Theater Shooter Caught, Real Joker Keeps Laughing

Our editorial in the American Thinker

Why is it that in the previous decades, when life was tougher, weapons were widespread, and the ratio of mental disorders was presumably the same, mass shootings were unheard of? Some would say that those people had not yet been corrupted by moral relativism, desensitized by Hollywood's fantasy violence and glorification of crime, or addicted to gory point-and-shoot videogames. All valid points -- yet one major reason hardly gets any notice.

The set of rules for war are different from the set of rules for peace. Wars have always been brutal and soul-sapping; while killing was the norm, there have also been rules to spare innocent civilians. The inhuman murder of a random group of defenseless innocents for no other reason than murder itself was never a part of war -- let alone of peace. What has changed in our 2,000-year-old Western civilization that makes it possible?
~
Admittedly, the major driving force of cultural change is the education system. Until recently, no generation of young Americans has been exposed to such a massive, centrally planned indoctrination based on the dehumanizing, soul-sapping "progressive" ideology. Accordingly, never before have students dropped out of school in such large numbers, with so confusing and conflicting views of the world and their place and purpose in it, with blurred perceptions of right and wrong, and infected with what I like to call "secondhand envy" and "phantom grievances" (which is similar to the Marxist concept of false consciousness, only not as far-fetched).

The radical "progressive" ideology (a broad term embracing many offshoots of Marxism) dehumanizes people more effectively than any violent point-and-shoot video game ever could. It pits various groups of people against one another by cultivating envy and grievances that are mostly imaginary and secondhand. In the politically correct book of "progress," man is judged no longer by the content of his character, but rather by the color of his skin, class, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other secondary attribute. The trick is that when a secondary attribute becomes the primary one, man loses his unique individuality and becomes a mere social function, a drone in a collective, a peg in the machine, a sacrificial animal on the altar of "progress."

"Progressivism" remains more or less benign as long it feeds off a wealthy nation. But as soon as the wealth is squandered and there are no surpluses left to redistribute, human sacrifice begins. The final argument behind every well-meaning "progressive" scheme is always a gun pointed at those unwilling to be enslaved or give up their property for redistribution. Planned mass murders and incarcerations of "enemies of the people" committed by every communist regime on the planet provide enough evidence of that. "Progressive" ideology denies moral absolutes, yet it assumes the moral authority to give a license to kill in the name of a delirious utopia.

In Russia, shortly after the October revolution, a Leninist newspaper published this, if you will, call for "progress":

We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable... so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood... let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois -- more blood, as much as possible.

According to speculative reports, the Aurora shooter James Holmes's clothing and methods bore some resemblance to the violent "Occupy Wall Street Bloc," and he may have been angered that the new Batman movie was an attack on his movement's noble cause. But whether his political leanings are confirmed or not, there's little doubt that this mentally disturbed student had been exposed to the "social justice" and "class strife" rhetoric in school. These teachings are a near-mandatory supplement served to most American kids, explicitly or implicitly, courtesy of public education. Once in college, the intake of the "progressive" formula tends only to increase, involving heavy doses of every grievance man, woman, or beast has ever had from the beginning of time, factual or imaginary. All this is served up under the generic label of "social sciences."

So when a young college graduate's budding delusions begin to torment him with phantoms of horrific injustice and fictional causes, prompting him to shoot indiscriminately at the dehumanized mass of moviegoers while donning a comic book costume, is it really the fault of the National Rifle Association?

The ongoing gradual insertion of "progressive" memes into the comic book culture is a matter for another essay and, perhaps, another author. As far as the movies go, Hollywood has been demonizing "rich white America" as the formulaic villain in just about every "who-done-it" flick ever since the censure of Joe McCarthy. A sudden break from that direction in The Dark Knight Rises might well be perceived as treason, causing anger among many on the left. And if one is an anxious sociopath with a deadly weapon, who doesn't know right from wrong, truth from fiction, or a hero from a villain, who has learned all he knows from school, movies, and comic books, such a delirious loser may indeed want to stage a spectacular massacre in a movie theater, killing potential "enemy converts" and sending a warning to all the others.

In another time and place, James Holmes might be hailed as an idealistic revolutionary hero fighting for social causes. Che Guevara, anybody? How many revolutionary "heroes" of the past, now lionized on today's campuses, had been tormented by the same mental disorder that turned James Holmes into a mass murderer?

Che Guevara believed that "a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." Che had killed many more than James Holmes did -- yet his life is glorified by Hollywood, his writings are published worldwide, and his pictures are plastered over the t-shirts of a new generation of American college kids, whom Che would not have hesitated to shoot given the chance.

Of these two delusional murderers, why does Che get a pass and Holmes doesn't? Because killing 12 strangers at a movie is a crime, while killing thousands of faceless class enemies is a statistic? Mental illness does terrible things to the mind regardless of ideology, turning the individual into a loose cannon. Throw a radical cause into the mix, and it quickly removes the safety lock and points the weapon in a certain direction.

Under Che's brief management, Cuban economy hit an all-time low, quickly declining from one of the wealthiest Latin American countries to one of the poorest. To accomplish that, Che murdered thousands of the bourgeois class standing in the way. If this isn't criminally insane, what is? Yet "progressive" educators in the U.S. continue to decorate classrooms with Che Guevara portraits and arrange "educational" school trips to Cuba. Sounds more like the mind-trip of a madman in an asylum run by the inmates.

Bill Ayers, who launched Barack Obama's political career in Chicago, in his younger days was a leader of a communist terrorist group Weather Underground, whose ideology he summed up as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents." According to DiscoverTheNetworks, their long-term goal was to cause the collapse of the United States, replacing it with a communist society over which they themselves would rule. The resistance would be sent to re-education camps and killed. Ayers and his comrades estimated that it would be necessary to eliminate some 25 million Americans in this fashion, so as to advance the revolution.

Ayers participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and of the Pentagon in 1972. In his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers writes of the day he bombed the Pentagon: "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them." He remembers his fascination with the fact that "a good bomb" could render even "big buildings and wide streets ... fragile and destructible," leaving behind a "majestic scene" of utter destruction. A comic book villain, anyone?

In his later days, Ayers realized that bombings were nothing compared to the damage he could inflict on the country through education of young, malleable minds. He dedicated his life to what he calls "teaching for social justice" as a professor of education. Supported by the left-dominated academic establishment, Ayers became a prominent member of and later vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), exerting great influence over what is taught in America's teacher-training colleges and, through indoctrination of a generation of teachers, its public schools.

While the gradual poisoning of the minds of American students is not as spectacular and doesn't lend itself to the silver screen as well as Joker-style terrorism, the utter destruction it leaves in its wake is beyond the dreams of a comic-book supervillain. With all the guessing and fingerpointing with regard to the Aurora shooting, no one is mentioning that James Holmes's disturbed mind may have been poisoned with the perverted concepts of "social justice" that have erased the value of individual human life through class envy, hatred, and falsely interpreted ideas of social duty. Since the age of five, he has been receiving social justice programming at the hands of California public school teachers and University of California professors.

Besides acting as a catalyst on a depressed mind, "progressive" education is also a cause of depression in itself. Imagine growing up while believing that yours is the worst country on the planet, guilty of death and suffering of millions of poor people worldwide, who are being wantonly killed, robbed, enslaved, raped, and tortured so that your mom can shop at the mall and your dad can fill up the tank. The species are dying, the rainforest is dwindling, the ozone hole is growing, and the globe is warming. If it is frightful enough to turn a sensitive adult into a guilt-ridden neurotic, think about a ten-year-old, who, in addition, has to live with the fear that if he doesn't die of skin cancer by the age of thirty, global warming and rising sea levels will finish everyone off anyway.

Could those educators who impose such insanity on their students please explain if there is anything, in their view, left in this world for our children to live for? Other than, of course, to continue the struggle for "progress"? But that is manifestly not a skill or a trait of character that will help them to become happy, self-sustaining, professional individuals. All it can do is replenish the cancerous growth that is consuming this society, replacing its productive and vibrant cells with mutated dysfunctional neoplasm.

At this point, we can only wonder if the injection of "progressive" hatred had aggravated Holmes's madness, but it surely had given him a frame of reference and the direction to channel his rage. Without it, perhaps, a certain amount of medication could help him to move on and focus on writing some shockingly dark, violent screenplays that demonize Western civilization, Christianity, capitalism, and family -- always a winner in the movie academy circles. Meanwhile, calls to ban firearms continue from the same people in the media, government, and cultural establishment who have themselves, to a varying degree, contributed to the dehumanization of our culture by destroying the traditional notions of right and wrong and, instead, cultivating the "progressive" notions of class strife, division, and envy.

It appears that James Holmes, as well as those before him and those who are yet to follow, are only unwitting tools in the hands of the real villainous Joker. Can you hear Bill Ayers's behind-the-scenes maniacal laughter yet?

 

Poppycock! How could our good intentions have yielded such disastrous results?
 

And let's not forget the other Virgina school shooting, which happened just a couple years prior to the one at Virginia tech - where “A student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, who has just been told he will be suspended for failing grades, storms through the campus, clutching a handgun. As terrorized students run for their lives, they hear him say, ‘Come get me, come get me.’ But before anyone can get him, the student, a forty-two-year old immigrant from Nigeria, goes on a shooting spree, killing a dean, a professor, and a fellow student. He also shoots and wounds three other students – one in the abdomen, one in the throat, and another in the chest.”

And then, as people were running and hiding behind cars, “Mikael and Tracy were prepared to do something quite different: Both immediately ran to their cars and got their guns. Mikael had to run about one hundred yards to get to his car. Along with Ted Besen [who was unarmed], they approached Peter from different sides. As Tracy explains it, ‘I stopped at my vehicle and got a handgun, a revolver. Ted went toward Peter, and I aimed my gun at [Peter], and Peter tossed his gun down. Ted approached Peter, and Peter hit Ted in the jaw. Ted pushed him back and we all jumped on.’”

What's that you say? You DID forget this (or never heard about it)? Gosh, don't tell me the media forgot to mention that it was two people armed with handguns that stopped the massacre!
 

What we have to remember is that, as Michael Savage rightly stated, "Liberalism is a mental disorder".

Not-sane people can't be reasoned with; normal, sane logic does not apply, and pointing out the differences between the two Virginia school shootings will only result in a blank look on a liberal's face, because it goes against their basic world view and they can't comprehend it. Try pointing out the difference between Virginia Tech, where no one but the lunatic was armed with a firearm - and therefore no one could stop him - vs. the Appalachian School of Law, where two other people armed themselves with firearms and the massacre was stopped just as it was getting underway, with about 30 less people killed, and your liberal friends' eyes will simply glaze over.

I didn't understand it when Michael Savage first stated it - I thought it was a made-for-radio polemic extrapolation - but the fact of the matter is that he was completely correct. People with a liberal mind view are, by and large, people whose minds haven't fully made the jump from child to mature adult: they still want to be protected, they still want to be provided for, and with Mom and Dad out of the picture they expect government to protect them and provide for them.

Contrast this with a mature adult mindset, where grownups believe in being responsible for themselves, and don't want anyone else providing for them or protecting them. Grown, mentally mature adults understand that we are responsible for our own protection and provision, and that's how we want it.

Frankly, the United States of America was designed by mature adults who designed and built a country, and a rule of law, designed FOR MATURE ADULTS, not for immature, mentally disordered child/adults.

But after decades of dumbing down, courtesy of the public school system and the universities - which today are staffed with the immature and entitled spoiled rebels of the sixties - we have a country that's at least half afflicted with a mental disorder. Is it any wonder that they elected a man to the highest office in the country who has exactly zero valid proof of who he is or where he came from? Who lies consistently?

I fear for what's left of America - and I know that that's why Oleg started this site, why he writes, and why he speaks. With a fully-controlled national media of immature, mentally-disordered mannequins telling the nation, day after day and night after night, their "current truth", how long can this go on?

/rant
 

Liberal means never having to say you're wrong.

Some people taste freedom and don't like it. In America these people are known as liberals.
 

[off]
Amen, Amen, Ditto, Ditto....

[on]

More kapitalist propaganda and lies.... excellent work Peoples Director in replicating the thought process of the kapitalist killing machine. Maybe we can eventually teach Faux News an effective lesson on counter creative propaganda.

[off]

A sad day.... the worlds of ideology twisted in knots by sick psychofants (sp).... in the sick minds of the news, populace, and the predator... maybe some people should visit the warnings of Yuri Bezmenov again?
 

Komrades, thank you for your astute analysis. Rock, you appear destined for early graduation in trench digging at your local re-education camp. Your words appear to closely mirror those of the traitor, liar and reactionary, Yuri Bezmenov - discussing ideological subversion and Western progressivism: http://youtu.be/gc0I4XtHQ3o
 

From a denver.cbslocal.com story on Drudge:
"Three days after the massacre, it still remained unclear whether Holmes’ professors and other students at his 35-student Ph.D. program noticed anything unusual about his behavior."

Our comrades in academe have done their jobs splendidly. The hothouse ideological insularity of American universities virtually guarantees that the only unusual behavior they could have noticed would have been that of teabaggers.
 

Red Square quoting Leninist newspaper

We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable... so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood... let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois -- more blood, as much as possible.

Rush Limbaugh

The opposite of peace isn't war... The opposite of peace is tyranny.
 

Comrade Square, I thought this piece was profound when you first wrote it after the Virginia Tech atrocity, and unfortunately it turns out this piece was frighteningly profound....

I'm sorry you were so right, and I am pretty sure you take no pleasure in being right about this either, but many times the truth hurts. It is not the job of the truth sayer to consider the feelings of those who need a crack in the skull with the potato shovel in order to get their attention.

I wanted to share with you a true story from last summer.

I had a large cherry tree in the back yard go to rot, and was in the process of safely taking it down with my People's chainsaw, when a couple we know stopped by with their 5 year old daughter, who had just finished her first round of "pre-kindergarten". She was very upset with me and told me I should not cut that tree down because I was "destroying habitat". Just where would a 5 year old child come up with an idea like that, which drove her near tears??

Just about everywhere as it turns out...

That was as big of a wakeup call to her Mom and Dad as it was to me and they pay a lot closer attention to what she is being indoctrinated with, but I think that little vignette verifies every word you wrote in this piece...

Thank you for your clarity, Sir.

Carry on, Comrades.
 

TREE BUTCHER!
 

I laugh, slightly, every time a liberal spouts their rhetoric, because it flies in the face of common sense. Let's take gun control, for example. I saw a cartoon once that showed two identical apartment doors- identical, save for their decorations, I guess you could call it. One had signs that stated claptrap like "Give peace a chance" and "Gun control saves lives." The other simply had a target, like the kind used at firing ranges, that was completely peppered with bullet holes. The caption was "Which house you rob?" Of course, it's a no-brainer: you rob the people who want to give peace a chance- maybe, if you're lucky, they'll simply give you the money and you won't have to ransack the place.

Comrade Square is correct in his argument that liberalism requires a full-functional, productive nation in which to thrive benignly- and when things start running low, the purges begin.

Perhaps it is because they are ignorant of the plans of their dark lords (or maybe they do know, which would be far more frightening), but liberals refuse to admit that purges result in societies where the right of the collective trample upon the rights of individuals. I think the movie that caused this hullabaloo, The Dark Knight Rises, put it best *Spoiler Alert* when Catwoman enters the wreckage of a 1%er's home, and finds a photograph of that person and their family, and she remarks "This was someone's home." To which her friend replies "Well, now it's everybody's home. This is what you wanted, isn't it?" *End Spoiler Alert*

I daresay when people are divided along class, religious, gender, sexual, or political lines, they begin to view their opponents as less than human- nonpersons, if you will. Of course, that is how the Leftist Elite view those who haven't their money, ideology, and contacts, for we see them spouting "redistribute the wealth" whilst they give nary a penny. And then (my personal favorite) there are the environmentalists, who espouse taking care of the environment at humanity's expense. That they have not yet killed themselves to save the world shows their hypocrisy.

If I disagree with Comrade Red Square on one point, it's this (DISCLAIMER: this is simply my opinion, as I have no idea if Red Square saw the new Batman movie): Bill Ayers is not like the Joker. The Joker was a nihilistic maniacal anarchist. He was clever, no doubt, but he sought to overturn all vestiges of civilization- that is not what Ayers has in mind. He is more like Bane (The Dark Knight Rises) in that he wants to overturn supposed injustices (in the movie, this involved releasing dangerous criminals from a maximum security prison) perpetrated by the bourgeoisie against the people. Ayers, like Bane, is no maniac, but a frighteningly rational and intelligent person bent on carrying out their own master plan, no matter the lives lost- for no life save their own matters in their eyes.


 

Fhalkyn

Ayers, like Bane, is no maniac, but a frighteningly rational and intelligent person bent on carrying out their own master plan, no matter the lives lost- for no life save their own matters in their eyes.
I agree. If Ayres is a maniac, then so are all our socialist heros and martyrs, like Pol Pot, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Che, and Jim Jones.
 

The best news I have heard is that Coloradans are responding logically to the tragedy. Weapon purchase background checks are up 41% and Concealed Carry classes are packed.


Hopefully rational and progressive gun laws can be passed so the guns will no longer go on such rampages and indiscriminately kill innocent movie goers!
 

I think the proletarian revolution is a historical inevitability. Letting people keep their guns only brings the revolution closer by. Aren't we Marxist revolutionaries being duped by the reactionaries into surrendering our own guns? The more guns the people have, the closer the proletarian revolution comes. How are people going to fight the revolution if these reactionaries have their way?
 

Comrades
We must all demand material equality with this Holmes. We have Rights to thousands of rubles necessary to purchase military semi automatic rifles of choice with grants from the Cocktail Party which resides where possession of is forbidden. For $15,000 Yankee Dollars all can have SOCOM in 7.62 with night vision scopes on top rails, flash suppressors, full battle dress, web gear, extra magazines, and Kevlar helmets with UV visor coating. Is crime against We The People.
 

Red Square, that picture of Che the Joker is genius. And not just borderline genius in the 96th percentile, but 100 percent pure genius!

Now, I dare you—no, no, I triple dog dare you to do the following:

1. Print out that picture of Che the Joker.

2. Go down to the nearest stoplight and tack the picture to that pole alongside the crudely lettered signs advertising super quick weight loss, foreclosure help, lost dogs, and pole dancing lessons which beg the question, “Do they take place at this pole?”

3. Snap a photo of it.

d. Then submit the photo to Kelly and Jen at CHE SPOTTING!

Oh, and as long as I'm here, have one of these . . .



And for your mother:


 

Comrade_Androgynov

Hopefully rational and progressive gun laws can be passed so the guns will no longer go on such rampages and indiscriminately kill innocent movie goers!
I once saw a website where someone had set up a 24/7 live video camera pointed at an AR-15, which was leaning up against a corner of the room.

The stated purpose of the website's existence was to document, on video, the moment that the Evil Black Gun jumped up all by itself and started killing people.

:)

BTW, a MOST equal article, Comrade Square - you deserve your Beet of the Week!
 

R.O.C.K. in the USSA

I once saw a website where someone had set up a 24/7 live video camera pointed at an AR-15, which was leaning up against a corner of the room. It is most progressive to keep a sharp eye on these assault weapons! There should be minimum life sentences when one is caught red... er... stocked! The FAQ reveals just how dangerous these rogue weapons are! http://www.assaultweaponwatch.com/
 

Thank you Comrade Comrade_Androgynov!

It is good to know that track is still being kept of these dangerous and out of control Evil Black Guns. Why, just looking at them at that link - and realizing that is was a live camera feed - made me desirous of more and more intrusive government protection to keep me safe!

The horror... the horror...
 

 

A nice review of the article here -

Oleg Atbashian: We are Bleeding to Death from Something Much Worse than Theater Shootings

Quote:

If anybody knows whether America has anything to fear from Marxists or Marxist thought, it should be Oleg Atbashian. This writer and artist from the former Soviet Union has first-hand experience with the production of verbal and graphical agitprop designed for the indoctrination of billions of good communists. After emigrating to the West, Oleg now lives in Florida where he writes under the name of Red Square. He is also the creator of ThePeoplesCube.com, and for years he has been a good watchdog and a strong voice against the twin threats of Marxism and Islam.

A few days ago, Oleg published an article in American Thinker that was ostensibly a speculative analysis of the motivations of James Holmes, the suspect in the recent Colorado Theater shooting. His article was really much more than that, in that he condemned the American Left’s stranglehold on the educational establishment and the entertainment industry, both of which seem to be producing a new generation of depressed and mindless, green-obsessed occupiers, America-haters and Che-worshipping revolutionaries.

More here: http://4gfc.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/ol ... shootings/
 

Short version: If the theater hadn't had a policy against firearms in their establishment, then there would have probably been someone in the audience with a CCW to stop the bad guy. Thus, the shooting wouldn't have even occurred in the first place because these nutjobs go places where the audience / victims will be unarmed.