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njlauren -> RE: Does it bother anyone else the Boston terrorist is 19? (4/27/2013 12:25:10 PM)
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Aswad makes valid points about use of the word evil too lightly, it is very easy when using the term to use as a label on others to be able to do evil yourself and justify it. Bush called Hussein evil, went madly marching off to a war that cost hundreds of thousands of iraqis their lives, thousands and thousands of soldiers killed, many seriously wounded and messed up for life, and at a cost of several trillion dollars that could have been used for other things....using the term evil made it easy to say "we are the good guys" and do stupid things...
The concept of evil is bad because it does say that those who commit foul acts are different from ourselves. What came out of the Holocaust, what came out of the famous "obediance to authority' experiments by Miller, was how ordinary many 'evil' people are/were, how much evil ordinary people can do. Hannah Arendt describes it as the banality of evil (she was talking about Eichmann, but it holds across the board), there were the French Functionaries who stamped the papers that sent Jews to their deaths, there were the people in Poland who after the war murdered returning the few Jews who survived the camps, blaming them for what happened during the war, there were gangs of Hungarians who killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in 1944 in a 6 month period.....
All of us are capable of it, if the right buttons are pushed, which is why it is so, so important to be careful about emotional manipulation. I am grateful that unlike after 9/11, no one assumed this was 'muslim terrorism' and went after Mosques and such, after 9/11 Sikhs (who ironically despise Islam) were killed cause they wear turbans, and the people who are doing that were doing evil as well.
On the other hand, to sit back and look at these brothers and to say you shouldn't be feeling these feelings, or declaring them evil, is also a bit off the charts. Whether the brothers could justify this or not in their own heads, few would other then psycopaths. Aswad said 9/11 was justified, but from what viewpoint? It was what happened in Boston, only on a more major scale, they choose their path to kill people, people who had done them no harm, claiming that this was 'retaltiation' for a list of ills, some real, some made up, and in the end it was a bunch of disaffected, asshole Saudis from well off families practicing what Tom Wolfe Called "Radical Chic", they were in some ways not all that unlike some of the bananas in the SLA and the Weather underground, well off kids playing at being freedom fighters and such. It doesn't make it any better to say "well, their motives make sense", 9/11 and the SLA and the Weather Underground were pointless stupidity, and this one even more so.
As far as terrorism goes, people keep wanting to try and show it is only being applied to muslims, that it is unfair, and that is bullshit. People have short memories, back in the 1970's the Puerto Rican independency group FALN was bombing places like banks, laguardia airport and the Port Authortiy bus terminal and Fraunces Tavern, and it was called Terrorism. When George Metesky back in the 50's was blowing things up, it was called a 'reign of terror', it isn't a new term.
The term terrorism itself evolved from traditional warfare, that basically said war was between the combatants, to using various tactics to cow a civilian population into submission. The two bastards in this case put together bombs that were pure terror, they were out to kill and maim innocent people simply to do that, kill and maim, and the weapons involved were specifically made to do that. Keep in mind that if they hadn't been caught, it is likely the brothers were heading to Times Square in NYC to try and the same thing. Terrorism basically says I don't think I can fight you legally or militarily, so I am going to make people pay for the pain I feel...and right then and there, they are lapsing into evil. To play around with Aswads sophistry, I will make the point that evil is a condition where you are so cut off from other people, specifically your victims, that you can't feel the pain you will be dealing upon them, that is truly what evil is. Using the term evil to describe someone else can stop you from feeling what they do, if you say "chechens must be a bunch of ignorant pissants to have created these two a-holes" and then go find a chechen family and burn their house down, you are right then stepping over into evil.
One of my objections about 'understanding the brothers' is the immediate claim that somehow they were justified in their own minds, and that makes it good, or 'someone must have done something to them' rather than looking at it as something that was in their own minds, that they cooked up. When they say he was an immigrant and felt 'isolated', the automatic corollary is that people made him feel that way, so he was justified in lashing out. It isn't that there isn't validity in that, one of the reasons that the US has had relatively little problems from their Muslim population is Muslims are a lot more integrated into US society then in let's say France or England, but it is important. On the other hand, when it becomes justification, when you say "you shouldn't call them evil, you have to understand' that is hogwash, in part because very few immigrants do what these two did.
It also takes away from the fact that both of them benefitted from society, the brother was going to college at a state school and was subsidized by the state plus he had financial aid, they both received welfare and other benefits from the state for a while (reputedly one of the reasons they were angry was the welfare benefits had been cut off). When it becomes an excuse, it is a problem, or a justification. Whether Pakistani tribesman are being killed by drones or the idiotic politics of the Middle East are part of the problem (and both are), justifications are horseshit because these exist on different levels, and what these two puddles of rat excrement did in the end had nothing to do with Peshtun people being killed, or the Palestinians, or the Chechens, it was two angry people looking for some excuse to justify their anger, because their actions were not aimed at those who did it, killing strangers automatically makes that so, because even if there was a 'guilty party' like a senator who supported Israel building new settlements at the race, these two morons weren't going for him (and note, I am not justifying political assasinations), they set out to hurt anyone they could, as many as they could, blind and in their own rage...and worse, apparently, had no remorse whatsoever afterword. If that 19 year old had shown remorse, if someone there was some sign he was bothered, I would give him hope, but what it seems is he really thinks he and his fucktard brother did something great.
It is interesting when we talk about state sponsored terrorism, and that gets difficult. People love to talk about drones, yet the target is not the people in the area, it is against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, where innocent people get killed as a result (note, I am not justifying drones). If soldiers were on the ground in the area, they would not be shooting deliberately at civilions, either. We hear a lot of state sponsored terrorism when Israel goes into the Gaza, for example, when civilians are killed, but then you find out that the Hezbollah guys hang out in residential buildings and such, because they figure it will give them cover, so which is state sponsored terrorism? The ISraeli bomb that kills civilians going after the Hezbollah guys, or the Hezbollah guys who put those people at risk?
There has been true state sponsored terrorism. The Battle oF Britain was primarily that, the Luftwaffe bombed british cities to kill civilians and hopefully terrorize them into submission, which violated what had been standard military doctrine. Likewise, the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden was terrorism, even in the guise of war, because it was designed to get civilians and demoralize them. It may have been in the guise of declared war, but it still had at its purpose going after civilians rather than true military targets.
A lot of it lies in the intent, and with Terrorism, if the target itself is people who had nothing to do with whatever you are pissed about, have no control over it, if it is designed to kill and main innocent people, it is terrorism. The right tried to defend Timothy McVeigh, that he was angry about the government oppression and so forth, and his target was' the federal government' but that is horseshit, because in doing so he was out to get people. If he had planted the bomb at night and tried to make sure people were out of the building, you might argue that, but he wanted people dead, he didn't care, because that was his whole point, to kill as many as possible, and that is terrorism. Timothy McVeigh and the Dagostanian geniuses who did the boston bombing were terrorists and they were evil, in that they commited an act of evil and had no feeling for the people they were killing.
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