The alleged shooter, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., was a long-time white nationalist, and (keeping in mind he hasn't been convicted) apparent first-time mad-dog killer, but an interview with a friend of his, Craig Cobb, suggested a possible trigger--a lung disease that was slowly taking him off. That's kind of what I always suspected set off James van Brunn, who at age 89 opened fire in the Holocaust Museum killing one, a security guard--seeing the end of life coming, he simply saw murdering some innocent people in the name of his twisted world view a thing to cross off his bucket list. But there's this other, ominous thing that Cobb said:
"People are fed up."Makes one wonder--of what, exactly?
I tend to look at these fringe characters as most likely having some deep issues that they probably carried around well before they even latched on to groups that gave them a sense of meaning they could weave around their dissatisfaction. I think the white supremacist movement, among them, are the sorriest of the lot--when I hear "White power", my brain translates it as "white impotence". But if there is a feeling among any of these fringe groups that they are being oppressed by some nebulous, insidious, and probably ethnic forces of tyranny, it should be pointed out that individuals taking means into their own hands can be as unjust as any tyrant, as indiscriminate and cruel.
I don't think I can understand the kind of hate that makes shooting at innocent people any kind of "message" that anyone ought to listen to. I do, just about, understand the fears that make it plausible that one might need to defend oneself from one's government (as persons mistakenly killed by LE throughout our misguided drug wars might have needed defending--but in my opinion, by clearer laws that protected their rights and met overreach with swift and certain justice). But who protects regular citizens from self-appointed "irregular" armies that clash by night?
(And by "night", I mean with some very dark methods in mind, indeed. )
It is a duty to be critical of one's government, especially in a democracy. It is imperative to be skeptical of its discontents. And as for society's chronic malcontents, like hate groups--of which doubtless, we can agree the KKK certainly is?
We ought to be vigilant. That's what freedom demands.
4 comments:
Hi Vixen,
every time I come over here your site looks different. You may like politics, but at heart and soul you may be an interior decorator.
I agree with you about the Nazis and the Unabombers and Timothy McVeighs and Bill Ayers and all the rest of the crazies.
However, I think I disagree with putting Cliven Bundy into the extremist category.
Investor's Business Daily, not exactly an extremist newspaper, published an interesting piece about this:
Cliven Bundy's Cattle Battle: Harry Reid, China and Agenda 21
--Formerly Amherst
Hah! I realized my jazzy orange-flowery look might clash with some of my regular topics, like crime and war and stuff. I think "easter lavender" is a nice compromise.
Cliven Bundy has said some things about not really recognizing the authority of the federal government over his land because it should be reserved to the state of Nevada upon its becominga stte--but somehow the land in question still keeps getting called the Bundy ranch. It isn't exactly correct according to the cases Bundy has lost, though. If he wants to cite history with the land, then, well, I'd say the Paiute and the Washoe have as good a claim to that land as the US, putting Bundy's claim at like, third place.
But I have to admit, that op-ed derailed me over this bit:
If the forces deployed in and around the Nevadan's ranch had been deployed to Benghazi, it's likely Glen Doherty, Ty Woods, Sean Smith and Ambassador Christopher Stevens would be alive today. If illegal aliens were grazing on the disputed property, there would not have been federal snipers perched nearby with American citizens in their sights.
Them militia guys couldn't have got to Benghazi on Greyhound, though...and that undocumented person sentence is oddly constructed. If INS were surveilling contentedly grazing (and apparently bovine) immigrants, why would they bother with watching American citizens anyway--unless they were doing something weird like, um. Getting ready to pop government agents over a tax dispute?
(I think the Ayers crack is fair--me, I think there is a lot of room for civil disobedience as a form of protest, but violence and destruction don't do a thing to endear anyone to a cause. They screwed up on the order of thinking the ends they were working for justified the means, and it just doesn't work that way.)
Hi-ho Vixen,
normally I let the lady have the last word.
However, inevitably, as history moves along certain salient facts are lost to the popular culture. And our chat about Bill Ayers made me think of a few things that are not widely known unless like me you lived through it.
In a capsule summation -- the heart was cut out of the old Communist Party in the US when Khrushchev finally admitted the Stalin purges. The Russians had been lying about those mass murders for years, and when Khrushchev came clean about it, thousands of leftist idealists in the US were deflated.
Upon the ashes of the old left arose a new sensibility referred to as the New Left.
The New Left is what everyone sees in all these old films of massive protests, occupations of university offices, and a myriad civil disobedience (we even tried to take over the Democratic National Convention in Chicago).
Karl Marx had said that eventually capitalism would run its course and fade away, leaving a cashless society that initiated a worker's paradise.
However he also said that if people were not content to wait until this eventuality occurred, it could be forced through by violent revolution.
Bill Ayers, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and a host of other members of the Weather Underground attempted to use violence as part of a revolutionary measure to push communism through in the United States.
They bombed buildings, police cars, and other targets of opportunity that they felt would help advance the agenda and bring a communist state into fruition in the the US the way it went in Mao's China.
Naturally, this did not work. As Timothy Leary pointed out in his autobiography Flashback, the United States is not equivalent to student movements in eastern Europe. The whole idea was naively conceived and moreover very few people in the US wanted to be communist anyway.
I'm ashamed to say that when I returned from VietNam and went to the university on the GI bill, I naively and foolishly fell into sympathy with these ideas. (I even subscribed to Ramparts magazine... I knew a white economics professor who was dating a black guy from a black university, and she was arrested as they cooperated in a large gun buy from Canada to create an arsenal to start the revolution. I knew another guy who taught Engels in a public park and when Mario Savio came down from Berkeley he would stay with Doug. The FBI would sometimes drive by and machine-gun his car.)
It was an insane period.
Revolution is the opiate of the intellectual.
--Formerly Amherst
Hi-ho Vixen,
normally I let the lady have the last word.
However, inevitably, as history moves along certain salient facts are lost to the popular culture. And our chat about Bill Ayers made me think of a few things that are not widely known unless like me you lived through it.
In a capsule summation -- the heart was cut out of the old Communist Party in the US when Khrushchev finally admitted the Stalin purges. The Russians had been lying about those mass murders for years, and when Khrushchev came clean about it, thousands of leftist idealists in the US were deflated.
Upon the ashes of the old left arose a new sensibility referred to as the New Left.
The New Left is what everyone sees in all these old films of massive protests, occupations of university offices, and a myriad civil disobedience (we even tried to take over the Democratic National Convention in Chicago).
Karl Marx had said that eventually capitalism would run its course and fade away, leaving a cashless society that initiated a worker's paradise.
However he also said that if people were not content to wait until this eventuality occurred, it could be forced through by violent revolution.
Bill Ayers, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and a host of other members of the Weather Underground attempted to use violence as part of a revolutionary measure to push communism through in the United States.
They bombed buildings, police cars, and other targets of opportunity that they felt would help advance the agenda and bring a communist state into fruition in the the US the way it went in Mao's China.
Naturally, this did not work. As Timothy Leary pointed out in his autobiography Flashback, the United States is not equivalent to student movements in eastern Europe. The whole idea was naively conceived and moreover very few people in the US wanted to be communist anyway.
I'm ashamed to say that when I returned from VietNam and went to the university on the GI bill, I naively and foolishly fell into sympathy with these ideas. (I even subscribed to Ramparts magazine... I knew a white economics professor who was dating a black guy from a black university, and she was arrested as they cooperated in a large gun buy from Canada to create an arsenal to start the revolution. I knew another guy who taught Engels in a public park and when Mario Savio came down from Berkeley he would stay with Doug. The FBI would sometimes drive by and machine-gun his car.)
It was an insane period.
Revolution is the opiate of the intellectual.
--Formerly Amherst
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