Politics & Power Quote by Timothy McVeigh

The first move here is a laundering of motive: McVeigh tries to scrub his act of spectacle and ego, to frame it as sober testimony rather than performance. “Not for publicity” is precisely the kind of denial that acknowledges what everyone suspects - that terrorism is, among other things, communication. A bomb is an argument delivered in shrapnel; it is meant to be heard. By insisting he isn’t “seeking to win an argument of right or wrong,” he sidesteps morality while still insisting on reason. He wants the posture of rationality without the burden of ethical debate.

The key phrase is “so that the record is clear.” That’s bureaucratic language, the diction of committees and after-action reports. It’s a bid for legitimacy, an attempt to relocate mass murder from the realm of atrocity to the realm of grievance and documentation. “Thinking and motivations” reads like a memoirist’s self-defense, not a killer’s confession. The subtext is self-mythologizing: he imagines a future audience parsing his intent, treating him as a political actor rather than a criminal.

Context sharpens the cynicism. McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people, including children, and was rhetorically tethered to anti-government rage after Ruby Ridge and Waco. Calling it “bombing a government installation” is a strategic narrowing that obscures who actually suffered. The sentence’s calm, procedural tone functions as moral camouflage: if he can sound deliberate, he can sound justified. That’s the seduction he’s attempting - not to be forgiven, but to be filed under “cause” instead of “carnage.”