Merely to satisfy the cruelty
The toll of an attack on a Bastille Day fireworks celebration in the southern French city of Nice rose on Friday to 84 dead and 202 injured, as the government identified the assailant as a 31-year-old native of Tunisia, extended a national state of emergency and absorbed the shock of a third major terrorist attack in 19 months.
…
Starting around 10:45 p.m. Thursday, the attacker mowed down scores of victims in Nice with a rented 19-ton refrigerated truck before engaging in a gunfight with three police officers, who pursued him down a storied seaside promenade before finally killing him.
The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, identified the man as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was born on Jan. 3, 1985, and raised in Msaken, a town in northeastern Tunisia.
No organized group has said “We did it!” They do say they did it when they did it, because they’re proud of doing it. The fact that they haven’t said that is a strong hint that they didn’t do it.
Mr. Bouhlel had a history of petty crime, including theft, going back to 2010, and he received a six-month suspended sentence in March for assaulting a driver during an altercation in January.
“However, he is completely unknown by intelligence services, both at the national and local levels,” Mr. Molins said. “He has never been in any database or been flagged for radicalization.”
Maybe he wasn’t “radicalized.” Maybe he just wanted to kill a bunch of people, for the sheer glorious fun of it. Maybe he wanted to live out a fantasy. Mowing people down with a big truck is one fantasy a person can have, and maybe Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel simply wanted to do that – maybe there was no more ideology to it than that, nothing but a love of violence and not enough compassion to inhibit him from pursuing his love.
“There are many children, young children who had come to watch fireworks with their family, to have joy, to share happiness, delight, amazement, and who were struck, struck to death, merely to satisfy the cruelty of an individual — and maybe of a group,” Mr. Hollande said, flanked by Mr. Valls and Health Minister Marisol Touraine, after meeting with victims and medical workers at the Pasteur Hospital in Nice.
Maybe that was the only point. People were out having fun, including children, enjoying a fireworks display just as we did here in the US 11 days ago – maybe Bouhlel’s only goal was to fuck that up.
He’s been given plenty of role models lately though, role models who did have an ideology. It’s the hot new thing, picking out a place where people are crowded together – an airport, a bar, a football ground, a music theater, a busy street – and killing as many of those people as possible.
Pick your role models carefully.
With each passing week I am more and more grateful to be living in a small village in the Alps. I know it’s statistically unwarranted, but I almost dread travelling to places like Paris, London or Seattle for work now…
I hope that France will do the only thing one can do to stop these kinds of attack, which is to improve the lives of the poor and fight against discrimination and inequality. Sadly, I think they will do exactly the opposite.
I’m not sure improving the lives of the poor and fighting discrimination would stop attacks of this kind – although it would be a good thing to do anyway of course. This isn’t straightforwardly class war or race war – it’s religious war. I think the only way to stop theocratic Islamism would be to convince every single imam in every single mosque to stop preaching theocratic Islamism and preach liberal values instead. I don’t see that happening.
A curious detail is that apparently most of his weapons were phony. According to the BBC:
So I gather he had one real gun and a bunch of pretend armaments. That does suggest to me an element of fantasy.
@1,
Like Ophelia, I would hope more would be done to diminish inequality and integrate the marginals of French society. But the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attacks in Europe were hardly marginal. They were not homeless and many have had well-paying jobs. Most have appeared thoroughly attuned to modern European society with all its materialistic trappings. Unlike their grandparents who were genuinely foreigners and downtrodden. The recent terrorists never seem to have trouble acquiring cars or trucks, apartments, travel fare and modern gadgetry, not to mention weapons and explosives. And in many cases they are hardly devout Muslims, just disaffected young people nursing all sorts of grudges and adopting the trappings of Islam (i.e. Islamism) to feed their sense of entitlement (the lost “Caliphate”) and assuage their resentments of the West. But to deny the role of religious indoctrination is wrong and perilous. The Christian or animist Africans who inhabit the same banlieues as the jihadis never seem to be involved in terrorism. They may be just as discriminated against – considering their darker skins probably even more so, and in many cases by their Arab Muslim neighbours – but they are missing the fuel to terrorism. And that fuel is provided by Islam.
David Rutten #1:
These people aren’t society’s outsiders. Most of them come from middle-class households.
When the Germans rolled into Poland in 1939, at least one English pacifist was reported (by Orwell) to have exclaimed: ‘how could we have let the Poles do this?’
That said, the isolation and ghettoizing of recent immigrants has helped create a supply of potential killers.
Do you know where Orwell said that? I’d like to read whatever it is.
@ 7 Ophelia Benson
Since John the Drunkard hasn’t replied, I’ll mention I couldn’t find it. But there is a passage where Orwell talks about post-war anti-Polish sentiment and it is reminiscent of attitudes today. An excerpt: