Virginia Tech Shootings

[WindFem3]

I don't know if this means anything. Perhaps it means nothing at all - but I found it interesting. Since the Virginia Tech shooter has been described as "Asian", I thought I'd look at some news out of Asia and see what the reaction has been there. I first looked at a Japanese news site, and on it I found a bit saying that the shooter may have been a Chinese national here on a student visa since 2006. So I then searched for a Chinese news site, and found "Xinhuanet." In their most recent story about the massacre, there doesn't seem to be even ONE mention that the shooter was Asian. That seems kind of . . . odd, doesn't it?

Also, in the Japanese stories, the shooter is described as "Asian-looking." Funny, but I don't recall any of the eyewitnesses or officials we've heard from saying such a thing. If anyone mentioned his ethnicity, they simply said he was "Asian."

Any thoughts?

[Dardedar]

DAR
It's pretty early with sketchy reports. "Asian" is vague and must include what, almost 2 billion people? This morning NPR is reporting he is a student from South Korea. But I don't see how it would matter, sometimes a brain works, sometimes it misfires.

[WindFem3]

They have confirmed the shooter as a student from South Korea this morning.

I'm not trying to indict all Asians for this crime or anything remotely like that, Darrel. I just found it curious that a couple of major Asian press agencies found it necessary to delete the word "Asian" from most of their reports, that's all. If an American committed such a horrendous crime in a foreign country, would our press self-censor that information? I don't know. If the race/ethnicity of the shooter was nothing but a matter of speculation, I would understand the absence of such a rumor. There were plenty of eyewitness reports, however, that the killer was "Asian."

I want to clarify that my comments have nothing to do - really - with whether the guy was Asian (or Martian or purple with green polka dots, for that matter) , but entirely with how the press and a country's national consciousness works.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

I suspect part of it has to do with the fact that Americans lump all the peoples of the largest continent on earth under the heading of "Asian" - and white supremists don't need any more than that to start harassing at best and killing at worst any Asian they run across/can find. (Remember the Indian nationals - Hindus - that were harassed after 9/11 because Americans can't tell the difference between Arabs and Indians? Or for that matter, back in the 1980 Iranian hostage "crisis", Mexican-Americans who were harassed because most Americans can't tell the difference between Mexicans and Arabs.) We'd be pretty angry if international media reported various other-than-USA citizens who go on killing rampages as "Americans" but we do it to other countries all the time.

[Dardedar]

how the press and a country's national consciousness works.

DAR
I know Windfem, I wasn't trying to imply anything like that but I can see how it looked that way. Along the lines of what you say above, there is a human tendancy to put people in these arbitrary groups and then you are either in or out of the group. I already heard a news report today saying what community he came from (some town in Washington, maybe a suburb of Washington DC) and therefore that this "community produced a killer." What a load. In the olden days people would blame blame (or perhaps kill) the family. If he was my brother or father there would be a tendancy to be blamed in some way. I doubt that his being asian won't be reported once the information comes out (and is now) but I don't have a problem with early reporters resisting to pass along anecdotal reports which are notoriously inaccurate.

D.

[WindFem3]

. . . "community produced a killer." . . . would blame (or perhaps kill) the family. . .

D.

I agree. The blame game now begins: the "community", the family, the Virginia Tech staff, the police, the gun salesman. Who knows how far these things go? It wouldn't surprise me if there were even grumblings that his room-mate, his native country, or his local Starbucks were responsible in some way (well, we can all agree that Starbucks is, of course, evil. )

I suppose it's understandable - this tendency to make certain entities singly responsible. The crimes individuals such as this student commit are so mind-bendingly horrible that we try to "make sense" of it by pointing a finger at something or someone specific. Kind of reminds me of Georgie-Boy's ludicrous "War on Terror." We become overly simplistic and resort to a mindset of "I know the cause and I can fix it (by waging war and stripping my citizens of their civil rights.) In the case of Virginia Tech, we'll probably see a load of new security measures aimed at "making sure this never happens again" (tune in to that phrase right now and see how many times you hear it) and another even bigger buttload of lawsuits blaming everyone for not preventing the slaughter.

And guess what? It'll happen again. Just like you can't kill every terrorist, you can't prevent enraged people from grabbing a weapon and committing mayhem. Not unless you want to turn this entire world into one massive prison or you put some sort of computer chip into every person's brain and monitor their thoughts, of course. And that isn't going to happen - not as long as we're a working democracy. Thank Joe Pesci that George only has a couple more years to work his wannabe theo-dictatorship.

*sigh*

Ideally, I would like to see the root causes of the rage people like Cho Seung-Hui and Timothy McVeigh feel investigated and prevented. Wouldn't that be better than locking the barn door after the horse got out? We always seem to be in a reactive posture in this country, unwilling to do the hard work of the kind of prevention that doesn't rely on force or the divesting of one's civil rights.

And, I think it's a cop-out to say, "Well, he was sick." No - there's got to be more to it that that. If it were that simple, wouldn't the answer be to just send every violent criminal/terrorist to a really great shrink?

One more thing: anyone see the mention in press reports that Seung-Hui ranted on about religion in his parting letter? I hope we get more detail at some point. I'd like to see what exactly he wrote.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

America has, to my knowledge, been proactive on anything. Preventing problems doesn't make good movies like reacting to the disaster.

[LaWood]

" The blame game now begins:"

We should stop and consider the Oklahoma Fed Building bombing and Timothy McVeigh. Strangely nobody blamed the extreme Rwingers, no one
looked up them as suspicious or "evil." Same for Jonesboro shootings, Columbine. No ethinicity ever made it to the fore in any of those. Yes
we are still a racist nation.

In fact, as another thread on this site points out, white ultra-conservative terrorists are almost completely ignored.
_

[Dardedar]

"Strangely nobody blamed the extreme Rwingers, no one
looked up them as suspicious or "evil."

DAR
I don't know about that. I remember hearing that membership in these rightwing, gun loving, post Wacko militia groups dropped 90% after the OK City bombing. I think those those guys took a hit for spawning and nurtuing a McVeigh.

D.

[WindFem3]

We should stop and consider the Oklahoma Fed Building bombing and Timothy McVeigh. Strangely nobody blamed the extreme Rwingers . . . "

Oh, I don't know about that, LaWood.

My husband and I lived OKC when the Murrah Building was blown up. We lost two USMC recruiter friends there, Sgt. Davis and Cpt. Guzman. I always felt that hard-right, white-supremicist, paramilitary-survivalist, ultra-conservatives had a lot to answer for. There was some stuff in the press about these kinds of groups and how they may have contributed to ugly, violent mentalities like McVeigh and his co-conspirators. On the other hand, of course, few people turned around and pointed directly at the government and asked those questions - except maybe some conspiracy buffs.

By the way; although my hubby and I are liberals and in general abhore "rwingers", we DON'T believe the government had anything directly to do with the destruction of the Murrah Building.

And before Hogeye jumps in here suggests that Cpt. Guzman and Sgt. Davis deserved what was coming to them because they were representatives of the military/government, I'd like to remind him that these two long-deceased gentlemen were NOT the lilly-white "statists" he might like to presume they were. Sgt. Davis was a black man who was to be informed the next day he was being picked up for an officers' program, and Cpt. Guzman was Pacific-Islander. At the time of his death, Randy Guzman was engaged to a lovely black woman named Felicia.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

What Larry is talking about is that there were no "watches" set on white males, white males weren't blacklisted by the airlines, nobody was out harassing white males because they are "terrorists" as a category, and so on. When the media - and a whole lot of people who listen to the MSM - talk about the violence that unfortunately is a normal part of poor communities, it's usually phrased in such a way (ghetto, gangs in the 'hood', - "welfare mothers" are assumed to be black - except where they're assumed to be brown or red - etc) to strongly suggest that only people of color are poor and violent. Ditto in talking about terrorists, the assumption is usually brown and probably Muslim - inherent in the words choosen, consciously or otherwise, to discuss the issue. White supremists/terrorists are rightly considered a relatively small subset of white people and so all white people aren't attacked as terrorists. People stopped joining the white supremist groups (in as large numbers). People talked about white supremists. Nobody bombed their camps or beat up or lynched their members. Other races/ethnicities are identified with their terroristic elements. That's racist, bigoted, prejudiced - take your pick of terms.