Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9505040009
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: E.J. DIONNE JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Of course, Gingrich's statement is right as far as it goes. It's wrong to suggest that honest advocates of smaller government have anything in common with killers and fanatics. But the country will do itself no favors if it evades a serious discussion of the political meaning of this evil act. It was, finally, motivated by a brand of politics not as detached from the mainstream as we'd like to think.
What needs to be looked at honestly is just what the violent people in the far-right militias believe and why they believe it. Mainstream politicians then have to assess whether they have stood silently as such attitudes took hold, whether they exploited them, and whether, at times, they may even have encouraged them.
The point is not to implicate decent people in the ghastly actions of a crazed few. Rather, it is to assert that when an event this awful discloses a previously unnoticed level of hatred in the body politic, politicians need to examine their consciences and ask whether their approach to winning political battles may be aggravating dark passions.
President Clinton put it well on CBS's ``60 Minutes'' a week ago. ``People should examine the consequences of what they say,'' he said, ``and the kinds of emotions they're trying to inflame.'' He might have been echoing Richard Weaver, a thinker revered among conservatives, who wrote a book called ``Ideas Have Consequences.''
The ultra-right paramilitary groups are motivated by a very basic and very wrong idea: that the democratically elected government of the United States is in fact a ``tyranny.'' If you truly believe that, your own government becomes the enemy - ``the beast,'' as some in these groups routinely call it - and stockpiling weapons to confront its authority becomes the imperative.
Norman Olson, commander of the Michigan Militia, did not shy away from the chilling implications of this view. ``When a tyrant's brutality is not reined in by justice,'' he told The Washington Post's John Goshko and Anne Swardson, ``you will have somebody out there who takes it upon himself, deranged though he may be, to balance the scales of justice.''
Where does the idea that our government is tyrannical come from? Whatever the differences among them, virtually all these groups harbor a profound and unreasoning belief that the one liberty that truly matters is the absolute freedom to own and stockpile guns. ``If and when the federal government decides to confiscate weapons, people will band together to stop them,'' Randy Trochmann, leader of the Militia of Montana, told Goshko and Swardson. ``They are not going to give up their guns.''
But where does the idea that the government is about to confiscate all the guns come from? The restrictions on weapons that even the most ardent gun controllers talk about are ridiculously mild in comparison with those in force in virtually every other democratic, liberty-loving country in the world. Yet when even the puniest gun restrictions come before Congress, opponents do everything in their power to strike terror in the hearts of their followers. They reach immediately for the most inflammatory rhetoric designed to spread fear that basic American liberties are in danger.
That rhetoric is a lie and, we now know tragically, a dangerous lie. Only if you believe that the United States government is on the verge of becoming a tyranny can you possibly think that the possession of assault weapons and stockpiles of other heavy armaments is an essential component of liberty. It is the task of politicians and citizens who honor their country to fight such lies, not to repeat them or just let them fester.
Underlying fears that the United States government is a tyranny is an increasingly popular rhetorical style that economist Herbert Stein rightly criticized in The Wall Street Journal as ``demagogic.'' It is an approach that constantly casts ``the government'' and ``the people'' as enemies locked in a fierce struggle. It is an approach, as Stein noted, that overlooks the fact that ours is an elected government, one unusually responsive to popular wishes. It is also a government whose reach is sharply and rightly limited by a strong constitutional tradition. Our government may act in wrongheaded ways. It may be too big. But it is not an enemy of ``the people.''
Only a handful of unfeeling fanatics take the rhetorical excesses of politics to deadly extremes. But the fact that they have done so - and the fact that the potentially violent militias are growing - ought to lead to some soul-searching in the mainstream. After the suffering in Oklahoma City, the country needs an extended period in which political rhetoric is toned down, words are more carefully weighed and, as the president said Monday, ``the purveyors of hatred and division'' and ``the promoters of paranoia'' are resisted and condemned.
E. J. Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post editorial-page staff.
- The Washington Post
by CNB