|
Biography: Oscar Benjamin Liddell
Part 1
by Chris Oakley
He started his infamous career as a low-level functionary for an obscure white power faction in West Virginia and went on to become the most hated and hunted man in America. He was the progeny of a wealthy, fairly prominent Oklahoma oil family but became estranged from them after he denounced their political views and embraced the twisted philosophies of neo-Nazism. His demands for a “racial holy war” against the alleged “mud people” of the world would inspire-- and serve as a major pretext for --the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Oscar Benjamin Liddell struck a blow at the American collective psyche that is still being felt nearly a decade later. He loomed as evil incarnate in the public mind right up until the minute he was killed in a raid on his Pacific Northwest compound by ATF and FBI agents in May of 2011.
Most people know him chiefly through the FBI profile given to the media in October of 2001 or the videotaped diatribes he released through third parties at odd intervals. Very few people ever got close enough to him to get to know him intimately; even fewer were willing to share their knowledge of him with the outside world. So it may be years before a complete portrait of Liddell emerges-- if it emerges at all. But from what is known about him, it’s abundantly clear that his path to infamy started at a very young age.
Liddell was born March 10th, 1957 in Oklahoma City, the son of an oil company executive who according to one of Liddell’s biographers had a number of connections with some of the biggest players in the corporate and political worlds, including at least one member of then-President Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet. With the exception of a
brief stint in Oklahoma City’s public school system during his sixth grade year, Liddell was educated in parochial or private schools up until he started college; most reliable information about Liddell’s adolescent years suggests it was during his sophomore year of junior high that he first began to take a serious interest in the writings of American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell-- an interest his parents tried their level best to discourage.
By the age of 15 Liddell had become deeply immersed not just in the particulars of Rockwell’s ideological mindset but in the entire neo-Nazi underground culture; he regularly went in secret to American Nazi Party rallies in Texas and, under a pseudonym, published his own weekly neo-Nazi magazine for fellow aspiring fascists. At 16 Liddell joined the Oklahoma state branch of the American Nazi Party’s youth auxiliary. The fact that the ANP was by this time splintering into a multitude of quarreling rival factions made little difference in his decision-- in the neo-Nazi movement he saw an opportunity not to get away from the corporate career his father had mapped out for him but also an opportunity to vent his contempt for the civil rights movement and other liberal causes.
When the original American Nazi Party dissolved for good in the mid-
1970s Liddell, who by then had started college, didn’t waste any time in starting to look for a new outlet for his neo-fascist beliefs. He soon found it in the Brotherhood of White Unity, a West Virginia-based group whose politics were a grab bag of every neo-Nazi cliché in the book mixed with a pinch of 19th century-style American populism. When Liddell first joined the BWU, its membership roll was so miniscule the group could hold its meetings at a kitchen table.
But that would steadily and dramatic change with Liddell on board. The twentysomething Oklahoman had a gift for organization and rhetoric that promised to grow the BWU’s numbers exponentially. Within just two weeks after he joined the organization its membership roll had tripled in size and the Brotherhood was starting to actively recruit potential members elsewhere; by the time that Liddell had been with the BWU a full year the neo-Nazi faction had created its first branch in another state, setting up a modest office in the town of Myersville, Maryland. And that was only the beginning of Liddell’s grand ambitions for the organization....
******
In 1982, as the guerrilla war against Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan was intensifying and the Reagan Administration sought to neutralize leftist insurgencies in Central America, Liddell began cutting his last remaining ties with his family. In a typewritten two-
page letter to his father, he denounced what he called the “ongoing satanic mongrelization” of America and condemned his family for, in Liddell’s view, acquiescing to the alleged corruption of Anglo-Saxon America by the “mud races” neo-Nazi doctrine had taught him to hate. He also accused his siblings of being closet Marxists and promised that in the racial holy war he and his fellow BWU members envisioned in America’s near future, anyone who opposed the white power movement would pay a severe price for doing so.
At just twenty-five years of age, Oscar Benjamin Liddell was on the fast track to becoming one of the most visible members of the neo-
fascist movement in the United States. He was also proving himself to be one of the most fanatical adherents in a political subculture which bred fanaticism.
******
Sitemetre
 |
