There's a powerful new documentary recently added to Netflix, which covers not just the bombing but also the themes underlying the rise of the radical right and the militia movement.
Oklahoma City (2017) - IMDb
Also caught an older doc on YouTube,
Terror From Within.
If you can get past the generic portentously intoned narration, and the terribly misjudged packaging, and that the director's previous documentary was called
Waco: A New Revelation, it's actually a well-drawn piece.
Like
Oklahoma City it doesn't just start with Tim McVeigh deciding one morning to blow up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, but looks back into the past - not just to psychoanalyse McVeigh, but to place the events into historical context. However, whilst Oklahoma City only really went as far back as Waco and Ruby Ridge,
Terror From Within looks a lot more closely into the religiously-minded radical right from the seventies onwards.
Director Jason Van Fleet makes a very assertive case that circumstances around them helped ramp up the right wing in such a way that it was both increasingly defensive and inward-looking and paranoid, but also increasingly prepared to justify the use of deadly force against not only those directly threatening them, but also against anyone else, in a manner which
mirrored the trajectory of some groups on the left.
Interviews with Kerry Noble, until his arrest in the early 1980s a key member of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) group which evolved out of the Zarephath-Horeb Community Church, emphasise a development in thinking and action over time in the radical religious right, and help paint a picture of how the militia movement expanded.
Also featured are the likes of Robert Millar, founder of Elohim City, Dennis Mahon (White Aryan Resistance), and Clark Brewster, attorney for Carol Howe (the former Tulsa socialite-turned-neonazi and then ATF confidential informant), who together with various ex-FBI and ATF interviewees, and
Telegraph journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, provide interesting and illustrative contributions.
Not a conspiracy theory film - there is no scepticism that McVeigh did it - though attention is drawn to, for example, the targeting of the Murrah Building by the CSA in 1983, and the provocative involvement in the milieu of German ex-serviceman Andreas Straßmeir, and the question put in the air: did McVeigh really conceive and execute it from start to finish all on his own, with only a small bit of (towards the end, reluctant) help from Nichols, and even less from the Fortiers?
