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Friday, July 22, 2011

This time Norway

  It doesn't always happen in the "evil" United States. It often happens in other countries. 
  Usually the "right wing extremist" epithet is hurled before anyone really knows what happened.
  Then when the identity of the current terrorist becomes apparent, the media goes silent. Decapitated in their commentary about the truth of what happened.
  When the left wing politics or the Asian ethnic origin emerges, the media sets about, clucking, justifying their original assertions with a, "Well, they're the most likely..." and completely ignoring reality.
  In fact, as soon as they discover the identities of the perps, "the motive is unknown." No one can figure out how or why anyone would want to do this to a civilized culture.
  Civilized.
  That would be a clue.
  I wasn't there in New York on 9/11 but it marked me forever.
  Today feels like September 11.
  John Podhoretz feels it too:
The monstrous events today in Norway—as of this writing, word is that a gunman slaughtered at least 30 kids at a youth camp who had gathered to hear about the earlier bombing of government offices in Oslo—have stirred in me a kind of rage I haven’t felt this viscerally since the days after 9/11, when my apartment in Brooklyn Heights looked out directly on the violent purple gash in the sky that hovered over the wreckage like a demonic counterimage of the holy cloud that followed the Jews through the desert in the aftermath of the Exodus. Perhaps it is that my own daughter is, as I write, at her own day camp outside New York City, and so there is something visceral, primal, in my sense of connection to the dead and dying and their parents. This rage, which is accompanied by all manner of violent thoughts about what should be done and could be done to the living body of the depthlessly evil monster who committed this Satanic act, is disturbing in its intensity. I would like it to go away. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t, because without it–without a stark response to something so purposefully awful–we are unilaterally disarming ourselves. The monster and his comrades have the passion to commit their foul deeds. If we respond with dispassion, we are ceding to them part of the animating force that makes us human. If we decide to intellectualize our emotions rather than allow them to influence us, we are turning our back on our responsibility to those whose lives were stripped from them.
  Podhoretz dares to call it what it is.
  Evil in Norway. 

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