Rakesh is mistaken if he thinks that I have any sympathy with the Narcissistic iconoclasm of teenagers wearing swastikas. In my opinion there's nothing worse than people who want to be controversial but are not willing to do the work of developing a real critique of existing conditions.
Like Charles, Rakesh seems to want to fit this contemporary event into a template derived from past political activity. The two boys killed on Hitler's birthday, so they must be acting according to some recognisable racist agenda.
But the anomie expressed in contemporary youth culture, and parroted by our two killers, is a long way from organised racism. The appeal of racist epithets in this context seems closer to their shock value than it does to an identification with a militarised society like Nazi Germany.
I remember Sid Vicious wearing a Swastika T-Shirt - which had tremendous shock value in Britain - but in no sense meant that he was Nazi or even racist (he wasn't). Not surprisingly, in Paris' Jewish quarter they didn't get the joke and Sid was beaten up by pensioners.
The narcissistic and doom-laden culture celebrated by these teenagers would be considered decadent and unmanly by any self-respecting Nazi.
In message <v02130500630bd37d6fb0@[128.112.70.69]>, Rakesh Bhandari
<bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> writes
>James H thinks he has located some special anti conformist energy that has
>simply been misdirected. But these kids were not anti conformists; they
>were the the most violent expression of the basic premises of middle class
>youth society: misanthropically individualistic, racist, and computer and
>video game obsessed.
>
>Why were they obsessed with jocks and blacks? Could it be that with only 15
>out of 1800 students as black, they needed an additional target that could
>more easily be imagined to be a threat worthy of their attention? Could it
>be that athletics to them represented the field in which blacks excelled?
>Hitler was obsessed with athletic success but this was before the
>embarrassment Jesse Owens visited upon him and his barbaric racial utopia.
>Maybe they wanted to destroy the very field of endeavor in which blacks
>most visibly assert their standing in society. Again, why were they
>obsessed with jocks? Has anyone even offered a guess?
>
>Or could it be that they had accepted the devaluation of manual labor and
>the body that our society inflicts on upper tracked youth to prepare them
>for 'symbolic analytical' work?
>
>Or maybe they were reacting against all the sports hype in the Denver area
>after two superbowl victories? Perhaps the Olympian status enjoyed by a
>racially integrated group of athletes spelled to them the destruction of
>social hierarchies and standards? It would be ironic indeed if they reacted
>against the fascistic spectacle of superball football by becoming followers
>of Hitler.
>
>I have no idea what was going in these kids' heads; perhaps race was more
>important than presently recognized. Perhaps not.
>
>What I think is important to explain is the possible media reluctance to
>recognize that socially sanctioned racist ideas *may* have been centrally
>important to the descent of these two thugs into horrifying barbarity. That
>if these kids had not been racists, they would not have became who they
>became. This presents a racist society with the disturbing dilemma of
>rooting out racism root and branch or taking the risk of allowing racist
>ideas to flourish, whatever the collateral damage.
>
>As for this claim, "Eric had three best friends," classmate Nora Boreaux of
>Plattsburgh, N.Y., recalled. "One was black, one was white and one was
>Asian."
>
>It would be interesting to track down these kids and ask them what they
>thought of Eric and his parents. Perhaps they will remember a certain level
>of condescension?
>
>Yours, Rakesh
>
>
-- Jim heartfield