SPENGLER Terror and school shootings sides
of same coin By Spengler
Consider two situations. First, a madman
kills 20 schoolchildren in America for unexplained
reasons. Second, Muslim terrorists kill 22
children in Israel (at Ma'alot in 1974), or 186
children at Beslan in the Russian Caucusus in
2004, for clearly stated reasons. What do they
have in common?
The suicidal jihadi is the
Doppelganger of the angst-ridden Westerner.
The jihadi attempts to reconstruct a faux version
of a
traditional society that
cannot survive the bright light of modernity; the
Westerner seeks distractions from the
inevitability of death. What the jihadi does in
practice, the jaded West does in its imagination -
and occasionally in real life.
Slaughter of innocents is
commonplace in many Muslim countries. In this
morning's news, we hear that 10 Afghan girls were
killed by a roadside bomb, and that 27 Iraqis were
killed by bombs near Mosul. The National
Counterterrorism Center counts 79,766 terror
attacks from 2004 through 2011, with 111,774
killed and 228,317 wounded. It does not report how
many of the dead and injured were children.
Why
are so many Muslims willing to kill themselves and
others? It is an expression of cultural despair.
Muslim civilization is disintegrating under the
onset of modernity, as I argued in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and
Why Islam is Dying, Too). The encroaching
sense of social death motivates the most horrific
sort of acts.
What kind of mind could walk
into an elementary school and shoot 20 young
children to death? Whatever it was that motivated
the Sandy Hook killer, he had something in common
with the Chechnyan and Arab terrorists who
systematically murdered 186 school children during
the 2004 Beslan massacre. That probably was the
single most horrific act since the downfall of
National Socialism.
The slaughter of children is
sufficiently rare in the West that it overwhelms
us with horror and grief. There have been five
school shootings in Europe during the past 10
years with 10 or more dead, and two in the United
States - the 2007 Virginia Tech incident and the
Sandy Hook shootings. Despite its much stricter
gun control, Europe has been the scene of more
mass school killings than the United States. We
Americans would be fooling ourselves to think that
stricter gun laws would help.
Meanwhile, we in the West
suppurate in imagined mass killings. The only
surprising thing is that we are surprised when the
fantasy turns into reality in the case of a
deranged individual. The horror genre consumes a
tenth of Hollywood's total output of films and
television programs. The zombie apocalypse, with
its images of repetitive killing, is the subject
of the most-popular cable series ever, AMC's The Walking Dead.
And
that doesn't count the action films whose main
content is the mowing down of numerous assailants
by a heavily armed hero. We should not be
surprised at incidents like the Sandy Hook horror.
We should be surprised, instead, that deranged
individuals do not cross the line between fantasy
mass killing with greater frequency.
Why
does the West wallow in images of death - not
merely death, but death in massive doses, in the
form of zombie armies of the walking dead? Jihadi
atrocities and mass murders in the West do not
occur in different worlds. On September 11, 2001,
the horror of Muslim despair broke into American
consciousness. As I wrote on the 10th anniversary
of the attack (How the hijackers changed
American culture, Asia Times Online, September
8, 2011), the popularity of horror films increased
sharply after 9/11, from one in 25 in 2000 to one
in 10 in 2009. During the 1930s, the proportion
was only one in 200.
Earlier this year, I wrote :
We have
dismissed the Jewish and Christian hope of
eternal life as superstition offensive to
reason, but instead, we find ourselves trapped
in a recurring nightmare. We know that we will
die, but (as Woody Allen said) we don't want to
be there when it happens. We act as if exercise,
antioxidants and Botox will keep the reaper
away, but we know that our flesh one day must
putrefy nonetheless. The more we try to ignore
death, the more it fascinates us. The more we
tell ourselves that mortality doesn't apply to
us, the more it surrounds us. And the more we
try to fight off the fear, the more we feel like
the beleaguered survivors resisting the zombie
herd. (Zombies remind us that
death is social, Asia Times Online, May 15,
2012.)
Nothing horrifies more than
the murder of children. It is not only that all
children are beautiful in their own way, and that
their innocence testifies to something inherently
good in humankind. Children are our future. We
know that we will die, and we hope that something
will remain of our time on earth after we die.
Otherwise our lives will have no ultimate meaning.
Man's much-discussed search
for meaning is a search for enduring meaning. The
murder of children is the ultimate rejection of
life, for it destroys our hope to bringing meaning
to our own lives. Among the pool of prospective
suicides, there is a small but disturbing number
who not only wish to destroy their own life, but
life in general. These are the candidates for mass
killings.
Enlightened secular culture
tells us that the brain is a machine, albeit a
very sophisticated one, that ultimately will be
decoded by the neuroscientists; that sin and
salvation were sad imaginings of our ignorant
ancestors; that the soul is an illusion of
flickering neural impulses; that human life has
nothing more to offer than fleshly satisfaction
combined with a random sense of idiosyncratic
spirituality; that our choices of lifestyle are
ultimately arbitrary, such that every culture,
quirk, and sexual subculture has equal rights to
social esteem; that there is nothing sacred to
human sexuality, such that we may enjoy our
partner's bodies; that the only truth is that
there is no truth; and that we are all one our own
to seek whatever meaning we might eke out of the
chaos. That is a
prescription for despair, and to counteract the
effects of postmodern despair we consume vast
amounts antidepressants, tranquilizers and
narcotics. Eleven percent of Americans take
antidepressants, the most-prescribed drug in the
US.
If it were not for the
residue of Judeo-Christian faith, a great many
more people would go mad, and kill themselves, or
kill others around them. Most Americans still
believe in a personal God, even if their idea of
what this God might require of them might be vague
and confused. Our laws, institutions and common
civility derive from this heritage of faith.
Our
civilization is not doomed by modernity. To a
great extent, our civilization is what made
modernity in the first place. We have good reason
for optimism. Nonetheless, despair is gaining
ground. The fantasy-world of our young people
revolves around objects of horror: zombies,
vampires, werewolves, demons, not to mention human
mass killers. What people do in fantasy, they also
can do in reality. We should be afraid - very
afraid.
Constitutionally, it is easier for
Americans to censor film violence than to restrict
the possession of firearms. There is a
constitutional guarantee of the right to bear
arms, but no such guarantee of the right to splash
rivers of fake blood across movie screens. That is
a matter of judicial interpretation of the First
Amendment. Censorship of violence might or might
not survive court challenges, but it is time to
make a stand.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman,
president of Macrostrategy LLC. His book How
Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery
Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on
culture, religion and economics, It's Not the
End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared recently,
from Van Praag Press.
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