The Bizarre Life and Angry Times of Bill O'Reilly

By John Dolan, AlterNet. Posted December 31, 2008.

In this context, it's surprising to find O'Reilly actually bragging that he went on assignment to the scene of the most notorious of these massacres: "When the CBS News bureau chief asked for volunteers to check out an alleged massacre in the dangerous Morazan Territory, a mountainous region bordering Nicaragua, I willingly went."

This story is a brief aside in O'Reilly's long account of all the brave things he's done in his life. El Salvador gets a couple of paragraphs, whereas his story about quarterbacking the second-string football team against the first-stringers gets four pages of tedious detail. In O'Reilly's picture of the world, that "alleged" massacre is nothing but a bar boast, another claim to alpha-male status.

Unfortunately, this was no "alleged" massacre. This was the El Mozote massacre, one of the most horrific slaughters of civilians in this hemisphere. For three days in December 1981, the U.S.-trained Atlcalatl Battalion of the El Salvadoran army surrounded the village of El Mozote and its surrounding hamlets, and raped, tortured and killed at least 1,000 villagers suspected of sympathy for the Marxist FMLN.

If O'Reilly really went to El Mozote after the massacre, he saw not an "alleged" abuse but raw "evil," if that term has any meaning at all. O'Reilly helpfully supplies a definition of evil in his catechism on terrorism: "murdering innocent women and children is the most cowardly act on earth." Of those killed at El Mozote by American proxies, the vast majority were women and children. Mark Danner's detailed account of the slaughter in the New Yorker describes the moment when some soldiers balked, briefly, at the prospect of killing all the children:

"Well, we've killed all the old men and women," one [soldier] said. "But there's still a lot of kids down there. You know, a lot of those kids are really good-looking, really cute. I wouldn't want to kill all of them. Maybe we can keep some of them, you know -- take them with us."

"What are you talking about?" another soldier answered roughly. "We have to finish everyone; you know that. That's the colonel's order. This is an operativo de tierra arrasada here" -- a scorched-earth operation -- "and we have to kill the kids as well, or we'll get it ourselves."

"Listen, I don't want to kill kids," the first soldier said.

"Look," another said. "We have orders to finish everyone, and we have to complete our orders. That's it."

At about this time, up on the hill known as El Pinalito, Capt. Salazar was shrugging off a guide's timid plea for the children's lives. "If we don't kill them now," he said angrily, "they'll just grow up to be guerrillas. We have to take care of the job now."

By any standards, even O'Reilly's, this was pure evil. O'Reilly was there. He saw it face to face. And it made no impression on him at all, for the childish, contemptible reason that this particular slaughter of women and children was committed by people on the team he happened to support. So much for the O'Reilly theory of morality. He has none, and more importantly, he doesn't want to know.

That's the key to O'Reilly and his audience: they don't want to know, they don't want to argue, they want you to shut up: "We in America waste far too much time endlessly discussing stupid stuff." When these people meet something new, they run away like the sullen cowards they are. That's the simple story of the biggest cultural collision in O'Reilly's life: the Levittown boy fascist running head-on into the '60s. O'Reilly, born in 1949, was of the generation that came of age during the most intense point of the hippie era. I was curious about how he would handle this part of his life, because I've always wondered what right-wingers did during the '60s. How did a young authoritarian dweeb like Ken Starr cope with the spectacle of Woodstock? What did the young Rush Limbaugh do after Kent State? Where was Tom Clancy during Watergate?

See more stories tagged with: el salvador, bold fresh piece of human, el mozote

John Dolan is a contributor to eXiled Online. He is the author of Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).

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