In a very recent post, Richard, the author and proprietor of The Peking Duck, brought our attention to a truly insightful essay by David Brooks ostensibly on the teenage "Columbine Killers," Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, which blows away the popular myth of these underage murderers as victims of abuse by the popular in-crowd. Every high school has one and probably always will. As Mr. Brooks documents, Harris and Klebold weren't victims of bullies, they were flat-out perps, Harris particularly was an "icy cold" supreme egoist mass-murderer on the same metaphysical plane as other more infamous devotees of the self as "superman." The victims, in his eyes, were all of us, the masses of "subhumans" with whom he wished not to share his life and world.
As powerful and accurate as Mr. Brooks is in his defrocking of these mythologized American high school murderers, in this post I wish to memorialize in these pages--and present for your edification--the last four graphs of the "Columbine Killers" column. Here, Mr. Brooks' insight digs deeper and reaches into the demonic pit of the suicidal mass-murderers who prey upon much greater masses than Harris and Klebold in the end did, the Islamic supreme egoists who are popularly believed to be acting out of a semi-legitimate cult of victimhood. Perhaps you might have had such thoughts. It is not something to be ashamed of. We in the west often like to read virtue into all victims of alleged "oppression," and often we are right to do so. However, in the cases at hand, read the words below and think again.
Now, in 2004, we have more experience with suicidal murderers. Yet it is striking how resilient this perpetrator-as-victim narrative remains. We still sometimes assume that the people who flew planes into buildings -- and those who blew up synagogues in Turkey, trains in Spain, discos in Tel Aviv and schoolchildren this week in Basra -- are driven by feelings of weakness, resentment and inferiority. We cling to the egotistical notion that it is our economic and political dominance that drives terrorists insane.
But it could be that whatever causes they support or ideologies they subscribe to, the one thing that the killers have in common is a feeling of immense superiority. It could be that they want to exterminate us because they regard us as spiritually deformed and unfit to live, at least in their world. After all, it is hard to pull up to a curb, look a group of people in the eye and know that in a few seconds you will shred them to pieces unless you regard other people's deaths as trivialities.
If today's suicide bombers are victims of oppression, then the solution is to lessen our dominance, and so assuage their resentments. But if they are vicious people driven by an insatiable urge to dominate, then our only option is to fight them to the death.
We had better figure out who these bombers really are. After Columbine, we got it wrong.
