Home » Placing blame: thoughts on the first anniversary of Beslan

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Placing blame: thoughts on the first anniversary of Beslan — 10 Comments

  1. Displacement. Exactly. What fun you could have listing the standard defense mechanisms and drawing examples from current affairs. Intellectualization? Projection? Rationalization? We’ve got ’em all.

  2. About evil:
    Amos Oz has a good piece in the London Times on the existence of good and evil and the loss of these concepts over the last 100 or so years. Sample:

    … the modern age has … blurred the clear distinction that humanity has made since its early childhood, since the Garden of Eden. Some time in the 19th century, not so long after Goethe died, a new thinking entered western culture that brushed evil aside, indeed denied its very existence. That intellectual innovation was called social science. For the new, self-confident, exquisitely rational, optimistic, thoroughly scientific practitioners of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics – evil was not an issue. Come to think of it, neither was good. To this very day, certain social scientists simply do not talk about good and evil. To them, all human motives and actions derive from circumstances, which are often beyond personal control. “Demons,” said Freud, “do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.” We are controlled by our social background. For about 100 years now, they have been telling us that we are motivated exclusively by economic self-interest, that we are mere products of our ethnic cultures, that we are no more than marionettes of our own subconscious.

    In other words, the modern social sciences were the first major attempt to kick both good and evil off the human stage. For the first time in their long history, good and bad were both overruled by the idea that circumstances are always responsible for human decisions, human actions and especially human suffering. Society is to blame. Painful childhood is to blame. The political is to blame. Colonialism. Imperialism. Zionism. Globalisation. What not. So began the great world championship of victimhood.

    Via .

  3. Not only were they terrorists, not only were they Muslims,

    but they were Al Qaeda connected Islamofascist Jihadis as well, as I pointed out in my article:

    http://cuanas.blogspot.com/2005/09/woman-grieves-for-her-daughter-killed.html

    And look closely at that photograph, my friends. That is the Postmodern Pieta, one of the most powerful images to have come from the War on Islamofascism.

    This war is not a War on some nebulous “terror,” it is a war against

    Islamofascict Jihadis.

    They hate Jews. They hate freedom. They seek the imposition of a worldwide totalitarian state bent on the death of any who are not like them.

    They are not unlike the Nazis. And the Beslan Massacre, perhaps the most horrifying battle in the War thus far, is testament that this is true.

    Now is no time to mince words.

  4. I’m not sure who started with the serious pussyfooting around the terms “evil” and “terrorists” (and especially using both words in the same sentence), but what’s really outrageous is that for the most part we’re letting them get away with it.

    I was grateful to see someone else taking a moment to remember Beslan.

  5. Richard said,
    “If we can control it, it’s relevant. If we can’t control it, it’s not relevant. The actual relevance is irrelevant.”

    Excellent point, and the concept extends to many other political notions. Just about everything “PC” comes to mind (e.g., the speech codes on campus), as does the idea that we should leave Iraq immediately (the “out now” folks) without discussing the horror that would follow (for all who worked with us and many others).

  6. Charles Johnson at LGF pointed out that the incident at Beslan was a “tragedy” that just happened. Somehow. Like a hurricane.

    Anything that the West does is human action, and can be judged, and the agents held accountable. Anything done by anybody else — Muslims, Third World People, “brown people”, drug addicts, poor people, etc. — is like an act of God, like the wind, like the weather; it just happens. The results make us sad and we grieve, but it’s not like we can do anything about it.

  7. When faced with a serious difficulty, we naturally prefer to try to manage that relevant factor we can control.
    When there are no relevant factors we can control, some start to believe that a factor that we can control is relevant.

    Hence the emphasis on Israel’s actions in the ME. We can’t control those crazy Arabs, so we put undue emphasis on the importance of the only factor we can control.

    We can’t control nature so we put undue emphasis on the government because we can control that.
    We, not in Louisiana, can’t control Louisiana’s government, or New Orleans’, so we naturally believe that the federal government, which we feel we can control, has major relevance.

    We can’t get too mad at Ray Nagin because he’s black or at Gov. Blanco because she’s a woman and she might cry.

    That leaves Bush, whom half the country dislikes anyway, as a factor we can control, or at least condemn, as the only factor we can consider relevant.

    If we can control it, it’s relevant. If we can’t control it, it’s not relevant. The actual relevance is irrelevant.

    Naturally, this is a point of view that ought to go away about age eight. Those whose adolescence is extended, in some cases to senescence, continue to believe this.

    IMO, although I wish few people ill, being exposed to catastrophe with no help available might be a sovereign cure. That would be sort of like life was for almost everybody up until about a hundred years ago.

    One poster said the folks not evacuated did nothing for themselves because they were “project people” selected over decades for lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. Their adolescence–actually younger that adolescence–had been extended by society.
    Good work, society.

    There is an enormous number of factors to share in the blame. But only those we think we can control will be blamed.
    Can anybody blame the levee boards and their graft and stalling and patronage? Hell, no. It’s barely possible to understand them, much less blame them.
    And so, so forth.

  8. Those Chechen terrorists who perpetrated the Beslan massacre were Muslims and that is a fact whether people ignore it or not. They were murderers who killed innocent people in a school.

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