“To a degree that is almost unimaginable today, the bomb became a common mode of American political expression.”
“On the evening of November 7, 1983, an explosion rocked the U.S. Capitol. The bomb, which went off on the building’s second floor, caused an estimated $1 million in damages. And while no one was killed or injured, a communiqué issued later by the group that claimed responsibility for the attack suggested that the outcome could have been far different: “We purposely aimed our attack at the institutions of imperialist rule rather than at members of the ruling class and government. We did not choose to kill any of them at this time. But their lives are not sacred and their hands are stained with the blood of millions.”
Uncovering the history …. can help us understand how and why a tiny band of Americans decided to wage a war against their own country. That history isn’t likely to produce tidy “lessons” about how such terrorism can be prevented, but it can help us understand the circumstances and contexts from which homegrown domestic terror emerged, and make us better prepared to grapple with the violent political extremism that remains part of the American landscape. After all, as the Black Power militant H. Rap Brown said in 1967, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”
Catholic Critique 