Reflections on a Bloody Season

Every Day is A Precious Gift

'Tis the season of suicidal, mass murderers.  The latest is the murder of hundreds in Sri Lanka, mostly Christians, gathering together to worship God and His Christ on Easter Sunday morning.  In this case, the perps have been declared to be Islamists.

In New Zealand just over a month ago, there were 50 dead at the hands of one murderer.  The dead were Muslims, peacefully gathered for religious services on a Friday morning.  The perp was a solitary malefactor, twisted into such a mess that he (apparently) believed murdering Islamic men, women and children was somehow a righteous thing to do.  In his case, he believed he had a bunch of  anonymous cheerleaders on the dark web who would celebrate his courageous deeds.

It seems reasonable to expect that within another few weeks there will be another mass killing of innocents at the hands of vulpine murderers.  'Tis the season.

Secularists and atheists appear to join with every body else in condemning such an evil.  We are not sure why since their secularist religion has no ultimate truth--no "Thou shalt not kill".  As Sartre once put it, if the existentialist is driving down the road and a pedestrian steps out in front, it is an entirely neutral or irrelevant as to whether the existentialist chooses to avoid the pedestrian or accelerates to run him over.  When there is no ultimate meaning, life is cheap.  Thus the recent mass murderers have displayed their faith.

The Next Iteration

Did the New Zealand Shooter Change the Cultural Script?

By David French
National Review Online


In livestreaming the massacre, he may have created the next innovation in the mass-killing contagion.
As the number of massacres mounts, the best explanation for the never-ending stream of copycat killers, both here and abroad, remains the one articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his seminal article on school shootings, called “Thresholds of Violence.” Essentially, he argues that each mass shooting lowers the “threshold” for the next, and inspiration matters — a lot.

Gladwell’s focus was on school shootings, and he does an effective job of demonstrating the way the Columbine killers laid down a “cultural script” for subsequent school shooters. In fact, subsequent shooters often imitated the Columbine killers so much that their own shootings were essentially “versions” of the Columbine attack.

If you translate this analysis to the horrific New Zealand massacre, you can see similar patterns emerge. The New Zealand suspect allegedly called out previous mass shooters, such as the Charleston church shooter, and even apparently went so far as to pay tribute to mass killers by name on his magazines, including the Quebec mosque killer. Note that two of the individuals he highlighted slaughtered innocent people in houses of worship. To an extent, his crime was a version of theirs.

But here’s the thing that is even more disturbing than the simple, horrifying fact that this depraved man killed 49 people. Here’s the thing that’s more disturbing than his apparent copycat killing: He livestreamed the act, and in so doing he not only made millions of people direct witnesses to the slaughter, he may well have created the next innovation in the mass-killing contagion. He may well have written a new cultural script.

Of course the New Zealand killer is not the first person to film his own horrible crime.

"Pity is Treason"

The Jacobins and Their Influence Upon the West

The term Jacobin refers to an extreme political radical.  The Jacobins were part of a political club in Paris, established in 1789.  They were both ruthless and radical.  They took over the French Revolution and were responsible for the Reign of Terror where hundreds of thousands of people were killed, many via execution.

The Jacobins have been imitated by many  in following centuries.  Philosopher John Gray provides a brief description and summary:

The Jacobins form the clearest link between medieval millenarians and twentieth-century revolutionary movements.  The French reign of terror was more than an 'aristocide' of the privileged classes.  As would be the case later in Bolshevik Russia, the largest numbers of casualties by far were common people. . . . Around a third of the population perished in the region, where the methods of repression used by the revolutionary forces included burning crops, razing villages and mass drowning. 

The human cost of the French Revolution runs into hundreds of thousands of lives.  Producing leaders such as Maximilien Robespierre, who as a member of the Committee for Public Safety orchestrated the execution of around 20,000 enemies of the Revolution in Paris and was himself guillotined in 1794, the Jacobins acted on the maxim--formulated by Robespierre himself in a speech to the National Assembly--"Pity is treason."  [John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism (London: Penguin/Random House UK, 2018),  p.78.]

Alexis de Tocqueville points out that the Jacobins and the French Revolution became a new kind of religion.  Like Islamism, "it inundated the earth with soldiers, apostles and martyrs".  Gray adds that the Jacobins adopted their own secular forms of worship; they offered a glorious future life in an imaginary earthly paradise. 

In the twentieth century they were followed and imitated by Fascism and Communism. 

The modernist world sowed to the wind.  It inherited the whirlwind.  We are still living with the consequences.  It is not too far a stretch to see the Christchurch mass-murderer as a latter day Jacobin in action.  Robespierre's curse is still  bearing its poisoned fruit: "pity is treason". 

Minutes of Silence

15th of March, 2019

In New Zealand we are not used to acts of mass murder.  But it has come to pass. 

May God have mercy upon us all. 

The Murder of Citizens

Two Hundred and Sixty-Two Million

We recently came across the site of Professor R. J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii.  His most recent book is Death by Government.

The focus of his life's work has been the role of governments in the death of civilians.  According to the website, Professor Rummel's brief bio is as follows:

Wrote about two-dozen books and over 100 professional articles. Most recent books: Death By Government(Transaction Publications, 1994), The Miracle That Is Freedom (Martin Institute for Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Idaho, 1996), Power Kills (Transaction Publications, 1997), and Statistics of Democide (Center for National Security Law, 1997).

Through his undergraduate term papers, MA Thesis, Ph.D. dissertation, and academic career, R.J. Rummel has focused his research on the causes and conditions of collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. He published his major results in Understanding Conflict and War, Vols. 1-5 (Sage Publications, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, and 1981). His conclusion was that "To eliminate war, to restrain violence, to nurture universal peace and justice, is to foster freedom (liberal democracy)." Given the supreme importance of this conclusion published in 1981, Rummel then spent the next fifteen years refining the underlying theory and testing it empirically on new data, against the empirical results of others, and on case studies (as in his Death By Government). All this theoretical, empirical, and comparative research is documented in his final work, Power Kills, nominated for the 1998 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Power Kills sums up Rummel's research on violence and reaffirms and extends his earlier work. In theory and fact, democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other; the more democratic two regimes, the less likely violence between them; the more democratic a regime, the less its overall foreign violence; and the more democratic a regime, the less its genocide and mass murder (which in this century has killed about four times the battle dead of all its foreign and domestic wars).

According to his research, he argues that the twentieth century was an exceedingly bloody affair with governments being responsible for the death of 262 million citizens.  (Note--this does not include death through war.) The deadly table below says it all

The Nameless Dead

Backward Elements

The year is 1933.  Peasants in the Soviet Union were being re-located from the West into Siberia.  The Grand Chessmaster had decreed that they be sent East to populate the barren wastes of the frozen tundra.  They were being sent to the island of Nazino, in the Ob River.

The island of Nazino is a totally uninhabited place, devoid of any settlements . . . . There were no tools, no grain, and no food.  That is how their new life began.  The day after the arrival of the first convoy, on 19 May, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked up.  Starving, emaciated from months of insufficient food, without shelter and without tools . . . they were trapped.  They weren't even able to light fires to ward off the cold.  More and more of them began to die . . .

On the first day, 295 people were buried.  It was only on the fourth or fifth day after the convoy's arrival on the island that the authorities sent a bit of flour by boat, really no more than a few pounds per person.  Once they had received their meagre ration, people ran to the edge of the water and tried to mix some of the flour with water in their hats, their trousers or their jackets.  Most of them just tried to eat it straight off, and some of them even choked to death.  These tiny amounts of flour were the only food that the deportees received during the entire period of their stay on the island . . . . [Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),  p.88.]

When people are murdered, the Bible speaks of their blood crying out from the ground to the Living God.  [Genesis 4:10].  Two hundred and ninety five nameless, unknown-to-us people died that first day.  Unknown to us; known to God.  Their lifeblood still cries to Him.

But this black day was just the beginning.

Humanity's Greatest Threat

The Long Trail of Mass Murder

Nah.  It's all good, mate.  At least when it comes to violence and oppression of human beings, the Leftists amongst us are willing to excuse a good deal.  Their view, shall we say, is somewhat selective.

It's not that the Left ignores violence.  Rather, by means of a vast distorting prism, the Left sees violence as something that only occurs on the Right.  The Right, of course, means Fascism, Nazism, Hitlerism, and so forth.  If anyone is on the Right, by definition they are a closet Nazi.  Punch them hard enough and they will go on to prove it.  They will end up putting people in gas chambers.

However, a survey of totalitarian ideologies which have emerged in the Modern Period shows that by far and away the greatest totalitarian monstrosities have been Leftist.

Worse Than the Slave Trade

Planned Parenthood Jokes About Decapitating Babies in New Video

By Bradford Richardson
The Washington Times

Planned Parenthood executives joked about decapitated fetuses, admitted to altering abortion procedures to preserve fetal organs and said clinics have a financial incentive to sell human tissue in a new undercover video released Thursday.  The three-minute video was recorded at an annual National Abortion Federation meeting by pro-life investigators with the Center for Medical Progress.  The advocacy group said it’s just a preview of never-before-seen content that has been sealed for almost two years due to legal fights.

In the video, Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, admits to altering abortion procedures to preserve fetal organs.  “You know, sometimes she’ll tell me she wants brain, and we’ll, you know, leave the calvarium till last, and then try to basically take it or, actually, you know, catch everything, and even keep it separate from the rest of the tissue so it doesn’t get lost,” Ms. Nucatola says.

Also, Deb VanDerhei, national director of Planned Parenthood’s Consortium of Abortion Providers, admits that some clinics are motivated to sell fetal tissue for profit.

Darkness of the Soul

Dutch Champion Legal Murder

Thomas Williams
Breitbart London

A Dutch physician who had family members restrain a struggling woman so she could administer a lethal injection has been cleared of wrongdoing by a review board.

Without consulting the patient, the doctor put a sleep-inducing drug into the woman’s coffee in order to give her the injection, but then the woman woke up and reportedly “fought desperately” to free herself. At this point, family members were summoned to hold the woman down so that the procedure could be completed.

The woman, who was in her 80s and suffered from dementia, had signed an advance directive to be killed “at the right time” though she had not ratified the request recently. According to case documents, she occasionally exhibited “fear and anger” and several times had been found wandering around the nursing home where she was living.

Medical records revealed that the patient had said “I don’t want to die” several times in the days leading up to her death, yet the doctor chose not to speak with her about her earlier request to receive euthanasia.

Weighing Up the Evidence

Not a Jihadi, but A Narcissistic Murderer 

While the "fog" of war continues to blanket France, early indications are that the Nice truck murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a "lone wolf", angry, vengeful, and disturbed and not a jihadi.

There are superficial connections with Islam and terrorism: he lived in an Islamic area of Nice, he was Tunisian, therefore brought up within the Islamic fold.  But at this point the connections with jihadism become tenuous.

The Guardian provides an early, yet reasonable account:

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old delivery driver and father, was shot dead by police after killing 84 people, including 10 children and teenagers, and injuring scores more in a deadly Bastille Day rampage .  Despite a criminal record which saw him convicted for the first time in March this year, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not known by French or Tunisian officials to have links to terrorist organisations and was said by neighbours to have had little apparent interest in religion.

Echoing the remarks of French officials, security sources in Tunisia said he was not known by the Tunisian authorities to hold radical or Islamist views.

The perpetrator appears to have been a secularised Muslim, whose commitment to Muhammad was nominal only.

Letter From America (Ouch . . . )

The Other Side of the Coin

Blogger Patterico turns the tables on the NY Times over the matter of the Orlando Mass Murderer.

The Corrosive Politics of the New York Times Editorial Board That Led to the Orlando Shooting

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:59 am

The New York Times editorial board is blaming the Orlando shooting on Republicans:

While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.

To the contrary: the precise motivation for the attack is quite clear, actually. John Sexton explains: