The shattered light of Virginia Tech

[elfs]

Like everyone else I've been following the news at VA Tech. Probably the single most reliable summary of the incident is the Wikipedia page, VA Tech Massacre, and it's doubtless the best place to go if you don't want to wade through the low-bandwidth nonsense of Fox or CNN.

It took me a while to process the tragedy. I tend not to automatically "get" things like this, and my initial reaction was that we were in for another round of grief pimping by the media and finger pointing at gun owners. It wasn't until a day or two later that I started to process just how horrific this must be for the survivors: classmates, parents, and children of the victims. The Lebrescu shooting was particularly painful to read. The grief is real now.

Everyone is now processing this event through their broken prisms. What disappoints me is that the prisms seem to be even more fractured than usual. I mean, sure, there's the usual pimping: Jack Thompson blamed video games, the psuedonazi wankers at Stormfront blamed multiculturalism (no link; I'm sure their roboposter will get me eventually) (why yes, I did just put Jack Thompsons and white supremacists on the same level). Barack Obama misstepped badly when he tried to claim the violence was bad but the violence visited upon families by outsourcing was even worse. Fred Phelps announced he would picket the funerals. The Huffington Post blames Iraq; the creationists blame Darwin.

This morning while flipping through the AM dial I stopped on Kirby Wilbur's show. Wilbur is a local conservative talk show host. He's pretty firmly in the FOX camp but in all the years I've been hearing him he's never been viciously stupid; he may have been shallow but he never struck me as the sort of man who turned his brain over to Karl Rove's machine.

This morning as he was talking to a caller he said that Sueng-Hi's suicide note was filled with "complaints about rich kids and debauchery, just full of typical liberal things."

I always thought complaining about debauchery was a conservative pasttime. Isn't it liberals and the left who supposedly have no morals or family values?

I was disappointed to hear this tripe this morning because I realized just how far apart this country has been driven: normally sensible conservative (and liberals) will now say absolutely anything they can to vilify and demonize the other side of the aisle. I could understand if it was members of the meritocracy of the mediocre, but to want to join that group willingly just disappoints me: even in the age of the Internet, we abandon our American principles for tribalism and strong man politics, and this incident has made it clear that this has become even more acceptable than usual.

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

The worst mass murder in American history that wasn't an act of war, perhaps? That gets rid of battles, sneak attacks, etc.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that we need to rank them at all. What's the point?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

We don't necessarily. Humans are naturally heirarchal in their thinking, this incident included, sad to say. Even if we resist that impulse, others won't. When they're wrong they need to be called on it.

9/11 wasn't an act of war. It wasn't conducted by a national entity. It wasn't even put together by a "well-organized group." It was a bunch of pathetic losers who managed to hold themselves and their "mission" together long enough to make one heck of an impression, but that's all it was. It was mass murder, on the order of the Jim Jones massacre, but still just mass murder.

Were the Crusades wars?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Or the Muslim campaigns that prompted the Crusades?

Both sets of conflicts were religious in nature, not fundamentally "national," but they were still wars. Don't we translate "jihad" as "holy war"?

Wikipedia rightly gives the purpose of "jihad" in this context as "the expansion and defense of the Islamic state." There needn't be any nations involved, just Muslims doing what they're told by their religious leaders.

The 9/11 attacks were certainly directed by an Islamic organization, and I don't mean al Qaeda alone. Osama bin Laden may be its most famous leader, but he may not be its most important leader; there may be others to whom he defers. I don't even know if this organization has a name for itself, and you're probably right that it can't be called "well organized," but it exists nevertheless. Its purpose is to unify Islam under a Caliphate spanning the entire Middle East, restoring to Islam the power it held during the Abassid dynasty-- and greater, since such an achievement would certainly include a nuclear capability, giving the new Caliph far greater power than any Abissad Caliph ever had.

The 9/11 attacks were specifically intended to help bin Laden and others establish such a Caliphate. As such, how can it be viewed as anything but an early battle in a possible fourth World War?

Murder, even mass murder, is done without political intent. We could call the 9/11 attacks a "mass assassination" except that the victims had no political position. No, this was an act of war; no other description fits.

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[memegarden.livejournal.com]

Yup. (http://syndicated.livejournal.com/slacktivist/314637.html)

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

Oklahoma City and Bath, Michigan come to mind right away. It's the worst mass shooting in American history, easily, unless you count incidents like Wounded Knee, where 300 Lakota Sioux were massacred, but since it was on tribal land I guess it doesn't count. >_>