War on the Innocent

Is there a reason to kill the innocent? What if there is no nationalistic or tribal imperative to treat all members of a nation/race/class/tribe/group as enemies, as did the Nazis and Communists, nor a belief system that is selectively indifferent to the humanity of others, like Aztec jaguar warriors seizing captives to be sacrificed? What if it is not a matter of being so angry at specific persons that no care or thought is given to the risk of hurting bystanders when an attack is launched?

What if it is about killing the innocent precisely because they are innocent? It is hard to imagine a purer state of innocence than children at prayer.

In the Iliad, Achilles’ friend, cousin, comrade in arms, the noble Patroclus, is punched in the back by the god Apollo (a supporter of Troy), left defenseless, then struck by a spear and finished off by Hector. (The behavior of the gods in the Iliad was uniformly appalling. Humans were far more honorable figures.) The scale of Achilles' vengeance was much larger than targeting Hector precisely because of the perfidy of a god. To begin that vengeance, Achilles added twelve live Trojan captives to Patroclus' funeral pyre before going on to kill Hector.

When one goes to war with a god (e.g., Apollo), there is no way to strike a god directly, so the only option is to find that which the god loves and kill it (e.g., the flower of Troy and then Troy itself). When one is at war with nature, country, culture, religion, history, reality and God (or even just the idea of God), the innocent or those otherwise apparently naturally favored by God thus become natural targets.

Andrew Phillip Kehoe, still the most horrific school mass murderer ever (see the Bath school disaster of 1927), was called a “dangerous injustice collector” by a modern analyst. This is a useful and insightful phrase. We now have cults and ideological movements designed to instill and intensify a perception of victimhood, to elevate grievance and concomitantly dehumanize non-victims as perpetrators and/or undeserving beneficiaries of injustice. Psychosexual unhappiness, for example, could be presented as the fault of the external world in its entirety, which would warrant vengeance on a horrific scale. Lots of online support for that point of view is readily available. A truly perverse aspect of social media is that interactions can be created that increase rather than relieve isolation and intensify the habit of resentment rather than offer the saving effects of a broader, saner perspective.

We cannot prevent individuals from “going postal” about particular grievances against particular persons (employer, boss, rivals, etc.) or institutions, nor can “red flag” laws do much to prevent that kind of violence. But we should be alert to the inherent danger in that which abets and fosters “dangerous injustice collection,” which invariably increases the risk of inevitable personal, seemingly irrational wars against the innocent in particular.

Personal note: My wife and daughter work in a parochial school where four of my grandchildren currently attend (two other grandkids are alumni). During the unwarranted attacks on Judge Kavanaugh during his nomination struggle, several idiots called the school. (Kavanaugh's daughters attended and he had coached their soccer teams.) The callers made ugly, stupid remarks about how he was presumably allowed to abuse girls. My daughter was an administrator then and was the one who took the calls. I don't think the callers felt good about themselves after speaking with my girl (mother of four), who is about as easily intimidated as your average Parris Island drill instructor. Nevertheless, the fact that anyone would target the school at all is troubling.

There is always a nagging fear about the evils that lurk in the "collections" out there.