Eugene Robinson on Mass Murder

REFERENCE: Eugene Robinson, "Sadly, the carnage will never cease," Ventura County Star 3 October 2017: 13A ; "The carnage will continue," The Washington Post, 2 October 2017

  

            Eugene Robinson will get corrected frequently for his assertion that Stephen "Paddock was using a fully automatic rifle" in the massacre on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday, October 1, 2017. Apparently Paddock had instead a number of legal semi-automatic rifles with legal "bump stocks," that in the words of Lisa Marie Pane of the AP "allow a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic weapon by unleashing an entire large magazine in seconds" and were all he needed for his point-and-spray approach to marksmanship with human targets.

            I wish to correct a less technical assertion in Robinson's fine column: "There can be no rational motive for mass murder"; unfortunately — tragically and worse than tragically — here Robinson is wrong. Mass murder is always and necessarily evil, but it can be the result of rational — measured, calculated — choices.

            If you're one Great Khan or other and have united the tribes on the Eurasian steppe and need to keep them united and producing income and not revolt, it is rational to set them moving into China and Europe. With Genghis Khan, the most impressive of the lot, the project killed some forty million people.

            If you've come from Europe to the New World to kill and conquer for profit, and you come across a mountain of silver and cities rich in gold, and if the local inhabitants are only lightly armed and frequently just die off from diseases you survived as a child — then it is rational to do what you came to do and enslave and kill as best calculated to maximize profit. An occasional Jesuit might ask you rhetorically, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" (Mark 8.36), but you can answer, "He gains the world, father," and as long as you keep sending back to your royal masters a big portion of the loot, and convert some of your new slaves to the true faith — you won't get into trouble in this life.

            Or if you're in California for the 1849 Gold Rush or in the Congo Free State for ivory and rubber around 1900 and you've been brought up as a committed or casual racist, then push the locals off any land you want or reduce them to serfs — or "Exterminate all the brutes!"

            The belief in evil is dangerous, especially believing in it as an absolute that allows you to judge guilty whole cultures for celebrating murderous conquests or slavery or female infanticide; "Evil" is a necessary concept, however, precisely so you can condemn mass murder (etc.) as evil and not have to fall back on calling irrational a tactic well calculated to fulfill one's greed or lust for power and fame.

<https://tinyurl.com/y8nn3edr>

Trump and Truth

il n'y a pas de hors-texte […] — Jacques Derrida

Translation: "There is no outside-text."

It is usually mistranslated as "There is nothing outside the text"

by his opponents to make it appear that Derrida is claiming

nothing exists beyond language […].

 "Of Grammatology", tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1976.

(Original French published by Éditions de Minuit,

Paris, in 1967, as "De la grammatologie"), 158-59 [...].)

  

            

            In attacking Donald "Trump's relentless assault on truth," Eugene Robinson in a column in mid-June 2016 assumes truth's existence. I agree with Robinson that truth exists and that Trump undermines the concept — and thereby undermines a crucial bond for human society.

            Trump was born in 1946 and is in part a product of his time, in this case in ways that can be clarified by talking with academics — especially academics in the humanities — who were on university campuses in the latter part of the 20^th century, and by reading such books as Eric Hoffer's thoughts on fanaticism in The True Believer from 1951 and, preeminently, George Orwell's 1948/49 masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

            In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the spokesman for a totalitarian Party tortures the protagonist and tells him "Reality is inside the skull […]. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature" and the triumph of the will of the Leader and power of the Party determines truth.

            This idea was cleaned up from the mid-1960s on to become "strong social construction": the idea that not just people's views of reality are determined by their cultures but reality itself is constructed "inside the skull[s]" of people interacting.

            And that academic idea trickled down or "osmosed" up or over to politicians, to where Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times could talk about a Karl "Rovism [that] posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all," and you can get Rove claiming "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality [...]."

            As Karl Rove would say, Robinson is part of "the reality-based community"; Donald Trump is not, and that makes him far more dangerous than more traditional liars.

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Reference: Eugene Robinson, 

            "The challenges in covering Trump’s relentless assault on the truth," The Washington Post 16 June 2016. <http://tinyurl.com/jehgsjz>

            "Trump’s relentless assault on truth," The Ventura County Star, print edition 18 June 2016, page 9B; on-line 17 June 2016. <http://tinyurl.com/hxegczm>