Reply #132: I wouldn't get too into motivation for a killer who blew 80 children away. [View All]

[Peace Patriot]

White Norwegian children, at that. It doesn't make sense. And why it doesn't make sense is that we are looking at a PSYCHOSIS. A break from reality. Madness (and I don't use this word idly).

I know some people are making much of his "Christian conservative" self-description but that, too, strikes me as mostly beside the point. In fact, who this killer most resembles--just on our sketchy knowledge of him, at this point--is Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper--an Eagle Scout, and former U.S. Marine, who, earlier in his life had great prospects for a career and a successful life, in or outside of the military, who one day took a bunch of high-powered weapons and walked up the stairs in the Texas Tower and just started shooting and killing people--students--faraway down on the campus streets. If he had said anything political, would it have been an explanation or have had any meaning? I don't think so. He probably suffered PTSS. He'd been in Vietnam, in artillery. If he'd made an anti-war statement, would it have been fair to blame the anti-war movement for that awful killing spree? No. It just isn't relevant. The man had cracked up. He was not himself. He was profoundly ill. (By the way, they found a brain tumor during his autopsy.) And I suspect the same is true of this killer. He is psychotic--has no control of his thoughts or behavior, no sense of reality and is certainly not responsible for his political beliefs, nor are "Christian conservatives" to blame for his actions. (Note: He doesn't seem to have had any political or other associates, as to his purported views, and no one else involved in these killings--at least none known at this point. A loner, suffering psychosis--anything could have set him off.)

I should also say that a whole lot of secular "liberals" have supported war that has targeted and slaughtered tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims--war that has seen widespread use of torture, humiliation, rampant disrespect and other evils inflicted on this class of people. Secular "liberals" have also supported the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs"--one of the war profiteer policies that has resulted in tremendous evil and injustice in our own country and in other countries, including the proliferation of weaponry and a thuggish, fascist culture in our prisons and among elements of our police forces. "Liberals" have done these things, not just "conservatives." The Christian right has no monopoly on fostering the ills in our society and the evil that our government has done. To express any righteous satisfaction that this very sick man, who has just slaughtered 80 children, held rightwing views, is wrong and unfair.

There is no sense to be made of his alleged views. He killed 80 children--children who looked just like him.

I myself have been going around with the smug thought in my head that the "Christian right"--whom I loathe as a political force--somehow got these 80 children murdered. But I've thought again. This is unfair and wrong. They may be gun nuts. They may be "survivalists." They may be hypocrites, racists, liars and shills for the super-rich. They may be a lot of things. But a class of people--the "Christian right"--did not kill these children or have anything to do with their deaths. This was an insane act.

One other possibility that needs to be considered--but for which there is no evidence, currently--is that this Norwegian was "programmed." I think this remains a possibility in the Giffords shootings--in which case an element of the far right could be involved, but there is NO evidence, thus far, that this is a possibility in this case, and even if it were true, this would be no justification for condemning a class of people--all "Christian conservatives"--for something done by a cabal of criminals for their own purposes. And I don't consider hyperventilating on political views--or even items like the "target" ads against Giffords--to be responsible for such murders and violence (random mass killings). A psychotic person--or a person programmed to kill--can be moved by any and every kind of trigger. They might "snap" and start shooting people after losing a job and reading some liberal column about injustice or corporate rule. Or they might "snap" and start shooting people at random because some stranger looked at them crosswise. The loss of civilized self-control is NOT related to some other person's expression, whatever their views are. Some other person or group could even be egging someone on to kill a bunch of random people, and it cannot and will not happen just because they said something. To deliberately aim at and shoot random victims, by definition, implies a psychotic break. This can happen all on its own, as the result of individual illness, or it can be induced by drugs and hypnosis. Motiveless, random, mass killing does not have a political direction--no matter what the killer may avow. Only in the case of drugs/hypnosis could political motivation come into it--the motives of the manipulators. A person who "snaps" and starts shooting dozens of other people at random is not in this reality. His politics have nothing to do with it.

I've done a lot of thinking about this--because of losing someone to the Texas Tower sniper. Every time this sort of event occurs, I re-live that horror from long ago. And I think that a lot of what we go through, to explain such events to ourselves, is useless. And it is especially useless to blame a class of people--say, in Whitman's case, the Eagle Scouts, or the U.S. Marines, or Texas gun nuts, or those responsible for sending Whitman to Vietnam. Yes, any of these things might have put pressures on him, but none of them--nor anyone involved in them--ever intended that the result would be my dear friend being shot to death out of the blue amidst a random mass murder. It's conceivable that Whitman was "programmed" or experimented upon by the government--something I will never likely know for sure. In that case, it is specific people within the government who authorized diabolical experiments. It is not everyone in government. It is not everyone who supported the Vietnam War. We DO need to understand this kind of casualty of war--if that's what it was--and oppose war with all our might. And we can certainly blame and condemn others for promoting war, or other bad policies that do great harm. But blaming THIS--a psychosis--on someone's political views is wrong, unfair and oppressive. It is not aimed at understanding. It is aimed at shutting people up, whose views we don't want to hear.

So I would say, don't lose any sleep trying to make sense of his views--whether about race or whatever. He murdered 80 children. And even if others might agree with him, about no racial mixing, or preserving their pure white culture, or whatever he had rattling around in his head, this does NOT make those others in any way responsible for the murders of 80 children. We may loathe their views. We may think their views dangerous and a steppingstone to nazism. They did NOT kill these children. And their ideas did NOT kill these children. HE killed these children, in an utterly pointless act of insanity.