Category Archives: Ideology

Can Fascism Come to America ?

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Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society

By Naomi Wolf, the Guardian, Tuesday April 24, 2007.

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy – but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree – domestically – as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government – the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens’ ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors – we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don’t learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of “homeland” security – remember who else was keen on the word “homeland” – didn’t raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable – as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1 Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a “war footing”; we were in a “global war” against a “global caliphate” intending to “wipe out civilisation”. There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space – the globe itself is the battlefield. “This time,” Fein says, “there will be no defined end.”

Creating a terrifying threat – hydra-like, secretive, evil – is an old trick. It can, like Hitler’s invocation of a communist threat to the nation’s security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the “global conspiracy of world Jewry”, on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain – which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks – than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2 Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal “outer space”) – where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, “enemies of the people” or “criminals”. Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders – opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists – are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA “black site” prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can’t investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don’t generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: “First they came for the Jews.” Most Americans don’t understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People’s Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3 Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a “fascist shift” want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America’s security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode – but the administration’s endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for “public order” on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station “to restore public order”.

4 Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini’s Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China – in every closed society – secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens’ phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about “national security”; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5 Harass citizens’ groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four – you infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 “suspicious incidents”. The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track “potential terrorist threats” as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as “terrorism”. So the definition of “terrorist” slowly expands to include the opposition.

6 Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a “list” of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America’s Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela’s government – after Venezuela’s president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, “because I was on the Terrorist Watch list”.

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,” asked the airline employee.

“I explained,” said Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.”

“That’ll do it,” the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of “enemy of the people” tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can’t get off.

7 Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don’t toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile’s Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that “waterboarding is torture” was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were “coordinated” too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8 Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s – all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened “critical infrastructure” when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy – a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC’s Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN’s Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won’t have a shutdown of news in modern America – it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it’s not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can’t tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9 Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as “treason” and criticism as “espionage’. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of “spy” and “traitor”. When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times’ leaking of classified information “disgraceful”, while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the “treason” drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and “beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death”, according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, dissidents were “enemies of the people”. National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy “November traitors”.

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year – when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – the president has the power to call any US citizen an “enemy combatant”. He has the power to define what “enemy combatant” means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define “enemy combatant” any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin’s gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo’s, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually – for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. “Enemy combatant” is a status offence – it is not even something you have to have done. “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model – you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you,” says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests – usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn’t real dissent. There just isn’t freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10 Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency – which the president now has enhanced powers to declare – he can send Michigan’s militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state’s governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears’s meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole’s baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: “A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night … Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any ‘other condition’.”

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act – which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch’s soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias’ power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere – while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” – a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president – without US citizens realising it yet – the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions – and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack – say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani – because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us – staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the “what ifs”. For if we keep going down this road, the “end of America” could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before – and this is the way it is now.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … is the definition of tyranny,” wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

My Comment:

I sympathize with the general direction of Naomi Wolf’s argument but the comparison with Germany is simply too facile…..and ultimately empty.

Is fascism always about Hitler and is what we have..or might have..fascism? I am not sure.There are similarities of style. There are similarities in tactics. But the US in 2007 is not Germany in 1933. If and when the US becomes fully fascist it will look different from Germany. Of that I am certain.

Germany was a deeply traumatized country that had been at war and then had suffered the chaos of economic collapse. It was a late comer to the position of a major power; as a state, it had developed out of militaristic Prussian Junker culture. It was not a multi-ethnic society of the type we have here. It had neither those strengths nor those weaknesses. These are not the only differences, of course. I can’t address them all now, but I’d like to get to them. I don’t think broad categorizations actually help the debate. They are too one-sided and tend to turn people off more than they do anything else. Historical equivalencies are rare and never very sustained.

Cho’s Reading Material, Email Accounts

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This is a PDF file of the contents found from the search of Cho’s room.

I missed this early morning report from AP on Forbes.com in which ebay denies that Cho bought a gun through it (I think eBay is referring to an earlier report saying he ordered the gun through the internet and then picked it up later from a pawnshop, a report I have cited in earlier posts. I will check if that’s the one that is now being refuted, and if so, will correct it).

“During the past 24 hours some news outlets have erroneously reported that Mr. Seung-Hui Cho may have purchased on eBay (nasdaq: EBAY – news – people ) ammunition used in his crimes. To be perfectly clear, guns and ammunition are not permitted on eBay. Mr. Cho did not purchase guns or ammunition on our site,” the company said in a statement.

eBay said Cho did purchase empty ammunition clips and a gun holster from the site, noting that the unregulated items can be legally purchased and sold on the site and in retail stores in the United States.

This from AP. Not only did Cho purchase empty ammo clips from a vendor in Idaho through eBay, he also

Quote:
“used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which [3] were assigned in one of his classes.

A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho’s e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are “aware of the eBay activity that mirrors” the Hotmail account.

One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications — written and electronic.

On March 22, Cho bought at least two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named “oneclickshooting,” which sells gun accessories and other items. It appears that he bought three Walther P22 clips in that purchase, but the seller could not be reached for comment.

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year’s Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

“The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class,” Cho wrote on the site.

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.His eBay rating was superb — 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

“great ebayer. very flexible,” the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

Andy Koch, Cho’s roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn’t have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

“We took him to one football game,” he said. “We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game.”

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre”; and “The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense” by Joyce Carol Oates — a book in which the publisher writes: “In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.”

Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class.”

End of Quote

My Comment:

The Lovecroft and Oates are pretty standard fare. I don’t know the other book. I fed myself a steady diet of horror stories, including Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and Stevenson, in my teens. But I expect there will be some ranting about what is taught in English departments.

It will be interesting to see what people can find on eBay with Cho’s handle on it.

CHO ON EBAY

This is what’s on eBay:

blazers5505

(64Feedback is 50 to 99)

Feedback Score: 64
Positive Feedback: 98.5%
Member since Jan-19-04 in United States

Shipping methods: Media Mail/Ground | Ships from: Blacksburg, VA

And this:

Half.com Item
Item #: 340169354660
Item Category: Books
Price: $5.25
Buyer: ravenwolfie
Seller: blazers5505

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:pLzHLl4kNnUJ:cart.half.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll%3FAnonymousTransactionDetail%26transidentity%3D340169354660:327589492+blazers5505&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a

This is Cho on a page rating another eBay buyer imabiddy22

 

Good buyer

  

Seller
blazers5505(64Feedback score is 50 to 99)

  Jan-16-07   200043065708  

This page also contains a seller, jellyfromctown. Jelly was a name that Cho is supposed to have mentioned at one time- an imaginary girl-friend.

 

Seller
jellyfromc-town(369Feedback score is 100 to 499)

  Nov-20-06

http://myworld.ebay.com/imabiddy22/

Here he is rating newyorkjetsfan4lif, also on eBay MyWorld:

 

Good

  

Buyer
blazers5505(64Feedback score is 50 to 99)

  Oct-21-06  

Here he is selling Microfiction on Half.com on eBay:

rice Seller
(Feedback)		 Comments Shipping Ships From

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:U2V2twR3nWcJ:product.half.ebay.com/Micro-Fiction_W0QQprZ155305QQtgZinfo+blazers5505&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=fi

refox-a

And here he is selling the Oates book on Half.com on eBay again:

Price Seller
(Feedback)		 Comments Shipping Ships From

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:tzSuu1cWTPIJ:product.half.ebay.com/The-Female-Of-The-Species_W0QQtgZinfoQQprZ45574750+blazers5505&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=11&gl=us&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a

This is a page with several books. Not having sold on eBay, I would like clarification if these are all books he had for sale, as it looks to be. Clicking on the pages, finds most are not available. Will go through them again.

blazers5505

(59Feedback is 50 to 99)

Feedback Score: 59
Positive Feedback: 98.4%
Member since Jan-19-04 in United States

Shipping methods: Media Mail/Ground | Ships from: Blacksburg, VA

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Best of H.P. Lovecraft: H. P. Lovecraft
(Paperback, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, 1982)

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Cathedral: Raymond Carver
(Paperback, 1989)

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Hell House: Richard Matheson
(Paperback, 1999)

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Fiction Writer’s Workshop: Josip Novakovich
(Paperback, 1998)

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Ten Little Indians: Sherman Alexie
(Paperback, 2004)

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John Donne’s Poetry: John Donne
(Paperback, Authoritative Texts, Criticism, 1991)

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Jean-Paul Sartre: Stephen Priest
(Paperback, Basic Writings, 2001)

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Playwriting
(Paperback, 1997)

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Micro Fiction
(Paperback, An Anthology of Really Short Stories, 1996)

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The Female Of The Species: Joyce Carol Oates
(Hardcover, Tales Of Mystery And Suspense, 2006)

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Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Carol J. Clover
(Paperback, Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1993)

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A Guide to the Norton Reader, Tenth Edition: John C. Brereton, Linda H. Peterson
(Binding Unknown, 2000)

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Feeding the Ghosts: Fred D’Aguiar
(Hardcover, 1999)

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Sabbath Night In The Church Of The Piranha: Edward Falco
(Paperback, New And Selected Stories, 2005)

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Exploring Poetry: Frank Madden
(Paperback, Writing and Thinking About Poetry, 2002)

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And here is a report with a second email account – SC2@vt.edu, which was his school account.

Other Information on Cho’s Records:
1.Blazers5505@hotmail.com was the account used to purchase the gun and was used last in February, according to a police affidavit.

2. Emily Hilscher, one of Cho’s first victims (7:15 am 4/16 in West Ambler Johnston Hall) had the following e-mail address, epixie@vt.edu. Police are investigating whether she had a connection with him.

3. The affidavit states that Cho made regular calls home on Sunday evenings. The police are checking the records for any announcement of his actions on Monday.

(Note from LR – I have moved the autopsy findings to my post on More Oddities. Sorry, some of this material needs to be reorganized on the posts).

Virginia Tech – An American Reader in Japan Responds

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Robert McKinney, an American who once taught English at Waseda University in Japan, writes in to me (letter is excerpted):

Thank you so much for your common sense essay. My own thoughts too.

What does it take to alarm Americans any more? If the 7:15 am shooting had taken place at an airport, even a small regional airport, the FBI would been covering every inch of the area within a five mile radius of the airport. Same goes for a Federal building or a shopping mall.. …..

But why oh why didn’t the administration or the campus police close down the campus at 7:30 and tell everyone to stay home? That’s why we have local television stations, e-mail and loudspeakers. Didn’t two bloody killings cause any sense of alarm? Sad day for all Americans. Public safety has become a thing of the past..

It is ludicrous for anyone in authority to “cover his or her ass.” These were almost criminal idiots. Medical doctors who display such idiocy are quickly sued and some see their medical careers terminated and their professional and personal lives ruined. Time for heads to roll at VT...

Some years ago I was a full time English instructor at Waseda University, one of Japan’s elite colleges. Ninety percent of the student body is male. Anyway, in 2001 a terrible scandal surfaced after one female student went to the police with a lurid tale of being violently gang raped by a group of male students from Waseda. The police did investigate and discovered that a registered social club on the campus called “The Super Free Club” had been secretly gang-raping women, some as young as 18, for the past four or five years…..Over 100 women fell victim to the Super Free Club rape scheme. Most of the victims were from small towns around Japan and were simply too naive to understand the danger the club posed…..

Despite campus rumors and gossip about what was really happening at the Super Free Club parties, the Waseda U. authorities did nothing to investigate or question the club’s main members. The university was fearful of bad publicity and so just looked the other way while the rapes continued year after year……until the newspapers reported the police investigation in 2001

Although as many as forty or fifty Waseda male students had been involved in the gang rapes over the course of four years, only two or three individuals were convicted.

The university authorities at Waseda simply ignored the crisis. Damage control, “hey boys will be boys,” was their explanation.
Japan too has its share of moral lepers and idiots.

Sincerely,

Robert McKinney.

Virginia Tech – the dangers of the police state

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Eugene Plawiuk has this posted on his site, cited at Brad Spangler. It’s something to keep in mind about V. Tech.

I’ve posted it here simply as a response to the mass of emails (to my email address, note, rather than publicly on this blog) that I received. Most of the mail was positive. Some – mostly from fellow immigrant Indians here in the US – was surprisingly venemous.
But seriously, how can any one confuse criticism of state power and laws with attacking a “free society”? Do you really think we live in a free society because we’re allowed to mouth off on blogs? Consider how swaddled in laws and regulations we are today. And it’s the same critics who complain about the litigiousness of this country who want even more laws.

Undoubtedly we have tremendous freedom of expression in certain areas. There are, of course, numbers of societies where even that’s absent, and I’m glad I don’t live in any of them. But must I really mention that as an obligatory preface to any statement I make?

“I am glad I don’t live in Iran, but…”

That’s a thought.

Doesn’t it occur to people that allowing vocal – if impotent- criticism is also a way in which the state diffuses threats to its power?

It bothers me that people can actually call for more gun laws and then tell libertarians that we despise the “free society.” How do you have a free society when the state is armed to the teeth and law-abiding citizens are largely disarmed?

How do you have a free society when every increase in state power is applauded by “law and order” statists who think that their position is “conservative”?

What are they conserving? State power? Big business? You can support a limited government and free markets, while still understanding that the corrupt expansion of either (and I would argue that only corruption allows them to expand beyond a certain limit) is inherently inimical to the healthy functioning of voluntary associations – community organizations, church groups, and families – on which traditional conservativism eventually rests.

Nock’s argument below points in exactly the same direction (emphasis is mine):

“If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power. It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power…….

Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact (except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic-asylum, city-hospital and county-poorhouse) destitution, unemployment, “depression” and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand-new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living. Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.

It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted.. ”

Read the rest of the chapter here:

Alfred Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935

Pulp Drama and Punditry: Virginia Tech, the Media and Violence

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Yesterday, the mainstream media took up the question that we unwashed Vinnies (I hereby proudly adopt Brian Williams’ contemptuous term for unpaid, solo bloggers) have been asking since Day One: What is the responsibility of the authorities (Virginia Tech and the State of Virginia) in this tragic business?

According to some people that question’s off-limits. How can you be so lacking in compassion, someone asked me.

I guess because I am too busy feeling compassion for the poor kids who got blown to bits — and for their families — to waste too much sympathy on guilt-or-angst-or-litigation-induced pangs among bureaucrats. Had Virginia Tech’s bosses been CEO’s, I doubt whether progressives would be so sympathetic. Bottom line is people at the top of organizations are paid a lot of money to take responsibility to see that things like this don’t take place. And so far, I haven’t see anyone stepping down from their posts – which in the old days would have been de rigeur. One would assume that that would be the first act of individuals prone to taking responsibility for their actions.

So, if Williams & Co. are asking a few pointed questions now, more power to them. We hope we are in for some incisive reporting on how psychiatric illness is treated in this country and what went wrong with security at V. Tech.

We wish, meanwhile, that the media had shown such keen interrogative skills when they were swallowing every lie and distortion handed down to them from the government on other matters……like the run-up to the Iraq war or the prolonged cover-up of the government’s torture policies.

Now it remains to be seen whether the rest of the coverage for the V. Tech shooting will be in the time-honored tradition of a respectable fourth estate, which is to confront and question – as vigorously as possible – the pronunciamentos of those in power. Being “nice” is not part of that job description.

Instead, it looks like we are getting more helpings of the usual pulp drama that reigns supreme on the air.

First, we had a focus on the most sensational aspects of the case – not hard to do in an obviously sensational case, filled with ambulances screeching around a lush campus and sex-and-guts-laden manuscripts. Thus, we had NBC’s re-re-replaying of the Cho video that immediately set off – what a surprise – copy-cat threats all over the country. Scores of serial killings and school shootings haven’t taught the networks that that’s what happens when you give too much prime-time air to pathological killers – it brings out all the wannabe’s in the woodwork. I guess they thought airing Cho’s berserker promo was as harmless as parading Sanjaya on American Idol.

Why not just present us with a detailed factual report/analysis of the material instead of flashing the imagery at us? Would that be too..well.. boringly factual?

Then, we had the human drama of it all, wherein seasoned reporters caught hold of traumatized twenty-year olds and ask them such gravitas-laden questions as, How did you feel when you saw your best friend blown to bits? Ah, thank god for the enhanced sensitivity which lets us be outraged, outraged by what some walking-dead tired-old has-been shock-jock says in his morning mumblings, but allows us to close our eyes to public dissections of other people’s pain. Fortunately, there are reports that that line of questioning is going to be turned off for a while.

Next, the whirring sound of axes (pun intended) of all kinds, from Jihad-opia (the manic condition of seeing jihadis everywhere) to Video-phobia and Gun-control-freakery being sharpened up on the news shows, thus Charles Krauthammer on FOX, letting us know that if Cho wasn’t actually a henchman of Osama-bin-what’s-his-name, he’d missed a hell of a chance.

Sound-bytes and sensations.

We can see monstrosity and evil when a psychotic twenty-three year old lashes out in madness and kills thirty-two of us.

Too bad we can’t recognize it when perfectly sane adults calculatedly kill over half-a-million of them.

Virginia Tech – How Come They Shut Down the Campus for Morva?

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I have been getting mail telling me that Virginia Tech’s decision not to close off the engineering buildings…or shut down the campus.. was quite understandable and defensible, and that hindsight from journalists is easy.

Here is my response:

If hindsight is easy, why didn’t Virginia Tech benefit from it? Why is it that authorities were able to shut down the campus…and the whole town… when William Morva, a survivalist and alleged murderer, was on the loose in the neighborhood last year, but could do precious little this year?

“The shooting was the second in the past year that forced officials to lock down the campus. In August of 2006, an escaped jail inmate shot and killed a deputy sheriff and an unarmed security guard at a nearby hospital before the police caught him in the woods near the university. The capture ended a manhunt that led to the cancellation of the first day of classes at Virginia Tech and shut down most businesses and municipal buildings in Blacksburg. The accused gunman, William Morva, is facing capital murder charges.”

(N. Y. Times – “Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead,” April 16, 2007).

Question:

If they could lock down the campus for that, why not for this?

Was that because in the Morva incident, the victims were police and security?

I hate to put it that way, but I feel compelled to. I do understand that the killing of policemen tends to be regarded as more heinous for a variety of reasons, some of which might be defensible, but it goes to show that Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guardians) is always a relevant question.

And to the Virginia Tech Administration groupies who wrote to me, let me point out that I did wait a couple of days and came down on the administration only when I saw the self-indulgent posturing going on.

In the old days, a university president would have stepped down immediately, regardless of who was to blame, simply for having had something like this happen on his watch. But university presidents today are like corporate CEOs – nary a word of self-reproach or self-recrimination. I think that was what angered me….and judging from the rest of my mail, a lot of people.
Still working on that summary…stay tuned.

A defense of guns from a different perspective

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I got this link from Brad Spangler’s anarchist site and thought it was interesting. I am posting it here as a kind of mea culpa directed toward whichever anarchist wrote to me and accused me of “smearing” anarchists.

Well, I am an anarchist, and I don’t think I did anything of the sort. I merely said I thought there was room for a nuanced position on guns. But, I don’t mind genuflecting to fellow anarchists……since we are such a widely misunderstood and embattled lot in this culture.

Mea maxima culpa, fellows.

Meanwhile, I have to say that I think FOX news, which is what I watched on TV for the V Tech story, was very careful not to dwell on Cho’s race in an inflammatory way. So, I am not sure that I think there has been a conflation of anti-immigration and gun-control arguments. After all, Cho had been in the US since the age of 8, even though he had not become a citizen.

As an immigrant myself, I am quite aware of the dangers of fanning the flames of xenophobia on an issue like this, but I also do think that people should be able to discuss crime and immigration in a fair-minded way, without automatically being termed a racist – a term, which by misuse or overuse we ultimately dilute just when we might most need to use it.

Racism is also not a very well defined term in common debate. But that’s something for another post.

Meanwhile, here is the post, which taught me something new – always a good thing.

http://phoenixinsurgent.blogspot.com/2007/04/disarming-robert-williams-re-arming-jim.html

I will be posting a summary of information about the V Tech shooting later today. I think I feel strongly about it, because the debate about it brings together a number of things I have been concerned with…..and wrote about in the Abu Ghraib book... violence and imagery, “the daddy-state,” and the proliferation of police state laws. Besides which, I have a number of thoughts about the dehumanizing effects of modern education….

So, more later.

Virginia Tech – More gun laws or fewer idiots?

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Dan Brown at the Huffington Post writes that there are only two ways to go on the Virginia Tech killings. (“Virginia Tech: Two Potential Paths, April 16) – either citizens will be encouraged to spy on each other and report suspicious behavior – the paranoid response, he calls it, or we tighten up gun laws that allow people to get as many guns as they want whenever they want it.

Talk about false alternatives. Would you really have to have been paranoid to have stopped some one like Cho Seung-Hui?

Some left anarchists (as well as adherents of the old right, like Pat Buchanan) argue that you would just need to have been armed. In 2002 the Appalachian Law School shooting, also in Virginia, resulted in only three deaths because it was stopped by armed students.

Hmm. That’s where ideology minus common sense gets you. Two camps of firearm fundamentalists, who refuse to look reality in the face, but are ready to fire from the hip.
However much we may support the second amendment, do we really want students packing heat in their book bags, as filled with alcohol, drugs and partying as most campuses are today? Why does the-right- to bear-arms-in-classrooms have to be part of a pro-gun position on this? I don’t think it does.

Nor do we have to end up on the other side, tying ourselves up with even more regulation on something that is already as heavily regulated as guns are. If the campus faculty and staff had been doing their jobs, Cho would have in psychiatric care of some kind. And if the campus police had been doing theirs, the campus would been closed after the first shooting, without any further delay. This has nothing to do with gun control. It has to do with ignorance about mental illness and about university officials and security not doing their job.

Look at this young man’s history. The 23 year old English major had written two plays that disturbed his classmates and teachers so much that he had been referred to counseling. What he wrote was described as “morbid and grotesque.”

His plays, Richard McBeef (replete with references to pedophilia, incest and chain saw murder) and Mr. Brownstone (scatological violence, and threats against teachers) – seem to reveal a disturbed sexual identity. Read them. I was a college English teacher once. I have read some pretty lurid stories from my students. But nothing that carried so much obvious personal freight. This is some one I would have definitely put on a watch list.

Poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, had been worried enough to take him out of her class. Students had stopped coming to class because Cho was taking pictures of them on his cell phone camera; some students even speculated that he might commit a campus shooting.
By the way, the name Ismail Ax found marked on Cho’s arm, is probably not a reference to any jihadi association as people might assume – it is very likely a reference to Ishmael, the son of Abraham by his servant woman, Hagar (I used the term bastard erroneously). Ishmael is considered to be the progenitor of the Arabs (I originally wrote Muslims) and is a name often used as a symbol for the orphans, exiles and outcasts of a society (think, “Call me Ishmael” – the opening line of Moby Dick). In the Jewish and Christian tradition, the son whom Jahweh demands that Abraham sacrifice is Isaac; in the Muslim tradition, it is said to be Ishmael. I wonder – and here I am speculating – whether Cho’s references to Ismail and the plot line of Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone, indicate some very troubled feelings about his own father or some other authority figure in his life – whether grounded in reality or in his own disturbed imagination, remains to be seen. Not to color this with any homophobic sentiment – it is the case that Moby Dick also has distinctly homoerotic elements.

Although campus police do not confirm it (and, remember they have every incentive at this point to downplay any prior record of suspicious behavior to minimize their responsibility), student and police sources say that Cho had stalked female students and set fire to a dorm room. These incidents – if they occurred – should have led to a police record. If Cho had had a police record, he never would have been able to purchase a gun, even under current laws. He even had time to post a warning on an online forum: “I’m going to kill people at vtech today”.

But campus police at universities are notorious for covering up or minimizing these sorts of incidents. Why? Because campus crime statistics are bad for enrollment and they reflect poorly on campus police.

Notice, however, that campus security did manage to give Cho 2 tickets for speeding. Doesn’t that figure! Ticketing students for minor traffic offenses, as anyone who’s been on a campus knows, is the favorite pastime of campus police. It makes them money. And keeps them so busy, they don’t have time to bother with the trivial matter of preventing deranged young men from arming themselves to the teeth and taking out the student body.

Now we learn that Cho also left a “disturbing” note in his dorm room which vented his rage at “rich kids,” “deceitful charlatans” and “debauchery,” adding “You caused me to do this.” He is also said to have made a suicide threat and school counselors, reportedly, treated him. Then how did they not know what he was thinking? He was in a creative writing class, churning out pages and pages of this sort of thing – the faculty should have been keeping tabs on him and following up on his counseling. Now the university excuses itself by saying that they could not follow up, because they were afraid of litigation. Oh, that makes sense – the laws prevented them from doing what they ought to have done – and now they want more laws?

As everyone knows, university administrations are big, hamstrung departments that spend most of their energy on bureaucratic nonsense and covering their behinds. And that’s all these excuses are. I will bet you, that right now university lawyers know that Virginia Tech is in big, big trouble and they are getting ready for the mother of all law suits, as Tech parents finally realize that the high price-tag of schooling today doesn’t come with any minimal safety guarantees of their kids’ lives.

A bomb threat note was reportedly found next to Cho’s body and the bodies of some victims, “directed at engineering school department buildings.” That ties Cho directly to the bomb threats that the school received in the three weeks preceding the massacre. With Cho’s history of stalking, arson and violent talk, why had there been no earlier investigation of whether he was connected to the bomb threats? Who did the university think was behind them – the IRA?

We also know that Cho was being treated for depression. Was he taking medication? How come he was still able to buy a gun?

The chairman of the English department who referred him to counseling, did not follow up and find out the result of the session. Why not? What was the sense of referring him to counseling and then not finding out what the counselor had to say about his mental condition?
The university said it misjudged the 7.15 killings, believing that one of the victims was the killer; that’s why they didn’t bother to warn students to keep off the campus. What business had the university to indulge in dangerous and unwarranted speculation about where or who the killer was? Common sense should have told them to quit playing Sherlock Holmes and just warn everyone off campus. What was the downside? Losing one day of classes? Look at what was in balance on the other side – dozens of lives. Shame on anyone who even suggests this was a valid excuse.

Yet, this is how Virginia Tech president Stegerd excuses himself: he says that he believed the shooting at the dorm was a “domestic dispute” and “mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.”

Now, which is it? Did the university think the killer died …or that he fled? Why two contradictory explanations?

Did they first think one thing and then change their minds? Or haven’t they got their excuses straight in time for public consumption?

Steger told Fox’s Geraldo Rivera that “we closed that building immediately, surrounded it with security guards, cordoned off the street, notified all the students in the building.”
He added that police expressed the opinion that the incident was confined to that one building. “

Now, why in the world would the police leap to that conclusion, when they’d had two bomb threats a few weeks earlier, specifically targeting the engineering buildings – not the residence hall, where the 7.15 killings took place. Wouldn’t the normal reaction be to assume that more was to follow at the threatened sites? Shouldn’t they at least have warned students off the engineering buildings?

Though no weapons were found in the dormitory, the police seems to have taken some time to figure out what that meant — that the killer had fled.

Steger claims he spent part of Monday morning “trying to figure out what was going on.” and only learned from radio reports that “there were multiple fatalities, another shooting incident was underway.”

So there you have it – the university only got alarmed after dozens of people were massacred – a paltry two deaths weren’t enough to do it for them! Are these idiotic statements symptoms of complete confusion or are officials covering up here?

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” said Steger. Oh yeah? Why not?

Murderers at large (William Morva, earlier in the school year), arson, stalking, bomb threats, two killings…..that wouldn’t be a reason to suspect any other incident, oh nooooo……..

The first two killings took place at 7.15 in the morning at Ambler Johnston dormitory, but the school’s first email to students went out more than 2 hours later, after the massacre at Norris Hall had taken place. What was the need for this frightful delay that delivered a death sentence to dozens of people?

We don’t need any more gun-control laws. What we need are fewer idiots.

The Noticeable Absence of Hip-Hop at Virginia Tech

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Now that we know that the massacre at Virginia Tech (33 dead and 22 injured) was perpetrated – apparently – by a South Korean male Cho-Seung Hui, rather than a black one, people might at last let up on the hip-hop industry – as the chief and only architect of the pervasive violence of American culture.

Oh, sorry, someone already has. Maybe in deference to the upcoming April 20 anniversary of the Columbine high school shootings – which the popular press inaccurately pinned on the video game, “Doom,” Marilyn Manson and Goth culture – Florida attorney Jack Thompson has already concluded that the electronic game industry is to be blamed.

Now, a good argument can be made that video games – and indeed every piece of electronic entertainment – have an impact on the human psyche qualitatively different from that of the print media – but there is no evidence yet that, whatever role they played at Columbine, they had any part to play here. But God forbid, that the words, “we don’t know” – should ever come out of the mouths of popular pundits.

At Virginia, the killer or one of the killers, seems to have been a young undergraduate. And the rumored motivation seems to have been a thwarted romance. But since there is no political constituency – at least, not yet – for outlawing youthful hormones, we can confidently expect that censors and gun-control advocates will be crawling out of the woodwork soon.

Of course, one wouldn’t object to a nuanced position on either issue. One could, for example, be in favor of gun ownership at large, while deploring the ease with which a student was apparently able to get two handguns and massive quantities of ammunition into a dorm room on a campus, especially, when bomb threats (April 3, and 13) had already been directed against some of the engineering buildings there. In hindsight, the threats might have been the gunman testing the campus security system.

But don’t hold your breath for nuance. Expect, instead, the usual thunderous denunciations on all sides and much righteous posturing from the pols and pundits.

Meanwhile, only half tongue in cheek, may I suggest that there is – so far – as little evidence that video culture caused this tragedy as there is that, say, academic culture did. Less, actually.

After all, with depressing regularity, university campuses do seem to throw up deranged, alienated specimens with mayhem on their minds.

There was Theodore Strelesky, who expressed his disgust with his advisor at Yale’s math department by taking a hammer to the man’s skull and then became an urban legend for his bald refusal to plead insanity in his defense or mouth the usual therapeutic platitudes to get paroled. He argued ,instead, that his advisor had it coming to him, a sentiment not unknown among some PhD candidates. It’s been suggested – again, not entirely facetiously – that a jury of his peers would never have convicted him.

Then there was the physics graduate student passed up for research funding at the University of Iowa who shot and killed three professors, his academic rival, and an administrator, before killing himself. And, most famously, there was the Unabomber, Ted Kasczyinski, a Harvard math PhD by the age of 25, who over 18 years mutilated and killed numbers of innocent people in a doomed protest against society. No hip-hop…or video games.. there – Ted once played the trombone and modeled his wilderness lifestyle on Thoreau. Maybe, we should ban Walden.

Still, although the perpetrator at Blacksburg seems to have been an English major, not an introverted science student, there truly are problems with the American university campus — and I don’t mean the alleged strangle-hold of the left, as cultural conservatives are prone to thinking (rather too facilely)….. only now is not the time for that discussion.

Especially, since we really don’t have enough information about this tragedy.

A more useful line of inquiry is the one probably uppermost in the minds of the families of the victims. Could this have been prevented?

I’ve already mentioned the bomb threats. Additionally, earlier this year, the Blacksburg campus was shut down when an eccentric survivalist, William Morva, wanted for alleged assault and murder, was rumored to have been sighted on the grounds. The rumor was false, but ought to have made university officials sensitive to the potential hazards contained on the 2,600 acre rural campus with more than 25,000 students.

One doesn’t want to rush to judgment about the university’s culpability, but the manner in which campus security responded does provoke thought. For some reason, I think gun control hard-liners are not going to want to pay attention to the surprisingly lackadaisical approach the university took to security.

Here are the emails as they were sent out:

‘A gunman is loose’: E-mails from Virginia Tech

April 16, 2007

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The first 911 call on the Virginia Tech shooting came in at 7:15 a.m. The following are emails that Virginia Tech officials sent to students during the shooting rampage, which left 32 people plus the gunman dead. The misspellings are as they occurred in the messages:

Email sent at 9:26 a.m.:
Subject: Shooting on campus.
A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.

The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case. Contact Virginia Tech Police at 231-6411

Stay attuned to the www.vt.edu. We will post as soon as we have more information.

AD(‘ArticleFlex_1’);

9:15 a.m.: Approximate time of second shooting at Norris Hall, in which 30 people were killed. Second email sent at 9:50 a.m.:
Subject: Please stay put
A gunman is loose on campus. Stay in buildings until further notice. Stay away from all windows

Third email sent at 10:17 a.m.:
Subject: All Classes Canceled; Stay where you are
Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where there are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus.

Fourth email sent at 10:53 a.m.:
Subject: Second Shooting Reported; Police have one gunman in custody
In addition to an earlier shooting today in West Ambler Johnston, there has been a multiple shooting with multiple victims in Norris Hall.

Police and EMS are on the scene.

Police have one shooter in custody and as part of routine police procedure, they continue to search for a second shooter.

All people in university buildings are required to stay inside until further notice.

All entrances to campus are closed.

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More than two hours to send out an email after two people are killed in a dorm? And no immediate cancellation of classes? This, on a state university campus, where the campus police are closely tied to the state police?

Before we get new laws restricting the liberties of ordinary citizens in what is already an incipient police state, maybe we should first make sure that our security forces know how to do their jobs with the laws already on the books.

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