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Terrorism?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by zeke12, Apr 17, 2007.

  1. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    I don't think he saw it that way.

    He sees himself as part of a long and illustrious line of school shooters.

    We might not understand the political motivation, but I don't know that there has to be one. There were certainly plenty of anti-establishment rantings in his writings.

    Any doubt I had that this was done primarily to inflict terror were erased when I saw the pictures of this guy pointing the gun at the camera. However crazy he was, he took time in between killing people to make sure that picture made it on television.
     
  2. JR

    JR Well-Known Member

    Zeke,
    I think I have a narrower definition of terrorism than you do.

    I don't think school shooters qualify as terrorist groups. Just fucked up psychopaths with too easy access to guns.

    Normally, a terrorist attack is part of larger strategy--and usually a political one.

    Just think of The Troubles.
     
  3. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    JR --

    I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. It is a reasonable interpretation.

    What haunts me about this question is that it is tied up in at least two very important but seldom discussed aspects of contemporary life: The power given to the naming of things and the meta-textual nature discourse and, subsequently, thought.

    As I said, it's perfectly reasonable to consider this shooter's motivation to be narcissism and his allusions to other school shootings the result of obsession or shared madness. But if we had to, couldn't we nearly as easily attribute a shared political motivation to them? Call it anarchism. A shared belief that the system, however the individual shooters define it, cannot be allowed to continue.

    And in a society where nearly everything is done in a representational manner -- that is, we have ceased to do anything without considering how it would play on television -- isn't shooting up your school a logical step forward from eating worms on Fear Factor? Paris Hilton replacing the connections with ammo? I realize this is a stretch, but then again, this guy obviously carefully considered the press coverage that would follow his actions -- to the point where said coverage might be described as his primary motivation.

    Some might feel that parsing things as such is so much academic navel-gazing, but I think it's extremely important. The United States claims to be engaged in a worldwide war on "Terror" and, as such, how the term is defined becomes a tool of great political power.
     
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