It’s not “senseless” violence

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that last week four Marines and one Sailor were fatally wounded in what a large chunk of the political and media “mainstream” has labeled a “senseless” attack. It has become rather common place to hear political figures and people on TV describing acts of violence as “senseless”, especially when the act has arrested the attention of the nation or the world. It’s almost rote at this point…someone commits some heinous crime or act of barbarism and immediately “senseless” gets glued to every description of the act that goes out over the air waves or the web.

The dictionary defines “senseless”, at least in regards to violence, as being without discernible meaning or purpose. There are certainly some acts of senseless violence. The “Miami Cannibal” attack would be an example of truly “senseless” violence, as it was perpetrated by a completely deranged man against a completely unrelated victim. The attack in Chattanooga, however, was not “senseless”.

Earlier this year two terrorists attacked the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Charlie was one of two publications in the entire world to re-publish a series of “controversial” cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed, and since then had put out a number of cartoons with unflattering depictions of Islam and Mohammed. Charlie regularly printed cartoons with unflattering depictions of Christianity, Judaism, and Jews in general, but it wasn’t until they reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons that they began getting death threats. In November of 2011 the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed, stopping production of the paper for a short time. Despite this, the paper continued to publish their material. Interviewed in 2012 after publishing cartoons relating to the controversy over the “Innocence of Muslims” film (which our domestic leadership initially blamed the Benghazi attack on) the chief editor of Charlie Hebdo told Al Jazeera:

The man in the video is Stephane Charbonnier. He and several others along with a French policemen were murdered in the January 7th attack. Cameras caught multiple dimensions of the attack’s aftermath:

This attack was called “senseless” by the usual suspects, including the President of the United States. As you can hear from the mouths of the terrorists themselves, though, it was anything but “senseless”. There was a very clear meaning and purpose behind the slaughter.

This attack was purposeful and effective. The new editor of Charlie Hebdo announced that their magazine would no longer have any Mohammed cartoons:

“We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to. We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature.”

Keep in mind that the man making that statement was wounded in the attack and survived only by pretending to be dead as he listened to the two terrorists murdering his coworkers and friends.

The Charlie Hebdo attack was most definitely not “senseless”…nor was it an isolated event in some far away country, as we learned in Texas where two more terrorists attempted to turn a Mohammed-themed cartoon contest into a slaughter.

The political and media “mainstream” has been trying very hard to paint the attack in Chatanooga as “senseless” to deny a fundamental reality that they also tried very hard to deny in the aftermath of the Fort Hood attack. In the immediate aftermath of that attack we were treated to all manner of possible explanations of why the traitor Nidal Hassan killed his brothers in arms from it all being based on disagreements with others, not wanting to be deployed to Iraq, and even a cockamamie claim that he somehow had second hand PTSD. Further investigation revealed Hassan had been chummy with Anwar al-Alwaki…a figure who had been hanging out with several of the 9/11 hijackers before fleeing to Yemen immediately after the 9/11 attack. (Where he was later killed by a US air strike)

…and I could go on literally all day listing one “senseless” attack after another that had a pretty clear point to it.

Words mean things, and using the right words is important. “Senseless” attacks are discussed almost like a tornado or some other natural disaster that comes out of the blue to destroy people’s lives…at least until someone senses the opportunity to maybe spin it into a “narrative” that gives them political advantage:

But these are not random events. They are not “senseless”. They are calculated. They are deliberate. And they are, unfortunately, effective:

“Following the Chattanooga shooting that took the lives of five servicemen, officials have shut down several recruiting facilities and warned Marine recruiters not to wear uniforms in public areas.”

Years ago I took a college course taught by a former member of the CIA’s Osama Bin Laden unit who had been working in terrorism related intelligence for a couple of decades prior. It was a fascinating class that covered the development of terrorism from Munich until the present day. The final exam was an essay where we were to give our best guess at the future form of terrorism against the United States. In that paper I argued that the spectacular 9/11-style terrorist attack was going to give way to what I termed “franchise terrorism.” Smaller, less coordinated, less sophisticated attacks perpetrated in higher frequency by individuals or extremely small groups (2 or 3 people) with perhaps only a limited amount of technical support from established terrorist networks. They would become radicals and then perhaps seek out information and training on how to carry out an attack, then act. Terrorist networks wouldn’t have to do much actual recruiting…these people would come to them desperate to commit heinous acts of barbarism in the name of their silly faith.

Unfortunately the assessment I made in that paper has proven to be accurate. Unfortunately it is impossible to make this problem go away by slapping the “senseless” label on it and hoping the bad men are sufficiently appeased to stop killing.

Chatanooga, Garland, Oklahoma City, New York, Boston…this is all really happening. Stopping it, defeating it, requires at a bare minimum a willingness to at least describe “it” accurately. These are not “senseless” acts of violence. They are an attempt at conquest by parties willing to die in the effort to endorse their belief in supremacy with the blood of all who oppose them.

Chatanooga will not be the last attempt at this. It would behoove us, then, to prepare accordingly and make the necessary changes. It’s hardly sensible to have Marines (and other service personnel) hiding their uniforms and forcing them to be unarmed when we know these sorts are out there gunning for them. There are guys out there who get orders to go find and kill bad men like Osama Bin Laden but aren’t allowed to have so much as a pen knife on them at their bases because, god forbid, they might hurt themselves. Pardon my French, but that is absolute merde.

Lest you be tempted to believe that it’s just the folks in uniform that have to deal with this problem, remember that civilians are fair game to the global domination set, too. Do you have a good medical kit handy? Do you know how to use it? Have you spent any time considering how you would respond to the Unthinkable?

If not, maybe now’s the time. As I said, these attacks have been effective. The bad men believe that if they kill enough people they’ll get their way. It worked with Charlie Hebdo. Find me a paper or magazine in the western world that will publish a Mohammed cartoon. As the new editor of Charlie Hebdo stated, “…no one dares to.” The heckler’s veto is alive and thriving, ladies and gentlemen…and they’re not going to stop at cartoons. Because they’ve had such great success, expect more of them. And soon.

Be ready.

12 Comments

  1. Sadly I don’t think this line of thought is confined to Muslim terrorists (who are the small minority in this country). From where I’m sitting a good case can be made that the head-in-the-sand crowd simply cannot grasp that for some people violence is just another way to get what you want.

      1. No arguments with that! also the documentation (because it is the media) does make for a convenient teaching example of just how far people will go to deny the obvious fact of hey there are Bad people out there and they are willing to hurt/kill other to get there way.

        My point is simply this: we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get a blind spot to “normal” thugs because we’re focused too hard on “political” or “religious” thugs (aka terrorists).

  2. There’s an Orwellian element to this trite use of an inaccurate term. I don’t think it impacts terrorist an iota to be thought of as lacking sensible decision making capabilities. Hell, they may think of it as a great marketing strategy. However if our leaders frame these attacks as random and ill considered they’ve set the rhetorical stage for citizens to preemptively capitulate rather than embrace a more self-reliant ethic. Citizens scared of “senseless” boogiemen are more easily herded than those capable of autonomous and effective response, while every terrorist manual written embraces civil disruption as an end, leaving statists and savages washing each other’s hands.

  3. Well, the labeling of violence as senseless is just another way that the statists foster the notion that no individual is responsible for their own actions. The bowl-cut freak who shot up the church in Charleston is just a victim of a racist southern white culture according to them, therefore removing the rebel flag is the answer (I am actually all for removing that flag, but this was the wrong reason). Ironically, the labeling of everything as terrorism tends to come from the right wing, only when it is related to Islam. I think acts of terrorism, regardless of the motivational ideologies, should be treated as such, and instead of blaming the rebel flag, or blaming racism, or blaming Islam, or white supremacy, or fundamentalist Christianity, maybe we should start blaming the individuals who commit these crimes themselves regardless of what their motives were. Of course I am a firm believer that the best way to deal with such criminals is to stop them on the scene with force, but the same crowd that labels all of this violence as senseless does it’s best to keep the public disarmed in these most likely spots for terror attacks.

  4. I said the same thing at the time. These are not senseless acts of violence, they are perfectly sensible acts of war.
    After all, Lenin said “The purpose of terror is to terrorize,” and it still works.
    Here’s something else to think about: The theory of modern terrorism was laid out in a 1967 book called The Urban Guerrilla, written by an Argentine communist named Carlos Marighella. In a nutshell, the goal of the modern terrorist is not to overthrow the government, but to frighten the government into becoming so oppressive that the people overthrow it on their own. Sound like anything you’ve seen lately?

  5. Pretty sure I’m more in danger of being killed in a mass shooting by an entitled white guy with backwards conservative views, but sure, keep up the anti-muslim obsession, if that’s what fulfills your identity.

    1. If you have stastistics backing up that notion, I’d like to see them. As it is, however, people with backward liberal views are more likely to cause harm than people with conservative views, backwards or otherwise…

      Furthermore, of all the terrorist acts that are occurring around the world, the most common element that shows up is that the perpetrators are Muslim. It’s not anti-muslim to observe this, either, it’s merely a statement of fact. (Alas, I don’t have the statistics at the tip of my fingers on this to back up my claim; however, I suspect that if you have the statistics backing up your notion, you will likely have the statistics to debunk mine…)

  6. In obumas world if your nice to terrorist they will be nice to you,in the real world the terrorist will see an opportunity to attack a weakness. L

  7. This article is very true. It’s really sad that these things are happening, but we have to be aware of the truth. Thanks for sharing!

Comments are closed.