[image:Standing Watch, 2008, JA Van Devender]
"But there was enough in America already to alienate young men like Adam Lanza, Dylan Klebold and all the other mass murderers in recent history. There are enough weapons to kill anyone you want, and a madman can always find an excuse for murder if he looks for one."
[Oliver Bullough, Op Ed, New York Times, 20 April 2013, "Beslan Meets Columbine"]
On the whole the Op Ed piece is not entirely without merit. His review of the Chechen refugee issues and despair is well worth reading. If he had left it there I would have had nothing but praise for the piece. But he simply couldn't bring himself to do so. Somehow the actions taken by these young men had to be justified. Therefore he had to take a swipe at the US before he ended it.
It is not politically correct these days to talk very much about the whole Chechneyan situation... it is an awkward data point that progressive liberalism has trouble explaining. After all, we have been "nice" there and the Russians should have seen the light years ago and given these people their liberty. It's much easier to talk about Israel and Palestine because, you see, Israel is being unfair in their demands for autonomy, full recognition as a state and defensible borders. Since Israel has maintained its existence pretty much depending on its special relation with the US then it makes it easy for progressives to see that we are really the ones who bear responsibility for it and the Palestinian disgust with America is justified.
But Chechneya? It's tough for a liberal to understand how the prima facie case there can be warped in such a way as to justify terrorist attacks on the USA. There must be something wrong with us.... something that we have done to cause this.
But there isn't, at least not apparently. The "radical Islam" idea is just as politically incorrect also for that would indicate a compelling motivation to jihad which would bring every Muslim under suspicion. We just can't have that.
So, all that was left, was to dump these young men into the pot with the other "crazies" who have committed mass murder recently, brand them all as "madmen" searching for an "excuse for murder", throw out a glancing blow at the "easy access to weapons" [here I assume the writer is now linking the ready availability of pressure cookers to the current worry about assault rifles], shake the dust off your feet and move on. Such is the selective vision that governs much of what passes for analysis these days.
In a previous posting ("A State of War Exists...") I urged us to come to grips with the harsh reality that is the modern hypertense world situation. The United States is no longer a country isolated by two oceans although geographically they remain in place. We no longer are separated from the events of the Middle East or Chechnya. When people, anywhere, are faced with bleak despair, oppression, systematic brutality, they are motivated in two fundamental ways. They want to run and they want to lash out. The United States, by its very prosperity and essential "peace", takes on symbolic status. It becomes viewed, with some justification, as a people who sit by and concentrate only on themselves while the rest of the world suffers. It's like those "rubber-neckers" who drive by an auto accident and slow down to look (itself an infuriating tendency) and having satisfied their morbid curiosity, click their tongues and accelerate away. If someone is lying along the road and no one stops, that person would be pretty angry at those who drive away. It is not too far a stretch to see how a Chechnyan could view us that way.
I do not agree that this is absolutely true. What I am saying is that this world is in more of an organic, interlocking state than has ever existed during the history of mankind. What happened in Boston is just an outworking of that circumstance.
Lumping people who commits acts of terror in with other certified lunatics (Newtown) is demonstrating an essential unwillingness on the part of some to admit that the more we achieve stability and domestic prosperity in this country, the more we will become symbolically an object of rage for those who suffer apart from those things. There is now (Radical Islam), and there has always been (Communism, Facism, Nazism), and there will most likely always be, ideologies which will furnish a framework justifying horrible crimes which express the underlying passion for revenge.
Progressive's, because of their axiomatic dependence on the idea of the essential goodness of man and his potential perfectability, will always be surprised when evil things happen to peaceful people. As Christians we need to remember that a war of ideas is a bloody thing. We have to fight it at home and abroad. At home we have to fight against the kind of wilful blindness that is evidenced in this op-ed piece, and it is prevalent everywhere. In the world we need to see geographically distant lands as neighboring communities. What happens there concerns us and concerns our Lord. Christians need to "run to" the places where tragedy happens just as those first responders "ran to" the people lying on the streets of Boston after those explosions. If we don't care... it will be noticed. If we do care... God just might use it to prevent some other child from dying back home.
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