Last posts on violence

Domestic Abuse, Red Card it!

2009-09-26T13:40:11+02:00

This blog is in conjunction with the Red Card Campaign on Twitter.

Scotland’s domestic abuse statistics rise by 80% after a Rangers and Celtic football match was reported by assistant Chief Constable Neilson of Strathclyde Police. During an Old Firm match serious and violent crimes can double.

After one football game back in February this year, police were called out to 185 incidents of domestic abuse- a jump of 52% compared to weekends when a match is not being played.

Assistant Chief Constable John Neilson said the force arrested more than 550 people on the day of the match - all of whom were drunk.

Officers also had to contend with a rise in the number of attempted murders, assaults, and breaches of the peace.

And such incidents have peaked during the past Old Firm showdowns during this year.

Now with the league match next Sunday at Ibrox the bigoted wife beaters need to feel the might of the football clubs. Punching the wife is a serious as punching a fan, yet a violent thug will only be refused entry to a match for fan bashing, and wife beaters will still get welcomed into the terraces. This needs to be addressed. Men who beat their partners and have been prosecuted should never be allowed into a football ground for life.

The clubs should be highlighting this situation, it can’t all be blamed on alcohol and if the clubs are seen to be doing something, it can only help.

Sectarianism has been being tackled with some success.

But thugs have basically swapped one form of abuse for another and yet again women get the brunt of their pent up frustrations.

These cowardly thugs, are restricted from bottling other football fans who wear a different coloured scarf on the streets by the police have now found an outlet for their drunken spitting hatred. They can now do their beating in private.

It is shocking to realise that women and children recognise that when their father’s favourite team gets beat, then so will they.

There has to be some sort of solution to this issue.

Police have warned pub and club owners to reinforce their responsibility towards customers and to make sure that drunks will not be served.

Booze is not always the cause for post match wife beating, it’s not as prevalent with other Scottish premier league clubs, it is mainly connected with Rangers and Celtic fans, and so that rules alcohol out as the sole instigator in this issue.

There is something that runs deeper with the psyche of the Old Firm fans, why do they become so vehemently angry? What makes an Old Firm football attendee kick his wife in the head when his team gets beaten?

Someone somewhere needs to come up with an answer and my opinion still sways towards football managers and committees to come out and talk about Old Firm violence.

Sectarianism isn’t Scotland’s dirty secret- Old Firm Wife Beating is.

Please support this campaign on Twitter, do all you can to highlight this issue. Thanks Janey Godley

Anarchic Mercy

2008-09-14T14:35:00+02:00

Love this, from Rowan Williams via Inhabitatio Dei:

"To believe in Jesus' God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well." -- Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (1990)

Rewards and Other Ways

2008-07-20T15:10:00+02:00

This week's Parshah (Torah portion):Moses' great-nephew is rewarded for his zealotry; he receives a "covenant of peace" because he killed a prince and princess from two non-Hebrew tribes who indeed posed a serious threat to Moses and his people. In the Torah, the vav (ו) in the word "shalom" (שלום) is broken. This story is followed by a story of five women who, facing an injustice, ask the question, "is there another way?"

Violence

2008-06-22T16:35:00+02:00

I broke up with him a few months ago

and ever since

he's been stalking me every day

"As long as he's not violent

there's not much we can do"

the police say

and

"Try not to worry

he'll probably get tired of this soon"

after they told him to leave here in a hurry

Here we are sitting in his car

after he ambushed me from behind

I managed to cut loose once

but I didn't get very far

He's looking at the gun

and says

"I know you won't be coming home"

and

"Life means nothing without you

but I don't want to go alone"

I can see in his eyes when he looks at me

that this is not a bluff

and as he points the gun towards my head

only one thought has time to sink in

I wonder if this is violent enough

A Day So Unkind

2008-06-22T15:50:00+02:00

Just an ordinary morning

breakfast

kiss

and off to school

One last wave before the bend

and gone

her long hair flapping in the wind

A day like everyday

chores

groceries

and preparing dinner

She's late

where could she be

another worried peer along the street

Calling everyone

nothing

nowhere

no one knows for sure

Growing feelings of unease

with every hour climbing

finally calling the police

Lost without a trace

last seen going home

missing ever since

it's been more than a week

Forever etched in my mind

her last wave before the bend

on a day so unkind

Collective Violence - Examples - Part V

2008-06-20T12:00:00+02:00

It's been another month since I last blogged about mob violence, which continues pretty well unabated. Below are some of the latest incidents reported, and some commentary on the phenomenon by others. (And here's why I'm doing it.)

I won't be making the Girardian connections for each of these as I have previously because the connections are the same as always -- scapegoat is often someone from the margins (disabled, poor, stranger, female, old, young, from another caste or class or country, seen as privileged, etc. ), mob often forms spontaneously or grows larger as the scapegoating occurs due to accusatory mimesis, perpetrators easily justify the scapegoating as necessary and right, scapegoating's intention is to bring about peace in the community.

INCIDENTS

** 15 May 2008, Baltimore MD: "Child Was a 'Demon'"
"One Mind Ministries of Baltimore, MD, allegedly starved an 18-month old child because he was viewed as a ‘demon' ... after the baby wouldn’t say 'amen' at mealtime." The baby's "body was found last month in a suitcase in Philadelphia two years after his death." Immediately after his death, "the baby was placed on a mattress, on which cult members said God would resurrect him from the dead." Examiner article here.

** 31 May 2008 Para, Brasil, in the Amazon: "Brazilian Tribes Say Dam Threatens Way of Life" reported at NPR

Indigenous people protesting a proposed hydroelectric dam on the "remote, pristine Xingu River," near the mouth of the Amazon River, attack Paulo Fernando Rezende, a representative from the state's electric power enterprise, with machetes as he speaks to them about the dam:

"Roquivan Alves Silva takes the microphone and declares: 'If necessary, I will make war to protect the Xingu and the people of the entire region.' Moments later, the Indians rise in unison. A mix of warriors and women moves menacingly across the room toward Rezende. Then suddenly they're on him. Machetes and sticks flailing, they push Rezende to the floor, poking him with their weapons. The warriors rip his shirt to shreds and carve a deep gash in his right arm. Blood pooling on the floor, Dom Erwin, the Catholic Bishop of Xingu, steps in. The gymnasium hangs suspended between fear and euphoria. Chief Tabata, whose tribe lives in the Xingu National Park in the state of Mato Grosso, says he feels the Eletrobras representative lied. ... 'We have to hurt them. They weren't respecting the Indians. ... That's our fight. I want the people, the white people to understand why the Indians are so angry.'"

** 2 June 2008 Imphal, Manipur, India: Woman killer lynched: Mob justice at Umathel:

"In a macabre incident, a woman (45) was hacked to death by a man (60) who was subsequently lynched by an angry mob at Umathel Mamang Leikai under Waikhong Police Station this morning. ... According to police report, at around 6 am today, Sangai was returning home from collecting monthly subscription of a Marup from a person at Umathel Mamang Leikai. While she was preparing to cross a bailey bridge, Khullachandra, who was then splitting bamboo, came from behind and hacked her on the neck killing the woman on the spot. When the news of the incident spread, angry locals came out in large number and beat up Khullachandra to death. The body of Khullachandra has been picked up by the Waikhong police. None of his family members have come to claim the body so far."

** 2 June 2008 Flushing, New York: "Mob Violence Against Falun Gong Worsens in Absence of Police"

"About forty Falun Gong practitioners were surrounded on Main Street in front of the Flushing Library Saturday evening between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. by a large, angry mob. According to eyewitness reports and Epoch Times reporters on the scene, the mob was emboldened by the absence of the police. ... 'These mobs, there were hundreds of them, at least 200-300 of them.'" ... There is speculation that the Chinese consulate is organizing the mobs and that "some of the violence is being aggravated and encouraged by well-placed individuals among crowds of Chinese. On Sunday, an unidentified Chinese man, standing among a large crowd of Chinese on Sanford and Kissena Streets, described how he had attacked a female Falun Gong practitioner the previous week, ripping the sign she was holding and knocking her to the ground. The man, who was described as about 5'7" and in his mid-40's with scars on his face, encouraged people in the crowd to attack Falun Gong practitioners themselves." More on an earlier incident here.

** 9 June 2008 Bagamoyo, Tanzania:

Kate Kozonasky reports on her blog of an incident of mob violence: "A few nights ago ... us girls were sitting outside at night, probably around 730, inside out home base just talking. All of the sudden, we heard this massive ROAR of people coming from outside the gate; it was ridiculous. at first it just sounded strictly like shouting, but as we ran outside our protective gates to see what the fuss was, we realized that at LEAST 150 people were running down the road with torches and spears, screaming "THIEF!" Our Tanzanian security gaurd explained that this often happens in Bagamoyo when there is a crime; when something happens and a citizen witnesses it, he has to scream to get others attention to catch the criminal themselves, because police are not affective here. So apparently, a man stole from a local store and they were literally chasing him out of the town to kill him!"

COMMENTARY examining triggers for mob violence:

South Africa: Ugly Politics Aggravate Xenophobia by Terence Corrigan and Faten Aggad, 4 June 2008: The "recent eruption of mob violence targeting foreigners living among us" in South Africa" have been put down to "xenophobia," but this, the authors contend, "cannot on its own explain the violence. After all, South Africans have been living alongside foreign nationals for decades. This suggests that other factors are involved. We need to understand what they are – urgently." Factors the suggest and explore are (1) the inability of the existing democratic process to mitigate conflict; (2) the 'uneven' South African policy on immigraton, which leads to grievances such as "anger at competition for jobs and services, envy at the perceived success of foreigners, and suspicion of other cultures;" (3) a political system that fails "to channel people's grievances into formal channels;" (4) "a lack of understanding on the part of ordinary people as to how they can make themselves heard."

South Africa: Graca Machel Warns of Revolt Among Victims of Pogroms, 10 June 2008:

"Mozambique's former first lady, Graca Machel, who today heads one of the country's most respected NGOS, the Community Development Foundation (FDC), on Tuesday warned of possible revolt among the tens of thousands of Mozambicans who have fled from anti-foreigner pogroms in South Africa. ... Should the government prove unable to satisfy their demands, and to reinsert them into Mozambican society, that could lead the victims of the pogroms to revolt against their own government" with mob violence. ...

"She added that the solutions to such problems must lie in the establishment of governments that are able to respond to the needs of their citizens, and reduce the likelihood that they will be driven to the margins of society. Machel claimed that the mob violence in South Africa was aimed more against the sub-human living conditions in the townships than against foreign citizens. She argued that the attacks had been unleashed by people who were 'rejected, marginalized and unused' by the South African system. (However, contrary to this view, there is good evidence that the initial riots were far from spontaneous, but were organised by self-styled 'community leaders'). Machel argued that the development models adopted by African governments have produced millions of marginalized and excluded people, living in conditions favourable to outbreaks of brutal violence. 'Extreme poverty dehumanizes people and leads them to madness,' she said. 'That's what happened in Rwanda over ten years ago.'

South Africa: Xenophobia on Trial at Boekehuis: Dark Tales and Hope by Liesl Jobson, 2 June 2008:

"Johannesburg readers crammed into Boekehuis" recently to "talk about xenophobia in literature. ... Store manager Corina Van der Spoel [chaired] the event," introducing "the topic with a series of salient readings and reflections, starting with an excerpt from the Goldstone Report of 1993/4, which noted the different ways that perpetrators, victims and bystanders react to massive human rights abuses -- the callousness with which innocent people are murdered, raped and tortured, and the shallow excuses produced by the perpetrators for such brutality.

"'He finds similar behaviour everywhere,' said Van der Spoel. 'The situations are universal. Throughout the world one must recognise that any people, anywhere, has the potential for evil on a massive scale. And all victims, whoever they may be, need the opportunity to heal. No continent, no region, and no people are immune from it.'" ...

"Van der Spoel also quoted from the Southern African Migration Project's World Values Survey on International Attitudes to Immigration, which she described as 'astounding'. In calibrating attitudes to foreigners it was found that South Africans held the harshest anti-immigrant views among the 29 nations surveyed. 'More than 20% of people surveyed here wanted all foreigners barred from entering the country on any grounds, compared with 13% holding this view in Britain, 11% in China, and 4% in the USA and Mozambique.'"

Pakistan: Burning of robbers shows lack of justice, police inefficiency by Zamir Sheikh, 26 May 2008:

Speaking of "the unfortunate burning of two alleged robbers by an angry crowd in Karachi recently" -- due to "a daylight robbery in a flat located in the congested locality" -- Skeikh points to "the rising unbearable cost of living" as a possible cause.

He also notes, "The desperate element in the street justified the mob justice arguing that there is no other way than to handout instant justice to the perpetrators of heinous crime. ... It is difficult to single out one single factor as the cause of the incident. It was just the instant anger with no restraining saner voice in the mob that caused the gruesome and inhumane act. But if discussed from various angles, one could reach the conclusion that snail pace process of justice, overburdened police force dominated by a few corrupt elements, tribal justice system prevalent in some areas the country and lack of trust of the judicial system were some of the factors that forced the unconscious mind of an enraged mob to indulge in an act which is prohibited both by the God and the man made laws.

"None other than William Shakespeare had written about the mob mentality in his famous drama Julius Caesar, how Mark Antony is his funeral speech played with mobs emotions in order to whip them into a frenzy of rage.

"The crowd that caught hold of the robbers as soon as the victims raised hue and cry had to react immediately and in the fit of mob anger they found no alternate than to beat them near death. Some one in the crowd who might have seen or undergone the sufferings of facing a similar personal experience lost his sanity and resorted to an act which otherwise under normal circumstance he would have just avoided and handed over the culprits to the police."

Pakistan: Rule of the mob by Ishtiaq Ahmed, 7 June 2008:

"In the wake of viciously gruesome attacks recently by angry mobs on criminals -- robbers and thieves -- caught recently red-handed on the scene in Karachi and other parts of the country, Gallup Pakistan conducted an opinion survey on May 18 and 19, 2008 ... Fifty-two percent (52%) of the total respondents were of the opinion that beating to death and then burning the bodies of those robbers apprehended on the spot was the "right thing to do" while 42 percent (42%) disapproved of such brutal methods. ...

"If we now recall that in the past few weeks a Hindu worker has been killed in a similar fashion by a mob which suspected him of blasphemy, incensed lawyers beat up pro-Musharraf ministers of the previous government in Lahore, and rival groups of lawyers fell upon each other in Karachi, causing a number of deaths, then the situation becomes very worrisome. It is symptomatic of not only a state and its institutions failing to establish and uphold law and order but civil society failing as well to inculcate norms and ethics that discourage violent conduct.

"When such a situation becomes endemic the name for the phenomenon is ochlocracy, devised by the ancient Greeks to describe mob rule or mob justice. Sometimes another word, "mobocracy," is applied instead to describe the power of the masses, in contrast to the power of an established ruling elite. ...

"The outbursts of mob fury and the concomitant 'rough' justice meted out to the culprits [in Pakistan] reflect not only loss of faith in the political leaders and state institutions' ability to maintain law and order and practice justice. Rather, in a more serious manner such extreme behaviour is a manifestation of helplessness and despondency in relation to the ruling class. "

More on Pakistan's blasphemy laws and the consequences for those accused of it. ("The blasphemy laws impact everyone, regardless of religion -- and the tragedy is that almost every case is completely fabricated. ... The reason is simple. The blasphemy law requires no evidence other than an accusation made by one person against another.")

Religion and Polarity

2008-05-25T16:45:00+02:00

Tim Townsend's "Love Thy Neighbor: The religion beat in an age of intolerance" in the May/June 2008 issue of Columbia Journalism Review, is worth the read, in light of the Jeremiah Wright drama and the fundamentalist Mormon news of late here in the U.S., and the ongoing and manifold religious conflicts (and power conflicts cloaked in religion) all around the world.

Townsend is a reporter who has covered religion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last four years. The gist of this essay is that religion is divisive and religious folk -- Jesus, too! -- are polarising. (The Matthew passage he quotes at the start of the essay doesn't convince me, but I agree generally with Townsend that a prophetic message can be polarising, and that Jesus's harsh language at times is divisive. My view is that Jesus disrupts the 'peace' we cling to, the very peace Jesus threatens verbally in the Matthew passage, in order to displace that temporary, violent sort of peace with a shot-through-with-life peace ...)

Townsend suggests that this polarity is nothing new in America, citing Puritan John Winthrop's landing-in-America sermon outlining "a political system whose top priority would be ... 'the duty of suppressing heresy, of subduing or somehow getting rid of dissenters.'" Townsend doesn't state the obvious, that suppressing heresy and marginalising dissenters had been the modus operandi of many in power, or seeking power, long before this.

Later, he speaks of the current chasm in the Episcopal church, which he says isn't about "sex, or even theology, but about power, and who gets to make the decisions that will tie the hands of everyone else." He quotes Cathleen Falsani, a religion columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times: "'Heat is good for a story, and religion is consistently good for that. ... Religion is polarizing. Maybe that's not the way it's intended to be, but it is.'"

I think adherence to religion both is and isn't intended to be polarising; it's intended to bring cohesion among some by excluding, marginalising, demonising, and polarising others, and it's very effective. Townsend quotes Neela Banerjee, religion beat reporter for The New York Times, who, speaking of the 'culture wars' between 'secularists' and 'the Christian right,' says that "'each sees the other as a profoundly dangerous influence on society.'" Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, agrees: "All parties, he says, feel their worldview is under attack." Look at almost any conflict, geopolitical or interpersonal, and you'll see the same mechanism, the same justification: the other is a danger, a threat, to what's good, to what's right.

Quickly, Townsend himself, when in his reporting he sought to respect all beliefs, became seen as the dangerous other and became the target of accusations: "Besides being called ignorant, arrogant, balding, stupid, rude, fat (my new nickname was Burger Boy), lazy, and incompetent, I was depicted as a Satanic baby. My mother was insulted. I was accused of lying about my academic degrees, having a comb-over, being a paid agent of the Saudi government, and acquiring 'numerous social diseases.' I was, apparently, a plagiarist and a terrorist. Someone did a search to see if I was a pedophile." And not only was he accused, his life was threatened.

I think, from a Girardian perspective, one could say that it's never the other who is the danger; the danger -- the real obstacle to love and to life lived fully -- is the perception that it's the other who threatens us and our worldview. (For more, read an excerpt from René Girard's I See Satan Fall Like Lightning at Paul Nuechterlein's Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary).

Mob Violence - This Just In

2008-05-21T22:40:00+02:00

Reported today at CNN: "Mob burns to death 11 'witches, wizards'" in Nairobi, Kenya:

"Officials say a mob has burned to death 11 people suspected of being witches and wizards in western Kenya. Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino says the mob hunted down the 8 women and 3 men in two villages in the western Kenya district of Kisii Central. Owino says most of the victims were between 70 years old and 90 years old. Only one of the victims was 40 years old. Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu says ... 'These people identified who is to be killed by accusing their victims of bewitching their sons and daughters.'"

A BBC report on the attacks adds:

"The mob dragged them out of their houses and burned them individually and then set their homes alight, our correspondent says.

"Residents have been ambivalent about condemning the attacks because belief in witchcraft is widespread in the area...."

The International Herald Tribune put the size of the mob at "300 young men" and said that in some cases the victims' throats were slit or they were clubbed to death before being burned.

One police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, questioned how the young men could prove someone was a wizard and suggested that "'It is likely that the people who committed these killings had personal vendettas against their victims.'"

Added 22 May: In depth article on the issue of witch-hunting in Malawi, from the Women's Internatonal Perspective: "Mob Justice in Malawi: Accused of Witchcraft, the Elderly Are Rarely Protected by the Law"

Collective Violence - Examples - Part IV

2008-05-21T12:05:00+02:00

It's been almost a month since I last blogged about mob violence. Again, that's not because it's not happening but because it continues relentlessly. Here are some of the latest. (And here's why I'm doing it.)

26 April 2008 in the Erie Times-News, Erie, PA, USA: "Police charge 3 as victim remains on ventilator": Kyle Miles, 28, is in critical condition after being attacked by "a group of 10-15 people" who chased him and beat him severely after "a perceived slight triggered mob violence on a spring evening. ... The [original] assailant told Miles the assault was all about respect, said a witness. ... 'He was telling him that he (Miles) can't come down to this neighborhood and disrespect nobody.' ... The attacker boasted that he had dropped Miles with one hit. ... Arrington estimated up to 15 men in their late teens or early 20s chased Miles and gathered to watch the assault, as if it were a spectator event. 'Some girl said something. He said something. Someone took offense, and all hell broke loose.'

Conformity: The assault was a bonding experience for most of the onlookers. The cause of the brutal attack was a 'slight' that nonetheless seems to have justified the brutality in the eyes of the perpetrators. The victim was apparently someone from outside the community, since he ran the wrong way seeking escape.

28 April 2008, Karachi, Pakistan: "Jagdeesh Kumar, a 22-year-old Hindu worker in a garment factory in Pakistan's largest city, was beaten to death by a mob [as police looked on] for allegedly making blasphemous remarks about Prophet Mohammad. ....'His murder may have nothing to do with blasphemy. What we saw was an honour killing, coloured as a killing for blasphemy. Most, if not all, of the cases of killing for blasphemy have a different, more mundane and criminal reason. Blasphemy provides a cover,' says [A.H.] Nayyar [, an Islamabad peace activist]. He has reason to believe that the Hindu boy was in love with a Muslim girl." Hindus make up less than two percent of the population in Pakistan. (Sify News)

Conformity: Hindus, a tiny minority of the population in Pakistan, would be prime scapegoat material because they are non-conforming, marginalised and have been historically persecuted in Pakistan since the Partition of India in the 1940s. The scapegoating is cloaked in religious terms -- the scapegoaters claim to kill for sacred reasons -- while the truth seems rather different.

6 May 2008, Madurai, India: "A police official was stabbed and 17 policemen injured while a police jeep and four motorcycles were set on fire in mob violence which engulfed Eliyarpathi Village of the district today. Police sources said the trouble started when members of Mutharayar Community resorted to road blockade demanding action against some Dalits who allegedly desecrated a portrait of King Perumpidugu Mutharayar in the village. The incident was sequel to the stoning of Dalit houses in the villages by Mutharayars over a petty quarrel in a tea shop last night." (MyNews.in)

Conformity: Apparently a revenge attack. Dalits are the lowest caste in India, the so-called untouchables, and here they are alleged to have desecrated something sacred.

8 May 2008, Patna India: "Villagers pour acid into man's eyes in Bihar": "A man was severely beaten and acid was poured into his eyes by residents of a village in Bihar's Purnia district. ... The villagers "overpowered Vinay Yadav alias Pappu Yadav, wanted in connection with the February 28 killing of Bihari Lal Yadav and his grandson, and beat him mercilessly with sticks and iron rods on late Monday night. As Vinay collapsed in pain, the villagers poured acid into his eyes. The police soon arrived and took him into custody. He was rushed to the Purnia sadar hospital where his condition was stated to be stable. ... A mob had recently gouged out the eyes of two alleged thieves in Bihar's Nawada district. "

Conformity: Not much based on this report, other than the mob aspect and the escalation (if acid in the eyes is worse than being beaten with an iron rod ...) . Ruthless revenge attack of an alleged murderer.

10 May, Patna, India: "Mob justice takes 5 lives": Four bank robbers (including a murderer) and a would-be thief were beaten to death in Bihar in two separate incidents.

"In Siwan, Chand Quereshi (29), was beaten to death right in front of Siwan police station early in the morning. The incident took place around 3am when Quereshi broke into the Jai Prakashnagar residence of Vinod Mehta. 'Some 10 to 15 neighbours rushed to the house, overpowered the thief and beat him up till he fell unconscious.' ...

"At Buxar, four robbers were beaten to death by a mob, while another drowned in the Ganga while trying to escape the crowd. The robbers ... were part of a group of seven, who were trying to flee after a loot this afternoon," which they had taken from a branch of the State Bank of India at gunpoint after shooting and killing the bank's guard. ... The alarm alerted residents and they chased all seven and overpowered six of them within 500m from the bank. A mob of 100 started beating the men up and attacked them with bricks, stones and sticks -- anything they could lay hands on."

Conformity: Again, pretty common story of retaliation, in one case a small mob for an attempted crime and in another a large mob for an apparent robbery and killing. "Anything they could lay hands on" gives a sense of the frenzy of the mob. And did 100 men all start beating at one time, as if on cue, or did one start, and then another, and then the rest joined in?

12 May 2008, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India : "2 Dalit boys paraded naked for killing birds": "In yet another instance of mob justice, two Dalit minors were paraded naked for allegedly killing birds at Byawar village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district. ... The minors, identified as Vinod (12) and Sagar (10), belong to the Kanjar tribe. The two were caught by villagers while they were catching birds and, on rummaging through through their bags, were found with a few pigeons and partridges. Furious villagers then beat up the boys and stripped them naked in public, police said. The villagers then called a barber and got their heads tonsured before parading them naked in the village."

Conformity: Humiliation of two Dalit boys, the lowest Indian caste (the 'untouchables'), easily scapegoated. I don't know enough to know what the aparent crime was here, what made the villagers 'furious': that the boys killed the birds (animal cruelty? the birds belong to someone else?), an 'untouchable' touching the birds that others might want to eat? Keeping the birds for themselves (stealing)?

13 May 2008 in the Sun News Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: "Police chief warns thugs following swarmings": Edmonton police chief Mike Boyd proclaimed that his city would not tolerate "this kind of mugging and swarming mentality against our police officers and any citizen in this city" after "the school resource officer at Eastglen high school was kicked in the head when he tried to stop former students from stunting in a vehicle. ... One pulled out a baseball bat but dropped it when the officer pepper-sprayed him. During the fight, the officer was pulled to the ground and kicked in the head, leaving him unconscious and having to be taken to hospital. ... Boyd said there have been other swarming incidents and muggings in which civilians are also being targeted.

Conformity: This story points to the no-holds-barred nature of group violence when the group feels provoked, including against law enforcement officers. (Perhaps drugs were involved, too?)

14 May 2008, Karachi Pakistan: "Residents of an apartment building attacked and set on fire three alleged robbers here on Wednesday, killing them all, police said. Police officer Amir Shaikh said residents of the building heard gunshots from an apartment where a neighbour had resisted robbers trying to steal his possessions. A mob of residents confronted the thieves and beat them with burning wood from the oven of a nearby bakery, setting them on fire." (That's the entire reported story.)

Conformity: Another brutal act against would-be thieves. The intention and outcome, as it often is, is not just to keep the thief from one's possessions but to punish the thief indelibly -- either because there's that much rage towards the thief or to signal to others that such an act won't be tolerated. Does the mob really feel that their actions should be tolerated? Is there that much perceived justification?

17 May 2008, Calcutta, India: "Shop fire triggers mob attack": "Over a dozen youths today stormed the home of the owners of the Sodepur shop where 12 people died in a fire yesterday, and failing to find them beat up a heart patient who stood nearby." They were thwarted from setting fire to the garment shop owners' house by neighbours. Two of the owners were in intensive care after the fire while other family members had fled to avoid retaliation and/or probable arrest. "Faced with a locked house, the young men ... vented their anger on a local youth. Raju Nag Biswas, 30, was standing in front of the house ... when he saw the cars pull up. About a dozen men jumped out and rushed to the house, but seeing it locked turned towards Raju," whom they apparently took to be the shop owners' watchman. Raju "pleaded with them saying he was not the guard and was a heart patient. 'But some of them grabbed my collar and began slapping me.'

Conformity: Retaliation. The beating of the innocent bystander when the intended victim can't be found -- and the justification that the bystander was culpable by association, is as guilty as the intended victim -- is a hallmark of scapegoating. Any victim will do to discharge the rage, to bring about peace. Interesting that according to the victim, only 'some' of the dozen youths/men continued to attack him after he denied association with the shop owners.

Tell Them: Physicians Should Screen for Sexual Violence History

2008-05-06T05:55:00+02:00

For many people a routine visit to the doctor is anything but routine. But for 1.8 million Texans (According to a University of Texas at Austin study) the visit to the doctor can be an even greater challenge. According to the study these Texans at some point in their lives have been a victim of sexual assault. According to RAINN 82% of people who are victims of rape/sexual assault never recieve medical interventions but they are being seen in the physicians office. They are being seen for symptomology related to chronic depression, eating disorders, obesity, anxiety disorders, gasteroentistinal problems, difficulty with concentration, maintaining healthy b0undaries/relationships and sleep disorders. Many doctors at intake will ask questions concerning a client's history that some people may indeed feel are invasive and personal. The problem is that when people with a history of sexual assault present themselves in the doctors office with these symptoms and a sexual assualt history has not been taken, physicians are missing opportunities to offer survivors access to interventive measures (through a referral system) to counseling, therapy, support groups and other social services.The second part of the problem is that almost 50% of persons sexually assaulted are under age 18. Of those victims, 70% of the victims know their perpetrators or are related them. Many physicians find this challenging with respect to having to report instances of child sexual abuse, but the law is not merky, they must report. The following are some other reasons that physicians list as why they do not screen:They fear opening Pandora's BoxThey lack the trainingThey lack the timeThey believe it is a personal issueThe cost would be too muchThese arguments are indeed valid but one has to wonder about the correlation between having to screen for domestic violence in the ob/gyn community but no such requirements for the other medical disciplines. When so many children are at risk it does not seem at all seem prudent or fair. But for the sake of a balanced argument, suppose all of these arguments had merit. The question then becomes not why it is not possible, but how can we work through the barriers of screening for sexual assault to be able to offer survivors access to the best possible services to ensure a better overall quality of life.With respect to training physicians must CME trainings which can be used toward education related to sexual assault. As for time, it is clear that time in the physicians office is less and less. However, others in the office can recieve the appropriate training to be able to approach individuals who make the decision to make an outcry. The staff can also where buttons which encourage people to ask questions; for example: Ask Me About Sexual Assult. This gives whomever wants to talk about the issue the opportunity to ask of their own volition in their own time about their concerns. Physicians can also work with local and are sexual assault agencies to have brochures in their offices which give informtion about sexual assault, available interventions, brochures that talk about help, hope and how to obtain justice. If the oath that the doctors take is to first do no harm, could it not be taken that lack of movement on this issue on behalf of victims, though passive is doing harm?As for this being a very personal issue, this is right. It is one that involves fear, shame, guilt, sometimes hopelessness and mistrust. When physicians make the decision not to ask the question at intake and directly to the client as a part of a routine doctor visit then they have made offering hope, healing and justice for survivors less attainable and contribute directly to the darkness and secrecy that predators depend on to continue these dastardly acts. It is their responsibility.The bottom line is that if advocates, survivors and other concerned persons don't let physicians know that screening is something they want to see done in their physicians office it will never get done. Let your physicians know that you want them to screen for sexual assault, have educational materials available in their office, have referral and legal brochures, DVDs available and also be prepared with respect to training to avoid re-victimization of victims.

The Contagion of Violence

2008-05-04T02:40:00+02:00

Long cover article titled Blocking the Transmission of Violence by Alex Kotlowitz (author of There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, 1992) in the NYT Magazine today about CeaseFire, a group of mostly ex-cons working in Chicago and a few other cities to contain the contagion of violence. The key point: violence is contagious, like an infectious disease:

"THE STUBBORN CORE of violence in American cities is troubling and perplexing. Even as homicide rates have declined across the country -- in some places, like New York, by a remarkable amount -- gunplay continues to plague economically struggling minority communities. For 25 years, murder has been the leading cause of death among African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has analyzed data up to 2005. And the past few years have seen an uptick in homicides in many cities. Since 2004, for instance, they are up 19 percent in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, 29 percent in Houston and 54 percent in Oakland.

"The traditional response has been more focused policing and longer prison sentences, but law enforcement does little to disrupt a street code that allows, if not encourages, the settling of squabbles with deadly force.

"CeaseFire tries to deal with these quarrels on the front end." 'Violence interrupters "suss out smoldering disputes and to intervene before matters get out of hand. ... [It] doesn’t necessarily aim to get people out of gangs -- nor interrupt the drug trade. It's almost blindly focused on one thing: preventing shootings.

"CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source.

"'For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,' Slutkin told me recently. 'And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.' Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior)."

About violence and murder, Slutkin is convinced that "longer sentences and more police officers had made little difference. 'Punishment doesn't drive behavior,' he told me. 'Copying and modeling and the social expectations of your peers is what drives your behavior.'"

The interruptors, Slutkin says, "have to deal with how to get someone to save face. In other words, how do you not do a shooting if someone has insulted you, if all of your friends are expecting you to do that? ... In fact, what our interrupters do is put social pressure in the other direction."

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About this contagion of violence, and its cure, Girardians have a lot to say:

** Rene Girard, in "Are the Gospels Mythical?" talks about the contagion with reference to Peter's denial of Jesus:

"Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion -- a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to 'the foundation of the world.'"

** James Alison, in a 2007 lecture entitled "Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self," talks about Jesus's command in Matthew 5, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you":

"The instruction is not one about being a doormat, it is one about how to be free. 'Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you' means 'do not be towards them as they are towards you, for then you will be run by them, and you and they will become ever more functions of each other, grinding each other down towards destruction. ... Instead of that, allow your identity to be given to you by your Father who is in heaven, who is not in any sort of reciprocity with them, and is able to be towards them as one holding them in being and loving them, without reacting against them.'"

Alison says that to change the pattern of our desires so wholly requires prayer, a recognition of our similarity with our enemies; this will "'eventually empower you to be towards your enemy as God is. Thus you will be free of any contagion from their violence towards you'."

Alison also speaks, in Blindsided by God: Reconciliation from the underside (2006), of the Holy Spirit's power to operate "neither from fear, nor from necessity, nor from togetherness, nor from contagion, nor from hate, nor from vengeance, nor from survival, nor from any other of the structuring forces of our society. And so it enables the person who is moved by it and recreated by it to begin to swim spaciously in the midst of violence without that violence infecting them."

** Drasko Dizdar, citing both Girard and Alison in his paper "Leaving the Temple" in the Australian EJournal of Theology (2004), says:

"Humanity is, indeed, so easily misled -- and not least by those who 'come in my name, saying: I am! – leading many astray' (Mark 13:6). The contagion of violence, working through fear, anxiety, indignation, anger, resentment, vengeance, etc, infects all who are not immunised against it: 'But when you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be terrorised (throeisthe); this must happen, but the end is not yet' (Mark 13:7). Maintaining peaceful balance in a storm of contagious violence is Christ's gift...."

** G. B. Caird (in Richard B. Hays, chapter "Revelation" in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, quoted here) explains the contagion, expressed in the book of Revelation, this way:

"Evil is self-propagating. Like the Hydra, the many-headed monster can grow another head when one has been cut off. When one man wrongs another, the other may retaliate, bear a grudge, or take his injury out on a third person. Whichever he does, there are now two evils where before there was one; and a chain reaction is started, like the spreading of a contagion. Only if the victim absorbs the wrong and so puts it out of currency, can it be prevented from going any further."

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The work of CeaseFire seems to be to convince the victims to imitate another model, to absorb the disease, to keep each other from reacting against 'the enemy,' and thus to keep the violent contagion from spreading and eventually to free the community from the disease.

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Read the article for more details about the violence interruptors, why they turn from violent perpetrators to interruptors, how they operate (e.g., they "respond to every shooting and stabbing victim taken to the hospital"), founder Slutkin's background, the impact of CeaseFire on communities, its struggles for funding, etc.

Collective Violence - Examples - Part III

2008-04-26T03:25:00+02:00

It's been 16 days since my last Mob Violence post. The delay isn't due to lack of material but instead to being overwhelmed with material. The news from the Patna area of India would be enough by itself to fill this entry.

(If you want to know why I'm doing this, read the first posting.)

On with the show ...

1. 25 March, Port Harcourt, Nigeria:

The Advocate reports on the brutal beating of a chapter director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, a gay rights group, during a funeral service: "A man approached him while the congregation sang a hymn, asking him to speak with him outside. He said he was then attacked with slapping, punching, kicking, and spitting by a group of six men.

"'While beating me they were shouting, "You notorious homosexual, you think can run away from us for your notorious group to cause more abomination in our land?" Those who attacked me were well-informed about us, so I suspect an insider or one of the leaders of our Anglican church have hands in this attack.' ... The attackers "said they would not rest until gays are silenced from activism."

"Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude England, said in the release that violence against LGBT people has been encouraged by the Church of Nigeria's leaders, including notoriously antigay archbishop Peter Akinola, who is primate of the Church of Nigeria."

Conformity: Homosexuals are likely scapegoating targets in a majority heterosexual society, particularly one that considers homosexuality 'an abomination.' The attackers seem to have found meaning in their violence, announcing that they would not rest until their mission was accomplished.

2. 9 April, Karachi, Pakistan: 7 die in Pakistani clashes

"Rival groups of lawyers fought Wednesday in Pakistan, triggering greater mob violence that left at least seven people dead in Karachi, police said.

"Five of the victims, including a woman, were burned alive when rioters set fire to Tahir Plaza, the Press Trust of India reported. Fifteen more people were reported injured, and a bank and several vehicles were torched, PTI said.

"The confrontation between the lawyers started near the office of the Sindh High Court Bar Association over the alleged manhandling of former federal minister Sher Aftgan in Lahore the previous night. The violence then spread elsewhere in the city with armed men exchanging gunfire at several locations, PTA reported." Per UPI

Conformity: Not much info here. The spreading of the violence to other quarters speaks to the contagion aspect of violence and mob actions.

3. 15 April, Zweletemba township, Worcester, South Africa:

IOL reports:

"Thomas Chamiso, 32, an Ethiopian refugee, ran the Thembikosi Trading Store in Fulang Street in Zweletemba township, Worcester. A month ago, he was one of 50 foreigners chased out of the town by local residents.

"With his four cousins, Chamiso fled Zweletemba with only their wallets and cellphones. They lost their refugee permits, business papers, financial records, identity documents and driver's licences. 'Maybe we will sleep on the street. What will we eat? We have nothing. How can I start a business again? I have nothing left, nothing. Who will give us money? We have lost our humanity in Worcester.'

"As one drives from the bustling town of Worcester ... it is hard to imagine that this place, where the shacks have neat gardens and children play in the streets, could have been the scene of violent all-night looting of 23 foreign-owned shops.

"Foreigners, about 20 from Somalia, 15 from Ethiopia and a handful from Zimbabwe, the Congo, China, Pakistan and Bangladesh, were driven away on the night of Friday, March 7.

"The violence is said to have erupted after two shooting incidents in which a teenager was killed and a woman injured. Two Somalis have been arrested, one on a charge of murder and one on a charge of attempted murder. Both were released on bail and are scheduled to appear in Worcester Magistrate's Court again on April 25. ...

"South African shopkeeper 'Lani' Rasi, whose parents own Vukuzenzele Spaza Shop, said it was as though the community 'were just hungry for violence'."

"[Worcester police spokesperson Captain Mzikayise] Moloi said the perception of many locals that Somalis were murderous and intent on 'killing our children' was an issue that needed to be addressed. 'Locals don't acknowledge how many people their children have killed,' he said. ...

"Duncan Breen of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (Cormsa) said the Worcester attacks seemed to fall into the same pattern as other recent xenophobic attacks across the country.

'There appears to have been tension building for a while, and it just took a trigger to ignite into mob violence. One of the common challenges we see is that many foreign nationals and South Africans have very little interaction, which allows negative stereotypes of foreign nationals to remain unchallenged.'"

Conformity: Pretty typical choice of scapegoats, people who aren't (for the most part) an intrinsic part of the community, strangers and unknowns on whom the locals can project all manner of evil. All 'foreigners' could be tarred with the same brush. What surprised me most was the police spokesperson's comment that while locals may perceive Somalis as child killers, the same locals don't take into account how many people their children have killed!

4. 17 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Two men lynched in Bihar for theft

"In yet another case of 'mob justice', two people suspected of committing a theft were lynched by a mob in a Bihar village, the police said Thursday. The victims, identified as Mahant Nat and Butan Nat, were brutally beaten after they were caught allegedly while stealing a water pump set Wednesday night in Pokhra village of Siwan district, about 150 km from here. Both victims belonged to the economically weaker nomadic Nat community.

"'An angry mob of villagers caught them and beat them to death with bricks, bamboo sticks and iron rods. One eye of Mahant Nat was gouged out by the mob,' police sources said." Reported by ThaiIndian News.

Conformity: No sense of the size of the 'angry mob' or the unifying aspects of the violence. As I commented last time, with the regularity of these mob lynchings in Bihar, one can only assume that the feeling of unity and peace during and following the lynching, if there is any, is extremely short-lived. The victims' status (or lack thereof) -- poor and nomadic -- conforms to Girardian predictions for typical scapegoats, those on the margins.

5. 19 April, El Alto ("La Paz's destitute and neglected satellite city"), Bolivia, S.A.:

The BBC reports on mob violence in January against two innocent bystanders mistaken for perpetrators:

"Tony and his friend arrived at a birthday party in the Bolivian city of El Alto and realised they had come empty handed. After greeting the host, they went to find a shop. But as they came out of the house a girl who had just been the victim of an attempted robbery saw them, and alerted the neighbours.

"'People started to point at us, they started to bang the doors yelling we were robbers,' Tony told the BBC as he walked down the streets where he was attacked, his face still swollen from the beatings.

"'All the other people around there woke up and were coming out of their homes with whatever they had at hand, like sticks. They started to beat me insanely, with their hands, with rocks.'

"'They were out of control, not listening at all … we were yelling: "you are confused, we are innocent, we are innocent, please", we begged a lot, even crying', Tony added.

(The article continues with a discussion of Bolivia's increase in mob violence and of the distinction between community justice and mob justice.)

Conformity: The mob was not interested in the guilt or innocence of the people it was beating; they came out of their homes ready to attack whoever was there. Tony even recounts the accusatory gesture: "People started to point at us."

6. 24 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Two [more] beaten to death in Bihar

Headline looks the same, but it's a different case a week later, as ThaiIndian News reports:

"In two incidents of 'mob justice', a man was lynched for allegedly attempting to rape a girl while another man was beaten to death for opposing extramarital relations of his wife in Bihar. Mithilesh Singh was lynched for allegedly attempting to rape a girl at Kelbanni-Dahiyar village under Rosra police station in Samastipur district, about 100 km from here, police said Thursday.

"Singh entered the house of Manju Devi, a ward member in the village, and allegedly tried to rape her twelve-year-old daughter. But the family members caught him and beat him to death, a police official said.

"In another case, Nasib Paswan was beaten to death by the family members of his wife for opposing her extramarital relations in Betadi village in Bhojpur district, about 70 km from here."

Conformity: The first case doesn't sound as much like mob justice as protection of a child by her family. The second case is perplexing -- the man was killed by his wife's family because he didn't like her having an affair? Probably more to this than the short article can convey.

7. 24 April, Bihar, Patna, India: Man lynched for delay in serving tea:

"In yet another case of mob violence, a tea shop owner was beaten to death by a group of youths for delay in serving tea in Bihar's Araria district, the police said on Thursday. Abdul Qayum, in his 40s, was the victim of the violent act. ...
The police said some youths were angered by the delay in serving tea. They first beat up Qayum's son Bittu. When Qayum intervened to rescue his son, they severely beat him with bamboo stick and bricks, they said. He died on the way to hospital and his son was admitted to the hospital for treatment, the police said.

"According to the police, the victim was busy serving tea to people at his shop and requested others to wait for some time. But the youths took the request as an act of humiliation." Reported at Rediff.

Conformity: The lynching was seen as justified because the youths felt humiliated.

8. 25 April, Gotkharik village in Bhagalpur, Patna, India: Mentally challenged man lynched

From India enews: "A mentally challenged man was beaten to death by a mob in a Bihar village on charges of trying to give injections to children. ... According to the police, some girl students informed the villagers that a man was trying to lure them so that he could administer injections.

"A group of people attacked him with bamboo sticks, bricks and stones. He was seriously injured and fell unconscious. Some people took him to the house of a village council member. But before the police could intervene, he was dragged out and beaten to death.

"Deputy Inspector General (eastern range) Raghunath Prasad Singh said the police were yet to identify the victim. 'No injection needle was found (on him),' said Singh."

Conformity: 'Mentally challenged' is almost shorthand for 'likely scapegoat.' (Bamboo sticks and bricks certainly seem the brutal weapons of choice in Patna.)

9. 26 April, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia:

(This is a follow-up to the actual attack, reported by GoldCoast.com.)

"Some of the teenagers responsible for a sickening attack on an off-duty Gold Coast police officer and his girlfriend have walked free from court, smiling and laughing. Meanwhile, their victims, Constable Rawson Armitage and Michelle Dodge, who have been left physically and psychologically devastated by the attack, made a secret exit from the court yesterday, away from the spotlight.

Constable Armitage "told the court he was questioning his career as a police officer, had lost his confidence and desire to have children because of the violence inflicted on him by 'the pack of animals'.

"Of the nine teenagers sentenced in Southport District Court yesterday, six -- including ringleader Tiani Slockee, 18 -- walked free with either probation and community service or a suspended detention sentence.

"Two other teenagers, who assaulted Constable Armitage while he was unconscious, were sentenced to 15 months in juvenile detention.

"Many of the teenagers allowed to go free yesterday were happy to pose for the cameras, safe in the knowledge the media cannot identify them. Queensland's Juvenile Justices Act prevents the media from doing so.

"Described as inflicting 'mindless, gutless, mob violence' by Crown prosecutor Stuart Shearer, the gang worked together to render the couple completely defenceless as they walked home from a night out in Coolangatta.

"Constable Armitage was beaten unconscious and his head then stomped on.

"Ms Dodge was repeatedly punched and large chunks of her hair and scalp were ripped out as she tried to call for help.

"Alcohol abuse, peer pressure and a lack of parental supervision were raised as explanations for the attack."

Conformity: The article doesn't talk about what led the children (in their minds) to attack the couple, so it's hard to draw conclusions. Obviously, lots of communities have alcohol abuse, lack of parental supervision, and peer pressure without mob violence resulting, though those conditions certainly increase the chances. The article does imply that the teens are perhaps not unhappy with their identity as savage attackers.

Correlation between Rainfall and Witch Killings

2008-04-13T20:50:00+02:00

Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYT today -- "Extended Forecast: Bloodshed" -- connects the killing of witches with the environmental affects of climate change:

"Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches. As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars -- and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

"In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall -- either drought or flooding -- witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

"'In bad years, the killings explode,' Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches."

Kristof also looks at the strong relationship between economic hard times and lynchings, civil wars, and other forms of violence against 'the other' who is judged to have caused the hardship.

Collective Violence - Examples - Part II

2008-04-09T16:00:00+02:00

I wasn't sure how often I'd be posting stories of contemporary mob violence but it looks like there are enough incidents to post a list of them every two weeks or less. (If you want to know why I'm doing this, read the first posting.)

Be sure to read the last incident, which is different from the others.

1. 8 April, Bolivia, S.A.:

Journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe, with Radio Municipal in Pucarani, was beaten and left unconscious when a mob opposing the mayor attacked the radio station on 27 March. He died on 29 March of his injuries.

"At least 150 protesters rallied outside the government building in Pucarani, a small city about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the capital, La Paz, and called for the ouster of Mayor Alejandro Mamani. ... The protesters forced their way into the municipal building and broke down the door to the government-run Radio Municipal. ... Protestors wielding whips and metal rods beat Quispe in the head and chest." The group was allegedly made up of "members of the municipal government's monitoring committees (comités de vigilancia) who have accused Mayor Alejandro Mamani of corruption" and who "felt the station had been used by the mayor to defame them."

Conformity: The mob felt justified in beating the 'mouthpiece' of the radio station, believing they had been defamed by him. I.e., he deserved it. A journalist is an outsider to some extent because simply by acting as observer and commentator, he places himself outside the circle of those he observes and comments on. No report on how the scapegoating may or may not have united the townspeople.

2. 6 April 2008, Igunga, Tabora, Tanzania, Africa: Igunga police kill, hold 14 over witchcraft saga

Police in Igunga have shot dead a 20-year old youth and are holding 14 people in connection with mob violence in which the Igunga Police Station was burned. ... The regional police chief said an angry mob of more than a thousand people, holding stones, laid siege on the police station on Thursday, threatening to kill two women, Hawa Athman and Malizia Ramadhani, residents of Nkokoto Street in Igunga. Their neighbours accuse them of practising witchcraft, prompting the police to put them under protective custody.

Conformity: The accusation of 'witch' makes those accused seem to be outsiders. There are no details about how the accusation came about, what perceptions it was based on, whether the women had caused perceived harm to anyone. The group attacked the police station where the women were in protective custody because they felt the police were delaying 'justice' in this case. That there were more than 1,000 people in the mob indicates strong community unanimity in the accusation.

3. 5 April, Bihar, Patna, India:

"With a man suspected of stealing books being beaten to death by a mob here, shocking incidents of lynching continue in Bihar. Ram Pravesh Mahto, in his late 20s, was Friday brutally thrashed after he was allegedly caught stealing books from a printing press at Chakaram intersection under the jurisdiction of Buddha colony police station. 'Mahto was beaten to death with bricks and bamboo sticks by a mob after he was caught stealing books,' Gaurishankar Singh, officer in charge of the police station, said. He was a resident of the Dujra locality here and his family said that he was not a thief."

Conformity: Not much info here. This part of India sees a lot of lynchings, so obviously if there is a sense of peace and unity afterwards, it's very short-lived. The most interesting part of this report is the family's testimony that he is not an habitual thief. Remember that in the report on the man lynched on 26 March in Bihar it was said that "there seems to be no resentment as the man had criminal antecedents." In this new case, the family may be signalling that the man did not deserve this treatment and that there may well be "resentment." (Or they may just be upholding family honour.)

4. 3 April 2008, Sheffield, England, UK:

"Three Asian men were locked up this week for their part in the 'mob violence' that led to the death of an Iraqi Kurd on the streets of Sheffield. Ismail Rashid, aged 42, was the victim of an 'honour killing', beaten to death because he had been sleeping with a married Pakistani woman. A gang of up to 20 attacked him ... in June last year and he died in the Northern General Hospital eight days later, despite brain surgery. Amjad Latif, aged 27, armed himself with part of a roof rack from his car and hit Mr Rashid around the head, knocking him to the ground, Sheffield Crown Court was told. A 'sustained attack' by others followed, with Ashraf Latif, 18, and Ishtiaq Ahmed, 19, both admitting kicking him as he lay on the ground. On Tuesday they were sentenced to a total of 20-and-a-half years in custody. ... The purposes of sentencing in a case like this are clear – to punish the individual offenders and to send a clear message that the use of mob violence in the streets cannot be tolerated in a civilised society." The catalyst for the attack had apparently been Rashid's spraypainting of his nickname 'Rambo' while he was drunk on the front of a shop owned the Latif brothers' cousin.

Conformity: The victim was seen as deserving violence, because he was breaking a cultural (and presumably religious) taboo. He further 'incited' his attackers by flaunting himself and defacing another's property. In a 'civilised society' that places a cultural prohibition on extra-marital affairs, the victim probably would not be attacked or killed (though he might be, but probably only by one person, not a group) but would likely be scapegoated in more subtle ways, by economic and social exclusion, by ruining his reputation, and so on. The woman would probably be scapegoated as well. In some civilised societies, there is little or no prohibition on extra-marital affairs, perhaps because the role of religion is minimal in those areas. ? Are there 'civilised' countries where such things are handled by a civil legal system?

5. 1 April 2008, Waycross, GA, USA: Third-graders plot to harm teacher.

"A group of third-graders plotted to attack their teacher, bringing a broken steak knife, handcuffs, duct tape and other items for the job and assigning children tasks including covering the windows and cleaning up afterward, police said Tuesday. The plot by as many as nine boys and girls at Center Elementary School in south Georgia was a serious threat, Waycross Police Chief Tony Tanner said. ... The scheme involved a division of roles, Tanner said. One child's job was to cover windows so no one could see outside, he said. Another was supposed to clean up after the attack."

"The children, ages 8 and 9, were apparently mad at the teacher because she had scolded one of them for standing on a chair."

Conformity: For 8- and 9-year-olds, the teacher is an outsider by virtue of both her exalted role and her advanced age. Justification for the attack was that one of their classmates was 'unjustly' scolded for what they probably considered a minor infraction. The unusual thing about this case is that the mob attack was heavily premeditated, not spontaneous. If it had actually occured, however, others might have joined spontaneously, sucked into the excitement of the moment.

6. A different kind of mob story.

J. Dunne at Through the Eyes of Faith: Holy Cross Ghana blogs about witnessing and transforming an incident of mob violence last month.

At around Noon that same day [Good Friday] I heard a loud ruckus outside the school library where I was working with a student. I turned to see a few students running across the assembly area towards the canteen just outside the campus grounds. As I walked out of the room I saw about a hundred of our boys gathered around the canteen outside the campus.

I knew what it was before I got there. It was what I feared… Ewee. In the Fante language Ewee means thief. Now why does that cause me to fear? Stealing in Ghana, or in Africa, for that matter is a pretty serious crime. The thing is thieves aren't turned over to the police, in fact, the police sometimes don't ever hear about the incidents. When a thief is caught he faces mob justice which usually ends up with the thief being beaten, humiliated and then lynched, drowned, or burned to death. The general justification for such brutal punishment is that to steal something that someone has worked their whole lives for is like taking that person's life; so you should be killed for doing such a thing.

Anyway, the story is this. A young man was caught trying to steal a TV antennae in Anaji, where our school is located. The small mob stripped the man naked and beat him severely. They walked him down the road humiliating him in front of all who were present until the thief ran toward our school for some vain hope of refuge. His accusers continued to beat and insult him outside our school grounds.

When I finally got to the scene I was overcome with anger. There were my own students laughing, insulting, and encouraging the other men to beat the thief. Once of the students ran up to me laughing like a jolly fool, 'Hey Bro…look look Eweeo!' I shoved him to the ground and started screaming at the tops of my lungs for the students to go inside. I don't think they ever saw me that angry because they all scattered and ran inside. One of the teachers came out behind me and helped me to get the rest of the boys back inside.

I turned back to see the thief crying and begging for his life whilst bleeding all over. His accusers stood over him holding big sticks and shovels. They were shouting insults in the vernacular and slapping him across the face.

They wanted to kill him. I felt sick. I couldn't stand it so I stepped up to the accusers and begged them to let him go. At first they didn't mind me at all. Almost as if I wasn't there, but eventually they began to move away from the thief until there was only one man left. He still stood there holding his stick threatening the thief by slamming it on the bench behind where the thief was sitting. I looked at the man and told him he was sick.

All of the students were still watching from inside the campus. I had to do something for the young man. I took off my undershirt and gave it to the poor naked criminal. We made eye contact for about one second before I turned and headed back inside the school.

As I walked back into the school all of my students with impatient tones demanded to know why I would do such a thing. 'Bro why would you give that man your shirt? He is a thief.'

I was so bewildered by my mixture of rage and discouragement that I could hardly speak, but I did manage to answer their question. 'Because I am a Christian.'

I don't think they understood me.

Addiction to the Sacred

2008-04-09T04:00:00+02:00

René Girard and others (particularly, and excellently, James Alison in this post-9/11 essay) talk a lot about how humans use the act of sacralising something or someone -- grief, death, a victim, violence, etc. -- to justify the thing or the one, to make it beyond reproach, to give meaning to a meaningless act, to create unanimity and excitement, and primarily and purposefully, to confer to ourselves by association with the transcendent a heightened sense of identity, stability, and worthiness.

Eric Gans explains the relatonships between sacrifice and 'making sacred': "The word sacrifice contains within itself the paradox of culture. Etymologically to make sacred (sacer + facio), it means both to renounce and to kill. Culture is about renouncing and making sacred, but it is also about killing in the service of these ends."

With this in mind, I was interested to read this in The Economist today, in an article about how science is seeking to explain religious belief as beneficial in an evolutionary framework (the entire article is chock full of intriguing studies and conclusions):

"Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on." [Non-Orthodox Christian or Jewish Americans might find it difficult to understand how practicising one's religion incurs short-term costs ... ]

"On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

"To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

"A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

"As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."

Other studies mentioned in the article corroborate the idea that, perhaps, belief in a supernatural being (whether it's G-d or a ghost, as in some studies) creates coherence and a sense of security among group members, and leads to increased cooperation, collaboration, and sharing among members of the group. This seems to accord with the Girardian thought that 'making sacred' is a way to create unanimity, stability, shared identity. It says nothing of the possible cost, which Alison addresses in his essay, talking about the response of many to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 11 Sept. 2001:

"And immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create meaning. ... As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The 'tremendum et fascinosum,' as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. ... The old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. ... Phrases began to appear to the effect that 'We're all Americans now' -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us [in London]. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero....

"And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like 'to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.'

"And there was fear. Fear of more to come. Fear that it could be me next time. ... Fear and disorientation in a new world order. Not an entirely uncomfortable fear, the fear that goes with a satanic show. Part of the glue which binds us into it. A fear not unrelated to excitement.

"What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic. ...

"When I say satanic, I mean this in two senses .... The first sense is the sense I have just described: the fantastic pomp and work of sacrificial violence leading to an impression of unanimity, the same lie from the one who was a murderer and liar from the beginning, the same lie behind all human sacrifices, all attempts to create social order and meaning out of a sacred space of victimization. But the second sense is more important: the satanic is a lie that has been undone. It has been undone by Jesus's going to death exploding from within the whole world of sacrifice, of religion and culture based on death, and showing it has no transcendence at all. ... The pomp has nothing to do with heaven. It has nothing to do with God."

Obviously, religious communes like those referenced in the Economist article are likely not overflowing with pomp and cathartic grief. A religious commune, or religious order, may well survive not by any contrived sense of unanimity and feverish excitement borne of co-opted tragic grief -- after all, that unanimity and excitement doesn't last, and to believe that they do is to believe the lie -- but perhaps they are characterised more often rather by true transcendence, true cooperation and compassion, a unity achieved through struggle rather than unanimity. The similarity I see between the religious communes, as briefly described in the article, and the response to 9/11 that Alison is talking about, is the simple action of making meaning by referencing the sacred and transcendent, and even by actually making sacrifices (or feeling that one is making them), in an effort to feel, by association, that one has value.

As Alison has said, and points out later again in his essay in examining a passage in Luke 13, it's so very easy to feel justified and morally good when we ally ourselves with the transcendent, to adopt a dualistic viewpoint, to see others who differ from us as bad, as 'them,' as 'other.' It's so easy to think that I am privileged and valuable, because of my experience with the transcendent, in a way that you are not. That my life has meaning in a way that yours doesn't.

Alison again:

[I]f we are caught up in the world of giving sacred meanings, then we will be caught up in the world of reciprocal violence, of good and bad measured over against other people, and we will likewise perish. Once again I stress: Jesus [in Luke 13:1-5, and in Mark 13:1ff] will not be drawn into adding to meaning. He merely asks those who come to him themselves to move out of the world of sacred-seeming meaning. What does it mean for us to learn to look at the world through those eyes? ...

"Jesus not only taught us to look away, not to allow ourselves to be seduced by the satanic. He also acted out what the undoing of the satanic meant: he was so powerful that he was able to lose to its need to sacrifice so as to show that it was entirely unnecessary. We are so used to describing Jesus's cross and resurrection as a victory -- a description taken from the military hardware store of satanic meaning -- that we easily forget that what that victory looked like was a failure. So great is the power behind Jesus's teaching and self-giving that he was able to fail, thus showing once and for all that 'having to win,' the grasping on to meaning, success, reputation, life and so on is of no consequence at all. Death could not hold him in, because he was held in being by one for whom death does not exist, is not even the sort of rival who might be challenged to a duel which someone might win. But if death can only get meaning by having victory, if the order of sacred violence can only have meaning if it matters to us to survive, to be, to feel good, at the expense of someone, then someone for whom it doesn't matter to lose is someone who is playing its game on totally different terms, and its potential for giving meaning collapses.

"Here is where I am heading: We can imagine in the abstract something of the power which has nothing to do with death. What is much more difficult is imagining that power incarnated in a human heart and eyes looking at this world. Yet that is what we are talking about. A human heart and eyes so utterly held by the Creator that they speak the Creator's heart about this world. And not just in word, but by a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it, thus enabling creation to be unsnarled from our truncation of it into a violent perversion and trap.

"Now this is what I find difficult. The heart, the desire, that wants to do something like that. What does it want? Why should it do it? Why not leave us to get on with it, stuck in our charades, thinking the world of our meaning and our death? In other words, the very fact of distracting us, by word and deed from being involved in what Merton rightly called 'pseudo events' suggests a desire for us to be something else. The eye that is teaching us to look away from the lure of the sacred is powered by a heart that wants us to be something else. And we learn our desire through the eye of another. Our learning to see through Jesus' eyes will eventually result in us desiring with Jesus' heart -- which is to say, our receiving the mind of Christ. ...

"Jesus not only teaches us to look away, but models what living from utterly non-rivalistic creative power for which death is not, looks like. There is a desire in this. A desire for us not to be trapped in death. And this is where I think I'm going -- something apparently terribly banal, but I think, of earth shattering significance. The person who teaches us to look away and models for us another way of desiring actually likes us. It is only possible to imagine doing something like that for someone you actually like. And Jesus is doing it for all of us who are caught up in the sacred lie -- which is to say, all of us.

"The staggering thing that this means, for me, is that the most extraordinary fruit of contemplation in the shadow of the violence which we are experiencing is this: God likes us. All of us. God likes me and I like being liked. It has nothing to do with whether we are bad or good, indeed, he takes it for granted that we are all more or less strongly tied up in the sacred lie. In teaching after teaching he makes the same point: all are invited, bad and good. Those are our categories, part of the problem not part of the solution, not God's category. God's 'category' for us is 'created' and 'created' means 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfilment, fruition to, to share in just being.' We are missing out on something huge and powerful and serene and enjoyable and safe and meaningful by being caught up in something less than that, an ersatz perversion of each of those things. And because God likes us he wants us to get out of our addiction to the ersatz so as to become free and happy. "

Predicting Behaviour

2008-03-01T17:55:00+01:00

Gavin de Becker's Book, The Gift of Fear, and Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence (1997), is a book I recommend to everyone. To women as a handbook, to men primarily as insight into most women's experience, though I think we can all benefit from learning to recognise signals of violence, and from distinguishing between risks that our intuition warns us of, and unlikely risks, about which we worry fruitlessly.

A few bits that have spoken to me so far (1/3 through this time, my second reading of the book):

FIRST, that criminals are basically like us, not inhuman monsters, not other and therefore unknowable; and SECOND, that we successfully predict human behavior every day:

"People do things, we say, 'out of the blue,' 'all of a sudden,' 'out of nowhere.' These phrases support the popular myth that predicting human behavior isn't possible." Yet, de Becker says, we predict complex human behaviour every time we drive: "We expect all drivers to act just as we would, but we still alertly detect those few who might not." We also successfully predict "how a child will react to a warning," "how a consumer will react to a slogan," "how a spouse will react to a comment," and so on.

"Predicting violent behavior is easier than any of these, but since we fantasize that human violence is an aberration done by others unlike us, we say we can't predict it. ... The human violence we abhor and fear the most, that which we call ' random' and 'senseless,' is neither. It always has purpose and meaning, to the perpetrator, at least. We may not choose to explore or understand that purpose, but it is there, and as long as we label is 'senseless,' we'll not make sense of it.

"Sometimes a violent act is so frightening that we call the perpetrator a monster, but as you'll see, it is by finding his humanness -- his similarity to you and me -- that such an act can be predicted. ... [W]e want to believe that people are infinitely complex, with millions of motivations and varieties of behavior. It is not so. ... We want to believe that human violence is somehow beyond ourunderstanding, because as long as it remains a mystery, we have no duty to avoid it, explore it, or anticipate it. We need feel no responsibility for failing to read signals if there are none to read. We can tell ourselves that violence just happens without warning, and usually to others, but in service of these comfortable myths, victims suffer and criminals prosper."

He says that the behaviours of "violent people" will resonate with our own experience if we let ourselves make the connection. One example he later gives is of a person who seems to enjoy the fear he causes in other people: "Getting pleasure from the fear of others is something most of us cannot relate to -- until we recall the glee of every teenager who startles a friend or sibling by jumping out of the dark."

de Becker insists that someone who commits even the most heinous and gruesome crime is as human as the rest of us. He quotes Maya Angelou at the start of a chapter, who says "I am capable of what every other human is capable of. This is one of the great lessons of war and life." But then, in other spots, he makes a repeated distinction between "decent men" and "violent men," as if they are two different species, as if the "violent man" were not capable of being decent or the "decent man" of being violent.

THIRD, de Becker describes some signals of violence from strangers that can help us anticipate it. Strangers account, he says, for only 20% of homicides, while 80% of committed by someone known to the victim, and most of the book is about the 80%. Nevertheless, imo, these signals are useful to know about not only in the context of someone seeking to do you physical violence but also in the context of people seeking to pick you up, sell you something, get you to serve on a committee, do something for them, or otherwise control your actions. The signals are:

Forced teaming: The would-be attacker implies that he shares something with the victim, that they're in the same boat, so that boundaries between them blur and trust and rapport can be established. This is done by projecting a "shared purpose or experience where none exists: 'Both of us;' 'We're some team;' 'How are we going to handle this?;''Now we've done it.'" The defense is "a clear refusal to accept the concept of partnership."

Charm and Niceness: A charming man is a man seeking to charm you. It's an ability, not a character trait. "Charm is almost always a directed instrument, which, like rapport building, has motive." Similarly, niceness. "We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait." Remember that both are strategies and look for the motive.

Too Many Details: People who are lying give too many details, because even if you believe them, they don't sound credible to themselves, so they keep talking. de Becker says that when confronted with the disorienting blur of too many details, designed to make the would-be attacker (or clunky Casanova, or pyramid-scheme salesman) appear to be familiar to you, a friend, someone you can trust, it's most important to remember the context, that this is a stranger who has approached you.

Typecasting: Typecasting is when the potential perp labels the potential victim in "some slightly critical way, hoping she'll feel compelled to prove that his opinion is not accurate." Examples will be familiar to every woman and some men: "You're probably too snobbish to talk to the likes of me." "There's such a thing as being too proud, you know." "I bet you think I'm just no-good, like everyone else." The defense is silence, acting as if the words aren't spoken. Don't engage, and don't try to refute the words with actions (talking to him because you don't want to seem snobbish, allowing him to help with the groceries because you don't want to seem too proud), because that's what he wants you to do, to increase the illusion of a bond between you. (Here, that Buddhist slogan of "nothing to protect, nothing to defend" comes in handy for me. So, I'm too proud. So, I'm snobbish. Let it be.)

Loan Sharking: This is when someone helps you in order to put you in debt to them, "and the fact that you owe a person something makes it hard to ask him to leave you alone. ... The predatory criminal generously offers assistance but is always calculating the debt." The defense is to remember that he approached you and that you didn't ask for help; "then, though a person may turn out to be just a kindly stranger, watch for other signals."

de Becker notes that many of these strategies are employed by "men who want little more than an opportunity to engage a woman in conversation. I don't mean to cramp the style of some crude Casanova [he says], but times have changed, and we men can surely develop some approaches that are not steeped in deceit and manipulation."

The Unsolicited Promise: Similar to Too Many Details, the unsolicited promise is given because the would-be attacker sees that you don't trust him, that you aren't convinced, so he hopes his "promise" will overcome your doubt. The defense is simply to recognise that the unsolicited promise comes because you are hesitant to trust this person, because there is reason to doubt and you know it.

Discounting the Word 'No': "Declining to hear 'no' is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it. With strangers, even those with the best intentions, never, ever relent on the issue of 'no,' because it sets the stage for more efforts to control." Don't negotiate from 'no,' because "negotiations are about possibilities, and providing access to someone who makes you apprehensive is not a possibility you want to keep on the agenda."

FOURTH, de Becker talks about pre-incident indicators (PINs). These are the clues that occur before every violent act:

"Behavior is like a chain. Too often, we look at just the individual links. When we ask why a man committed suicide, someone might say, 'He was despondent over major financial losses,' as if this could possibly explain it. Many people are despondent over financial losses and don't kill themselves. Though we want to believe that violence is a matter of cause and effect, it is actually a process, a chain in which the violent outcome is only one link. If you were predicting what a friend of yours might do if he lost his job, you wouldn't say, 'Oh, he'll commit suicide' unless there were many other PINs of suicide present. You'd see the loss of his job as a single link, not the whole chain. The process of suicide starts way before the act of suicide.

"The same is true for homicide. Though we might try to explain a murder using simple cause-and-effect logic (e.g., 'He learned his wife was having an affair so he killed her'), it doesn't aid prediction to think this way. Like the earthquake [whose initiation might start thousands of years before we are aware of it], violence is one outcome of a process that started way before this man got married."

I think what resonates for me about his book is that though it is focused on predicting and intuiting the most violent human acts, which is in itself worthwhile, it is at the same time about predicting, intuiting and to some extent explaining (or at least seeing patterns in) the most minor, subtle and common acts of human violence, too -- manipulation, control, power-mongering, some advertising and sales strategies, influence-peddling, coercion, etc. All the ways we try to change people so that they do what we want them to do, so that we get what we (think we) want.

Mimesis and School Shootings

2008-02-15T16:55:00+01:00

I think Michael Hardin at Preaching Peace has it right, both in his comments on the most recent school shooting at Northern Illinois Univ. (where by early accounts the shooter was not obviously 'socially aberrant' though there were mental health concerns) and in his plea that we look at our own desires, our own imitation of others and the desires of others', the war in our own heads.

"According to the mimetic theory, culture is breaking down because of the proclamation of the gospel. Our tendency to valorize violence, in video games, movies, sports, politics and national conflicts (John McCain "we must bring our troops home with honor") are sure indications that we are reaping what we have sown.

"But before culture can break down in its external form, it breaks down in its internal form, in the minds of those who have been real or perceived victims of violence. These are the demoniacs of the gospel tradition, the 'crazy' people locked up in institutions, the socially aberrant so well described by Michel Foucault and others.

"Getting out of the war in Iraq is real big these days, especially among our progressive Christian friends. Getting the war out of our heads ought to be as high a priority. The reason we war in our heads, create rivalries that escalate out of control is because we have not dealt with the more primary component, viz., imitated desire. We still laud the 'free market economy' that urges us to think more is better, commercials and advertisements tease us with a Platonic dream of wanting and having more as though our needs would or could be met by things. Our right as Americans to 'pursue happiness' is bringing us to our knees, we were not meant for this lifestyle as creatures made in the image of God.

"So do not be surprised my friends when citizens among us (who are really expressions of our inner selves and not distinct from us) break down and utilize violence as the solution to their problems. "

Giving Meaning

2008-02-01T12:45:00+01:00

Just finished Patricia Cornwell's latest, Book of the Dead (2007). I read it at breakneck pace and thought it one of her best, less in terms of plot -- I got lost a few times, and I felt like the story was a bit cobbled together -- and more in terms of character and relationship development of Scarpetta, Benton, Lucy, Rose and Marino.

Anyway, this excerpt stood out like neon when I read it. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta is talking about a serial killer who is predisposed, we learn, by both nature and nurture to his actions, then sent over the edge by what he endured and witnessed as a soldier in Iraq. He photographs his victims, women he's 'saving' from their 'unbearable suffering,' before they're dead and sends the photos to someone.

"Sending photographs to her indicates he's created a psychological landscape and a ritual for his crimes. And it also becomes a game, serves a purpose. Removes him from the horror of what he's doing, because to face the fact that he's sadistically inflicting pain and death might be more than he can bear. So he has to give it a meaning. He has to make it cunning. ... Rather much like religion. If you do something in the name of God, that makes it okay. Stoning people to death. Burning them at the stake. The Inquisition.The Crusades. Oppressing people who aren't just like you. He gives a meaning to what he does. My opinion, anyway."

Nazis - 75th Anniversary

2008-01-29T17:00:00+01:00

Tomorrow it will be 75 years since Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took office in Germany. Nicholas Kulish writes today in the NYT about the continuing struggle of the German people to come to terms with the Holocaust in their country, including "the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace" that " continues unabated," with new construction beginning in Berlin of two monuments, "one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, ...; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust." These are in addition to the recently opened "Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters" and "a huge new exhibition ... at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp," as well as other building projects recently launched or in the works.

Two points that interest me in Kulish's short article (both mentioned briefly and warranting further investigation):

The younger generation of Germans, "who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively," view the Holocaust not as a source of guilt but as motivation for them to be responsible "on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq."

If this is true, it makes me curious about opposition to the Iraq war by those who are steeped in Holocaust history and likely aware of their own families' complicity in it or victimisation by it. Some people see Saddam Hussein as Hitler writ small, merrily exterminating his own people; I wonder what course these young people think would have been best in the case of Iraq, considering their own history: don't interefere, use diplomacy, use another strategy? Second, on the same point, because many people consider WWII a 'just war,' one that needed to be fought if any war ever did, I also wonder how the younger generation arrives at a position of pacifism generally.

The second comment that I noticed was Susan Neiman's, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group. She worries that the young will eventually "express their exhaustion with the topic. 'I can't help but feeling that some of the continued, "Let's build monuments; let's build Jewish museums," is a fairly ritualized behavior. ... I worry terribly that it's going to backfire.'"

This framing as 'ritual' of the construction of reminder after reminder of a terrible act reminds me of some of James Alison's thoughts about the sacred centre in his article after the events of 9/11/2001. The sacred centre offers those of us not actually involved in the crisis itself a sense of transcendent meaning, of good clean purpose, in lives that are often cluttered with the banal and with "little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences." The sacrificial centre is invoked to generate a feeling of unanimity, which can then harden to become militant goodness, and so on; and which can resemble, not in intent but perhaps in outcome, the technique well-understood and effectively and terribly used by the Nazis themselves, of bringing people together for a 'great purpose,' which often and seamlessly leads to opposing and scapegoating those who won't come together for the 'great purpose,' to creating the belief that this is thing that really matters, to instilling fear in those who refuse to believe it. Humans seem prone to being, as Alison puts it, "sucked into" the sacred centre. It makes us feel good.

Or, maybe, this younger generation won't so much become exhausted by participating in (or being expected to participate in) the sacred centre as they will come to see the buildings and the history as a reminder of something ... ordinary. Not transcendent, not filled with purpose and meaning, but very ordinary, and as some may already understand in their pacifism, very capable of being re-enacted any time, any where.

Untraceable

2008-01-26T19:50:12+01:00

I haven't seen the thriller film Untraceable, and having read the synopsis, I very likely won't see it (I can read about horrific events but adding audio and visual cues to the mix makes it something I wouldn't willingly endure), but I still found interesting and useful Nancy Hitt's summary of the film and especially her analysis of it in light of mimetic theory. The film's central idea is that anonymity changes people's behaviour and in fact allows people to participate in murder without feeling they're doing anything wrong. Check it out. My favourite bit:

"The film's most obvious conclusion is that law and order are the way to salvation from violence and death, yet it also points to the missing factor that could have inhibited the entire process. The gospel call to love one's neighbor as oneself, not being careless of the feelings of others even if they are unknown to us personally, is present through its absence."

Avoiding Violence of Spirit - Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute

2008-01-21T00:25:00+01:00

In memory and honour of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929 -1968 ...

MLK Quotes

MLK Bio Sketch

MLK Birthday Commemoration Resources

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

It's not only necessary to know how to go about loving your enemies, but also to go down into the question of why we should love our enemies. I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus' thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that's the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. -- 17 November 1957, "Loving Your Enemies," sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL

There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. ... For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does. -- 17 November 1957, "Loving Your Enemies," sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL

For nonviolence not only calls upon its adherents to avoid external physical violence, but it calls upon them to avoid internal violence of spirit. It calls on them to engage in that something called love. And I know it is difficult sometimes. When I say 'love' at this point, I'm not talking about an affectionate emotion. It's nonsense to urge people, oppressed people, to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I'm talking about something much deeper. I'm talking about a sort of understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. -- Speech at the Great March on Detroit, 23 June 1963, Detroit, MI

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. ... The chain reaction of evil -- hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars -- must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. -- Strength To Love, 1963

I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. -- "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?," Annual Report Delivered at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16 Aug. 1967, Atlanta, GA

______________________________________________

Biographical Sketch

King was born on 15 January 1929 at the family home in Atlanta, Georgia. He entered Morehouse College at age 15, graduating in 1948 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was ordained in Feb. 1948 (at age 19) at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, soon becoming assistant pastor of that church. He received his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, PA, in 1951, after which he accepted the call of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he served as pastor from Sept. 1954 to Nov. 1959. In September 1951, King began doctoral studies in Systematic Theology at Boston University and studied at Harvard University as well. In June 1953, he married Coretta Scott of Marion, Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in June 1955. His dissertation was titled “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.” In 1959, he and the family moved to Atlanta to direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which he helped found in 1957), and from 1960 until his death, he co-pastored Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father.

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise, born 17 Nov. 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama; Martin Luther III, born 23 Oct. 1957 in Montgomery; Dexter Scott, born 30 Jan. 1961 in Atlanta, Georgia; and Bernice Albertine, born 28 March 1963 in Atlanta.

King authored six books: Stride Toward Freedom (1958), about the Montgomery bus boycott; The Measure of a Man (1959), sermons; Why We Can't Wait (1963), about the Birmingham campaign; Strength to Love (1963), more sermons; Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), "reflections on the problems of today's world, the nuclear arms race, etc.;" and, posthumously published, The Trumpet of Conscience (1968), lectures.

King was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. He was there to help lead sanitation workers in a protest against low wages and poor working conditions. Though James Earl Ray was arrested, convicted, and pled guilty to the crime, a jury in Memphis in 1999, deciding in a case brought by King's wife and children, concluded "that Loyd Jowers and governmental agencies including the City of Memphis, the State of Tennessee, and the federal government were party to the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

King's mother, Alberta Williams King, "was shot and killed as she sat at the organ in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta" on Sunday, 30 June 1974 by Marcus Wayne Chenault, a 23-year-old black man from Ohio who said he shot her because "all Christians are my enemies."

______________________________________________

MLK Birthday Resources

Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project (Stanford University) Biography, a very detailed MLK Jr. Chronology, eleven MLK Jr. speeches, eleven MLK Jr. sermons, and information on articles, papers, more. Includes pdf-formatted text of the Letter From Birmingham Jail (16 April 1963), the Address at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the "I Have a Dream" speech, 28 August 1963), his Acceptance Speech at Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony (10 December 1964), Beyond Vietnam (4 April 1967), and the "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech (3 April 1968, his last speech). Very slow loading.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (Seattle Times), an extensive resource on King, with sections on The Man, The Movement, The Legacy, The Holiday, Electronic Classroom, and Talking About It.

The King Center, whose sections include Welcome, History, Philosophy (a collection of quotes from various King sources), Words, King Holiday, Community, Children, News, and Shop. Not as much information here as in other resources.

Time 100: Leaders & Revolutionaries: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Time magazine), a three-page profile of King, with accompanying timeline and a sidebar entitled "What if King had lived?"

"Loving Your Enemies" speech, delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957.

I Have A Dream" Speech (28 August 1963) text. Also available in audio mp3 format.

Robert Kennedy's Speech on MLK Jr.'s Death (4 April 1968) text (at History Place), and in RealAudio.

King's Legacy: PBS NewsHour Talk with Taylor Branch (PBS), the transcript of David Gergen interview with MLK Jr.-biographer Taylor Branch about King's most important legacies, from 2 Feb. 1998.

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV (FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), an article on MLK's largely unnoted shift from civil rights issues to human rights issues during the last three years of his life, by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, in Jan. 1995 Media Beat.

Note: The source for most of the biographical sketch is The King Center Biographical Outline of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Atrocity of the Day Calendar

2008-01-11T20:54:16+01:00

Strangely compelling, the Axis of Evel Knievel ("Another Day, Another Pointless Atrocity") posts details of an historical atrocity most days. Among 'evel' topics are crime, executions, nuclear radiation accidents, birthdays of tyrants and dictators, fires, declaratons of war, war battles, shipwrecks, genocides and other mass slaughters, governmental conspiracies, self-immolation, and so on.

”Civil” War

2007-11-11T19:13:15+01:00

I listened to this article -- "Maronite Christians Thrive in Lebanon" by Peter Kenyon -- on NPR earlier this week and wanted to record two astute quotes from it:

"Like much of the Middle East, Lebanon was fabricated by foreigners. It might be called an accident of history -- if the rapacious manoeuvers of European colonial powers could be called accidents." (Kenyon proceeds to detail some of these manoeuvers.)

Samir Khalaf, author of Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict (2002), says: "'What I argue is that as long as the Lebanese were fighting over the visible issues, they don't care. But when these are deflected into [invisible] issues -- autonomy, identity, whom am I, where is my home -- it is then that the fighting begins to be uncivil.' At no time was the violence more uncivil than during the 15-year Civil War that began in 1975."

What I'm Reading: Teens, Happiness, Theology, Music, Violence, Death (the usual)

2007-11-09T00:20:00+01:00

Assorted reading:

1. What teen girls are made of, in Salon: "In their own dark and funny words, four teenage girls tell us everything we need to know about sex, parents and gym class." Excerpted from Red: The Next Generation of American Writers -- Teenage Girls -- on What Fires Up Their Lives Today, edited by Amy Goldwasser (2007). Better than you think it's going to be. (If you're not a Salon subscriber, you may be asked to watch an ad or two.)

2. Two from Gretchen at The Happiness Project:

Four tips for surmounting boredom or irritation. I'm rarely bored but frequently irritated. The one that almost always works for me is: "Take the perspective of a journalist or scientist. Really study what's around you. What are people wearing, what do the interiors of buildings look like, what noises do you hear? If you bring your analytical powers to bear, you can make almost anything interesting."

What’s making you 'feel bad'? I don't think I agree with all she says here, but it seems worth thinking about: The premise is that "removing sources of bad feelings will protect your good feelings from being swamped by guilt, anger, remorse, irritation, envy, fear, anxiety, boredom, and all the rest of that awful family. ... These emotions are unpleasant, but they're VERY valuable. They're showing you what you need to change or accept. These feelings are so unpleasant, however, that we often pretend that we aren't experiencing them, or we try to ignore them. In some situations, this attitude is useful. But for this exercise, really concentrate on your negative moments."

3. What We Learn from the Dying by T.E. Holt, M.D.: A doctor shares what his patients' last moments have taught him, in Men's Health. The incidents are well-selected and well-written (i.e., made me cry).

4. Curing the Religious Disease, Part 4: A/theism by Richard Beck at Experimental Theology. Quoting from Peter Rollins in How (Not) to Speak of God: "We ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate. Hence we act as both theist and atheist. This a/theistic approach is deeply deconstructive since it always prevents our ideas from scaling the throne of God. Yet it is important to bear in mind that this deconstruction is not destruction, for the questioning it engages in is not designed to undermine God but to affirm God." ... This approach is "a recognition that negation is embedded within, and permeates, all religious affirmation. It is an acknowledgment that a desert of ignorance exist in the midst of every oasis of understanding." Lots more at ET, including comparison to theologians Tillich and Barth.

5. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Cowen talks about Randall Collins' new book with this title: "The main argument is that people are not as predisposed to violence as we might think. Collins cites a wide array of evidence, from military behavior in the field to, most intriguingly, video studies of the micro-expressions of violent perpetrators. People are more naturally tense and fearful, sometimes full of bluster but usually looking to avoid confrontation unless they have vastly superior numbers on their side. The prospect of violence makes people feel weak and scared. The greatest dangers of violence arises from atrocities against the weak under overwhelming conditions, ritualized violence enacted in front of supportive audiences, or clandestine terrorism or murder. ... 'Violence is not primordial, and civilization does not tame it; the opposite is much nearer the truth.'" The last line and the bit on ritualized violence in particular could be read as consistent with Girardian thought, but the idea that violence is synonymous with physical confrontation seems plain wrong. People who are fearful of confrontation may act from and cause great violence all the same, and their actions (or inactions) may even lead to physical violence down the line, where it can't be traced back to them. Think about gossip, numerous kinds of passive-aggressive behaviour, actions that derive from envy and jealousy, cruel acts disguised as kind ones, and so on.

Some of the topics sound fascinating: discussions on "the micro-dynamics of the Rape of Nanjing, how British soccer stadium designs were (but now less) conducive to violence, how demonstrations can turn into violent confrontations with the police (lines break down and micro-situations of overwhelming power arise), which children and schools are most conducive to bullying, why basketball has fewer fights than football or hockey (no padding), the dynamics of a mosh pit, and how hired assassins motivate themselves."

6. Looking for a good book? Fall Books: Slate's take on this season's books. Fiction and non-.

This one sounds promising to me: A Secular Age by Charles Taylor: "In medieval times virtually everyone in the Western world believed in God; disbelief was hard since magic appeared to be everywhere. Charles Taylor describes this earlier time as having 'the social grounded in the sacred' and "human drama unfolded within a cosmos." Today belief in God is often seen as 'optional,' most of all in Western Europe. The modern world, Taylor argues, creates an open space where people can wander spiritually. Reason has been exalted as the best road to knowledge, and thus many people choose uncertain detachment rather than commit to one particular religious worldview. Taylor's masterful integration of history, sociology, philosophy, and theology demands much of the reader."

And an engaging review of three short non-fiction titles about classical music: "The Musical Mystique: Defending classical music against its devotees," by Richard Taruskin, in The New Republic (22 October 2007). The books reviewed are Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson; Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears by Joshua Fineberg; and Why Classical Music Still Matters by Lawrence Kramer.

Cool it, Matt!

2007-10-28T05:45:00+01:00

The appalling Matt Hayden continues to make light of the planet's impending doom. Here, he attempts humour with a facetious post about the rise in naked sleepwalking being caused by global warming.

The reich-winger thinks he's being "ironic". But the real irony is that his joke may actually be closer to the truth than he realises.

Ambient temperature has long been linked to sleep quality. And it is not unreasonable to suggest that someone who feels hot and bothered might attempt to disrobe.

Matt may not like it, but the fact is that climate change will increase a whole range of social ills, including violence.

Will he ever learn?

Remorse

2007-09-23T16:50:00+02:00

Every now and then they resurface

to take me back to days long spent

Unholy pictures weighing heavy on my mind

to punish and make me repent

a stupid decision made in younger years

for which I have no reasonable defense

I'd rather keep them buried painful as they are

but I know I should never forget

the tears I caused along with the scars

when I took a man's life just because my demands were not met

I paid with time and freedom but could that ever be enough

for his wife and three children for life bereft

Books of Faith Expunged from Prisons

2007-09-11T15:19:47+02:00

Saw this article, "Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries," in the NYT yesterday and notebooked it to write about later, but Nancy Hitt at Preaching Peace beat me to it and speaks for me as well. Here's a lengthy excerpt from her response:

"If you were wondering how the war of all against all was coming along, I'd say it was on its way. We have reached a new level of desperation when we start purging religious texts from our prisons in order to keep the nation safe. Not that such texts aren't useful for inciting violence; of course they are! After all, religion, like the law that keeps the offenders behind bars, is meant to contain and control human violence. The texts that are used in service of that goal are powerful, used as easily to meet the goal of containing violence as to inciting it. I'm guessing few of these officials have read the Bible, because there was no mention of removing it from the shelves in the NY Times article reporting on this. If they had, it would have to go too; there are way too many ways to encourage violence by manipulating what's within its pages. However, in time honored human tradition, violence is being used to contain violence. ...

"Of course the characteristic American response to all of this is to file a lawsuit. So far, two of them have been filed focusing on First Amendment concerns. So now we have two of the three pillars of culture at war with each other over violence. Is there no way to stop the madness?

"In my frustration, I've been muttering things like: Mimetic Theory should be mandatory! Then I laugh at myself as I realize I've just replicated the same response that I'm scandalized by, that old idea of using law to enforce understanding and contain human violence. ...

"I'm pretty sure that censoring the religious texts available to prisoners will neither reduce violence (it's more likely to increase it) nor protect the nation from further terrorist activity. But I have to admit that those prison officials are on to something. They are right to recognize that religious texts can be used/misused to manipulate violence."

Book Thoughts: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

2007-07-12T16:40:00+02:00

I haven't done many (any?) book reviews here but am jotting down my thoughts on Water for Elephants, a novel about circus life by Sara Gruen, because I have found online only extravagant praise for the book -- including numerous comments along the lines of "I don't know anyone who's read the book who hasn't loved it" -- and I wanted to at least weigh in with another view. I finished the book only because it was a book group read (although that didn't stop one person in my group from returning it to the library in disgust), and the ending(s) did not justify my perseverance.

First, what's good about the book: It's a very fast and easy read (I read it in a 24-hour period). The writing, for the most part, flows well, although there are notable exceptions, and some passages felt cliched and old. The main character, Jacob, is likable and engaging both as a 23-year-old and as a 93-year-old. I don't know much about circuses or the Depression but from reviews I've read, Gruen seems to have researched her work thoroughly and captured the atmosphere and spirit of both the place and time. The nursing home scenes, though they are too few imo, rang true. The themes of the book are interesting: good vs. evil, responsibility and culpability for actions, charming illusion and harsh reality, inhumane humans and human-acting animals and human 'freaks,' the twists of memory, and, of course, rivalry.

Now to the rest.

The writing at times feels clunky and cliched (especially the sex and post-sex scenes); there wasn't one line of prose or any paragraph in this book that made me swoon with delight or want to mark it to remember it. The plotting, while fluid, is predictable. Even the 'surprise' ending didn't feel like one to me; the structure of the book led me to believe that the 'prologue' version of events would be re-imagined at some point, and the second ('real') version of events is even less satisfying than the first.

But these are minor quibbles in a fast-paced, plot-centered book. The larger problem for me is that the book takes on grand themes and then treats them so simplistically. I didn't recognise this at first; I just knew something didn't sit well with me when I finished the book. Then a friend described a family situation in terms of 'good guys' and 'bad guys' and I saw what was troubling me about this book.

This is a book in which the major characters are either good guys or bad guys: Jacob and Marlena are good, Uncle Al and August are bad. Walter and Camel, supporting characters, are more complex but are basically foils for the good guys and the bad guys; the brutal, cruel treatment by Al and August of Walter and Camel reinforces in the reader the notion that these men are Bad with a capital B., and the kind treatment of these men by Jacob shows us how Good with a capital G he is. Rosie, not as major a character as I would have liked, gets to be seen as 'good' (even as a 'heroine' according to the blurb on the paperback edition of the book) even though she commits a 'bad' act. Is this because she is 'just' an animal (though it's hinted that she knows what she is doing) or because she is justified in retaliating against a bad guy who has so harmed her and others?

What troubles me about this book, and about the nearly universal praise for it, is that it's a book that celebrates as good and right 'justifiable' violence. It seeks to uphold the illusory line between profane violence -- that of the bad guys, violence inspired by greed, selfishness, and even a mental illness like schizophrenia -- and sacred violence -- violence done to scapegoat the bad guys, violence done in the name of good, kindness, and love. Rosie's act essentially frees Jacob and Marlena to a lovely life together. The message here is that if we can just kill all the bad people, or expel them in some way, then we can finally live in peace and harmony. But as Solzhenitsyn said in the Gulag Archipelago: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

Gruen's novel may have accurately contrasted the brutal and nitty-gritty reality of circus life during the Depression with the 'step right up' illusion of the entertaining family-friendly circus, but her novel only solidifies the illusion that we can live in peace once we identify and do away with the evil-doers.

Current Reading

2007-06-19T22:20:00+02:00

A smattering of online ideas, opinions, images that are intriquing, amusing, perplexing, and inspiring me right now:

1. America Assimilates Terrorists. Source: Onion: "After 5 Years In U.S., Terrorist Cell Too Complacent To Carry Out Attack." TV addiction, weight gain, and debt has done 'em in.

2. Sorted Books Project. (via Blog on a Toothpick.) Fabulous. Books and journals shelved to tell a story. Example: A Day at the Beach. The Bathers. Shark 1. Shark 2. Shark 3. Sudden Violence. Silence. Also: Genealogy of the Supermarket.

3. Eye contact and shame as invitation to violence at Preaching Peace: "Using shame to keep order will ultimately result in violent chaos and death as the citizens and community become each others' police. While there are laws and agencies to prevent this, the fact that the leadership has resorted to invoking shame suggests that they're not working..."

4. Sex and death, reminders of mortality, from Experimental Theology: "[I]t appears that there are good theoretical, observational, and scientific reasons to believe that religious faith is operating as an existential buffer, as a defense-mechanism to repress death anxiety. This will not prove to be the final story about faith. But it is the beginning of all faith." Believers who remain in "this 'defensive stage' of faith ... never fully confront the anxiety that necessarily accompanies an existential sifting of faith. This adventure is, simply, too scary a prospect. Thus, most retreat from this work and remain, keeping with Freud's metaphor, intoxicated." Hence, bodily sins (sex and drug use) are most shameful in American society and in Christian (among other faiths) culture. Hence, our 'animal-reminder disgust' triggers: Body products (e.g., feces, vomit), Animals (e.g., insects, rats), Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality), Contact with the dead or corpses, Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity), and poor hygiene.

5. Photo of a Royal Poinciana in bloom in Miami in June. Mmmm.

6. How to keep lettuce and other greens 'bright, firm and flavorful' for a week.

7. In Seattle, 31 church-goers report their experiences at (or almost at) 31 faith community worship services, including the Seventh-day Adventists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopals, a mosque, a synagogue, Sea-Tac's (airport) meditation room. church on TV, and 'the Jesus freaks at Mars Hill.' (The prospective attender couldn't find the Baha'i worship space and no one would answer the phone.) They weren't that chuffed with what they found. (If you're skimming, read #10, #13, #15, #18, #19.)

Looking Back: 24 May 2007

2007-05-25T03:45:00+02:00

24 MAY is ...

>>> 151 years since American slavery abolitionist John Brown (1800 - 1859) staged his first anti-slavery raid, on Pottawatomie, Kansas (1856). "His perennial zeal for the underdog ... drove him to struggle on behalf of the economically vulnerable farmers of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western Virginia a decade before his guerrilla activities in Kansas." In late winter of 1856, Brown came from his home in Pennsylvania to Kansas, which was hotly divided on the slavery issue. Slave state forces were using violence and terrorism to win the state for their side in an upcoming vote, which inflamed Brown, as did the lack of effective response by free state forces. Brown was also concerned that his family could be the next targets of the terrorists. During the night of 24 May, Brown and a group of others, including some of his sons, took five pro-slavery settlers -- James Doyle, James Doyle's sons William and Drury Doyle, Allen Wilkinson, and William Sherman -- from their cabins on Pottawatomie Creek and hacked them to death with broadswords. He evaded capture in the woods. "This was one of the many bloody episodes in Kansas preceding the American Civil War, which came to be known collectively as Bleeding Kansas." Brown's undoing came in 1859, with this raid on Harpers Ferry, WV (then Virginia). He hoped to start a liberation movement among enslaved blacks and to deplete Virginia of slaves, wreaking economic havoc, but no slaves answered his call. In October, with a group of anti-slavery advocates gathered, he went ahead with his raid on the Harper's Ferry Armory. Gunfire lasted all day, until by morning the Marines surrounded them. Brown's group killed 4 people, including a free black man, and his opponents killed 10 of Brown's men, including two of Brown's sons. He was tried, and hanged on 2 December in public, believing himself (and many others agreed) to be a martyr.

Sources: PBS: The American Experience: Pottawatomie Massacre / The Pottawatomie Killings -- It is Established Beyond Controversy That John Brown Was the Leader. Statement of James Townsley. In the Republican Citizen, Paola, Kansas, 20 Dec 1879 / The Trial of John Brown: A Commentary, by Douglas O. Linder, 2005 / Wikipedia: John Brown and Wikipedia: Pottawatomie Massacre / John Brown and the Pottawatomie Killings, sourced from To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown, by Stephen B. Oates, 1970 /

Where Were You?

2007-04-26T01:35:00+02:00

I bought Alan Jackson's Greatest Hits II the other day, mainly for his partial duet with Jimmy Buffet of "It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere."

But listening to his "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)," I teared up as always. I don't believe the world stopped turning for most of us (those of us not immediately involved) on Sept. 11, 2001. The acts of violence perpetrated that day seem to me like so many other acts of violence, before and after, and just because it occurred on soil that happens to be in a country called the United States of America doesn't make it remarkable.

What's moving about the song for me are the varied responses he names to news of shocking violence*, and how on target they are for so many of us; and what's remarkable to me and resonates for me about that day and every day is this:

"I'm just a singer of simple songs,

I'm not a real political man,

I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell you

the difference in Iraq and Iran

But I know Jesus, and I talk to God,

And I remember this from when I was young,

Faith, hope, and love are some good things he gave us --

And the greatest is love."

------

(*Responses he names: stand there in shock watching images, shout out in anger and fear, sit down and cry, weep for the children, pray for those who still don't know whether they've lost a loved one, rejoice for those who walked away, sob for those dead, burst with pride for the country and the heroes doing their job, look up to heaven for an answer, look at yourself and what really matters, feel guilty to have survived, feel alone in a crowded room, call your mother to tell her you love her, dust off your Bible, wish it away, have trouble sleeping, notice the sunset, speak to a stranger, buy a gun, turn off a violent movie and watch 'I Love Lucy' reruns, hold hands with strangers at a church, give blood, stay home and cling to family and thank God for them.)

Mike Daisey Assaulted on Stage

2007-04-25T22:48:32+02:00

Mike Daisey, the hillarious author of 21 Dog years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, had his notes ruined during an assault during a walk-out. The whole thing is on Youtube, and Mike's blog.

Aftermath

Apparently, the criminal (Mike calls him a terrorist, and it's hard to disagree with that term) is a self-described Christian. Of course the assalut wasn't Christian. The assault was the opposite of Christian. This isolate crime -- this particular act of terror -- has a more in common with the Muslim cartoon riots. Which, perhaps, is appropriate. The assault against Mike Daisey is a perversion of a Christian, as Islam is an heresey of Christianity.

Shootings and The Borg

2007-04-24T15:14:35+02:00

Nancy Hitt at Preaching Peace offers a meditation on the recent VT shootings, and on shootings, shooters, and "the crowd" in general. She speaks eloquently about the need to examine individual and community responsibility for societal violence, and her need to "renounce the Borg," which must eliminate anyone who doesn't perfectly belong, and to embrace the forgiveness Jesus gave his killers:

"I've been thinking a lot about the Borg as I've read the media coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. Commentator after commentator has been devoted to the problem of unraveling the thought process of the shooter. To that end all sorts of experts have been brought in to shed their insight on the problem, resulting in all sorts of answers. We've been given a variety of diagnoses -- some medical, some criminal -- through which to understand this young mans' violent behavior. In our desire to distance ourselves from him, to diminish his humanity and the reality of his experience, we have described his writings and video as incoherent, a violent diatribe that makes no sense. I guess if we can't make sense of it we don't have to worry about any responsibility for it. After all, if it's crazy, by definition it's him and not us. Now please don't misunderstand me; I know that his words are bizarre and violent, his images angry and provocative. I don't for a minute think he is not responsible for his own actions, nor am I looking for a scapegoat to blame for his behavior. However, I also know he didn't act in a vacuum, and I can hear both Girard and my psych nursing instructor speaking in my head. Girards' voice is directing me to examine the role of the crowd, and my psych instructor is insisting "ALL behavior has meaning and can be understood!" While there are exceptions to every rule, I need to examine things from these perspectives before ruling them out."

Love and Violence

2007-04-19T03:18:37+02:00

Related to the same NPR interview I just commented on, about how to understand and how to control people who might be dangerous to the rest of society, I offer this to ponder:

"Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love." -- psychiatrist and existentialist R.D. Laing, The Mystification of Experience, in The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (1967, 1990 p. 50)

When we notice the 'red flags' of potentially dangerous deviancy and seek to institutionalise, drug, or otherwise control the behaviour of the deviant person -- when we "attempt to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire" -- and do so without concern for that person, and in fact while sacrificing that person's "existence or destiny" for the sake of many others' existence and destiny, is this indeed a violent act, one that destroys us as society? Is there any way to keep the members of a society safe from one who would seek to harm them without controlling that one?

Life is Not Safe

2007-04-19T02:50:00+02:00

In the wake of the shootings this week at Virginia Tech, I think what Dr. Russ Federman, director of counseling at the University of Virginia, said on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon is worth repeating here. He was responding to interviewer Michele Norris, who had asked him, in retrospect, what lesson can we learn about how to handle students whose behaviour raises red flags for other students, administrators or teachers.

Federman replied: "The lesson is that we pay closer attention to student behaviour, the lesson is that we get as much involved as we can, at the same time being mindful of students' rights. And that leaves us with a grey area."

He commented further on that grey area:

"I think we would like to think that violence and tragedy is avoidable. We would like to think that we get up each day and we go out into the world and we experience a day of safety and relative stability. And if things go haywire, we'd like to find ways of preventing that in the future, such that if we can prevent it in the future, we can feel less anxious about life. But I think the reality is that human behaviour is not always predictable. And the ways in which we can control an individual's behaviour, when they have their own legal rights as adults, is limited."

When I heard this, I thought not only of the massive desire to understand and predict (and possibly control) deviant, violent human behaviour -- such as we are seeing in the media and in our own personal conversations and thoughts about the Virginia Tech killings now (why did he do it? what prompted it? could teachers, administrators, parents, the system etc., have prevented it? and so on)* -- but also of the desire to understand and predict nature, to avoid natural disasters, and, underlying both of these urges, the desire to find an explanation for anything "bad" that happens not only in our own lives but in everyone else's life (but especially in our own). We tend not to look for explanations for "good" things that happen: "I lived another day! How could that be? What was I doing to cause that?" or "I didn't have a car wreck on the way home. Wonder why?" It sounds ridiculous because we don't generally think that way.

I'd like to underscore Dr. Federman's implication that violence and tragedy are not avoidable, and neither are natural disasters, freakish accidents, illness and injury, birth defects, and simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can prevent and avoid these things some times, by being cautious, by being careful (and care-full), by thinking and planning, even by seeking to prevent them and applying ourselves to the task. And maybe that's what makes us think that it's possible to completely avoid violence, tragedy, and so on. But it's not possible. And, as psychologist Alfred Adler said, "The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions." I'm not an Adler fan but I agree with the quote. We can work so hard at protecting ourselves and those we love against anything potentially injurious that we end up not so much living life as watching it pass by from inside our snug, protective shell.

We can't avoid or prevent "bad" things from happening because there is randomness. There is coincidence. There is genetics. There is luck, and fate. There is cause and effect in layers so complex that we don't understand it, even when we think we do -- we can posit this based on systems of cause and effect that weren't understood 100, 50, 10 years ago and which are better understood now (leeches? venesection? sun revolves around Earth? -- although millions of Americans still believe this), but even for something as simple-seeming as the effect of food on health, there are all kinds of conflicting 'cause and effect' hypotheses.

And we can never really feel less anxious about life, because it always ends the same way, and we are always aware that we are tending towards that end, that one wrong move could be our last move. Even if that move is simply taking a luxury boat cruise. Or driving through a Boston tunnel. Or being born of parents with AIDS in Africa. Or going to German class at your college one spring morning.

(* I'm not speaking here of the questing for answers by those actually involved in or personally affected by the shooting spree. That seems to me part of the process of grief.)

Diminishment

2007-04-10T18:10:00+02:00

Christopher at Bending the Rule writes about his Maundy Thursday experience of being accused as a "faggot" in Target in light of Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection. Christopher was standing looking at packages of tea on a shelf when a couple of young men pointed at him from down the aisle and one said, "Look at that faggot over there" in a menacing voice, following it up a moment or two later with the hissing of "Damn faggot" as they passed by.

Naturally, Christopher was shaken. He writes about his immediate visceral responses, and about his 'temptations' -- questioning himself and wondering what he had done to provoke the attack, wanting to react to his own fear and anger by freezing up or fighting back, and internalising their perception (and much of the world's perception) of him ... He quotes James Alison on the conflicting message the Church gives gays: "God loves you. God wants you dead."

Describing Jesus's death at our hands (not God's), he reflects back on his experience in the store:

"Demonizing requires a victimizer and a victim. In Christ, we need no longer be either. He has overcome the ways of the world, the voice of the devil, all that would demand we accept ourselves as less than human and all that would lead us to actions that would place us as gods above others. All that would tell us we should be the sacrifice or sacrifice another. These voices no longer bind us."

Today's Dilbert cartoon almost captures the Girardian nature of Christopher's Target experience, the temptation to compare and live the hierarchy that says self or others are gods / self or others are unworthy. (The rivalry is certainly obvious in the cartoon; I'd change the word 'success' to 'being' to make it purely Girardian, from my pov.)

McCoys Naturally Prone To Violence?

2007-04-06T03:10:00+02:00

It sounds like The Onion or an April Fool's story but it's apparently not:

Disease: Secret to Hatfields-McCoys Feud:

"The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

"Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other 'fight or flight' stress hormones.

"No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan’s notorious behavior.

...

"Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland."

And what explains the Hatfields' attacks, murders, and other violence?

Apocalyptic Violence in the Bible

2007-03-22T02:10:00+01:00

We interrupt our James Alison note-taking to bring you this special bulletin from Girardians everywhere about apocalyptic violence in the Bible:

Lutheran pastor Paul Nuechterlein writes, in "Opening Comments on Apocalyptic" at Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary:

"It is important, I think, to understand the Girardian explanation of apocalyptic violence. Sacrificial violence is a sacred, sanctioned violence that comes into place in order to keep in check the fearsome profane, random violence. A sacrificial crisis, in the Girardian parley, occurs when the effectiveness of the sacrificial institutions is waning such that the sacrificial violence loses its effectiveness in containing profane violence. If a new sacrificial solution does not come into play, then the profane violence grows into apocalyptic violence. Throughout human history we see cycles of being on the verge of such violence and then new sacrificial solutions come into play to again bring relative peace. During the sacrificial crises, there are often cries of the Final Apocalypse, a violence that will finally consume us. And in sacralized settings, this apocalyptic violence is attributed to the deity: the gods will bring a resounding judgment that will punish the wicked and reward the just. To the mind under the influence of the Sacred, apocalyptic violence is the ultimately divine sacred violence.

"But Girard argues that the continuing effect of the Gospel in history is to desacralize, i.e., to make it clear to us that violence is not of the true God; violence is ours alone. ... It begins with a small band of disciples who have witnessed the resurrection of the Innocent One who was crucified by those sacralized powers of violence and raised from the dead by the true God in Vindication. As more and more people come to see the revelation (apocalypse in the Greek) of sacred violence, however, it also means the increasing ineffectiveness of the sacrificial institutions to contain mimetic violence. The times of sacrificial crises increasingly come closer together, and what looms on the horizon is the possibility of a truly apocalyptic violence: a sacrificial crisis in which a new sacrificial solution cannot assert itself because the revelation of the cross has finally made such solutions impossible. In short, the Apocalypse would be a sacrificial crisis that doesn't result in a new sacrificial solution -- no sanctioned violence to contain the random, mimetic violence. And this is a possibility that the revelation of the cross and resurrection bring about and that the work of the Paraclete slowly has made more real. Girard contends that this is why the New Testament is realistic about the possibility of apocalyptic violence -- because it is the Gospel itself which disarms the powers of sacred violence."

Later, Nuechterlein quotes extensively from Mark Heim's new book, Saved from Sacrifice, in which Heim directly addresses the role of violence in the Bible. Briefly:

"What is violence doing in the Bible? It is telling us the truth, the truth about our human condition, about the fundamental dynamics that lead to human bloodshed, and most particularly, the truth about the integral connection between religion and violence. ... We always knew this was the way things were, we claim. We don’t need a religious text to tell us so. We need cures, not diagnosis. But is that true? What if our cures need diagnosing? ..."

Heim repeats the question, What is violence doing in the Bible?, and responds further:

"It is showing us the nature of the mimetic conflict that threatens to destroy human community. It is showing us the religious dynamic of scapegoating sacrifice that arises to allay such crisis. It is letting us hear the voices of the persecuted victims and their pleas for revenge and vindication. It is showing God’s judgment (even violent judgment) against violence, and most particularly, God’s siding with the outcast victims of scapegoating persecution. The Old Testament is an antimyth. It is thick with bodies, the voices of victims and threatened victims. This landscape is either the product of an idiosyncratic, bloodthirsty imagination or the actual landscape of history and religion. If the latter, then what is remarkable is not that the scriptures describe it, but that we should think it normal not to." (pp. 101-103)

I recommend reading further if the role of violence in the Bible interests you (and why wouldn't it? :-)).

Eschatological Imagination - Part III - Death, Life and Judgment

2007-03-19T20:20:00+01:00

I am posting and commenting on excerpts from James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (1996) every day for a while. (Part I and II here)

Alison on seeing God as violent:

"There is a certain understanding of God that is absolutely bound up with a mechanism of violence. That is to say: God keeps the group pure and clean by expelling from its midst any contaminating element. " In the majority of cultures, God shows "his mercy and justice to the group by expelling the evil one. ... The image of God which [Jesus] proposes in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3-7) is exactly the inverse of the [violent] god we've seen. According to this parable, God is shown not to the group, but to the lost member, to the outsider. ... [M]ercy has been changed from something which covers up violence to something which unmasks it completely. For God there are no 'outsiders,' which means that any mechanism for the creation of 'outsiders' is automatically simply a mechanism of human violence." (p. 35)

My comments:

"Violence" has a specific meaning for girardians. Briefly, it refers to a particular mechanism humans use in an attempt to make 'peace' and maintain order -- in a community, a group, a relationship, and I would say (I'm not sure others would) also within our selves -- through the expelling, killing, and in any way seeking to exclude those whom we judge to commit "sin" -- i.e., those who threaten peace and order and contaminate what we think of as clean, good, holy, and sacred.

Violence in a girardian sense is not necessarily about anger, although anger very often ends up being justification for doing so-called righteous or deserved violence to our enemies and loved ones alike, to blame, accuse, scapegoat, and purge the object of our anger. The emotion of anger can also, with an eternal perspective, lead to healing and compassion; see Paul Nuechterlein's notes on Mark 1:40-45 - scroll down, and on John 11.

Alison on a god who says YES and who doesn't participate in our violent moral system:

"It is very difficult for us to imagine the huge change of perception underway here, but it could be described as the change from a perception of a god in which the deity has a double face, saying 'yes, but...' or 'yes, and no', or 'yes, if...', to the perception according to which God only and unconditionally says 'yes'. Another way of putting it is as a change from a god who is both good and bad, who loves and who punishes, to a perception of God who is only love, in whom there is no darkness at all. Jesus had begun to teach this to his disciples, but it had been incomprehensible to them until after the resurrection. Consider Jesus' teaching that God makes the sun to shine on good and bad alike, and causes the rain to fall on both the just and the unjust. This has the effect of removing God completely from the sphere of reference of our human morality, excluding him from any participation in judging and condemning humans. The same thing happens in the parables: we are not to separate the wheat from the tares (Mt 13:24-30) in this life, because we cannot judge adequately, and God's judgment has nothing to do with our own. The same with the parable of the fish caught in the net (Mt 13:47-50). Exactly the same point occurs in Luke 13:1-5: there is no link between any type of physical happening, or accidental death, and God's action, but those who think that there is are trapped in an understanding of God which is meshed in by death, and they had better repent or they too will perish." (p. 42-43)

Note that Alison doesn't say here that God doesn't judge; he says that God's judgment is nothing like ours, and nothing like what we imagine judgment to mean, formed as we are within a system where judgment means deciding who is good and who is bad, who is clean and who is unclean. God, on the other hand, treats "the good" and "the bad" the same (at least as far as weather goes).

Later, in Chapter 7, when he looks specifically at John 5:21-30, Alison elaborates. Essentially, he interprets the passage in John this way: God the Father doesn't judge. The Son, in obeying his Father by revealing the murderous lie of the world, and as a victim of that very lie, becomes a judge, although he did not come to judge us. He ends up becoming our judge when we reject him, because his rejection, death, resurrection and forgiveness exposes our participation in the system ruled by death, the mechanism we use to do away with what we perceive as threatening. Alison says: "The coming of the Son into the world has as its end to create a belief in the absolute aliveness of God and to empower us to act as if death were not, thus being set free from our compulsion to act in a way governed by the kingdom of death." (p. 139)

Alison has something helpful to say too about our conception of "love" (as in "God is love" and ""love one another"):

"We often interpret Jesus' words about love from within a general notion which we have of love, that is, love is a general term embracing passion, affection, addiction, compulsion, generosity, sex and other realities besides. According to a certain fairly widely held view, Jesus is talking about a special subsection of this general notion: the sort of love that requires sacrifice, especially so that someone else may live. ... Well, I beg to dissent. ... Jesus is not talking about a particular subsection of the general term 'love.' Rather he is creating a new open definition of love."

Alison then examines John 14:23ff for a page or two, noting that the passage is not about renouncing one's life for one's friends; it's about giving -- living out -- one's life "as a creative overcoming of death, showing that you are prepared to die because you are not moved by death," and by living out this belief, making possible a similar belief and life among those who know you. The passage is about imitating Jesus's whole life, his very purpose in being on Earth.

"The commandment of love, far from being an insistence that we strain our feelings, as it is so often understood, in a sort of grotesque Christian parody, is a commandment to create a visible and imitable human history, living a life that is empowered by an imagination not shaded by death in a free and diverse imitation of the human story created and lived out by Jesus." (pp. 70-72)

Another school bites the dust!

2007-03-06T08:55:00+01:00

The events of early June 2006 at my daughter's school were shocking, to say the least.

Now CSI can join the ranks of the other infamous schools for violence...

It has always been a safe school, well, within it's walls at least. There have been many events over the last year outside it's walls where kids have been attacked and robbed. The 7th arrondisement is not making a good name for itself at all!

The one thing I like about the CSI is that around 70% or so of the kids there are either foreigners or are returning French expats.

Walking through the school one hears so many languages - but the nice think is that the common language is French.

No one feels different or foreign as a result. It feels good. Of course there is still the French educational system - this is a French government school afterall - oh well, I guess you can't have everything!.

The result of the French educational system can be seen in the results of yesterday's events.

The boy in question was Cuban. He was told that he would have to repeat the year because his grades were not good enough to let him pass into the next year! At 16 years of age this is a huge slap in the face. What about remedial teaching, I hear you ask! Hasn't been invented here yet! You just fail and repeat until you get it right or you are too old to continue! Or your parents have lots of money and can send you to one of the numerous and succesful tutoring schools!. And that's only if you are given enough warning that you child is failing. Communication is definitely not a strong point anywhere here!

Why is the French education system so poor that kids are still failing at the age of 16 one wonders?

The Anglophone education systems around the world are certainly not infallible - they do produce kids who still have problems reading and writing when they leave school - but I don't think that it produces as many psychologically tormented kids!

If you compare the French system with any Anglophone system you will find that, in the end, each produces its fair share of doctors, dentists, scientists, marketing experts etc etc etc.

The difference is, that in France, you go to school from around 8:00am (lycee) to 5:30pm (or something like that -depending on the school you go to). If you don't manage to repeat somewhere along the line then that's incredible - it's all part of they 'system'. You will be yelled at and told that you are stupid. You will have you marks announced to all the class and with it a suitable comment from you teacher! Kids being kids, you can expect that your child will then have to suffer the humiliation outside in the playground from his or her peers!

When you finally make it through school you then need to do another 1 or 2 years prepatory school before you can get into University or a special senior college. Then you can expect that any degree you do will take you at least 5-6 or 7 years! In the Anglophone world you go to university directly from high school then you do your degree - usually 4 years or a diploma, 3 years. And, voila, you have a young person ready to be trained in the real world at the age of 23 or 24 whereas, in France, you can expect to be looking for that same job at 27! And, of course, you expect the highest salary and conditions - you are 27 afterall - no matter that you have no experience!

Hmmm, let me see, which would I prefer.......! ;-)

Notes on Girardian Thought

2006-10-21T15:30:00+02:00

Girardian Anthropology and Mimetic Theory

Due to length, my current, idiosyncratic notes on Girardian anthropology and mimetic theory have been moved here.

Computer Games Aren't Bad For You, and The Internet Is Good For You

2006-08-28T20:55:00+02:00

The text's statements on computer games are doubtful. It states that "an increasing number of studies show that playing violent games, like watching violent TV, increases hostility and aggression." However, more than half of studies looking at the connection between media violence and violent activity failed to find any significant link (Pinker 311). The spread of video games has mirrored the fall in the violent crime rate. Nor it is clear that the greater appeal of software applications to boys than girl is a problem. Newborn boys show a greater affection for mechanical contraptions than newborn girls in their first day (Alford and Hibbing 2004), so how are similar observations later on surprising? Likewise, the the Columbine shooters played “Doom” lessens when one learns the last game they played was bowling (Moore 2002).

Mario Made Me Do It

2006-08-13T09:25:00+02:00

I recently watched this debate and couldn't help but get frustrated. First off, Jack Thompson was a dick. It's fine to be passionate about a topic, but c'mon. I ended up searching Game Daily for the article they published. It's here, and I found it very interesting. This whole debate just irks me. Why do I think trying to connect violent crime to video games is so ludicrous? Well, me and my friends for a couple of reasons. I've played some incredibly violent video games (including the infamous Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto III games . . . in fact, just about every Grand Theft Auto game in existence) and I've also never committed a violent crime. As a matter of fact, I've been told by several people that I'm one of the least violent people they've ever met. Granted, I'm no Gandhi, but you'd think I'd be just a little more aggressive. Same with my friends. We all play the same video games, and I'm proud to say that none of my friends have ever committed a violent crime. You know, as I think back, most of the pricks who were bullies didn't play as many video games as me and the people I called friends. They were too busy playing football (ya know, the sport that promotes actual violence against other actual people) and, pfft, leaving the house and knocking up cheerleaders to play video games. I think the real problem here is the institution of cheerleading.Another of the many myths about violence and video games (and one that Mr. Jack "Uber-dick" Johnson likes to exploit) is the notion that you can somehow "train" yourself to fire a gun with deadly accuracy on a video game. Now, to be honest, I've never fired a "real" gun (again . . . not a violent person), but I have fired an air rifle and . . . not to kick my own ego in the crotch but good lord I sucked. I fired a depressingly large number of pellets at five different cans lined up maybe . . . fifteen feet away and I didn't hit one of them. Not one! Sigh . . . now, to put an ice pack on my bruised ego, I'm pretty damn good at those first-person shooters. And give me a rifle with an aiming and trigger device in the shape of a game control, as well as a universe with simplified laws of physics, and I'll bullseye any turkey you put in front of me.Mr. Thompson also says he represented the families of victims in Paducah, Kentucky, claiming that games like Doom trained the killer. He doesn't include the little fact that he lost that case, and failed to prove any link between the motive or execution of the crime to video games.The plain fact of the matter is, we're not caught in some epidemic of youth violence. Society is not on the brink of armageddon. Jesus . . . ain't visitin' for a while (if at all--hey-o!). I mean, what do you want from me? People go on and on about violent video games and they never mention cartoons, including old cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry. Have you ever tried to count the number of violent acts represented there? I could cite another essay for you but it's not gonna change your mind. This is one of those issues where people have an opinion and they find evidence that backs that up. You know what, here, just for kicks I'll post a link to the article I can only assume is the one Jack Thompson was referring to since he didn't cite a specific title or author, just threw out a big name like the American Psychological Association (yay, big words!). You'll notice that for all the facts on how the brain works, Dr. Anderson doesn't address the fact that violence among youths (as well as among Americans as a whole) is at an all-time low, a fact stated by Duke Ferris, founder of Game Revolution, in the first article I found--Mr. Ferris citing, of course, the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics.Suck it, Thompson.

Chankpe Opi Wakpala (Wounded Knee Creek)

2006-08-06T18:25:00+02:00

They took all you had and more

left you no means to survive

and with winter knocking on the door

deprivation would surely take a lot of lives

You needed salvation and hope

a way to get by

so you listened to the message of renewal

from the old

and your spirit was revitalized

They watched you dance the circle dance

that should restore your way of life

make peace stand a good chance

and help you overcome this bitter strife

They heard you chant the sacred words

for paradise to come

and restoration of your precious earth

for which the ways of the whites

should be shunned

They saw you wear those special shirts

that made you invincible to their bullets

and heard you pray for the return

of the buffalo herds

and man who would live again

as they should've

But your ghost dance scared them

more and more

and when your drums, like thunder rolled

their guns stopped the rites, just to be sure

and you at Wounded Knee Creek

paid a horrendous toll

Kiksuye

On A Full Moon Night

2006-07-16T13:00:00+02:00

In the fading afternoon

of a full moon night

restless thoughts

arcane and abstruse

will climb his mind

and smoulder profoundly

in this aberration

of humankind

It's the ominous foreplay

of pain and pleasure

leading to

murder and death

The bittersweet desire

in the taste of flesh

never satisfied

until the last breath

Nothing will stop him

when he's ready to kill

he turns into this ferocious beast

A predator without a soul

howling at the moon

and preparing for

another sanguinary feast

Noises

2006-06-15T17:50:00+02:00

I woke up this morning

with the city's noises

fusing into my dream

A pride of lions

roaring in anger

The traffic, it must have been

A hunter shouting something

but I probably heard a street vendor

For a moment, total silence

then a shot rings out in the wild

Perhaps a car's broken exhaust

or the toy pistol from a child

The noises slowly become familiar

as I slip out of my dream

I hear the neighbours coming in

through the walls

and I yawn in the dawn's early gleam

The old man from below

like every morning

is listening to the radio

The children from upstairs

screaming their lungs out

and there are people stumbling in the hallway

as they go about

But from the young couple next door

usually fighting, not a sound

Did they finally reconcile

or at long last break up

like they were bound

Suddenly the people in the hallway scream and run

I hear the panic in their voices

and hurry out of bed

As I look through the peephole

I see the guy from next door

his shirt, bloodshed red

and in his hand a gun

Photograph: Gary M.Stolz

For more information visit: www.weforanimals.com

Prisoners Of War

2006-06-04T02:40:00+02:00

Darkness falls

the shade of death on his heels

Abandoned and impaired

gloomy and demoralized

they're left to the horrors of war

and inhumanity

Caged like animals

the night brings a tear to their eyes

Tortured and humiliated

ashamed and broken

they weep for the loss of brothers

and humanity

The Blue Cottage By The Sea

2006-05-19T18:45:00+02:00

One sweet summer long

it seemed like nothing could go wrong

and we were happy as could be

in a blue painted cottage by the sea

For you I left my kin

and together we moved in

enjoying each others so longed company

in that nice old cottage by the sea

Lazing on the beach

you, me and a cat we called Peach

who came along with the inventory

of that sweet old cottage by the sea

You did some odd jobs in town

and I waited tables in The Old Crown

unaware of what soon would be

so happy together in that little cottage by the sea

But one evening when I was walking home

near the old gate made of blue whale bone

two drunken tourists ambushed me

only minutes before I would've reached our cottage by the sea

You found me just in time

raped and left for dead underneath the honeysuckle vine

and carried me home

where you took care of my bleeding heavily

and saved my life in that small cottage by the sea

Later in hospital you sat by my side

until the doctors said that I was doing alright

then you kissed me goodnight so tenderly

and went back to our lonely cottage by the sea

They said you caused quite some mayhem

when you finally found and killed them

and for a long time now you won't be free

to come back to sweet Peach and me

waiting for you in our blue cottage by the sea

Old Acquaintance

2006-02-13T13:45:00+01:00

While the waiter serves my tea

I see you sitting in the back

talking to an empty chair

but not bothered by the lack

Every once in a while you pause and listen

and maybe nervously laugh

much to the amusement of the tearoom

and half of its staff

"Loony, but wouldn't hurt a fly"

the waiter says

But I know better

because like you I'm from Godstone too

"She must be really lonely, don't you think"

he then asks and I nod

after all that must be true

But it won't be me that unmasks

your sorry tale of abuse and tyranny

and how you tried to resolve the matter permanently

When life became unbearable and left you no hope

you did what you had to

but your mind it just couldn't cope

The house was still burning

when they broke down the door

too late though because stabbed in his sleep

they could do nothing for him anymore

You tried to escape your life of fear and misery

but lost your grip and now you'll never be free

to you it's all real and he's still here

But what's truly beyond sad

are your restless eyes

stating he still has you scared