Author Archives: L

V-Tech: Cho – fits of anger as a child, church suspected demons Updated 5/11

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More details here about Cho’s interaction in church and an analysis (and criticism) of a 4/30 article in Newsweek describing bullying by rich members of a Christian youth group:

I am quoting the article in its entirety:

“It turns out Pastor K is the person Newsweek got this story from. He left the church almost two years before Cho graduated high school. In an interview published in various Korean language newspapers between April 18th and April 20th, Pastor K shared his experiences with Cho.

In this article dated April 19th, Pastor K says that Cho’s mother wanted him to join a Saturday youth group because she was concerned that he was too withdrawn and spending too much time playing video games. While at the youth group, Pastor K reports that he rarely spoke except to say “yes” or “no.”

But in this article from another Korean paper, Pastor K adds that Cho was picked on in the youth group though, as you’ll see, calling this “bullying” is a bit of a stretch. Here is the complete article translated into English [One of my wife’s co-workers agreed to translated it for me. I streamlined some of the wording]:

“When we watched his video manifesto explaining his reasons behind the massacre, all of our family said “that is not like Seung-Hui’. That’s because it was the first time we saw him talking in full sentences and not in pieces of words and because we were surprised to see him spitting out curses like bullets.”

As a Christian leader, I feel responsible when I see him cursing Christianity.According to the interview with Joongang Ilbo (Korean newspaper) on the 18th, Reverend K (age 50) — who taught Cho at the Korean Church in Centerville for 2 years beginning in 2000 when Cho was a 10th grader in High School in Fairfax County, VA — who wished to be remain anonymous, said “As a Christian leader, I feel responsible when I see him cursing Christianity. I am terribly sad.” The followings are excerpts from the interview:

– Have you seen Cho’s video?

“It was the first time I ever saw him so angry. I couldn’t believe it.”

– What was he like in the past?

“He was a loner. I never knew he could talk so fluently. In the past, he never spoke in sentences. If I asked him to pray, he usually didn’t say anything for at least a minute and then would say short sentences like “Let’s have a good time. Let’s be thankful.” Because he always had his mouth shut, even elementary school kids made fun of him. Some even pushed him a bit. So, often I told Seung-hui, “if you get annoyed by these little pranksters, why don’t you yell or get angry with them?” But his usual responses was to just nod and do nothing about it. Because of Cho’s inaction, teasing by some of the mischievous elementary age kids lasted for quite a while.

– Didn’t Cho’s behavior change as he came to church?

He was smart and quick to understand the biblical stories. But his understanding never materialized into faith. I’d say his faith was at about 20%. Every Saturday, I gave him a ride to our church so he could make friends his own age in the youth group. But he never got along with anyone. During snack time, he usually ate in the corner by himself.

– In his manifesto, Cho said ‘do you know how it feels to be insulted (or to suffer)?’ and showed his hostility toward the world….

When other kids made fun of him, he never reacted on the outside but perhaps he felt scorned and belittled inside. Among those whom I had to counsel not to bother Cho were some kids from rich backgrounds. Maybe these little things accumulated inside Cho’s mind for a long time and then exploded all at once.”

– Has he ever been rebellious in church?

No. However, once I recommended that his mom take Cho to see a doctor because he showed some autistic behavior. But his mom didn’t agree with my evaluation and refused to take him to the doctor. If Cho had received proper medical care from early stage, it’s possible this terrible thing might not have happened. I feel regretful for not persuading his mother more firmly at the time.”

So, according to Pastor K, Cho was indeed teased at his Saturday youth group, just as he was everywhere else. His pastor at the time was aware of it, took steps to shelter him from it and tried to get him to stand up for himself. The Newsweek story condenses all of this down into a single sentence that introduces the word bullying:

His parents turned to the church for help with his emotional problems, but he was bullied in his Christian youth group, especially by rich kids.

Is bullying what Cho really experienced in youth group?Is bullying what Cho really experienced in youth group? According to Pastor K he was teased and even pushed by some kids. That might sounds like bullying except for the fact that the kids involved were in elementary school. Cho was in 10th grade at the time. It’s not the image most people probably have in mind when they hear the word “bullying.” For me, that brings to mind a hefty kid who likes to hit people when they don’t hand over their lunch money, not a couple of 5th graders making wisecracks about a sophmore in high school.

It also appears that there were some wealthy kids who picked on Cho, but the pastor stepped in and told them to leave him alone. He wasn’t left to the mercy of these spoiled brats as the Newsweek piece suggests.

So here’s the real story. Cho was picked up and driven to a Saturday youth group so he could make friends, yet sat alone in the corner. He was protected from teasing by his pastor, but refused to protect himself from teasing by much younger kids. He was invited to join a Bible study; yet, until the manifesto appeared on TV no one had ever heard him utter more than a few words. His pastor recommended he be examined by a doctor but — possibly because of the shame associated with mental illness in Korean culture — his mother refused to take him.

Cho’s church made a sincere effort to reach out to him and help him fit in. For whatever reason, he was unable to respond. Perhaps he had a serious mental illness (schizophrenia has been suggested by some, autism by others). Perhaps he was physically or sexually abused by an adult, as his college writings seem to suggest. In either case, it’s hard to imagine what more Cho’s church could have done to help him.

Far from being just another part of the problem, church seems to be the only place Cho went where an adult stood up for him.A lot of people mocked and picked on Cho Seung-Hui. A few, in high school and college, reached out to him, including members of Tech’s Korean Campus Crusade chapter. But no one tried harder to reach out to Cho than the pastors at Centerville Korean Presbyterian Church. Evan Thomas’ story for Newsweek isn’t a lie since Cho was in fact picked on in his youth group, but it manages to mislead the reader about what really happened there. So far as we know, Pastor K was the only adult who attempted to teach Cho how to get along with others. Far from being just another part of the problem, church seems to be the only place Cho went where an adult stood up for him. That effort deserved a lot better treatement than Evan Thomas’ dismissive one-liner.

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My Comment:

Fair enough. I think the detailed analysis of the Newsweek piece was warranted. Those sorts of throwaway comments in the major media deserve intense examination. They’re not always as innocuous as they might seem to some one who isn’t familiar with media framing tactics.

More:

A report on 5/5 reports that a bomb threat written on a flyer was found in a classroom the morning of 4/16 by a professor who handed it to the janitor. Note that the note was written in red ink; Ismail Ax was written on Cho’s arm in red ink too. But there is nothing else linking the note to Cho. The janitor described as tall Asian in a maroon cap, black shirt and cargo pants with something jingling on him.

More reporting on Cho in this profile of the onset of his problems in the Washington Post.

Key new points:

*Turns out that Cho exhibited fits of anger as a child, not just taciturnity, as we heard earlier.

*We also learn now that his mother turned to the church rather than to medicine for help. She went to several northern Virginia churches, especially after 2005. The Pastor of the One Mind Church in Woodbridge, Dong Cheol Lee, thought Cho’s behavior showed demon possession and tried to help but didn’t do so in time. Cho’s behavior seems to have got worse in 2005-06, which coincides with his visit to the health center.

*We learn that Cho hardly attended classes in his senior year and spent most of the time in front of the computer. This squares with what his neighbors in Virginia have said – that they hadn’t seen him for some time. Apparently, his behavior deteriorated in his senior year (that is, after his brief encounter with the health care system and – possibly – with medication).

This is a distinct departure from what he was like as a student in earlier years. This report has information that Cho was a math whiz who started out at V Tech by working all the time and trying hard to fit in. His declared major in 2003-04 was business information, but later (by 2005 probably) he changed to English.

That’s about when he started sliding. Hmmm…maybe Limbaugh had a point about the English department (only kidding!)

Something changed and changed drastically for the worse in 2005.

* He is said to have studied a text on Deviant Behavior in class in that last year, which may show he had some awareness of his problem. The class was held on the second floor of Norris Hall, where the shooting took place.

* What’s also interesting to me is how university officials are guarding his records, citing privacy laws. I am sure it’s going to be a major embarrassment for them to explain how Cho managed to avoid being flunked for such incompetent writing, non-attendance, and generally erratic and dangerous behavior.

All this reflects poorly on Virginia Tech, I’m afraid, however much people spin it. What a pity. Apparently, the school has a great engineering faculty. Too bad that the administration and security don’t seem to have matched up, at least in this instance

Note: the more I see the different pieces of this puzzle, the more I am inclined to think that although we have a person with psychological/psychiatric problems at the center of it, we also have some other influences at work here. I suspect we may find some kind of traumatic incident in 2005, or some authority figure’s influence coming to bear on him…

Now we have a couple of more hints why Norris was chosen: Cho took at least two classes that we know of on the second floor – one where he read about deviant behavior and another where he studied the Genesis story of Ishmael.

We also know he was a very bright math student, a whiz according to at least two reports. If he chose to go into business management at first, maybe it was because he wanted to be more socially acceptable to the affluent Virginian kids he envied or resented (if we go by what he said on his video).

Karan Grewal, his suite mate, was puzzled by that comment, though, noting that most of the students were middle class and on scholarship of some kind. I haven’t studied the demographics of the school, but looking through the list of victims I found that, as you would expect in a Virginian college, a lot of his victims were Virginia residents:

1. Leslie Sherman, sophomore history and international studies student from Springfield, Va.

2. Maxine Turner, 22, senior majoring in chemical engineering from Vienna, Va.

3. Mary Karen Read, 19, freshman from Annandale, Va.

4. Reema Joseph Samaha, 18, freshman from Centreville, Va

5. Erin Peterson, 18, of Chantilly, Va., an international studies major

6. Lauren Ashley McCain, 20, of Hampton, Va., freshman international studies major.

7. Henry J. Lee, also known as Henh Ly, 20, first-year student majoring in computer engineering from Roanoke, Va.

8. Rachael Hill, 18, of Glen Allen, Va.

9. Emily Jane Hilscher, 19-year-old freshman from Woodville, Va., majoring in animal and poultry sciences.

10. Matthew Gregory Gwaltney, 24, of Chester, Va., graduate student in civil and environmental engineering.

11. Austin Michelle Cloyd, sophomore international studies major and member of the honors program from Blacksburg, Va. Previously from Illinois.
12. Daniel Alejandro Perez Cueva, 21, of Peru, sophomore majoring in international studies. He also had lived in Woodbridge, Va.

13.Brian Roy Bluhm, 25, civil engineering graduate student from Stephens City, Va. He had previously lived in Iowa, Detroit and Louisville, Ky

14. Jarrett Lee Lane, 22, senior majoring in civil engineering from Narrows, Va

14/32 means that nearly half of his victims were Virginian residents or had moved there. (The rest were foreign born or were from close by (PA, NY or NJ).

Was this, in fact, an attack on the Hokies, as Pat Buchanan puts it? Or is this simply the usual proportion of locals you’d find in any college?

I am going to hold off commenting on the fact that this is yet another murder/shooting in which a charge of demon possession has raised its head. It’s too easy to speculate irresponsibly at this stage on something like that. I wonder why we are not hearing anything more about the medication he was reported to be taking daily, according to roommates. I would think it would be easy enough to find evidence in his dorm room.

Meanwhile, I would like to find out more about the One Mind Church and what if any connections it had to the prayer circle Cho’s sister attended. I wonder if any other pastor had the same belief about Cho and whether anyone else tried to help.
Also, this new information doesn’t sit too well with jihadi theories. I wonder if the freepers will find a new classification – Diablo-fascist, or some such thing…

(no offense intended to Christians, Muslims…. or Satanists or anyone else…)
Where is Charles Krauthammer when you need him?

Buchanan links Virginia Tech to immigration

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Pat Buchanan argues that the killer at Virginia Tech is a product of the misguided “melting pot” ideology behind present immgration policies:

“Cho was among the 864,000 Koreans here as a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, which threw the nation’s doors open to the greatest invasion in history, an invasion opposed by a majority of our people. Thirty-six million, almost all from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country, now live in our midst.Cho was one of them.

In stories about him, we learn he had no friends, rarely spoke and was a loner, isolated from classmates and roommates. Cho was the alien in Hokie Nation. And to vent his rage at those with whom he could not communicate, he decided to kill in cold blood dozens of us.

What happened in Blacksburg cannot be divorced from what’s been happening to America since the immigration act brought tens of millions of strangers to these shores, even as the old bonds of national community began to disintegrate and dissolve in the social revolutions of the 1960s.”

Here’s the rest of Buchanan’s article.

I am busy now, but want to comment on this post in detail. Perhaps on Tuesday, when my work lightens up. Hope some of you reading can check back then. Talking rationally about what we are not supposed to be able to talk about except irrationally is always a good thing. Meanwhile, here’s something that came to my mind when reading Buchanan’s article:

“Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.”

It’s from Letter III from Letters from an American farmer, by J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, reprinted from the original ed., with a prefatory note by W. P. Trent and an introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York, Fox, Duffield, 1904.

I suppose Buchanan would argue that the immigrants Crevecoeur referred to were legal, came from European countries and were assimilable. But between, say, the Irish or Eastern European immigrant of the nineteenth century and one from Germany or Holland, between a Catholic and a Protestant was a gap almost as large as the cultural gap between some immigrants today and the mainstream of American culture, although what that mainstream might be is not the easiest thing to define.

Buchanan also overlooks the fact that Cho’s parents followed the route generations of immigrants have taken and have been urged to take — hard work in a small business, owning your home, and scrimping and saving to send your children to the elite schools and colleges which presumably assimilate them into the mainstream.

Cho’s sister — immersed in Bible studies, Christianity, and humanitarian work — seems to me as much a part of “heartland” American values as any one can be.

The holes in Buchanan’s argument don’t end there, of course. The beleagured Hokies whom he calls “us” included a number of immigrants and foreigners — Lebanese to Israeli to Sri Lankan — several of whom gave their lives for their native-born and non native-born friends. I suppose, under fire, they didn’t have enough time to get the skin colors, features, and immigration status sorted out.

Buchanan takes principled positions on a number of issues where other people duck, so it’s a disappointment that on this one, he falls into the trap of demagoguery. Still, there’s no need to resort to shoving his argument into the outer darkness of public debate, as this blog seems to want to.

For one thing, while his view on race and culture can be called “nativist” (probably correctly) all day long, it’s still a view held – sometimes silently but not always thoughtlessly or maliciously – by a good number of reasonable people, not only in the U.S but across the world. It’s a view that has suffused the major religions of the world for centuries.

I know people might label it racist (and it might well be on some levels), but since that’s often a term used to shut people up and because I never know what anyone actually means when they call someone a ‘racist’, I will simply call his position ‘racial’ or ‘racialist.’ By that, I mean he defends racial feeling as a legitimate category of human experience and not on its face suspect.

So, while I don’t agree with his position on immigration, I think it calls for more than ad hominem.

The only way to get through the impasse on this subject is to talk about it candidly.

As I see it, there are two constraints on the government in either direction: on one hand, we can’t make arguments about the constitutional limitations on the state while we reward people for breaking the law, but on the other, I agree with Tibor Machan that it’s best to take a minimalist approach. Limit the state’s role in the whole business: require would-be immigrants to obey the law (penalizing those who don’t) and require them to be financially self-sufficient and not a burden on the tax-payer.

Really, that’s all any state can justifiably police or practically accomplish. Any more than that, and we’ll just be stuffing the already distended belly of cetus washingtonii — which is what’s got us where we are in the first place.

Anthony Gregory is close to the way I see this, although I have more of a “commons” approach to property ownership in some areas than he seems to.
Identify and rectify the perverse incentives driving illegal immigration; don’t demonize immigrants. They’re just doing what makes economic sense to them.

As for the cultural angle, Joe Sobran, who seems to partly share Buchanan’s belief in the need for a degree of homogeneity in culture (and I suppose race) for a society to hold together, has a good recent piece on the subject:

“Today conservatives nearly as much as liberals accept the deadly premise that the state is the answer for every problem, when most of our huge problems are created by the state itself. Immigrants don’t tax us; the state does (while also imposing trillions in debt on our descendants into the bargain). Immigrants don’t send our sons (and, now, daughters) to war; the state does. Immigrants don’t attack our traditional morality and the natural law itself; the state does. So whom do we need to be protected from — immigrants or the state?

While the tyranny Belloc predicted keeps growing new tentacles, we are constantly distracted from the implacable pattern before our eyes by momentary but essentially minor excitements — terrorism, same-sex “marriage,” elections, even politicians’ verbal gaffes. Truly, to quote one of Belloc’s friends once again, “Men can always be blind to a thing, so long as it is big enough.”

More later….

Crowds and Powers

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Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Powers is a book that you must read if you’re interested in crowd psychology. Here is a sample of what you get:

“There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.

Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unknown touch can amount to panic.

All the distances which men create around themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which no one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation into which the fear changes into the opposite.”

In my opinion the book is somewhat uneven, passages of great power and insight alternating with observations that are a little artificial…. even, at times, contrived.

But that’s an idiosyncratic response, since this is the book which won him the Nobel Prize in 1981. And the book’s style of argument is so suggestive that it makes up for that occasional weakness.

For the sustained complexity and richness that comes with a great work of literature, read his magnum opus, Auto da Fe — one of my favorite books. But really, the comparison of the two isn’t fair, or even viable, because this is a work of sociology, while Auto da Fe – with all its philosophical depth — is a novel.

And, despite all my quibbles, Crowds and Powers is filled with immensely fertile observations.

Worth a slow, meditative read.

Not the worst US massacre….

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Carla Blank, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (reprinted in Counterpunch), points out the way in which the media sensationalized the Virginia Tech story.

Her piece is thoughtful, but it does two things that I think are mistaken — it racializes the issue (what happened to Waco, for instance?), in this case I think in an unwarranted way; and it moves away from incidents involving one or two individual shooters to group confrontations. Intentionally, I suppose.

“The mass media coverage of how 32 students and faculty members were fatally shot and at least 15 injured on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., is punctuated by phrases such as, “the worst massacre in U.S. history,” or, as the New York Times put it, the “Worst U.S. Gun Rampage.” CNN called it the “Deadliest Shooting Rampage in U.S. history.”

This was followed by San Francisco Bay Area’s FOX affiliate KTVU Channel 2’s claim that it was “the worst massacre ever in the United States.” TV commentary did not qualify these claims, and at least one Virginia Tech student, an Asian American himself, echoed the phrase when interviewed on national television, pondering his presence at the “worst massacre in U.S. history.”

In reality, an accurate investigation of mass killings of this magnitude would quickly reveal that the Virginia Tech massacre, as horrendous as it was, was not the worst massacre to occur on U.S. soil.”

There were much bloodier massacres before Blacksburg, she writes, including the Gunther Island Massacre of 60-200 Wiyot Indians, committed on Feb. 26, 1860 and encouraged by a local newspaper; the massacre on April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow, near Memphis, Tenn., by Confederate troops under Gen. Nathan Forrest of 227 black and white Union troops”; the Colfax Massacre on April 13, 1873 of 280 blacks by armed members of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan; the Ludlow Massacre in 1913 that killed more than 66 people, including 11 children, and two women (burned alive) and was sparked by a strike against the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation by the mostly foreign born Serb, Greek and Italian coal miners after one of their union organizers was murdered;the 1921 shooting deaths of at least 40-300 people, most of them black, in an area known as the “Negro’s Wall Street,” home to 15,000 people and 191 businesses. Police eventually dropped bombs from private planes to break it up.

Read more here.

My Comment:

I think it’s fair enough to point out the sensationalism involved in the coverage of V-Tech. But, it’s also fair to say that people really do find crimes committed by identifiably psychotic or evil individuals more interesting, psychologically, than political or social confrontations between groups.

The media plays on that bias and lets something like V- Tech distract us from bigger issues, while also handing the state another excuse for imposing more security laws.

But that said, people are really interested in this case.

We’re always fascinated by stories that combine just enough of the visceral and the violent with the coldly analytical. It’s why Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy still fascinates us, even though statistically, the damage such killers do is miniscule next to more endemic social and political problems, like war.

People like to argue that it’s the violence in our lives that drives this fascination. But I wonder about that.

It might be, instead, that we don’t really run into violence much at all — outside our TV screens; our worlds are fairly antiseptic. We don’t deal routinely with anything as intense, sensual and emotionally raw as violence….which is why we can’t take our eyes off when it finds us.

We have a yearning for deep experience, even when it is savage and even if it is vicarious. That, I suppose, is what accounts for the popularity of war as a spectator sport…

Police Attack Largely Peaceful Crowd In LA

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On Tuesday, there was a sample of what law and order can sometimes look like. I know a lot of people are going to dismiss this because they think it’s somehow about “illegals.”

I can understand how people might feel that way, especially with the ongoing threat of terrorism. But I think it would be mistaken in this case. The use of force really does seem to have been completely uncalled for:

Democracy Now has this account of a police attack on what looks to have been a peaceful immigration rally in LA. Apparently, there was also an incident in Detroit. Here are some excerpts:

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

Amy Goodman:

In Los Angeles, an afternoon immigrant rights march ended when police fired dozens of rubber bullets and tear gas into the peaceful crowd. Families with young children were forced to flee for their safety. Eyewitnesses said police gave little or no warning before firing the rubber bullets….

For the second year in a row, May Day featured a massive display of solidarity for immigrant rights in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country. Marches were held in cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Denver, Milwaukee, Phoenix and New York……….Although the May Day events went off mostly without incident, one major confrontation took place in Los Angeles.An evening protest was disrupted when police fired rubber bullets and teargas at thousands gathered in MacArthur Park. LAPD officials said protesters had thrown plastic bottles and other projectiles. Protest organizers dispute the account and are demanding an independent investigation…

Jorge Mujica (journalist and union organizer, formerly of Telemundo):

One week ago, the FBI, in combination with Immigration Enforcement, sent over sixty federal agents to a shopping mall at 2:00 p.m., when mothers had just picked up their kids from school and they were doing their shopping. And these federal agents were carrying machine guns and M-16s, and they were looking for what is supposed to be a ring of fake ID dealers, you know, sellers of false IDs. Nevertheless, they handcuffed over 100 people. They made them sit on the floor. But they detained 160 people for a couple hours, and then they just let them go, because they knew exactly what they were looking for. They didn’t need to arrest anybody else or detain anybody else…….

Angelica Salas (executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, LA):

We voluntarily cut our program at 6:30. We had our permit that would go until 9:00. We cut it. We made sure that people — we told people to start leaving the park slowly, not to run, with their children.I stayed towards the end, and what I saw was, instead of isolating a problem group, they pushed them into the crowd.

They started shooting rubber bullets into a crowd of just innocent people. I was caught in the middle of all of this, as we were trying to send people out, had to cover a mother with some children….

…There were several members of the media who were actually hurt, who were hospitalized, especially, I think, our friends from Telemundo..

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My Comment:

The LA event seems to have drawn far fewer people than last year’s, only some 25,000, compared to 650,ooo in 2006. That’s really not a lot.And the police conceded that the crowd behaved peacefully, blaming some minor rock or bottle throwing, that seems to have instigated the police response and has been blamed on a few “anarchist” elements.

(For some reason, anarchists are always depicted as wild-eyed bomb-throwers right out of Dostoevsky).

Leaving that aside for the moment, as well as the whole vexed business of immigration — even though I know it’s one of the most important domestic issues today, notice how uncritical reporting sets up a false equivalence between unarmed civilians throwing plastic bottles or rocks and armed policemen responding with plastic bullets.

Actually, plastic bullets are quite capable of killing or maiming. But because they sound so innocuous, they’re likely to be used a lot more indiscriminately and with less criticism from the press.

This kind of non-lethal (a more accurate term would be semi-lethal) weaponry was developed in the 90’s under the Clinton administration. And the purpose was to shore up the US position in the post Cold War world. That is, non-lethal weapons initiatives came out of military and strategic imperatives. Only, now they’re being redirected at the domestic population.

That’s not a wild-eyed anarchist speculation, either. I’m drawing from memos penned by none other than the Pentagon.

(By the way, I will try to post something on other effective ways of dispersing or controlling a crowd, which would not leave permanent injuries. Obviously, there are many instances when police are within their rights to intervene).

Now, here’s the memo (I found it in the footnotes of my Abu Ghraib book, on p. 202 — and that is a plug (chuckle):

” A memorandum written by no less than Paul Wolfowitz to Dick Cheney states, ” A U.S. lead in nonlethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post Cold War world. Our Research and Development efforts must be increased.,” Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, memorandum to the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, subject: “Do We Need a Non-lethal Defense Initiative?”

More on the subject from the website of the Federation of American Scientists” Project on Government Secrecy:
“March 30, 1991.

Overcoming Non-lethal Weapons Secrecy

“As the Defense Department program to develop so-called “non- lethal weapons” gathers momentum, Pentagon officials are tightening controls on public information about the program accordingly.

Late last year, Greenpeace submitted a FOIA request for a copy of one of the early policy documents in this field, a 1991 memorandum from Under Secretary of Defense (Policy) Paul Wolfowitz entitled

“Do We Need a Nonlethal Defense Initiative?”

The Pentagon denied the request in its entirety on May 3, claiming that the memo was “deliberative in nature” and therefore exempt from the FOIA.

But unauthorized disclosures of government information are growing almost as fast as the secrecy system itself, and Greenpeace was able to obtain a copy of the document through unofficial channels.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the memo are the comments handwritten in the margin apparently by then-DepSecDef Donald Atwood who noted that “non-lethality may be a misnomer.” And where Wolfowitz had indicated that “Nonlethal weapons disable or destroy without causing significant injury or damage,” Atwood wrote: “This claims too much.”

A copy of the memo is available from S&GB.

Jumping on the rhetorical bandwagon, the Air Force and the Energy Department are advertising a new nuclear weapon concept as “non-lethal.” The proposed High Power Radio Frequency concept is a “non-lethal, ICBM-delivered, and nuclear-driven device intended to damage electronics and/or electrical components.” (Energy and Water Development Appropriations for 1995, Part 6, House Appropriations Comm, page 494).”

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There’s a lot more stuff on the site worth reading.

My Comment:

Here, I am going to brag a little…you’ll have to excuse me. No sense having a blog if I can’t do that once in a while:

While I was finishing up my book at the end of 2004 (it was published only the next year, by the way — that’s publishing for you), I’d already noticed this memo. I was hunting for direct links between Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and the torture policy at the time — which I did find, and which showed up on the web after an FOIA request from the ACLU got the government files all out in the open.

But, this DOD memo only really seems to have got real public attention in 2006, two years later. These days, of course, a whole lot more people are alarmed by the police state issues involved and have begun to see what it means to have an official policy of torture while the government is also busy dismantling the constitution.

Ah well… (sigh)…we bloggers content ourselves with doing the dirty work ahead of the crowd and watching, gratefully but somewhat cynically, as people jump on board after the fact.

Crowd behavior — it runs every aspect of our lives. The herd is in us, as Nietzsche recognized.

Solzhenitsyn: What Intellectuals Need

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“There is not a way left to us to pass from our present contemptible amorphousness into the future except through open, personal and predominantly public (to set an example) sacrifice. We all have to “rediscover our cultural treasures and values” not by erudition, not by scientific accomplishment, but by our form of spiritual conduct.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Smatterers,” from Under the Rubble, p. 273 (author’s italics).

Guns forbidden to those deemed dangerous or treated involuntarily for mental illness

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AP April 30, 2007

Story Highlights

• Database lists people barred from busing guns
• List would include anyone ordered to undergo mental health treatment
• Virginia Tech gunman was treated as an outpatient
• Court finding that shooter was a danger never made it into database
RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) — Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said Monday he has closed the loophole that allowed a mentally disturbed Virginia Tech student to acquire the guns he used to kill 32 students and faculty members.

Kaine issued an executive order requiring that a database of people who are prohibited from buying guns include anyone found to be dangerous and ordered to undergo involuntary mental health treatment.

Seung-Hui Cho had been ordered by a court to undergo psychiatric counseling after a judge ruled that he was a danger to himself.

But because Cho was treated as an outpatient and never committed to a mental health hospital, the court finding never made it into the database that gun dealers must check before selling a firearm. The law prohibits selling firearms to people judged to have mental disabilities.

“Whether that treatment is to be provided in an inpatient or outpatient facility is of no moment,” Kaine said.

Cho did not disclose his mental health problems or the court-ordered treatment in a form he completed before buying the guns.

“His lie on the form would have been caught,” had the order been in place before Cho attempted to buy the guns, Kaine said.

But it would not prevent Cho from acquiring guns by several other means that require no background check in Virginia, including buy-and-trade publications, individual transactions among gun collectors or hobbyists, and gun shows — vast firearms bazaars where scores of people sell or swap firearms.

Legislation that would also subject firearms sales at gun shows to instant background checks is introduced annually in Virginia, and just as often it dies without reaching a floor vote in the General Assembly.

Kaine, a Democrat, has said he expects new support for the legislation this year and that he would support it, as he has in the past.

The executive order does not apply to people who seek mental health care of their own will. After the report is added to Virginia’s state police database, it becomes part of a federal database that gun dealers nationwide use.

Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior described as a troubled loner, bought his guns legally through gun shops before gunning down 32 people on campus, then killing himself.

No motive has been established for his rampage.

Jefferson On Compromise In Public Debate

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“Every man cannot have his way in all things. If his opinion prevails at some times, he should acquiesce on seeing that of others preponderate at other times. Without this mutual disposition we are disjointed individuals, but not a society.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Dickinson, 1801. FE 8:76

A Response to Wolf From Jewcy

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Wolf’s piece drew this acerbic response from Joey Kurtzman:

I am including it here on the basis of Kurtzman’s confession to libertarian tendencies, and because I thought it was funny and well-written, although ultimately evasive. Even if Wolf is not right on every point or even particularly insightful from a historical viewpoint, she nevertheless voices that sense of rottenness-in-the-state- of-Denmark that hangs pretty thick in the air right now, no matter whom you blame for it.

American Fascism in Ten Hysterical Steps: Naomi Wolf in the Guardian:

During the six years I was marooned in the British Isles, I became, by necessity, an amateur taxonomist, like those dilettante Victorian naturalists who poked around looking for new types of dung beetles or butterflies. I wasn’t after dung beetles, though; I was cataloguing the diverse forms of obeisance with which American liberals try to elicit the condescending approval of Europeans, that sublime reassurance that “You, you’re not quite like most Americans, are you? You’re rather…European.”

I lovingly collected my specimens, and identified the occasional species—for example, Declinatio pessumus absurdus (Kurtzman, 2003), the warbly faux-British intonation with which the American Europhile triumphantly peppers the end of any sentence in which he’s asking a question. Or the dreaded Fellatio iratus michaelmooricus (Kurtzman, 2003), which sees the disgruntled American lecturing his European hosts on the exquisite sophistication of their own culture, and the hopeless barnyard vulgarity of American culture.

But every so often I would be so mesmerized by some virtuoso performance, some unclassifiable peacock display of American self-loathing, that I’d pine for a systematizing genius, a sociological Linnaeus who would catalogue the entire fauna of overseas American life and just hand me the multi-volume taxonomy necessary to describe the whole writhing ecosystem…

Read more at Jewcy.com.

My Comment:

Yes, Wolf could have been more precise. But sometimes intellectual rigor is not a substitute for moral intuition. I offer this from Orwell, writing here about James Burnham (whose influential work described the inevitable ascendance of a managerial class in both fascist and socialist states that would make the two virtually indistinguishable):

“One cannot always make positive prophecies, but there are times when one ought to be able to make negative ones. No one could have been expected to foresee the exact results of the Treaty of Versailles, but millions of thinking people could and did foresee that those results would be bad. Plenty of people, though not so many in this case, can foresee that the results of the settlement now being forced on Europe will also be bad. And to refrain from admiring Hitler or Stalin – that, too, should not require an enormous intellectual effort. But it is partly a moral effort. That a man of Burnham’s gifts should have been able for a while to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order shows, what damage is done to the sense of reality by the cultivation of what is now called ‘realism’. “