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By a contributor March 27, 2005
[MIM has accepted as true many of the media reports on Red Lake, because mistakes concerning dead bodies in that situation are rare and because the family has stepped forward; although there is some dispute within that family on the psychological state of the killer. We have verified the existence of pro-Nazi web pages with Weise speaking on them. Our arguments proceed from the assumption that the Hitler connection and indigenous identity of the killer are factually correct; however most of what we have to say is a matter of principle, not specifics. --mim3@mim.org]
Littleton shooter Eric Harris, Kip Kinkel, "Zoloft defense" Christopher Pittman and Red Lake shooter Jeff Weise were all taking antidepressants when they killed their victims--in different years.(1) What these shooters also have in common is that they had conflicts with their caretakers, whether they were parents or grandparents. Before the killings in Littleton, a court had required both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to attend anger management classes, and Harris' parents had forced him to get therapy. "Prosecutor Barney Giese said the real motivation for the crime was [Christopher Pittman's] anger at his grandparents for disciplining him for choking a younger student on a school bus."(2)
The media is already suggesting that antidepressants played a role in the Red Lake mass murder .(3) Shooting suspect Jeff Weise killed others as well as himself. This writer is not going to review the research on antidepressants' role in suicide, etc., because that is beside the point. We can say offhand that antidepressants' causing suicide could happen only in combination with other factors even if there is a correlation between taking antidepressants and higher suicide rates for example. For one, suicides rates vary tremendously cross-country, and antidepressants cannot explain all of this variation, which also suggests that there are underlying social causes of suicide in general, since there is no reason to think a medical approach should work differently in different localities.(4) Something that the media is neglecting to point out is that doctors prescribe millions of children antidepressants annually and more than a million children are currently taking antidepressants.(5) What this means is that children shooting up their school while taking antidepressants is just as unlikely to happen as children dying from school homicides. Recently, there has been only one school multiple killer on antidepressants for every couple of years.
The decision to focus on antidepressants but not other commonalities in school multiple killings is ideologically motivated. The truth is that the media could just as easily point to other things playing a role in the Red Lake mass murder. For instance, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and reportedly Jeff Weise all liked the German band Rammstein (http://herzeleid.com/en/lyrics).(6) It would be more reasonable to focus on Rammstein than antidepressants because European culture and ideology could lead to decisions to shoot up schools in the long run, while antidepressants could only precipitate the shootings. On the other hand, the issue is not the particular band, but the white man's oppressor culture in general.
Regarding the media coverage of antidepressants in the context of "school violence," MIM certainly would not mind parents' switching to less invasive and violent forms of social control than antidepressants for children, who are gender-oppressed under patriarchy; however the choice for MIM is not between drugs and therapy, but between keeping or abolishing p$ychology as a weapon of the class, gender and nation oppressors. MIM seeks to abolish p$ychology in all its forms including individual-focused therapy.
Red Lake shooting suspect Jeff Weise's actions on Monday were decidedly individualistic in character. In this, Weise did not depart from the white man's ideology, which in various ways tries to find a balance between the individual and the collective, but ultimately relates everything back to the individual, including in p$ychology. Weise's actions were not even altruistic from his bloodline theory viewpoint; clearly, he murdered people with indigenous ancestry while doing absolutely nothing to make his nation's blood more "pure." That's not to say that such a goal, racial purity, was ever attainable. Statistical simulations on the effect of eugenics on humyn genetics have already shown that. Racial nationalism leads to genocide and even self-destruction. Last Monday's mass murder is a kind of proof of this. Weise did the oppressor white man a favor by taking this sub-reformist approach to racial nationalism. It was almost a lifestyle statement, and also a violent manifestation of typical Amerikan individualism.
Strangely, the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, whose message board Jeff Weise allegedly posted on, "condemns modern society" in the Red Lake killings for glorifying the individual over the collective, but at the same time forcing the "individual . . . to sacrifice his or her life for an impoverished, isolated existence, jail time, or suicide" in order to oppose modern society.(7) The LNSGP's pretense of upholding the collective over the individual is silly when LNSGP simultaneously claims to be libertarian and believes that the government should be minimized to serve the individual. The difference between minimalist-authoritarian LNSGP and Liberals is that LNSGP does not pretend to be democratic.
The focus on the individual is something that Liberals as well as Nazis have in common; although, the connection between individualism and Nazism is not as transparent. Where Liberalism, in its "liberal" as well as "conservative" flavors, intersects with Nazism (not just LNSGP) is in their shared notion that society should be organized to the benefit of the individual--even though some of the more pragmatic Nazis will occasionally mention class for the sake of pandering to the labor aristocracy. In both Liberal and Nazi ideology, there is just the individual and the state, and then there is competition among the nations. Liberals tend to caricature the Nietzschean sentiments of Nazis, but really the Liberals are just trying to distance themselves from the Nazis. In actuality, both Liberals and Nazis are national-chauvinists, and both claim in different ways that national-chauvinism is to the benefit of most of the people they care about.
MIM says that opposing imperialist militarism is in the interests of the typical Amerikan if s/he wants to avoid nuclear catastrophe. This does not mean MIM panders to the individual. MIM is not utilitarian, and in the struggle against oppression and its violent consequences, MIM could care less if the average individual does not benefit materially from revolution particularly when it comes to the typical Amerikan individual, who is an exploiter. MIM, which is not trying to win Presidential elections, does not shy away from this unpopular position; eventually, remaining firm in this position will be a matter of life or death for the actually oppressed and exploited inside and outside u.$. borders.
Texts on MIM's Web site have mentioned Jost Hermand's 1997 book A Hitler Youth in Poland before, and this book deserves a proper review at some point, but it needs mentioning again as a book that exposes the myth of solidarity among Nazi youth groups in Germany. Those who uphold the NSDAP as an example must understand that fierce, brutal and even sadistic individualism coincided with fierce nationalism in Nazi fascist Germany. What happened on a national scale was reproduced, albeit in other forms of course, on a persynal scale.
The shared Liberal/Nazi notion of the common good is a myth that hides domination within and among nations. It is also unscientific and arbitrary, viewing the nation as the eternal unit of progress when in fact any smaller or larger unit could chosen, like Pan-Africa, as long as there is a commonality of interests. Genes have nothing to do with it and not even all national struggles deserve support. Racial nationalism is even self-contradictory because there is substantial genetic variation and isolation within nations. It is just national-chauvinism and also racism in most imperialist-country contexts to ignore this.
President Bu$h "praised Minnesota high school security guard Derrick Brun for saving countless students by bravely confronting the teenage gunman who shot and killed him. . . . 'Derrick's bravery cost him his life, and all Americans honor him,' Bush said in his first public comments about Monday's shootings on Minnesota's Red Lake American Indian reservation."(9)
Here, "conservative" Liberal imperialist Bu$h provides an example of thinly concealed national-chauvinism masquerading as Liberal common-good rhetoric about the pigs serving "society." This kind of doublespeak, present in both Liberalism and Nazism, fueled Jeff Weise's irrationality. Weise himself put forward a confused doublespeak when he called himself a "Native American National Socialist." The term "Native American" is Liberal integrationist the same way as "Irish-American" or "Afro-American"; yet Weise was saying he opposed integration and supported a genetically-based nationalism as one would expect for a "national socialist." None of the Nazis at nazi.org contradicted Weise on this point either. It goes to show how Liberalism and Nazism combine explosively, but they are often connected in the minds of the pre-scientific, because they both lead to racism and the internalization of white supremacist ideology in oppressed nationality people like Weise.
The blame for these confusions falls squarely on the Nazis and Liberals alike, including most calling themselves "Marxist" who unite with white Nazis as part of their belief of uniting the white "working" class, which might as well be called the Aryan Nation for all the difference it makes. Clearly Weise saw himself carrying out Hitler's slogan about "uninterrupted killing . . . so that the better may live" as Weise put it. He dubbed himself and his people as "unworthy" and thus carried out Hitler's mission. That is just one more reason we have to be done with all the white utopians calling themselves Marxist: it will be hard enough to keep the oppressed nationalities moving forward without introducing the stupidities of the white nationalists calling themselves Marxist. What was in Weise's mind can surely be found in the minds of other oppressed nationality people as well.
We also have to break with the petty-bourgeois vacillators--the ones who cannot systematically support the national struggle against white oppression because they want a little of this and a little of that. Proletarian materialists always adopt the approach of finding the "best" and the "most advanced" road forward. We don't try to have everything both ways. That results in confusion, frustration --and even mass murder. In many cases, the lumpen will incline to suicidal action as well especially if we of the proletarian vanguard are not clear or if we are unable to set up a pole for our existence everywhere.
The Red Lake case shows how having indigenous blood doesn't prevent the white man's cultural penetration into the oppressed nations within u.$. borders. In this sense, culture may be more decisive than ancestry. The oppressed of the internal semi-colonies of the united $nakes must work for independent institutions and ideologies, and individuals in the Euro-Amerikan nation must separate from their oppressor nation's Liberal/Nazi ideologies, if only for the sake of not having to see future generations shoot each other to death.
(10)
Notes:
1. Kelly Patricia O'Meara, "Antidepressants May Trigger Violent Behavior," September 18, 2002, http://www.mercola.com/2002/sep/18/luvox.htm
"Kip Kinkel: Listening to Prozac?" June 15, 1998, http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/column.php?id=451
"Teen who murdered grandparents gets 30 years," February 16, 2005, -murdered-grandparents-gets-30-years/2005/02/16/1108500138537.html?oneclick=true
Joshua Freed, "US gunman said to be on Prozac," March 27, 2005, http://seven.com.au/news/worldnews/172978
2. "Teen who murdered grandparents gets 30 years," February 16, 2005, -murdered-grandparents-gets-30-years/2005/02/16/1108500138537.html?oneclick=true
3. "Friend: Minn. Gunman Took Antidepressants," Joshua Freed, http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=615224
4. "International Comparison of Selected Causes of Death," http://web-japan.org/stat/stats/02VIT23.html
"Rates of Homicide, Suicide, and Firearm-Related Death Among Children -- 26 Industrialized Countries," February 7, 1997, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00046149.htm
"Youth Suicide - international comparisons," http://www.nisu.flinders.edu.au/pubs/bulletin10/bull10-3.html#Heading17
5. Alice Dembner and Alan Wirzbicki, "Panel urges suicide warnings on 9 drugs," September 15, 2004, ton.com/news/nation/articles/2004/09/15/panel_urges_suicide_warnings_on_9_drugs/
6. "Violent animation attributed to Red Lake school shooter," March 23, 2005, http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/11213759.htm
7. Steve Martinez, "LNSG condemns modern society in school shooting," March 22, 2005, http://www.nazi.org/nazi/policy/weise/Notice also that Martinez does not disagree with Weise's ideological motivations, only that society pressurized him into his homicidal actions. In contrast, MIM does not suggest that homicide suspects kill people out of conscious opposition to oppression even though it is the systems of oppression that cause homicide.
8. Jost Hermand, A Hitler Youth in Poland : The Nazis' Program for Evacuating Children during World War II , trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997).
9. Associated Press, "Bush praises slain guard for saving others," March 27, 2005, http://www.indystar.com/articles/1/232389-6941-010.html
10. "verlassen4_20's profile," http://profiles.yahoo.com/verlassen4_20
Jeff Weise's purported Yahoo! profile.