Dr. Karl Menninger, The Crime of Punishment:
“The inescapable conclusion is that society secretly wants crime, needs crime, and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it.
We condemn crime; we punish offenders for it; but we need it.
The crime and punishment ritual is a part of our lives.
We need crimes to wonder at, to enjoy vicariously, to discuss and speculate about, and to publicly deplore. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to envy secretly, and to punish stoutly.
They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment -- “the iniquities of us all.””
(as quoted in An Essay on Proudly South African Parasite Hypocrisy (PDF)
I was, and still am, a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City Bombing, by Lara Braveheart:
If you think everything I have said is 'wrong', then you may be 'right'.
Maybe you drew yourself here to remember that. Man created concepts such as wrong/right, good/evil, sound/silence, solid/space, on/off, cause/effect, light/darkness, outside/inside, pleasure/pain, Dying/Giving Birth, Dead/Alive, and of course: Guilt and Innocence, Truth and Lie.
Man forgot that these are simply poles or aspects of the same thing. One cannot exist without the other. Maybe that is where man's problem lies, in wanting to seperate things, including the idea that he is seperate from the world. Are you seperate from the world? Then you will see Tim McVeigh as guilty and yourself as innocent.
If you see yourself as one of the world, and the world in you, you will see that both you and Tim McVeigh are guilty and innocent, truth tellers and liars, it is just a matter of the relativity between your truth-telling and hypocrisy, guilt and innocence.
"If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town." - Stanley Milgram -
As I said, “I am a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City Bombing?”
Are you?
Breivik, Norway and a politics of non-recognition, by Alwyn Lau, Free Malaysia Today:
The Story of Your Enslavement: We can only be kept in the cages we do not see. (13:10) |
To acknowledge that our good society may be a facade hiding more furious elements is no simple act. The way ‘forward’ is an uncomfortable one of opening ourselves to our most shameful wants, so shameful that most have pushed it to an unknown corner of their minds. It would require a drastic breaking, a radical self-interrogation for which no ‘solution’ is guaranteed. At the very least, though, we would be seeking to unveil self-deception at its purest i.e. that which we tell ourselves others believe about us.
“Norway, if the nation be the very paragon of democratic ideals it perhaps has the right to claim it is, could only benefit from further exploring the implications of this third paradigm. Isn’t democracy itself, in one sense, about avoiding any absolute political closure, about the drive to continually question and doubt any attempt to fill up that void which is political space itself? In a word, isn’t democracy the blood-type of a people who have decided to always search for – and thus forego the need to absolutely know – what they are about? Such a people would keep their eyes out for symptoms and signs of that which is in them which is more than them, more than they can bear. If nothing else, isn’t the recognition that we don’t know ourselves and the malignant forces within us, this politics of non-recognition, the very essence a politics of humility and thus the force to never stop learning?”
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