Shannon Benine

This Kind of Hell, 2012—2013

My ongoing multimedia documentary project “This Kind of Hell,” investigates the impact of the symbols and logic of the Vietnam War on racist violence within the United States. This work began in the Pacific Northwest in 2012 as a collaboration with Assistant Professor of U.S. History and the College at the University of Chicago, Kathleen Belew and will culminate into a broader project studying the violence of the racist right movement on a national scale and culminating with the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Exploring sites in U.S. history from 1975-1995, this work references imagery and text from historical archives, in addition to still and moving images created at the sites to examine why state violence cannot be limited to the time and place of war.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding hundreds more. Commentators immediately speculated about McVeigh’s involvement with the burgeoning militia movement and the fact that he carried out the bombing on the anniversary of the disastrous end to the Waco siege. The FBI acknowledged that McVeigh reenacted a bombing portrayed in the Turner Diaries, a fictional racist propaganda novel first published in 1978 that quickly became an underground bestseller and is still seen as the white separatists’ bible. The author Andrew Macdonald, a former university professor, wrote of a hate filled and violent revolution that would overthrow the U.S. government and establishes a white Aryan nationalist regime. This appalling book was his call to arms writing, “It is really only a minority of a minority which led our race out of the jungle and along the first few steps toward true civilization.” His dystopian future activated the movement and served as the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing, the culmination of decades of racist right organizing. Early reports about the bombing failed to consider how the event represented the nationwide unification of Klan, Nazi and other white separatist groups into a cohesive racist right movement. They were unsuccessful in identifying the connections between the bombing and the movement’s highest levels of leadership and the way that both the movement and the bombing sought to re-stage the Vietnam War. McVeigh’s action revealed a militant racist right unified around the story of the Vietnam War, even beyond the membership of its veterans.

After he was convicted and sentenced to death by lethal injection, Timothy McVeigh would give an interview saying that he had acted alone. He called the dead children “collateral damage” in a military action, said he was not racist, and denied connection to any political movement. “…The truth is,” he said, “I blew up the Murrah Building, and isn’t it kind of scary that one man could wreak this kind of hell?” However, in no sense was the bombing of Oklahoma City carried out by “one man.” “This kind of hell,” as McVeigh called it, was the culmination of decades of racist right organizing. McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state during the Gulf War, was redeployed to carry out the bombing by an organized racist right movement. His actions exemplified leaderless resistance, a strategy proposed by Klan and Aryan Nations leader Louis Beam in the early 1980s and reissued as a call-to-arms in 1992 at a militia movement summit. It was a strategy that called not only for soldiers in terrorist cells to carry out acts of violence against the state with no commands from movement leadership, but even to deny their participation in the movement at all.

This project documents the sites of racist right violence, presenting an innovative mix of photographic images with textual archive. In the collision of landscapes—beautiful and mundane, spectacular and everyday—with their violent histories, viewers encounter a forgotten part of the American story. Beginning in the Northwest where I was born, these sites include photographs of a former Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, where buildings have been razed and the land lies fallow; photographs of the former Capri Motel in Oregon, where the FBI captured fugitive Gary Yarborough and the escape of fugitive Bob Mathews; video of the eerie stillness of the place where Federal Marshalls shot Vicki Weaver during the siege at Ruby Ridge; a video installation of a Spokane bank projected onto a wall with a hole where they bombed and robbed the building to fund their race war; and the reenactment of an image of two white separatists at a paramilitary compound ca. 1979 by current war veterans. Here banal and grand landscapes meet a textual archive of white separatist propaganda, personal ads, maps that show invading populations of color and racist cartoons, illuminating the landscape under attack by the racist right.

This ongoing project documents the sites of racist right violence, presenting an innovative mix of photographic images with textual archive. In the collision of landscapes—beautiful and mundane, spectacular and everyday—with their violent histories, viewers encounter a forgotten part of the American story.

In 2014 this work was included in Filter Photo Festival’s fifth annual juried exhibition “This May Have Happened” at David Weinberg Photography in Chicago, Illinois and in 2013 as part of the group exhibition “I Forgot to Forget” at the Urban Art Space Gallery at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.