Aspiring to Monsterhood
How does one define a monster? Not all that difficult; many have qualified over the course of human history and their exploits that place them outside the mundane pale of entitlement to the human race sets them apart from ordinary criminals and murderers. These are the born psychopaths whose vision of destruction is on such a grand scale that they boggle the mind. These are the minds and the warped souls whose emotions are so far removed from human that they earn the sobriquet of monster.In millennia past they were those whose ambition of conquest of lands and peoples far beyond their own left a wake of carnage, pillage, smouldering villages and countless corpses as testament to their monsterhood. In the modern era we have the examples of heads of state whose negligent view of humankind lead them to believe lives were handily expendable in the pursuit of their greater goals.
In our post-modern era we have suddenly come to realize that some societies more than others appear to give birth to aspirational monsters. In the African continent there are too many sad examples of countries emerging into the modern age ruled by conscienceless egotists eager to squander the natural endowments of the country for their personal gain, eschewing any responsibility toward the needs of the people of the country. These too are monsters.
But it is the emergence of a new classification of monsters who become addicted to wreaking carnage in society, to instilling fear into the hearts of citizens whose countries become named as targets, whose goal is to incapacitate social infrastructure and in the process destroy as many living human beings to ensure their message of incandescent hate is being received, permitting them to achieve the kind of notoriety that they appear to crave.
They bring to their life-work the authority of claiming themselves to be blessed by one on high, a spiritual being whose purpose they serve. If god's purpose is what they serve, how can they fail? If it is god on high who inspires their holy war against all those whose vision of a holy spirit does not match theirs how can they possibly be wrong? If their realization of their god is one who demands that they lay aside any vestige of humanity to perform their duty in his good name, we are to tremble before their purpose.
So now we have one of the ilk of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, proud to assert that his was the warped mind that planned some of the world's most puzzling Islamist-inspired attacks against targets they deemed representative of the decadently hateful West. His was the "blessed right hand" (as in the right hand of god one presumes) that so heinously and publicly slaughtered a man because he was a Jew.
This spiritually degraded shadow of a human being was the celebrated mastermind behind attacks as various as the New York/Washington 2001 attacks, the Bali bombings, the Mombasa bombings, and the Istanbul bombings. Along with many more. His curriculum vitae is amazingly fulsome, this is a terrorist for all seasons, delighted to spread his evil as far and as wide as possible.
But, he avers, it was regrettable that so many died, particularly the deaths of children did he find regrettable. However, as he also points out, this is the language of war. And it is war that the group he so loved to serve has foisted upon the world. A war of ideas and ideals, of values and perceptions, a war of anger and denial, a war of obliteration, not necessarily conquest.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is proud of his work. Decadent Western society with its fundamental values of equality and opportunity, its societally protective laws, its pledge of all manner of freedoms ranging from religious to speech to the search for fulfillment has been too tainted by licentiousness and too broad an acceptance of behaviours seen to be an insult to a paternalistic superior being. Not that Mr. Mohammed did not take advantage of those lesser permissive opportunities like consorting with low-lifes and his own episodic carousing.
What a world we inhabit when such loathsome creatures as he slither hither and yon on the landscape, planning and burdening mankind with deranged assaults in league with the Grim Reaper. It is that distant cousin of god whom monsters like this serve.
Labels: Heroes and Villains
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, March 18, 2007
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