Another High School shooting? posted by Richard Seymour

I'm afraid so :

A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.

And check the resonance of this sentence:

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher in 1999.

How many school shootings has America experienced? The number seems to be well above average, and it is particularly worrying when you have a sufficient database of recent examples to start ranking them.

The suspect is said to have admired Hitler and posted messages on a neo-Nazi website, a fragment of information which, if true, is congruent with the story of those who carried out the Columbine massacre, who also admired Hitler. In Gus Van Sant's film Elephant, in which two alienated high school students decide to arrange a brutal cull of their classmates and teachers before offing themselves. One of their obsessions, it transpires, is watching footage about fascism and Hitler.

If I were to guess - and, okay I will - I would say that Hitler, fascism and the Nazi holocaust represent precisely the negative mirror to America's liberal, tolerant self-image. In a Channel Four documentary, The Battle for the Holocaust, several historians suggest that the memory of the Nazi judeocide has been appropriated as an ideological opposite to capitalism and liberal democracy, especially after the collapse of the Cold War. For those styling themselves as outcasts, or even the 'Angel of Death' as this particular suspect did, the Nazi contempt for humanity and its death-dealing, sadistic violence is an obvious pole of attraction.

Yet, the Moore thesis - that imperialist violence abroad, fear-mongering and alienation at home, and easy access to guns - create the conditions for such atrocities seems as powerful as ever. The background of mass murder in Iraq, the legitimisation of torture and rape (see in particular the reaction of right-wing shock-jocks to Abu Ghraib), and the disgusting intellectual apologetics for imperialism, does not seem to discourage the notion that callous murder is at some level a normal occurence, especially when married to fictitious zeal for justice. During the bombardment of Serbia, which is when the Columbine shooting occurred, Thomas Friedman wrote for the New York Times:

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (they certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."

Perform a quick mental experiment - replace the word 'Serbian' with 'American' and 'Kosovo' with 'Palestine' or, perhaps, 'Iraq'. Who would you think was talking?