must read on these "GOING POSTAL" attacks -- Mark Ames in Alternet:

[nashville_brook]

Mark Ames literally wrote the book on "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond"





Here's what he has to say about the Ft Hood killings...

http://www.alternet.org/media/143779/focusing_on_ft._hood_killer%27s_beliefs_are_an_easy_out_to_avoid_the_deeper_reasons_for_the_massacre?page=entire


Focusing on Ft. Hood Killer's Beliefs Are an Easy Out to Avoid the Deeper Reasons for the Massacre
By Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on November 6, 2009, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143779/

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons.

(snip)

So yesterday’s Fort Hood shooting isn’t the worst or most deranged mass-killing in Killeen’s history -- not by a longshot. The mainstream media is enabling the screaming about the Muslim traitors in our midst, but Hasan killed far fewer Americans than the white, racist George Hennard. And they were bested by the federal government in nearby Waco Texas, in 1993, when federal forces slaughtered some 75 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound.

But in what may seem like a strange coincidence, Maj. Hasan and Killeen are connected to another American shooting rampage. Killeen held the record for America’s worst shooting massacre until 2007, when Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 33 fellow students. And Malik Nadal Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech in 1997. Both Hasan and Cho were bullied and harassed -- Hasan’s cousin told reporters that after 9/11, his military comrades regularly abused him, calling him “camel jockey.” But the cousin insisted that Hasan’s opposition to the war didn’t grow out of the bullying, but rather from the stories he heard while interning as a psychiatric counselor to veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Hasan even hired an attorney to try to come to a settlement with the US government and leave the service, but they wouldn’t settle for a deal and instead forced him to deploy. He apparently fought it up to the day before his deployment -- and instead of going to the war, he brought the war to the US military.

(snip)

If the government really were concerned about all the suicides and PTSD cases, they could have prevented Mj. Hasan’s murder-suicide mission before it happened. It would have been easy: Hasan had pleaded with his superiors not to be sent to Iraq, where he was scheduled to be deployed, but his requests were denied. RIght-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin and some mainstream outlets have seized on reports emerging that Hasan supposedly voiced opinions sympathetic to suicide bombers. But if he was an Al Qaeda sleeper-cell suicide bomber himself, it makes no sense why he’d a) argue with fellow soldiers that the wars are wrong and we should withdraw; and b) that he tried to get out of being deployed to Iraq. The 9/11 terrorists did their best to “blend in” and pretend like they were as American as apple pie, because the point is not to draw any attention to yourself if you’re a terrorist planning to suicide bomb a military base. Moreover, the timing of his shooting, the day before he was to be sent off, shows that his desperation had reached the limit. What this suggests is that the massacre could have been avoided if Maj. Hasan’s objections were taken into account.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Did you read some of those FR quotes?

[nashville_brook]

3. what FR quotes? at alternet?

[sinkingfeeling]

11. Yes, at the bottom of the article.

[nashville_brook]

13. whoops -- i thought that was part of the comments section -- makes the article even better.

[dalaigh lllama]

2. some important history reminders here

[Flaneur]

4. Good piece, worth kicking.

[Raineyb]

5. Excellent piece! n/t

[newtothegame]

6. Guns are bad.

Guns are bad. Guns should be outlawed. If we had more restrictions on guns, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen because no one would have guns at all. No one should have guns because if you do you’re only part of the problem. Just imagine how much worse this would have been today or yesterday if someone besides the shooter had a gun. So much worse.

[Zoeisright]

9. Do you have any original thoughts at all?

This is the third time I've seen this tripe in about five minutes. Grow up.

[Stargazer09]

10. Someone besides the shooter DID have a gun

And she probably saved quite a few lives by putting four bullets into the shooter.

[nashville_brook]

12. actually, this author isn't anti-gun at all.

[havocmom]

16. Cain v Able did no involve guns. Violence, desperation kills

guns are just one of the more modern tools for the task.

You REALLY must want DEMS to lose elections. All your one note singing would lead to that if the chorus got very big.

Real solutions do not involve simplistic dreaming. Might be good to learn that lesson of life.

[nashville_brook]

17. i can't decide if this is sarcasm...do you mean to be facetious?

[kestrel91316]

19. Were you born a cretin, or did you have to take special lessons?

[Javaman]

7. It's been on my "to read" list forever, I think I need to move it to the top. nt

[nashville_brook]

14. i LOVE his writing style -- non-fiction isn't usually a page-turner. this is.

[Jennicut]

8. Like with Cho at VA Tech, the signs were there. The military choose to ignore

them. Hasan's superiors made a huge mistake. It is not entirely their fault, but the man needed help and out of the military.

[nashville_brook]

15. here's an interview w/Ames: " A Brief History of Rage, Murder and Rebellion"

A Brief History of Rage, Murder and Rebellion
By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on October 3, 2005, Printed on November 6, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/24796/

It's not easy to stare this country square in the face and bear witness to the pandemic of horror, misery and rape-the-fields viciousness that abounds. I can do it at the most for 10 minutes at a time... and then find myself drifting back to my Comfortable Place. It's far harder to sit down and write about what's really going on in America; there are entire publications -- like Newsweek or New York Magazine -- that give every sign of making it editorial policy to scour each article and delete any hint of reference to the scales on our dark underbelly.

So it's a fairly powerful event to find a decent-sized book that does nothing but articulate a series of truths about the American Life you've hardly read about or spoken about, but just simply felt.

Mark Ames' "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion -- From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond" (Soft Skull, 2005) is such a book.

Ames takes a systematic look at the scores of rage killings in our public schools and workplaces that have taken place over the past 25 years. He claims that instead of being the work of psychopaths, they were carried out by ordinary people who had suffered repeated humiliation, bullying and inhumane conditions that find their origins in the "Reagan Revolution." Looking through a carefully researched historical lens, Ames recasts these rage killings as failed slave rebellions.

Mark Ames lives in a kind of self-imposed exile, editing an expat English alt-weekly in Moscow (The eXile) where he regularly writes about the culture, politics and society of a country he could not live in. It's his simultaneous distance from life in America and deep familiarity with it that makes his book such a chilling read.

AlterNet contacted Ames in Moscow to talk about his book and what he sees as the underlying cause of the "Going Postal" phenomenon.



Your thesis that these rage murders are effectively failed slave rebellions takes you back in your book to consider in some depth the circumstances of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. At what point did the parallels start to dawn on you?

I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn't exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the '90s. No one in the "liberal" Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called "privatization" programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the '90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would "have to die off" before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia.

Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil. Later I looked at the details of these American rage murders -- they were all similar, mostly normal Middle Americans attacking seemingly "at random." If they weren't psychopaths, which they aren't, then that meant their attacks were very deliberate, that they were attacking something as a response. That's when I decided that it was the culture which was viewing the murders "at random," the culture which refused to see the purpose.

I simply assumed, from experience in Russia, and from looking at modern rage rebellions, that early slave rebellions would be completely misunderstood in their day as random acts of crazed evil just as modern "rage rebellions" are, and from the evidence I uncovered, it seems they were.


(snip -- much more at link)

[nashville_brook]

18. shameless kick.

[riderinthestorm]

20. Does anyone work in a psych hospital? Is it common for psych staff to "regularly abuse" each other?

To taunt one another with derogatory nicknames like "camel jockey" and get away with it? I mean that's whats being articulated but that just seems pretty far fetched. My sister's a psychiatrist and insists that kind of unprofessional behavior at any reputable hospital (and Walter Reed is damn reputable) would never be allowed.

Secondly, I just have to reiterate this: Major Hasan joined the US fucking Army. They go to war. He'd been in for many, many years. Why did he think he'd never go to a combat zone and be deployed? It makes no sense that this guy was completely unhinged on being sent to war. He's a soldier.

Thirdly, he's an educated man who presumably knew how to either maim himself permanently with his firearm to get out of going, and/or he knew exactly what to say to his superiors to ensure they had him psychiatrically evaluated before shipping out (where his increasingly crazy positions are looking pretty obvious in hindsight).

[nashville_brook]

21. you make a good point. it doesn't make sense that he'd be freaked about being shipped out.

seems like...for someone who had been ROTC since forever ago, that, deployment would be looked forward to.