Posted on 04/21/2007 10:14:44 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Just before 5am on Monday, April 16, Cho Seung-hui got out of bed and walked to his computer. Perhaps he fiddled with his rambling 1,800-word self-portrait of a killer as the insults and grievances that he had been nursing for years coursed through his head.
High on his list were his classmates from Westfield high school, who jeered at him to “go back to China” without bothering to check his nationality. Two of them — who happened to attend Virginia Tech — were going to pay later that day. Then there were the college girls who reported him to the police for stalking and got him carted off to mental hospital after he sent them shy love messages full of yearning.
“By a name, I know not how to tell who I am,” he had written to one of them. He understood literature, he could have thought, while they didn’t have the brains to recognise that he was quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Spurned by them, he had to make do with a fantasy girlfriend, a supermodel who called him “Spanky”.
On the way to the bathroom Cho bumped into his roommate Karan Grewal. As usual, Cho didn’t try to speak to him or even nod hello. He swallowed his antidepressants, put on his contact lenses and applied his spot cream. As he picked up his weapons, a Glock 9mm pistol and Walther P22 handgun, and twisted back his black baseball cap, he clearly did not want to be remembered as the kid with acne.
Watching just a few minutes of the rambling manifesto of paranoia answers the question which the US has asked itself for three days: why did he do it?
At 7.15am, campus police were alerted to a shooting at West Ambler Johnston residential hall, a two-minute walk from Cho’s own hall. Witnesses heard screams and the eerie “pop pop” of a semi-automatic weapon before finding the bodies of a young man and a young woman sprawled on the floor in the hallway between the men’s and women’s dorms.
The dead girl was Emily Hilscher, 19. Perhaps there was something about her that reminded Cho of another girl he had fancied — the one he had sneaked into the women’s dorm to see but, as a roommate recalled, “When he looked into her eyes, he saw promiscuity”.
Was Ryan Clark, 22, her boyfriend? Cho didn’t know but he shot him anyway. Deprived of sex himself, he regarded those who were getting it with malevolence. “All your debaucheries weren’t enough . . . to fulfil your hedonistic needs,” he had ranted on his pre- prepared “martyrdom” video.
He went back to his room and recorded one last QuickTime video clip. It was 7.24am, according to his computer log. “This is it. This is where it ends. End of the road. What a life it was. Some life,” he said agitatedly.
But Cho wasn’t finished yet. He still had more scores to settle and fame to seek. He downloaded 28 video clips onto a DVD, which showed him posing with his weapons like the star of a Quentin Tarantino film or Lara Croft, and set out for the post office, past the police cars that had arrived outside the dorm. By the time he arrived it was 8.45am.
It was tax-filing day in America, but as a student he didn’t pay any. The queue in the post office surprised him, though he waited his turn patiently as he rehearsed his next acts of violence in his mind. He posted his multimedia manifesto to NBC News, went back to his room, grabbed his weapons and set out for more killing.
This time he would target professors as well as students. He walked across the campus to the teaching block at Norris Hall, where he chained the front doors so nobody could escape. He may have remembered some lines from Mr Brownstone, a play he had written: “He gave me a D, when I only forgot to turn in two homeworks.”
As he gunned down Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French lecturer, science professor Kevin Granata and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, he may have thought again of the professor in his play who “ass-raped us all — isn’t that what teachers do?
“I wanna watch him bleed, the way he watched us bleed”. Now he was fulfilling his own prophecy.
As for the students, they could forget his sympathy. He fired at them again and again, scattering their flesh across the floor. Most of his victims, girls and boys, were shot three times. Sometimes he would return to check whom he had killed and who was merely playing dead. His face was blank, but his emotions were seething.
As he said in his video, “You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats, Your gold necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs . . . You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing.”
The baby-faced Cho was 23, an adult by most people’s reckoning. In any other era it is doubtful he would have thought of himself as a boy or described his fellow students at Virginia Tech as “brats”. Trapped in the perpetual adolescence of the student, he has become a new monstrous poster child for boys who would rather kill themselves and others than grow up.
Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.
Cho swallowed his medicine, but it failed to stop him carrying out the biggest mass murder by a lone gunman in American history. By the time he turned his gun on himself, 32 students and teachers were dead — more than twice the number killed by the Columbine high school students in 1999.
Colin Goddard, 21, whose father is British, was one of the last students to be shot before Cho killed himself. He remembers the horror he felt as Cho entered his lecture room at Virginia Tech and began firing calmly and methodically at the class. “He had on boots, dark pants and a white shirt. He just started walking down the rows of desks, shooting people multiple times. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t demand anything. He was just shooting.”
The scene at Virginia Tech was hellish. Some students managed to save themselves by jumping from the windows, but those left behind died without knowing what Cho’s grievance was or why they were being punished for his rage.
Yet in death and murder, the silent Cho found his voice, railing at the perceived ills of society and slights to his deranged ego. From the blunt message he posted on a college web forum warning, “I’m going to kill people at Va Tech”, to the mountainous last testament of writings, photographs and video clips sent to NBC, rarely has a killer been as loquacious or left so much evidence of his twisted mind.
“That’s got to be more than he’s spoken, ever,” one surprised graduate student said. “I thought, ‘Well, he does talk’.”
Cho’s parents were hospitalised by shock when they heard of the killings, but some relatives have begun to speak out. Cho’s sister Sun Kyong-Cho said: “This is someone I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.” But in Seoul some family members described Cho as alienated even as a child. After watching the videos of him posing with his weapons, his furious 82-year-old grandfather said, “Son of a bitch. It served him right he died with his victims.”
Kim Hyang-Im, Cho’s mother, was the second of five children, who was obliged to look after the younger members of her family. At 29 she was still unmarried. Fearful that she would become an old maid, her parents fixed her up on a blind date with Cho Sun Tae, 10 years her senior. “Her husband was very serious and quiet and careful with money. He was not very friendly to his mother-in-law and father-in-law,” Cho’s 85-year-old aunt recalled.
Cho’s father scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand bookstore in South Korea, where they lived in a cheap, rented apartment. When relatives invited them to America, they were thrilled at the chance to “provide a better education”, the grandfather said.
The family was already worried about Cho, then eight years old. Soon after arriving in America he was diagnosed with autism. “He was very quiet and only followed his mother and father around but never showed any feelings or emotions,” his great-aunt said. His parents were too poor and busy trying to scrape a new life together to get specialist help for Cho.
They opened a dry-cleaning business, like many Korean immigrants, and moved to a two-storey cream town house in Centerville, Virginia, just outside Washington. In fulfilment of her parents’ dream, Cho’s sister went to Princeton University and now works as a contractor for the US State Department on the reconstruction of Iraq.
Cho chose to study English in at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a sprawling residential college in the distant Blue Ridge Mountains. It is hard to fathom his rage at the “trust fund” brats with golden necklaces, vodka and cognac and “everything you wanted”, when among his victims were many immigrants like himself, who were proud of making their way in America.
But this carefully manicured campus — home to 26,000 students who called themselves Hokies — was no place for a social misfit. Even Cho used to wear the uniform of the mini-city: an orange or maroon T-shirt or sweatshirt with a baseball cap. Paglia, who has taught in American universities for 35 years, describes America’s residential campuses as vast “islands of green and slack conformity where a strange benevolent and tyrannical paternalism has taken over. It’s like a resort atmosphere”.
Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.
“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”
Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.
“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”
The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”
The former Virginia Tech student who posted two of Cho’s hate-filled plays on the internet recalls that Cho fitted the “exact stereotype of what one would typically think of as a ‘school shooter’ — a loner, obsessed with violence and with serious personal problems”. But the plays show he was preoccupied not just with girls but with paedophilia and sodomy.
In Richard McBeef, a drama about child abuse, a stepson rants, “I will not be molested by an aging, balding, overweight pedophile [sic]stepdad named Dick”, before threatening to shove the television remote control “up his ass”. It concludes: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick.”
Dr James Gilligan, a former prison psychiatrist who teaches at New York University, believes that misogyny and homophobia are a central component of the make-up of violent criminals, who often fear they have homosexual tendencies.
“An underlying factor that is virtually always present is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood and the way to do that, to gain respect, is to commit a violent act,” he says. “It is tremendously tempting to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”
It is not simply an American phenomenon. In Cho’s video manifesto, there are unmistakable echoes of the home-made martyrdom videos of the young male jihadists circulating on the internet.
Cho began working out in the gym weeks before the killings, and the video pictures sent to NBC reveal a bolder, more muscled character than the images of the shy young student released when his name was first identified.
Dressed to kill in black and tan, Cho borrowed the vocabulary as well as the iconography of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers by hailing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the two teen killers at Columbine — as “martyrs” of the same vengeful cult of death.
On his arm Cho had etched in red ink the nom de guerre Ismail Ax, a possible reference to the son whom Ibrahim (or Abraham) prepared to sacrifice in the Koran, sparking a torrent of speculation on the internet about his religious motives.
Others suggested that the student of literature was merely thinking about an American novel called Ishmael about a young boy growing up outside Washington, just as he did. But Cho was also explicitly drawn to Christian symbolism and its own veneration of martyrdom.
“Do you know what it feels to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?” he railed on video. “You have never felt a single ounce of pain in your whole lives. You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience.”
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes the common denominator between the terrorist suicide bomber and the suicidal mass murderer is their sexual frustration and gender. “It really is young men between 15 and 30 who are responsible the vast majority of crimes, although it is politically incorrect to say this too loudly,” he says.
Suicide bombers and the Virginia Tech killer, Fukuyama suggests, “fall into the same demographic of young males, a lot of whom are unemployed, without a clear place in the social hierarchy. These guys have the most to gain and the least to lose by martyrdom”. And often, he adds, they are upset about girls “whose attention they can’t get”.
Fukuyama believes that Cho’s case is “fairly unique” but “the maleness is important”. In his essay Identity and Migration, published by Prospect last February, he writes that radical Islamism should be understood in the context of identity politics.
“We have seen this problem before in the extremist politics of the 20th century, among the young people who became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader-Meinhof gang.” It is not specifically tied to radical Islam, he insists.
Yet Cho’s ethnicity may have prevented the university authorities from intervening in his life, Paglia suggests. Voicing a theme that conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh have taken up with gusto, she wonders whether political correctness about his background and culture may have led them to make excuses for him.
“He was Korean and so people were hesitant to declare he was abnormal in American terms,” she says. It is no accident, she believes, that the two female lecturers who were most suspicious of his behaviour were themselves not white.
One professor, Nikki Giovanni, known as the “princess of black poetry”, was the first to raise the alarm about Cho’s writing. It did not feature hardcore violence; but it was weird. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to rip your heart out’,” she said. “It’s that, ‘Your bra is torn and I’m looking at your flesh’.” When female students said they were scared of him, she wanted him out of her class.
Giovanni reported her concerns to Lucinda Roy, a British professor of literature who was then head of the department. She was so disturbed by Cho that she contacted the university police and went on to give him individual lessons — after devising a code word which, if ever used, would be a signal to her assistant to call security.
“You seem so lonely,” she told him. “Do you have any friends?”
“I am lonely,” Cho replied. “I don’t have any friends.”
The lone gunman is a familiar figure in American mythology. “In American culture you always have the rough-edged loner, the anti- establishment figure which goes all the way back to the silent films and westerns and continues through Humphrey Bogart, James Dean and Marlon Brando,” says Paglia.
In Cho’s case, there were echoes of Taxi Driver, the story of a stalker. The promiscuity that Cho saw in women was “a huge warning sign”, Paglia believes. “You want them, you want the status of being seen with them, you’re driven towards them and at the same time they are contaminated, they are dirty. That’s exactly the mentality of the stalker and assassin played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. There is an apocalyptic impulse to destroy everything and to purify the world.”
In a twist to the debate on masculinity, some commentators have complained that the terrified Virginia Tech students were no Rambos when it came to defending themselves. John Derbyshire, a right-wing British writer based in America, wondered, “Why didn’t anyone rush the guy? Yes, I know it is easy to say these things, but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?” — a reference to the passengers fighting back in the 9/11 hijacked plane.
The columnist Mark Steyn took up the theme with an essay on the “culture of passivity” that is overtaking America. In his view, students are becoming so infantilised that they have lost their capacity to take responsibility.
“In a horrible world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself and others,” he believes. “It is a poor reflection on us that in those critical first seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor understood instinctively the obligation to act.”
Librescu, 75, forced his body against the door to prevent Cho storming his classroom, gaining time for some of his students to escape. He was shot dead. But there were younger heroes, too, such as Derek O’Dell, who was shot in the arm but managed to wedge his foot in the door and prevent Cho from re-entering the classroom.
Another student, realising that a friend was playing dead, was said to have deliberately drawn Cho’s attention to himself as the gunman searched the room for survivors — and sacrificed his own life.
“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”
Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.
“This is part of the plague that has come with the drug culture in the inner cities,” she says. “Cho’s use of semi-automatic weapons can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap. It is a fabrication of urban life which is sold to teenagers trapped in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs.”
“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.
“Ever see someone in a company crying over how they have been treated by their peers? Can you think of that one kid that was outcast, picked on, left out, alone? Did you do anything to help that person? Did you add to their misery to get along with the group?”
I’ve had some thoughts along these lines, except in a slightly different way. In a different and sadly bygone era, people made an effort to be polite to one another. More people also had that “Good Samaritan” attitude where one wants to help others. Why should we respect others? Well, for one thing humans are the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Being a good person and making the world a better place has many beneficial aspects, not the least of which is that your associates are less likely to go on a mass-murdering rampage.
All that said, if someone DOES go on a murderous rampage the best response is clearly ending that rampage as expeditiously as possible. I also agree with the point that these students exhibited very poor survival skills and instincts. This nutjob was opening doors to enter classrooms, and clearly the doors open inward since it was possible to barricade them. One means of taking out an armed person is to wait behind the door (hinge side). When the person begins to enter, i.e. is halfway through the door, you thrust-kick the door as hard as you can. If you catch either the arm with the weapon or the head, it’s game over. At a minimum, the subject will be vulnerable for a follow-up attack. With a couple others ready to rush, he would have been down and we would really have some heroes to thank, and most likely a death toll way below 30.
The point has been made many times about the campus being a ‘gun-free’ zone, but I can’t resist bringing it up one more time. I think that issue will hurt gun control more than this entire incident will help it. Good deal.
Re:
Cho would make a great little Nazi or Communist or Jihadist...
I think his most clearly articulated views identify him as a great little Communist. He hated the wealth, the “Mercedes” of the “snobs”. Not trying to make this the “Reichstag fire” of 2007, but when communist sympathizers go on killing sprees the right ought to point this out.
“Then, of course, the kids would have made fun of his hairy palms”
But then he would’ve been blind and not nearly as able to shoot people so easily
“The world has weak people. Those that end up lashing out in horrible ways and those that don’t have the guts to step in and try to help someone being treated badly by others”
Good post. Though I don’t know how it will be recieved on this thread
So who is committing most of the 16,000 murders, 1.4 million violent crimes, and 93,000 forcible rapes in this country every year? Which gender comprises the biggest share of the 2.2 million prison population, which happens to account for a quarter of the world’s prisoners and is the world's largest prison population per capita? You can blame liberalism for a lot of things, but male passivity isn't one of them. In fact, one could argue that liberal policies have made us into a more violent society.
It’s just you. To anyone without an agenda he seems like a deranged psychopath with no soul. There may be similarities with the Islamic nuts, but they are different animals; though animals nonetheless.
Saw some talking head interview with a college professor who is pres of a group on concerned profs who say kids DO NOT participate in class any more because they are afraid of offending someone. Now to me it is the pot a kettle thing but if true it is an interesting take on the college world. My daughter who graduated last year tells me that she has seen that behavior in many other students.
My take on it is that broken McDonald's families don't develop social skills and the kids spend more time on video games than interacting with other humans. Except that doesn't seem to work in Cho's case.
You missed the point. Try reading it again with an open mind.
Liberalism has stripped men, America, integrity, and even academic excellence,
of their self-worth and honor and turned them into pansies, unable to act like men.
Up shot is other employees just ignored him more because they now knew it bothered him
Our culture is pretty much heading for a dead end unless we can reclaim it from the PC people. Talk about oppression. We need an alternative education system to US colleges.
High schools really need to be sex-segregated.
Colleges need to go back to being places to teach adults and enhance free inquiry of knowledge instead of indoctrination centers.
We have had education and learning stolen from us, folks, and used to create a pc monstrosity.
This is the kind of thing totalitarians dream of.
I find this interesting. I recall around the time of the Columbine shootings reading several articles about the psychotic side effects of some antidepressants - specifically those that the shooters there were taking, as were a couple of other school shooters around that time. Apparently, psychotic visions of mass murder and suicide are documented in the medical literature.
Does anybody else remember reading about this? Has anybody read what drugs he wa taking?
I haven't read what he was taking, but yes, there has been some correlation with increased suicide and other abnormal behavior in some who take SSR's (Prozac, etc). Phil Hartman's wife killed him and herself while on Prozac. The family sued the maker and they settled for a lot of money. I know at some point they said Klebold (I think it was him and not Harris)at Columbine was on Prozac, but I can't remember whether that was true or if he had stopped.
Yes, I was that kid at one point in my life (awkward pre-teens). I remember writing a story in creative writing about all of the popular kids getting killed off. I am not violent and wouldn't have done it, but it sure sounded appealing at the time. In this day and age, I am sure I would have been detained for my story! They sent me to the school counselor after another girl in the class threatened me (after she had kicked crutches out from under me). The counselor focused on what *I* could do to change. Luckily, I grew a sense of humor and a thick skin, and outgrew my ugly duckling phase.
I would never blame the victims, especially because this seemed very random. However, parents should teach their kids to treat others with kindness. The schools should reinforce it, too. Teachers and administrators turn a blind eye. I have dealt with a couple of bully situations now as a parent of a school aged kid, and I have to make an effort to get teachers to put a stop to situations.
As soon as he started reading,the whole class started laughing and pointing, and saying "go back to China" Davids said. I do indeed stand corrected and I thank you for the information. I do not doubt it for one minute. I agree with you on the sexual association factor, and the looney left.
An interesting sidelight on that group, can be found in the left in my own native country. For some reason they get off on persuading women to give of themselves. To prove non-prejudice, they say. One look at shoe bomber Richard Reid proves that. His mother was very middle class and intelligent. She married his father and it lasted three months. Poor man (Reid's father). Left all alone.
Reid almost pulled off a bigger stunt than Cho. The passengers on the aircraft, were not having it.
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