To See the Farm is to Leave the Farm: ‘I was, and still am, a co-conspirator in the OKC Bombing’ - Lara Braveheart
Timothy McVeigh: 11 June 2001: Invictus:
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. | In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. | Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. | It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
Andrea Muhrrteyn | Free Malaysia Today | 11 June 2012
NorskeForHold: «It’s not about the peculiar fact that you claim to be a part of the terrorist Anders Behring Breiviks organization and ordered him to kill all those people.»
LOL! You ever heard the maxim ‘We have met the enemy, it is us’? Another way of describing it is: ‘overdeveloped sense of justice’. A person with an underdeveloped sense of justice denies responsibility for everything, an individual with an overdeveloped sense of justice takes responsibility for everything, even that which it appears they are not responsible for. Some spiritual schools of thought consider it helpful towards an existential freedom to take responsibility for how we are creating the world. It is only when we take responsibility, that we can choose to change that which we are responsible for. When we deny our responsibility for our creation, we enslave ourselves into victimhood by denying us the opportunity to change it. I use the concept as a teaching concept, or try to! About your political officials, I must say I am as confused as you, about their behaviour. I am quite okay with your readers thinking whatever they wish, as they no doubt will!
Breivik, Norway and a politics of non-recognition - Alwyn Lau, Free Malaysia Today: How can we explain the emergence of a figure like Breivik? Is he reflective of Norwegian society and if so, where did the country go wrong? Or, if Breivik was an exception, was it something ‘forced’ upon him or chosen by him and, most importantly, what can Norwegian society do to prevent the (exceptional) creation of future Breiviks’?
What follows are three possible explanations: * There is light and only this pervert was full of darkness. * There is still light and racism is a product or symptom of darkness. * Light and darkness are one and the same.
Finally, the third more disturbing option, we could view Breivik’s violence as a manifestation of what was already and always there in Norwegian society. The bomb and the shootings were a sudden exposé of a dark underside, a side which was hidden yet necessary for a nation which wanted to nurture one of the most open and politically participative societies ever. This is to say that the violence witnessed last weekend is that which sustains the harmonious society witnessed for so long i.e. Norway the calm and prosperous nation is simply the flip-side of Norway the nation of potential mass-murderers. A peaceful multi-cultural democracy, according to this view, cannot persist for long without betraying the elitism, bigotry and totalitarianism inherent to and constitutive of this same democracy.
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.
