Page 1 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The world and Virginia
Tech By John Brown
Americans rushed to unite in horror and
mourning in response to the mass killings at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University in Blacksburg in a way we haven't seen
since, perhaps, the attacks on the US of September
11, 2001. Where I live, in Washington, DC,
residents are already sporting their Virginia Tech
ribbons and sweatshirts, the way so many Americans
once donned those "I (heart) New York" caps and
T-shirts. While media coverage has been around the
clock and fast-paced, if not
downright hysterical - as is
now the norm on all such American-gothic
occasions, from O J Simpson's car chase on - the
framing and contextualizing of the
massacre/suicide at Virginia Tech have been narrow
indeed.
As a former diplomat, educated to
see the world through others' eyes, I couldn't
help thinking about how the rest of our small
planet might be taking in the Blacksburg tragedy.
Despite the negligible coverage of overseas
opinion about this event in the mainstream US
media, there did appear one comprehensive overview
of how foreigners reacted to the killings - a
Molly Moore piece in the Washington Post.
"Nowhere, perhaps," Moore wrote, "were
foreign reactions to the Virginia shooting more
impassioned than in Iraq, where many residents
blame the United States for the daily killings in
their schools, streets and markets. 'It is a
little incident if we compare it with the
disasters that have happened in Iraq,' said Ranya
Riyad, 19, a college student in Baghdad. 'We are
dying every day.'"
Given my own 20-plus
years in the US foreign service, on occasions like
this I find myself looking at my own country from
a non-American perspective. I must confess that,
when I first saw psychopathic mass murderer Cho
Seung-Hui's photographs of himself savagely
pointing a gun at the camera, I was reminded not
only of the violent images in our popular culture,
but also of President George W Bush and his wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the
thrust of his whole foreign policy.
Indeed, for others on our globe, mass
murder in Iraq, scenes of degradation from Abu
Ghraib, Central Intelligence Agency
extraordinary-rendition expeditions, and the US
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have already
become synonymous with the US government and the
president; so it would not be surprising if Cho's
actions and Bush's foreign policy were linked in
the minds of people outside the United States. I
see several reasons that, for non-Americans, a mad
student and our commander-in-chief could appear to
be two sides of the same all-American coin.
First, as his own writings and evidence
from his Virginia Tech classmates attest, Cho felt
unloved. A thread running through his
psychological profile is that he believed the
world was after him. Many abroad will remember
how, in the wake of the New York World Trade
Center tragedy, the Bush administration
immediately began obsessing about "why they hate
us" (whoever "they" might specifically be).
Despite the sympathy the president, as the
representative of the American people, received
from every corner of the Earth - similar in some
ways to the fruitless support efforts teachers and
doctors gave Cho for his mental problems - Bush,
responding only to the hate he saw under every
nook and cranny, chose to react with what many
overseas considered disproportionate violence.
To begin with, there was the invasion of
Afghanistan. Foreigners (and perhaps some
Americans) might think of it as comparable, though
on a far larger scale, to Cho's first foray into
killing, his early-morning murder of two people, a
young woman he apparently felt had slighted him
and a young man who evidently happened on the
scene. In each case, there was then a pause while
elaborate propaganda was mustered, organized, and
sent off to the public to justify the acts to
come. In Cho's case, what followed was his final
rampage when the deranged English major
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