The Mind Of An American Terrorist

Over at Slate, author Dave Cullen takes a look at the mind of Joe Stack through his manifesto and comes up with a number of warning signs that identified stack for what he was:  a mass murderer in an all-too-familiar style of using domestic terrorism to make a political point.

Joseph Stack spent months on his manifesto. He was adamant about convincing us—or himself—why flying his plane into an IRS building was an act of charity.

The five-page rant the software engineer wrote before his performance murder is illogical, hysterical, hyperbolic, and deeply dishonest. Stack's convoluted arguments explain nothing, and the thumbnail sketch of his impoverished life is absurd. And that's exactly why it's so revealing. The software engineer tried to con us with a deceptive self-portrait, but the real Joseph Stack reveals himself in the way he concocts it.

I've spent 11 years studying routes to mass murder, in particular for a book on the Columbine school shootings, and it's startling how similar all the manifestos sound. Many of Stack's passages were practically lifted right out of the diatribes of Eric Harris, the Columbine mastermind. Yet while the notes are the same, the tune is not. Harris was a textbook psychopath, and Stack doesn't read that way at all. Stack has more empathy, less callousness, and none of the vicious desire to torment others for enjoyment. There are echoes of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui here, but Stack forms coherent thoughts and speaks rationally. He gives no indication of insanity. Instead, Stack shares Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh's disgust with intrusive government and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski's angry frustration at "the system." 

Matt Osborne disagrees with me that you can try to separate the political motivations from the murder here.  Indeed, the political motivation is what makes a terrorist a terrorist, in fact it was the political motivation that was at the core of his deadly spree to burn down his home, kill his family, and then smash a plane into an IRS building.

He was an Ayn Randie who tried to get away with a tax dodge and got caught. Then he tried dropping off the radar (this patriot was not registered to vote) with a move to Texas, consulted attorneys, and then -- upon getting the final bill from the IRS -- decided that rather than sell his $30,000 PRIVATE PLANE and (quit paying hangar fees) he would set his house on fire WITH HIS FAMILY IN IT and NOT TELL ANYONE before driving to the airport to BUY GAS for his PRIVATE PLANE and fly it into a GOVERNMENT BUILDING to kill TOTAL STRANGERS.

Matt is right on that account.  This man was a domestic terrorist.  He killed for political motives.  My point is not that it excuses his horrible actions, but that the argument over whether he's a left-wing or right-wing terrorist misses the very valid point that he was a terrorist and that America continues to have a domestic terrorist problem.

But Matt's larger point is that the right-wing is quick to justify that this wasn't terrorism but murder, or else they are even quicker to dismiss this as proof that Stack was a liberal and all terrorists are liberals, equating Stack's action to that of Dr. Amy Bishop's alleged shooting murders last week.

And that's a problem still.