print“To listen to the nation’s addiction and psychiatric gurus is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dirty deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors, victims of societal forces or organic brain disease.”
A well-aimed bullet would have stopped Cho. But gun-free zones are not the only areas in need of reclamation. The concept of the individual as a responsible, self-determining agent is the foundation of a free society. Liberty requires that psychiatric mumbo-jumbo not be allowed to oust morality…”
The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Evil, Not Ill.” It leads the Commentary Page. Barely-a-Blog participants will be familiar with some of the arguments.
Update: The indefatigable Thomas Szasz, the world’s leading critic of psychiatry, liked the following lines from my column best:
“Police and campus authorities responded to Cho’s stalking, pyromania, and voyeurism by medicalizing his misbehavior. As the nation’s pseudo-experts generally advise, Cho was referred to a mental health facility.”
I’d like to welcome Robert Reavis to Barely a Blog. He is a District Judge in the American “Heartland.” His colorful post on BAB today gives me a fresh appreciation of the many fabulous Americans I’ve “met” through my writing.
Now, with respect to the criminal Cho. Consider: the Korean wing of his family, an aunt to be specific, has called him, “that idiot.”? Koreans back home have a strong conservative streak. Saving face, personal pride and dignity are of the utmost importance to them. The move to the US probably severed the kind of family and community structures and value systems that might have sorted this misfit out early on in life.
Suddenly the university is not permitted to–and has no desire to–divulge Cho’s shenanigans to his family. The family is excluded. The progressives on campus consider his misbehavior a private “medical” affair. Back in Korea, the family would have handled the boy early on. They’d have realized he was severely limited —something our educational geniuses didn’t–and made clear to him what they’d tolerate from him; punishing his first sign of aggression, and placing him in a strict work environment–a dry cleaning business perhaps, not a college. A place where he’d do repetitive, calming, rote activity.
Yeah, the multicultural immigrant experience is not such a good thing for the immigrant who hails from adaptive, strong communities and families.
I was intrigued, but not surprised, to learn, moreover, that the incidence of mental health problems among Koreans is extremely low. Could that correlate with the fact that that culture views it as a stigma? Hence the more traditional Korean gets the message and doesn’t act out, as he would in the broader American society. Koreans remain well-functioning because there is no positive reinforcement associated with acting loopy.
In popular American culture, the mental disease construct has been so popularized and entrenched by the pseudo-experts that it is associated with rewards: attention, etc. To claim a mental disease is to be seen as good, virtuous, courageous, a hero struggling against all odds (all rubbish, of course).
Well said. We have got to reinstitute personal responsibility in this country.
Nobody is really bad? Nobody is really good? That’s what the education establishment has sold to students for years. No wonder we have become a nation of cowards. Nobody has been taught to stand their ground and recognize the absolutes of behaviour that are necessary for having a harmonious civilization. Our culture is many things but harmonious is not among them.
I wonder if anyone in the press will pick up on the fact that, as Ms. Mercer points out, he *was* on meds at the time, suggesting that the psychiatric institution acted as a kind of enabler for him. The “therapy” and prescription medications were just the excuse he needed to ramble on about how he was “forced to do it”.
I agree that Cho was evil and that his actions were voluntary; not a product of organic illness. Nor should society sympathize with him. However, you make it sound like there is nothing that could have been done to make him good. There is something that could have been done: philosophical education. If Cho were forced to undergo a proper philosophical education, then he wouldn’t have been evil. For example, no one who knows the meaning of life would commit suicide, but Cho was willing to kill himself in order to kill others as a result of his philosophical ignorance.
Also, I am not impressed with Nikki Giovanni. She’s just another liberal professor who was a part of the problem; not a part of the solution. What Cho needed was a philosophical education; not an anti-philosophical education, which is what left-liberals like Giovanni wanted to shove down his throat. I can understand his disgust for people, but his actions were totally self-destructive and they would not have been taken if he were to have been taught the meaning of life.
Ilana Mercer is like a diamond shining in a goat’s ass. Brilliant, tough, possessing attractions with (almost) everlasting appeal . Yet so few miners willing or able — even capable — of withstanding the stench to retreive it. These are hard truths for a very weak age. Robert Reavis
It is essential to those who would “run” the Nation, that such incidents be labeled “ill”, because any delving into the things that lead up to such actions inevitably demonstrate irresponsibility on the part of the majority of the adults around him. Some people appear to be born evil, I’ve known people who were nothing but evil, and they came from nice, well parented households. They are the odd ones, most of those who are “evil” have come to it step by step, and by being allowed to escalate until they reach a point where they have to make a substative moral decision about themselves. At that point, they choose a path, and if it is to continue, nothing short of killing and being killed will stop them. He chose to follow his path and it is evil to make excuses for what he did. He chose.
I read your article over at WND after writing my own post yesterday on the same problem. The very LANGUAGE of morality has been made verbotten.
Thanks for an insightful elaboration.
All the best,
D. Ox
I am really getting weary of the “it’s gotta be somebody else’s fault,” and the “all world views are equally valid” mentality. Some folks don’t have a clue. You either believe in right and wrong, or you don’t. At bottom, those are the only 2 “philosophies” to choose from. Which is really the most intolerant?
By the way, thanks for a refreshing, if depressingly rare analysis.
When is the last time a crime scene investigator discovered pure paranoid schizophrenia in the bottom of his test tube? Or pure evil?
The fact is Seung-Hui Cho was a member of our society and he murdered 32 of his fellows. As a member of that same society, I don’t care if Cho was motivated by mental illness or an evil heart or acute indigestion. He’s dead. He’s no longer a threat to me or anyone else in our society.
If Cho had survived his murderous rampage, then I would care about what motivated his actions, but only insofar as the criminal code of our society considers “state of mind” a mitigating factor in the crime of murder. Had he survived, Cho might have been adjudged “not guilty by reason of insanity” and might have remained a murderous threat to society for years to come.
As usual, Ilana has expressed it very well…the only thing that I might add is that the psych drugs in this case, as in so many others, allowed the murderer to act out his evil deed. Even an evil person has self-restraints, be it fear of consequences or whatever. The drugs pushed him to the point where he no longer had fear of consequences to restrain him.
Please see http://www.cchr.org for the facts on psychiatry’s involvement in these horrific crimes.
Has anyone noticed that the silence from the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Ted Kennedy, and many other liberals who are rabid advocates of gun control, is deafening. Their horrible, big-government mindset has suddenly disappeared, in the most likely scenario, they normally would be foaming at the mouth to spew out their false gun control agendas. Yes, we are talking about the massacre at Virginia Tech. If we were to pay attention to what the liberal democratic candidates were saying, (or rather not saying), you would think that they are proponents of the 2nd amendment. They represent the typical bottomfeeder, liberal mentality, to hush their mouths on this subject, because it may jeopardize their hopes of becoming President of the USA. They all love gun control, but now they would like you to think that they are having brunch with Ted Nugent in Waco Texas on his hunting reserve. These liberal democrats really think that they are shrewd. Not so. Instead of condeming the fact that the campus was a “gun-free zone”, they remain silent. But their silence speaks volumes. Just as it took many years for the United States airlines to take the cue from El Al airlines pertaining to arming the pilots & crew, hopefully it won’t take that long for people here to realize there must be some armed teachers in schools. Martin Berrow
I’m probably less appreciative of Cho being called ‘the idiot’ by his aunt… sounds like he came from a great family, alright (when a kid acts up, you punish him; spankings or destroying things and or objects that they enjoy. You don’t humiliate and degrade them. No wonder he hated people.
Lack of punishment, ignoring his clear misadjustment in life, and shutting up wonderful people like his aunt could have stopped this crap. In his writings he sounds like a five year old boy raging against the world – which reminds me of the saying that the evil man is the child grown strong. He needed discipline, structure, and a likely a better father figure. What he got was was the liberal form of child abuse; we’re finding out, slowly (America is pretty dumb) that ignoring kids and pretending that clearly anti-social actions and rebellion is ‘ok’, and letting kids ‘grown into their own’ is jsut as tyrannical as beating a boy for nothing.
What Cho needed, it seems, was a good spanking.
Too late now though – a bunch of (innocent) people are dead, and one man wasted away his life by becoming a monster. A total waste for all involved.
But don’t count on America learning anything from this.
[See comment/response in the post update.]
“Diamond in a goat’s ass”?? What a simile!!! I don’t know if I could wear that around my neck or not! Somebody ought to foward that to all the poetry instructors at VT.
[Strumpet, you’re too much. It is a rather jarring imagery.]
The Blame for the Virginia Tech Massacre
The media has done a great job at shifting the blame everywhere but… But they’ve failed to tell you the three most important issues.
1. First and foremost, we must blame Cho Sung-Hui (he did it.) [What do you think this column is about?]
2. Our own Countries immigration policy, has allowed this to happen.
3. Our own legislators, that do not want you to have the right to defend yourself against murderers like Cho, have encouraged Chos’ and much more to follow.
Did you know that in the two worse massacres in America, a gun was never used?
911/World Trade Center, Pentagon ect: Weapons used? Box cutters.
Oklahoma City Bombing: Weapon used: A rental Truck, ammonium nitrate & fertilizer.
[Massacres by the state, anyone? Wako? Or is the state allowed guns/bombs for the purpose of the odd massacre.]