct having the means to protect himself. And certainly the Branch Davidians were a Politically Incorrect group. For one thing they believed in spanking their children when they needed discipline. The government calls that “child abuse.” They also believed in permitting their girls to marry as young as 13 years old, and they let the leader of their church have more than one wife. So when a disgruntled former member told the government that the leader of the group, David Koresh, was a dangerous man and that he had a lot of guns, the government sent an undercover agent, a spy, in to check it out. Apparently the spy found nothing illegal going on at Mount Carmel. At least, if he did, the government hasn’t said what it was. But he did find out enough to lead one of the government’s secret-police agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, to decide to raid the place.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—ATF for short—is basically a bunch of tax-enforcement cops. Their original job was to make sure that the government got its tax on every bottle of booze and every pack of cigarettes sold in the United States. That accounts for the alcohol and tobacco part of their name. Back in the days of Prohibition and widespread moonshine making they stayed pretty busy, breaking up unlicensed stills and raiding illegal nightclubs. Some of the people they raided used to fight back with tommy guns, and so eventually the ATF also got the job of making sure that anyone who bought a tommy gun paid the required tax on it and filled out all the government forms. These days that’s most of the ATF’s work: checking to make sure that whenever firearms are bought or sold all of the required forms are filled out.

When you give people work like that to do, it’s no wonder that they eventually turn mean. The ATF has the reputation of being the most vicious bunch of armed thugs on the Federal payroll. There have been several efforts in recent years to get rid of them, to phase them out, to cut off their budget. They’ve survived because they’re the darlings of the gun-control nuts in the media. They’ve allied themselves with the people who believe that no one should have the right to self-defense, that all privately owned firearms should be confiscated by the government. The gun-control nuts love the ATF because it locks up gun owners who didn’t fill out all the forms.

It not only locks them up, it terrorizes them: it stages spectacular raids, often inviting the news media to come along and film the ransacking of their homes and the seizing of their guns. The ATF craves publicity, because it’s trying to convince the public that the ATF’s raids are protecting everyone from dangerous people who have guns. So the ATF looks for photo opportunities, for the chance to stage media events.

There’s no better target for one of the ATF’s photo opportunities than a cult. The ATF usually doesn’t raid people in the mainstream. It picks people or groups who aren’t likely to have powerful friends. It picks on people who seem a little strange or different, people who aren’t likely to get much sympathy from the general public. And once a group has been labeled a “cult” it’s not likely to get much public sympathy. To ordinary people cults seem sinister, unnatural, dangerous. And certainly the Branch Davidians had many of the characteristics of a cult. So the ATF decided to raid them. There was no proof that the Davidians had done anything illegal, of course. But they did have guns, and they were a cult. So a raid was organized: a big one, with plenty of newspaper reporters and camera crews from the television networks.

Early on the morning of February 28 this year, a Sunday, the ATF launched its raid, sending a hundred heavily armed agents up ladders and onto the roofs of Mount Carmel’s buildings, with the television reporters recording everything. Then the shooting started. The ATF says the Branch Davidians fired first. The surviving Davidians say the ATF fired first. It’s difficult at this time to know which side is telling the truth. We do know, however, that when the ATF stormed their homes, the people in Mount Carmel called the police for help. They dialed 911, and as with all 911 calls it was recorded. On the recording the group’s leader, David Koresh, can be heard frantically asking the police to send help. “There are armed men outside, and they’re shooting at us!” he cried excitedly into the telephone. And Koresh and his people did shoot back at the armed men swarming over their homes. They shot back and killed four of the attackers and wounded more than a dozen others, forcing the ATF to retreat.

The folks in the Clinton administration back in Washington weren’t happy to hear that. People aren’t supposed to fight back when the secret police attack them. So Clinton sent in the FBI, and the FBI brought along its elite Hostage Rescue Team, although it’s not clear who were the hostages to be rescued.

A long standoff began. The ATF and the FBI were outside with their tanks and machine guns and helicopter gun ships. Inside were David Koresh and his wives and children and the other members of his church, along with the bodies of six church members killed by the ATF during its initial attack. In a recorded telephone conversation between Koresh and an ATF agent during this period, Koresh asks why the ATF hadn’t just given him a telephone call and told him they wanted to check his guns or perhaps stopped him when he was out jogging and asked him about it. He said, quote, “It would have been better if you just called me up or talked to me. Then you could have come in and done your work.” End quote. Koresh also spoke with his attorney by telephone during the standoff, and that conversation also was recorded. Koresh explained why his church members had shot back at the ATF agents during the February 28 raid. He said, quote: “I don’t care who they are. Nobody is going to come to my home, with my babies around, shaking guns around, without getting a gun back in their face. That’s just the American way.” End quote.

Yes, that is the American way, or it used to be, when America was still healthy. Bill and Hillary Clinton wouldn’t understand that, of course. Certainly Attorney General Janet Reno and the people in the ATF and the FBI wouldn’t understand it either. Nor would all of the gun-control nuts in the media who think the ATF is just wonderful.

After what had happened Koresh and his followers didn’t think the ATF people were so wonderful, however, and they weren’t inclined to surrender to them, although Koresh did let the church members who wanted to leave go out, and more than 20 children went out with them. But the rest—more than a hundred—stayed with Koresh and prayed and read their Bibles.

And eventually the secret police got tired of waiting, and so on April 19 they got the OK from the Clinton administration in Washington to move against Mount Carmel with tanks, to knock holes in the buildings with the tanks and pump in gas. And so that’s what the ATF and the FBI and the so-called Hostage Rescue Team did.

During the siege the electricity had been turned off to Mount Carmel, and so the church members had begun using kerosene lanterns for light indoors. And when the ATF had shot out the glass in their windows, they had piled up bales of hay against the windows to keep the cold wind out. When the tanks smashed holes in their walls, a lantern was knocked over and set the hay afire. It was a windy day, and the fire spread quickly. Before it was over 99 church members were dead—or a hundred, if we count one fetus which burned to death with its pregnant mother.

The ATF and the FBI immediately put the blame on the church members. “It was mass suicide,” the ATF and the FBI said. “They set the fire themselves.” And the Clinton administration people in Washington echoed: “Yes, yes, it was mass suicide! They set the fire themselves.”

But unfortunately for the ATF and the FBI and the Clinton administration, there were a few survivors, a few church members who managed to escape the flames, and they explained what had happened inside. They explained about the hay and the kerosene lanterns, and they explained that there never was any intention to commit suicide. They explained that when one of the government’s tanks started the blaze, it spread so rapidly that most of the church members were trapped.

One more fact: after the fire had burned itself out and all the charred corpses had been hauled away, the ATF began sifting through the ruins looking for all those illegal weapons it had talked about during the siege. It had claimed, after the failure of its initial assault in February, that the church members had had the ATF “outgunned.” The church members in Mount Carmel had been shooting back with .50 caliber machine guns, the ATF claimed. After the fire the ATF began releasing more stories to the news media about all the dangerous weapons it anticipated recovering from the ruins. It hinted about hand grenades, bombs, rockets and other weapons. But it never did recover anything of the sort, because there was nothing of the sort. The ATF had been practicing what the government calls “damage control”: lying to protect its image, lying to make the Davidians look dangerous and criminal, lying to justify the killing of a hundred or so innocent people.

So today David Koresh and his church members are dead, Mount Carmel has been wiped off the map, and the Clinton administration people in Washington are going about their business as usual. The FBI and the ATF are still carrying guns and looking for new photo opportunities. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, which on April 19 murdered more people in one day than it has rescued in its entire existence is still in business, still drawing paychecks and presumably looking for more people to practice its rescue skills on.

That’s the crime problem in America I’m worried about. I’m worried when the government commits mass murder and gets away with it and doesn’t even seem to be ashamed of itself.

Now, I know that the Clinton administration and the FBI and the ATF and the so-called Hostage Rescue Team say it wasn’t murder at all. They say they didn’t intend to kill all of those people, especially not the women and the children, that it was just an unfortunate accident and let’s stop talking about it and get onto some other subject, like the economy.

An accident! Suppose there’s a church down the street whose beliefs I find offensive and I hear rumors that they’re using the wrong kind of Bible, and besides that some members of the church are said to carry guns. So I take a bunch of heavily armed men and march into that church and demand that they all come out with their hands up. It’s not my intention to kill anyone, just give them a good scare and check out what kind of Bible they’re using. But the people in the church panic, shooting starts, and when it’s all over a hundred people are dead. What does that make me?

A mass murderer, that’s what. And what does that make Bill Clinton and Janet Reno and their secret police bosses? Mass murderers, that’s what. There was absolutely no excuse for the ATF to attack David Koresh and his church in the first place. Absolutely no excuse, even if they hadn’t filled out all the ATF forms for whatever guns they had. For the ATF it was just a publicity stunt. The ATF thought it could get away with it, because it’s been allowed to get away with similar publicity stunts in the past. And when the publicity stunt backfired and people were killed the ATF was guilty of murder, regardless of what its intentions were. No government should tolerate that sort of criminal irresponsibility. A government that does tolerate it is itself criminally irresponsible and deserves to be overthrown by its citizens.

Do my words sound too strong? Do I sound like some sort of extremist? Do you understand what has happened? A hundred people, mostly women and children, who never bothered their neighbors have been murdered by the government. A church, which may have been a little bit nutty, but which had just as much right to practice its religion as any other church in this country, has been wiped out. The government did it. And the government isn’t even apologetic about it. That scares me. I don’t think such a government should be tolerated. I’d rather take my chances with Black street gangs any time than with such a government.

Another thing that scares me is the lack of concern on the part of most Americans. I realize, of course, that Americans see nearly everything that happens through the lens of the controlled mass media, and throughout the entire affair in Waco the television networks were practically a cheering section for the ATF. Every time the ATF or the FBI came out with a new lie about the Davidians or what had happened, the news media repeated it as if it were fact.

If the news media had immediately publicized the recorded telephone conversations with Koresh—his 911 call to the police in which he asked for help and reported that armed men were shooting at his church—if they had publicized his comment to the ATF agent after the February 28 attack, when he said “It would have been better if you’d just called me up or talked to me. Then you could have come in and done your work.” Or his comment to his lawyer that when people came charging into his home waving guns around his babies, they were going to have guns shoved right back into their faces, because that’s the American way—if the news media had publicized these recorded telephone conversations with Koresh when they happened, instead of holding them back until after the April 19 massacre, then the American public certainly would have had quite a different attitude toward the whole affair.

I remember how my own attitude changed as new information became available. When I first saw the story on television on February 28, I took for granted what the news reporter said: the ATF had tried to serve a search warrant on a bunch of heavily armed religious cultists, and the cultists had opened fire on them with .50 caliber machine guns. And then the case was made by the reporters that the cultists were crazy—their leader, we were told, believes he is Jesus Christ. What I learned from the television news that first day almost made me sympathize with the ATF.

It wasn’t until later that the news began slipping out to indicate there was another side to the story. Koresh didn’t really believe he was Jesus. The ATF hadn’t simply walked up and knocked on the front door of the church to deliver their warrant; they had staged a full-scale military assault for the benefit of the news media. They had climbed onto the roof and thrown concussion grenades in through the windows instead of knocking on the front door. And then there were hints that, well, maybe the ATF agents were the also the ones who began shooting first.

And the more I learned the more I wondered: just what had the Branch Davidians done to warrant this sort of military assault on their church? What kind of dangerous terrorists were they? I learned that the local people in Waco didn’t consider them to be terrorists at all, just quiet, polite people who mostly kept to themselves.

After the big fire on April 19, I accepted at first the government’s word—backed up by the news media, of course—that the Davidians had set the fire themselves and committed mass suicide. Only later did I hear the survivors deny this and explain what had happened when the government’s tanks began smashing in the walls of their church and knocked over a kerosene lantern onto a bale of hay.

And I kept waiting to hear about all the dangerous weapons—.50 caliber machine guns, rockets, and so on—that the government would discover in the ruins of the church. And then I learned that there were no weapons. And finally I heard the recordings of telephone conversations with Koresh.

So now I’ve been waiting for more than two months for the rest of America to begin to feel the sense of outrage against the government that I felt when I understood what had happened at Waco. And indeed a few people are outraged. A few people are saying, hey, Bill Clinton, we’re not going to forget about this! We’re angry that our government would do something like this. We want the people responsible put on trial for murder.

A few people are expressing the same concern about government criminality that I feel. But not enough. And that’s really too bad. Because when the government is allowed to get away with a crime as monstrous as the slaughter of the Branch Davidians, it will commit more crimes in the future. Other people will be slaughtered. Probably at first people who, like the Branch Davidians, are Politically Incorrect. With that sort of government in power, though, no one should feel safe, whether he’s Politically Correct or not.

—December, 1993