Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

Thomas777
Columbine by Dave Cullen

This book is an exhaustive treatment of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, and its purpose is to dispel media narratives about the event and to identify the motives of the gunmen, largely constructed from their own admissions that were, until recently, shielded from public scrutiny.

There are weak points in the writing, not the least of which has to do with Cullen's pop-journalistic tenor; ironically, he castigates his colleagues for their sensational and wildly inaccurate reporting while at the same time indulging himself in obnoxious stylistic nuances, tailored to the faux-gonzo and unmistakeably bourgoisie convention found in desperate-to-be-relevant shitrags like ''Rolling Stone''. Aside from that however, his factfinding is impeccable and despite his obvious cosmopolitan prejudices, he directly assails the myth that the shooting was prompted by ''bullying'' or ''racism'' or ''anti-Semitism'' (he openly acknowledges Dylan Klebold's Jewish heritage) and in doing so smashes the liberal shibboleths that came to define the event in public memory.

Essentially, the story of Columbine is the story of Eric Harris. Harris was a popular, outgoing kid who loved weapons, managed to charm adult women into bed when he felt like it, and was by many accounts a genius. He began keeping a journal a year before the killings and he described that he had contempt for humans because they had abandoned rationality, and in doing so, had embraced a passive nihilism that was entirely devoid of anything compelling or dynamic. Harris determined that life was reducible to ''mathematics and chemistry'' and a perverted morality had taken root which had robbed man of an ability to develop or evolve in any ways but marginal ones, and that the only remedy for the problem would be catastrophic violence - which Cullen explains culminated in a bombing plot to destroy his high school at a moment when ''maximum human density'' could be isolated in a handful of the schools rooms during a lunch hour, at which time at least 500 people would perish (4 times the attrition of the Oklahoma City bombing). In other words, Harris' and Klebolds' shooting rampage was an ad-hoc backup plan that was implemented when Harris' IEDs failed to detonate.

Cullen's conclusion is that Harris was a typical psychopath who aimed to destroy a high school because it was a microcosm of America's demographic milieu and it would be a way to strike a blow against the corrosive stasis that Harris perceived to be at hand in the historical moment in which he found himself coming of age. He didn't have any peculiar animosity towards any of the individual students, and he didn't have any personal hostility to any of the boys or girls that he gunned down; he believed, rather, that they had to die so that a point could be made that could not be rationally explained to people that he determined were no longer capable of making sound judgments, uncolored by sentimental morality or supersition or dimwitted emotional responses. Cullen's opinion is that the reality of this motive so horrified FBI forensic psychologists and so befuddled moronic local police that they colluded in some way in allowing the media to present a narrative of ''bullying'', racialist ideology, negligent parenting or mental illness to explain away the killings.

Treatment of Dylan Klebold's motives is less interesting although just as complete. Klebold was the half-Jewish son of career academics who enjoyed a privileged life but never developed any meaningful perspectives on his life and world, other than myopic longings for unearned recognition and maudlin hostility over unrequited love. It becomes clear, according at least to Cullen's treatment of the evidence, that Klebold was simply suicidal and was taken with the charisma of Harris - who was by all accounts his only close friend. This may be dramatic license on the part of Cullen, so as to buttress his own narrative of events but what is telling is that Klebold apparently only fired between 5 and a dozen shots from his TEC-9 while his cohort was executing people with ruthless efficiency for over half an hour during the assault on the school.
President Camacho
Wikipedia claims Harris fired 96 shots and Klebold got off 55.
Thomas777
The book is somewhat confusing on this point, largely on grounds of the fact that Cullen is not clear on whether or not Klebold's TEC-9 was fully automatic or a post-assault weapons ban semi-auto. I don't know enough about weapons to speculate; but its not entirely clear if Cullen means Klebold fired a number or ''bursts'' or individual shots prior to the mass killings in the library.

He claims that when the assault was first implmented, Harris shot two people who were on the lawn of the campus, and Klebold proceeded into the cafeteria commons where a number of students were fleeing up the staircase. Cullen alleges at this point that K. could have ''swept'' the crowd with his TEC-9 and inflicted mass casualties but he held his fire for some reason; the implication being that the weapon was fully automatic but IIRC that wasn't actually the case.

Some of the gun afficianados maybe will weigh in and clarify.
Gen. Butt Naked
Posting from memory here, but I'm pretty sure the TEC-9 was purchased for Harris and Klebold by a slightly older female friend at a gun show. Other than being an illegal straw purchase, the transaction was routine and on-paper. This means that the weapon could not have been select-fire given the paperwork, legal hoop-jumping, and cost required to transfer possession of an automatic weapon. All automatic weapons have had to be registered with the Feds since the 1920s, and the registry was closed during Reagan's presidential tenure. H, K, and friend likely lacked the resources required to procure automatic weaponry.

It's also highly unlikely that they purchased a semi-auto TEC-9 pistol and converted it into an actual submachinegun. The media myth popularized in the 1980s is that anyone with a screwdriver and a bit of know-how could take a military pattern rifle or SMG-clone pistol and turn it into a functioning automatic weapon. This is simply not true. If the TEC-9 is anything like the AK in terms of its civilianizing process, converting it from semi-auto to select fire requires a number of replacement parts (one of the most important being a different trigger sear). These parts are only easy to come by when there's a large milsurp market for a particular weapon's parts and accessories. AK parts aren't hard to find due to its world-wide ubiquity. The TEC-9 was never adopted by any military or police force and thus lacks the supply of military-grade parts.

And even converted weapons still fire from a civilian-typical closed bolt rather than the military-standard open bolt. Closed bolt automatic weapons heat up quickly and end up cooking off a round and initiating uncontrolled magazine purge at the maximum rate of fire. There's no evidence of this happening to Klebold's weapon, so he either barely fired at all (if it was converted) or the weapon was in its factory semi-auto configuration.

Journalists generally know next to nothing about guns and assume that any weapon that looks like an assault rifle or a submachinegun really is one.
Angocachi

Shariah Law - Kamali

Total garbage.
I wanted a thorough and objective read on Shariah; most importantly a straight forward presentation of Islamic jurisprudence on economics, government, family, etc... where does Shariah stand on most every policy question right down to environmentalism (would an Islamic State have wildlife preserves?), sexuality (are condoms OK?), etc. Instead I got a deluge of Arabic terminology and "some people say A but others say B", with a high dose of "moderate, modern Islam". The ass who wrote it is a Professor Doctor in Malaysia with his own organization advancing what they call Islam Hadhari (civilizational Islam).
"Renewal and reform are essential ingredients of Islam Hadhari. Islam Hadhari also seeks to provide a correct alternative to the rigid, exclusive, hard-line, and extremist misinterpretations of Islam that are propagated today by deviant groups. Such misinterpretations pose a great threat to Muslims’ own understanding of their religion, to say nothing of the non-Muslims’ understanding of Islam. Islam Hadhari seeks nothing less than a return to the pure, original teaching of Islam, unfettered from the biases and unwarranted accretions that have found their way into people’s understanding of religion."
"Islam Hadhari was introduced to solve a range of pressing problems. It was also introduced to provide an alternative to the extremist interpretations of Islam being bandied about today by fanatical groups. The Islamic revivalist discourse of recent decades had often voiced sectarian, local and partisan interests and it was legalistic, ideology driven and imitationist that failed to speak for the wider ummah and the broader universalist teachings of Islam. Islam Hadhari is an attempt to change that."
He devotes a whole section of his book to denouncing suicide bombing. I couldn't handle it.

Oswald
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The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia - Behind a cheesy subtitle this book tells the story of the surprisingly large number of americans who decided in the aftermath of the 1929 crash to move to USSR, either out a genuine political belief or, more often, just looking for work. Tim Tzouliadis gives us a fascinating tour of the USSR throughout Stalin's reign through the eyes of those imigrants. Spoiler : 2 survived the experience. For the Londoners on here if any, I bought it for 3 quids in the discount bookstore in front of British Library.
O'Zebedee

^^ reminds me of an episode in Allen Ginsberg's biography, where he visits his uncle in the Soviet Union.

The uncle had moved his family back during the time described in the book above, and had had no contact with the rest of the family since. Interestingly, even though the uncle suffered through Stalin's reign he fingered Beria as the real villain.

Oswald

It seems in USSR brainwashing was a reality - not the fancy high tech version but one where the mind-wrecking conditions of forced labour and homogenized form of state oppression can convince an innocent man he killed his son when he didnt: Tzouliadis comment on a few cases where victims of the OGPU started to believe in the (completely fantastical anyway) confessions that they had been forced to sign in Lubyanka.
Although to be honest I wouldnt blame anyone for "fingering" Beria as the first row of destalinisation was probably his sole good deed ever.

Cadavre Exquis
Child of God - Cormac McCarthy

A vivid depiction of survival and degradation among a mountain folk community of eastern Tennessee. I’m not sure how accurately the people are portrayed, but it’s believable. This was a great read.

The description of the environs – the sparse forests and back-breaking hills – is quite dramatic, in sharp contrast to the matter-of-fact episodes of human interaction. This gives the story a nice rhythm; given it is a short book, I finished it in a couple of days.

McCarthy probably draws on local mountain myths which I’m not familiar with in presenting his protagonist, an isolated and disturbed man. This man has few acquaintances, and they are all slightly less fucked up than he is. He eventually finds a pleasant way to pass the time.

McCarthy does well in showing how the resolution of personal and communal conflicts worked at one time or another in White communities, but more importantly is able to convey certain impulses and desires, manifesting in the most foul ways, as nonetheless human.

This is a solid book that you should read out loud to your spouse/significant other, or even act out a scene or two.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: /5
Oswald
Blood and Rage - Michael Burleigh

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The brits on here have probably heard of Burleigh before for his celebrated Sacred Causes , which was a riveting history of the interactions between totalitarian regimes and organised religion throughout the XXth century. This book I have read several times, for the density of information, the depth of the analysis and the width of the area analysed (diplomatic and military of course, but also cultural and economic) makes it one of the best analysis of totalitarianism "as a whole", even disregarding the religious elemement. Indeed the analysis of the religious aspects might have been a bit too factual for me, leaving aside the metaphysical elements within totalitarian doctrines to focus, more or less purely, onto the diplomatic and political relationships. On the whole the book took the party of being genuinely historical where as most studies of the question take the "cultural study" approach.

When I found his last book in a discount store (which I have refused to buy full price when it was released) I was very excited: Burleigh this time decided to write "a cultural history of terrorism". At first the idea of a "cultural history" appealed to me as contrasting with the rather dry and sometimes difficult program of Sacred Causes. Well Ill break the news now, I was very disapointed.
Each chapter cover one of the "big families" of terrorism (aka Fenians, Anarchists, RAF, etc.) providing the reader with a succinct but relatively complete chronology of the events relating to this group, but, most of the time, with little concern for their ideology, their relationships with other similar groups, the impact they might have had on the political or cultural landscape, etc. In other words it feels like reading a high school history text-book and one cannot help but suspect that Burleigh, in his concern not to glamourise terrorism, to which he confess in his introduction, succeed at making it dull. The one notable exception is his depiction of the developement of arabic/islamic terrorism, where he does emphasize the relationship between say for exemple the Algerian independance war and the Palestinian terrorism. For me it seems obvious that there is a continuity from early XXth century "socialist" terrorism to late XXth century Islamist terrorism but this doesnt come through much throughout the book, instead listing informations you could have found in many other publications of the same style.

On the whole I would say this book wont bring anything new to the table of anyone with an existing interest on the subject of"first half of the XXth century terrorism" - yet Burleigh has some interesting opinions about the political balance both historical and contemporary between Israel and the Arab states.

Score: 2/5