Oklahoma City Documentary Analysis

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He was enraged at the American government. He had military experience and help from others like him. He built an IED and used it to attack a federal government building, killing over a hundred Americans, including 19 children. Nowadays many would assume that this is the work of a Middle Eastern terrorist, but the perpetrator was white, and he was American. The purpose of the Netflix documentary Oklahoma City is to remind the American public that domestic terrorism is very real and damaging, and that there are more threatening homegrown threats than there are foreign ones.
The directors are clear in their intentions from the very beginning. The documentary starts with a cold open of the already devastated Murrah Building, complete with confused journalists in
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And for many of us in a post-9/11 world, this unfortunately seems like the logical place for them to go. In fact the most recent terrorist attack at the time was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing which had actually been committed by Middle Eastern extremists, so to many this was the most likely culprit. Once it is revealed to the viewer the true depth of why the bombing was committed, and the events leading up to it, it becomes clear what had gone wrong to create the perfect storm for this tragedy to occur. Every piece of footage from the various news agencies proposing it had something to do with the Middle East to the revelation that it was Timothy McVeigh, a former Marine, is meant to draw upon the logos of the viewer. It’s the knee-jerk reaction that many still fall back upon today, especially after 9/11, and finding out it was a “red-blooded” American evokes a sense of betrayal for everyone. “He was one of us”, they said. And today a vast majority of these perpetrators are “one of