06-14-2016, 11:20 PM
(06-14-2016, 07:08 PM)Mikebert Wrote: I am wondering how this will play out with the revelations today that the shooter might have been a self-hating gay man. Makes it harder to peg this event as externally-driven and more like an internal unrest event. That is, this event might have more in common, sociologically, with Dylan Root's shooting of Black Christians than it does with the 911 attack.
This is relevant because Donald Trump is trying to paint this as a terrorist attack like 911. That is, a political statement made by a foreign entity (AQ in the case of 911 and ISIS here) and not a internal instability event like a rampage killing or a riot. (I think we can all agree that the sheer scale of the carnage moves it beyond the category of mass murder--e.g. family annihilators or serial killers).
On the other hand the response of president Obama and Hillary Clinton implies this is a rampage killing in the vein of Virginia Tech in 2007 (33 dead); Sandy Hook in 2012 (28 dead); Luby's massacre in 1991 (24 dead) and the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre in 1984 (22 dead).
So how do folks here see this event? Is it a terrorist attack like 911, Oklahoma city, Bath or Wall Street? Is it a rampage (perhaps partially politically motivated like Dylan Root's or Elliot Roger's rampage)?
1. Self-hatred often leads to lashing out. I can only wonder how close Dylan Roof was to sorting out that white supremacy was a sham... maybe when he could no longer have anything to believe in, he had to lash out. Maybe we would know nothing of Dylan Roof had he so recognized that African-American Christianity is valid. Maybe if things had really gone right he would have found a new cultural and religious milieu to join, even to the extent of marrying and having children by a black woman. It might be an obscure story in Essence, Ebony, or Jet Magazine... but it would be an unqualified success.
2. Self-hating gay man? I am reminded that some leading Nazis lived in fear that they had some Jewish ancestry. Thus Hitler, Heydrich, and Eichmann. Eichmann often got teased in school as "the little Jew"... and even in Israel he was noticed as looking very ordinary among people who had been victims of or refugees from Nazism.
Killing a bunch of gay men could be to himself what killing Jews was to Nazis -- proving that they were not sullied with some connection to an 'evil' set of humanity.
3. I doubt that we can blame any President for mass killings. There is no political fault except for the availability of firearms to people who can be shown to be the wrong people to have them.
This said... everyone has some problem. Few of us who have problems do mass murder. Suicide, maybe, but that is the end of the suffering for many. If I found myself with a strong urge to cause mass carnage, then the most ethical thing for me to do would be to remove the menace to Humanity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.