THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Timothy McVeigh's mother just announced that people who were in the buildings that were bombed in Oklahoma City should "get over it." Naturally, everybody was appalled, and her history of mental illness was used as an excuse.

But McVeigh's mother is simply expressing the same view about her son that the media always takes toward LEFTISTS who commit violence. Has anybody every heard anyone even bother to criticize the Unibomber? That gentleman was 1) a Harvard graduate and 2) an environmentalist fanatic. He did his mail bombings in the name of environmentalism. Not only have I never heard any expression of outrage in the media, I have never heard the man CRITICIZED in the media. I have heard some laudatory remarks on some talk shows about how he lived with nature in the raw, but otherwise nothing.

One businessman got his hands blown off by the Unibomber. He admitted he had been a trendy type himself until that happened. He was appalled by the indifference of the media to this murderer and maimer. He wrote a book about the situation.

While McVeigh and the nuts who do school shootings are regularly tied in with "rightist hate groups," the Unibomber has never been mentioned in connection with leftist "environmentalists."

By the same token, no one has linked the rioting thugs destroying things in Seattle with other "environmentalists." When people begin destroying things in the name of this popular leftist cause, there is never any conjecture that the radical environmentalist rhetoric may be responsible. But if a kid shoots up a school, it is entirely the fault of right wingers and of gun owners.

Out in Seattle, they are rioting in the name, among other things, of saving the environment. How did people find an excuse to riot and destroy things in the name of preserving nature? To find out why they are so violent, you need only read the words of our Vice President. In his book, he says evil industrialists and other exploiters must be stopped at all costs. He says they are destroying the world. If he were a right winger, he would be accused of inciting violence.

Let me add something that will really surprise you

Respectable conservatives don't object to all this. They are too busy apologizing.

According to the media, all violence on the right is caused by the inherent and historical evil of right wing ideas. On the left, there is no such cause and effect.

I have formulated this as Whitaker's Law on History

"Any historical incident will be remembered to the exact extent that it serves to promote a leftist cause."

Many businessmen and church officials collaborated with Hitler fifty years ago, when he had their lives in his hands. No leftist will ever let us forget that. But I remember when most Western European "intellectuals" were outright Stalinists or had openly Communist sympathies.

Communists who stated flatly that they were Communists dominated the Italian movie industry. French and Italian universities were dominated by this kind of thinking and openly so.

With the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, many French intellectuals were repelled by the violence of the Stalinist regime. But their remarks saying this made it clear that, for decades, they had been admirers of Stalin.

But no one ever blames these collaborationist professors who backed the Communists a little over two decades ago. Condemning leftist "intellectuals" would harm leftism. Blaming Nazi collaborators who are long since dead serves a leftist purpose in discrediting religion and capitalism.

So the word "collaborator" is never used to describe Communist collaborators during the Cold War.

Media history does not include the word "collaborator" unless it means someone who worked with the extreme right over half a century ago.

I am sure the reader can come up with a dozen examples like this.

We hear a lot about the campaign to abolish slavery, but we never hear about the factories that financed that campaign. Women and children worked fourteen hours a day in the New England factories that produced the money that was used by financiers to support John Brown. If a woman or a child was crippled in one of those factories, as often happened, there was no workers' comp.

When abolitionism triumphed abruptly in 1865, the death rate among blacks just as abruptly doubled. The black population, which had doubled regularly every twenty-five years under slavery, immediately stagnated. Blacks were subjected to the same rules abolitionists maintained for their own workers, and they died like flies.

But this history serves no leftist purpose, so it is quietly forgotten.

Until World War I, about ninety percent of the blacks in America were in the South. The South was kept subject and poverty-stricken by the combination of discriminatory rail rates and high tariffs I discussed on October 23, 1999 in "McCain Waves the Bloody Shirt At Buchanan." Ninety percent of blacks were included in that subjection and poverty. But don't look for this to be discussed in any history class, least of all Black History.

As a result of Whitaker's Law on History, what little education media people are subjected to discusses cause and effect only to the extent it serves the cause of the left. It is no surprise that they apply the same rule in reporting.