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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Monday, April 26, 2004 :::
This weekend's Brooks is on this Columbine article on Slate and this appendix:In the weeks following the killings, commentators and psychologists filled the air with theories about what on earth could have caused those teenagers to lash out as they did. The main one was that Harris and Klebold were the victims of brutal high school bullies. They were social outcasts, persecuted by the jocks and the popular kids. But there were other theories afloat: they'd fallen in with a sick Goth subculture; they were neglected by their families; they were influenced by violent video games; they were misfits who could find no place in a conformist town.
All these theories had one theme in common: that the perpetrators were actually victims. They had been so oppressed and distorted by society that they struck back in this venomous way. In retrospect, it's striking how avidly we clung to this perpetrator-as-victim narrative. It's striking how quickly we took the massacre as proof that there must be something rotten at Columbine High School.
As we've learned more about Harris and Klebold, most of these misconceptions have been exposed. The killers were not outcasts. They did not focus their fire on jocks or Christians or minorities. They were not really members of a "Trenchcoat Mafia."
[...]
Now, in 2004, we have more experience with suicidal murderers. Yet it is striking how resilient this perpetrator-as-victim narrative remains. We still sometimes assume that the people who flew planes into buildings — and those who blew up synagogues in Turkey, trains in Spain, discos in Tel Aviv and schoolchildren this week in Basra — are driven by feelings of weakness, resentment and inferiority. We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.
But it could be that whatever causes they support or ideologies they subscribe to, the one thing that the killers have in common is a feeling of immense superiority. It could be that they want to exterminate us because they regard us as spiritually deformed and unfit to live, at least in their world. After all, it is hard to pull up to a curb, look a group of people in the eye and know that in a few seconds you will shred them to pieces unless you regard other people's deaths as trivialities.
If today's suicide bombers are victims of oppression, then the solution is to lessen our dominance, and so assuage their resentments. But if they are vicious people driven by an insatiable urge to dominate, then our only option is to fight them to the death. Link from J.J. Daley.
::: posted by Steven at 2:11 AM
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