Were the Tsarnaevs nuts or revolutionaries?

[DonViejo]

We may find the Tsarnaevs' ideology deluded, but we should take it seriously if we want to avoid others like them

BY MICHAEL LIND

Why do we Americans find it so important to believe that terrorists and assassins in the U.S. can be dismissed as mere emotionally disturbed maniacs, rather than viewed as revolutionaries in the thrall of militant political or religious ideologies? Why are so we intent in removing the political from political violence?

These questions are timely, following Vice President Joe Biden’s dismissive description of the Boston Marathon bombers as “knockoff jihadis.” Mere amateurs, these brothers, who were capable of murdering several marathon participants, maiming scores more and shutting down a major city and even rail lines for hours or days. The real amateurism, it might be suggested, is that of the pundits and journalists trying to psychoanalyze the Tsarnaev brothers and their relations from a distance.

But there are already reports that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving killer, has said that he and his brother acted in response to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars that they considered to be attacks on Islam. What if this really was the motive? What if these brothers really were sincere Islamist revolutionaries, like the thousands of others who have rallied to militant jihadism in the past several decades, whether they were connected to international Islamist networks or acting on their own? That doesn’t exonerate their brutal crimes in any way. But surely Islamist terrorists are best understood in terms of the common Islamist ideology they share, rather than personal or familial experiences that are unique to each.

There’s nothing new about stripping American terrorists and assassins of the ideologies that in fact motivated them. Consider the case of the martyred brothers John and Robert Kennedy.

-snip-

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/were_the_tsarnaevs_nuts_or_revolutionaries/

[hedgehog]

1. yes

[Renew Deal]

2. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter

It has pretty much always been this way.

[RKP5637]

26. Exactly! It's all relative to ones frame of reference. n/t

[hrmjustin]

3. They are evil!

[NightWatcher]

4. Amateur brats that slapped the hand that gave them refuge when they fled a genocide

They were easily manipulated by a "preacher" on YouTube and whomever the older brother met on his trip back to Russia.

Amateur terrorists, professional assholes.

[lapislzi]

6. Amateur how? An amateur terrorist makes a bomb that doesn't explode.

They got the job done. Whether they achieved their full objective to their own satisfaction, we will never know.

Assholes without a doubt. But they're terrorists as well. Having a clumsy or nebulous ideology doesn't diminish that fact.

[NightWatcher]

19. They couldn't get away because their car was in the shop

They had no cash on hand.
They dressed to stand out in a crowd.
They walked together in the crowd.
They were id'd in two- three days.
They had no plan to go into hiding.
One of them was killed and the other was caught...professionals get away.

Any idiot can make a device, but their tradecraft sucked horribly. Screw their ideology, they were horrible lone wolves with fieldcraft and planning that ended right after the device went off.

[Warpy]

30. Great point. They killed some people, hurt more people

and were utter bumblers afterward. Anyone worthy of the name "terrorist" would have claimed the act, made political demands, and gotten the hell out of Dodge on the first plane to Chechnya. Or Dagestan. Or wherever.

These guys were just ordinary, garden variety trashers. There was no higher purpose, they just wanted to go out and maim people.

[geek tragedy]

5. Again, does anyone conduct this analysis for rightwing terrorist like Eric Rudolph and

Timothy McVeigh and Scott Roder and James Wenneker van Brunn and Jim David Adkisson?

Answer: hell no. No liberal would ever dare pen something along the lines of "we have to understand what government policies caused these conservative white Christian men to kill."

[Hekate]

21. This liberal says that first we have to recognize that they are politically motivated

In no way does this mean an apology for my ideology and politics, much less an apology for the lawful government of the US.

They have an ideology. They are politically motivated.

Unless we can recognize their motivations beyond calling them crazy murderers, we are not going to get very far in recognizing the next ones that pop up, much less figure out a rational means of preventing their murderous acts.

[geek tragedy]

22. But, we don't know that they kill because of politics, or whether the politics is something

they latch onto to justify their killings.

Heck, Osama was complaining about global warming towards the end. Motive or excuse?

[Hekate]

24. The article in Salon actually presents the case pretty well

I recommend it in its entirety.

[geek tragedy]

25. I read it. Found it rather lacking.

We can always know what a killer says. We can't always know why a killer does what he does.

[HiPointDem]

38. we don't know what their motivation was.

[Hekate]

43. They each TOLD us. Using words in the English language.

That, as it happens, is the point of the article.

[onpatrol98]

28. Except McVeigh wasnt Christian...

[LanternWaste]

33. He stated Science, Agnosticism, and Roman Catholicism as his religion at different parts of his life

He stated Science, Agnosticism, and Roman Catholicism as his religion at different parts of his life. Additionally, before his execution, he took the Catholic sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick

[Warren DeMontague]

7. Apparently the dad was nuts, the older brother was a decent guy, the younger brother was a weenie

but the daughter is bad-ass.






...Oh, sorry, I thought you said the "Targaryens"

[backscatter712]

10. A crown for king! n/t

[Warren DeMontague]

11. ***

[Capt. Obvious]

8. Why can't they be both?

I'm open minded

[HereSince1628]

13. Mostly because if they were part of the bigger terrorist world, a threat would still exist

To be comforted of our fear, we need to either believe that the threat no longer exists,
OR a version of the "THEY can't hurt us" concept
OR a version of "Bring it on!/We're coming to get you" revenge concept.

[backscatter712]

9. I have little empathy with those who blow up children.

Excuse me for failing to care about his grievances.

[HereSince1628]

12. Yes, certainly because we must comfort ourselves and assuage fear

with beliefs that are plastic enough to conform to our needs.

Those beliefs include, among other things, a sense that:

1) The threat is over.

Making the Tsarnaev brothers part of a bigger plot not only denies us peace of mind it suggests there is an enemy to be dealt with.

2) Bad people do bad things to good people.

In 2013, in a world sophisticated enough to grasp that "justification" is relative, it is unacceptable to leave on the table the notion that the Tsarnaevs were in any way loyal soldiers in a cause. For this rationalization of the incomprehensible occurrence of bad things, the perpetrators must be defined as a quality of people less good/more diseased than the rest of us.

Less than 20 minutes after the Boston bombing a former FBI profiler was on MSNBC using terms relating to mental defect to communicate that he as a pundit profiler was on the side of 'US' and the perpetrators were a defective less good them.

[geek tragedy]

14. Yeah, we stupid sheep who deny think that intentionally killing and maiming

innocent people are of a less good/more diseased than the rest of society.

Next thing you know, us emotionally needy rubes will demand that such people be punished for their behavior, and that they be stigmatized by judgmental terms such as "murderer."

Moral disdain for murderers is so passe.

[HereSince1628]

36. Actually I said nothing to suggest all of this isn't mainstream and au courante

Recognizing the pattern of the dominant narrative has nothing to do with the things you wrote there. The OP was fairly overt about the nature of the narrative.

That such narratives are constructed and played out in society is hardly a secret. That such narratives exist doesn't mean they don't play important roles or serve the needs of real people.

I didn't call anyone a rube. All the angst is introduced by you.

[geek tragedy]

37. No, you just labeled the idea that people who intentionally blow little children to pieces

are shitty human beings a fabricated coping mechanism/myth. No condescension there at all.

[HereSince1628]

39. Well I respect your right to be of any opinion you choose

I on the otherhand respect my right not to be exposed to your account

[HappyMe]

15. Neither.

They are just evil assholes. I have no sympathy for people that blow up innocent people.

[cherokeeprogressive]

16. Isn't the sentence above the by-line a defacto surrender?

Submit, lest it happen again?

[Myrina]

17. Why do they have to be affiilated with a terrorist GROUP?

Just because they talked to a few people, read some shit on the internet and are foreigners that don't follow Christianity?


Maybe they were just really pissed off about (something) they determined was related to the US or Mass or marathoners or ... whatever .... and decided between themselves to blow shit up & attempt to go out in a blaze of glory?


Occam's razor, y'all.

[Hekate]

23. Not group. Motivation.

[DevonRex]

18. I read it. Don't bother. I'll sum up the stupid.

He quotes a letter by Stephen King, the author, to the NYT, in which he says Oswald wasn't really a Marxist who shot Kennedy for ideology but a man who wanted fame. Lind goes on to say that by that logic Hitler wasn't really a Nazi.

Uh, if Mr. Lind cannot tell the difference between a loser whose name we only know because he assassinated a great U.S. President and the psychopath who led a nation into committing genocide and starting and fighting WW2 and taking over almost all of Europe then I just don't think there's much help for him.

[Hekate]

20. That is a truly excellent article

In context of the gun uproar, I tried to say here that political assassinations abound in the US, only to be dismissed out of hand even after providing some quite recent examples.

Michael Lind of Salon has solidly fleshed out this idea with examples and contexts, and I applaud him for it. We will not be able to even address this particular evil until we can recognize it and talk about it.

Hekate

Other examples can be provided, but the point is clear: Political violence in the U.S. as in other countries frequently is inspired by political values, not by the personal pathologies beloved by our armchair Freudian psychoanalysts. Oswald believed that he was a heroic militant in the global communist revolution. Sirhan thought he was avenging the defeat of Palestinians and Arabs in general by Israel and its Western backers, including the U.S. Czolgosz sought to join the militants of the worldwide anarchist movement by assassinating a world leader. And Booth sought to avenge the defeat of the slave-holding South on behalf of the white race.

Why shouldn’t the Tsarnaev brothers fall into the same category? We may think that their Islamist ideology is as deluded and repugnant as other global, illiberal ideologies, including the Marxism-Leninism that inspired Oswald and the anarchism that inspired Czolgosz. We may reject their evident belief that massacring civilians at an American marathon or in their reportedly planned Times Square bombing is the moral equivalent of killings of Muslims by the U.S., Russia and other Western states in conflicts like Iraq, Afghanistan and the Chechen War. But we should take their ideas seriously. Because there are many others at home and abroad who share them.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/30/were_the_tsarnaevs_nuts_or_revolutionaries/

[FarCenter]

27. Since religion seems to have been a factor, how about nuts.

[BeyondGeography]

29. This article is dangerously stupid...These kids didn't have an "ideology"

The older one was rebelling against what America did to his hoped-for rock star lifestyle, not what we did to the victims in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's interesting about Tamerlan is what happens when you combine the real-world difficulties of carving out a life for yourself in America with the outlet that radical Islam provides for rage and disappointment. This kid was both ambitious and unwilling to pick himself off the ground when hard times hit. That's hard for anyone, but especially someone who feels entitled, and who is surrounded by enablers, like his shoplifting mother, his submissive and probably scared-to-death spouse and every angry person who would listen to him.

There is something to be gained in digging deeper if we want to make ourselves safer, but spare me the talk of "ideology." This was a young immigrant Muslim male whose first inclination was to believe the hype and go all-in with America, found the place both difficult and incomprehensible and consoled himself with violent revenge fantasies that he eventually acted upon. He then gave every indication that he wanted to enjoy his fame, bragging about the crime to his carjacking victim and apparently planning a blaze-of-glory ending in New York. Terrorism was the ticket to celebrity that he couldn't purchase through conventional means. His ideology? Party of one.

[HappyMe]

34. Well said.

All this talk of 'political motivation' just tries to make what these asshats did appear 'noble' in some sense of the word.

[smirkymonkey]

42. +10.000

best post!

[Puzzledtraveller]

31. Maybe terrorists?

[LanternWaste]

32. It does seem to beg the question...

It does seem to beg the questions...


"Why do we Americans find it so important to believe that emotionally disturbed maniacs in the U.S. can be dismissed as terrorists and assassins...? Why are so we intent in adding the political to mere violence?"

[CJCRANE]

35. I think they were disaffected losers

influenced by their own version of "Internet Jihadism": a mishmash of simple fantasies and grievances that they picked up via youtube and social media.

I doubt it's a uniquely American phenomenon. There is probably another disaffected idiot sitting in a basement in London or Paris with a head filled with similar incoherent ideas dreaming of unearned glory.

[JI7]

40. i think they were like that Ohio shooter who wore the shirt with Killer on it in Court

i don't think they cared about islam or war in iraq or had any other ideological motives.

[MrSlayer]

41. Neither. They're just assholes.

They aren't crazy, they're dicks. They certainly aren't revolutionaries. Easily led, gullible jerkoffs sucked in by nonsensical propaganda enough to commit a terrible crime. They're dead enders, losers, and nothing more.