NewsMax, btw, is another rightist website. Less citedthan WorldNetDaily or http://freerepublic.com but still, I'd imagine, it gets lotsa "hits" everyday. Michael Pugliese ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Germans Blame Hollywood, Satanism for Massacre (NewsMax.com Wires) Analysis by Uwe Siemon-Netto, UPI religion correspondent. Friday, April 26, 2002
They say in Germany, "Whatever happens in America will be here two to five years later."
Well, it took three yours, almost to the day, for the horror of Littleton, Colo., to be aped in Erfurt, capital of Thuringia, once a celebrated center of Central European culture and learning.
Clergymen, psychologists, politicians and criminologists were aghast Friday over the brutality of the "American-type" massacre committed by a 19-year-old former student of the Johann Gutenberg Gymnasium, one of Germany's finest high schools.
In a country where weapons are by law hard to come by, he went from classroom to classroom with a shotgun and a pistol, mowing down 14 teachers (other reports said one of these was a secretary), two female students and then, when the police arrived, a patrolman. In the end, he killed himself.
Police gave only sparse information about his identity Friday, other than that he had been expelled from the school for unruly behavior earlier in the year. He probably acted out of revenge, a police spokesman suggested, because he committed his crime while the other students were sitting their final exams from which he had been barred.
But that an evident copycat-type bloodbath should have occurred at all in the country, and especially in the former East Germany, was interpreted by media experts and clergymen as a symptom of the globalization of horror.
It was Germany's second school shooting this year. In February, a 22-year-old man who had recently lost his job killed two former bosses and his old high school's principal in a rampage outside Munich.
Blaming the Media
Sources of the violence, some proposed, are in Hollywood and the newsrooms of international cable TV.
"I am certainly not advocating censorship," said the Rev. Johannes Richter, former Lutheran superintendent (regional bishop) of Leipzig, which is close to Erfurt. "However, somehow we have to get a handle on what comes across the Atlantic via television and the Internet.
"Especially here in the East, young people are very vulnerable to the violence that comes gushing over in news reports and in Hollywood films. Remember, we have lost the ground under our feet.
"The Nazis and the communists have had 56 years to destroy our social structures, which had taken millennia to develop. The traditional family is largely gone. Congregational life, too, has vanished for most.
'Virtual Reality ... Without Values'
"The only reality many young people know is the virtual reality they experience electronically. It's a reality without values, a reality where parental neglect has become acceptable, a reality that glorifies brutality, waffles about human rights but disdains human dignity."
Helmut Reinke, former editor-in-chief of Hoer Zu, Germany's equivalent of TV Guide, agreed. "Eastern Germans are more vulnerable to the violent content of garbage programs than their Western compatriots. "For example, the most popular TV network in the East is RTL, a private channel featuring primarily that kind of junk. On the other hand, in the West, ARD, a public channel with predominantly quality programs, heads the charts."
Thus, a dozen years after Germany's reunification, Easterners and Westerners consume and digest information and entertainment in sometimes radically different ways.
In the East, said Reinke, many people still have not learned to make sense out of national and international TV news by reading background stories and analyses in high-quality dailies. Unlike their Western counterparts, Eastern papers tend to concentrate more on local and regional events.
Hence the inability of many young Eastern Germans to tell fact from fiction, right from wrong.
One Eastern German psychiatrist, speaking on condition of anonymity, described this as "a symptom of our warped collective soul.
"Our teen-agers are as helpless in the face of the barrage of violence that comes from the United States as South American Indians are to influenza infection," he said. "Their immune system is simply kaput."
Thus the wave of neo-Nazi violence that shook chiefly eastern Germany in the 1990s was largely inspired by the hate-mongering literature and Internet messages from American fringe groups, German authorities discovered, and eventually managed to jail, Gary Lauck, an American neo-Nazi leader from Nebraska.
Satanic 'Missionary Work'
A spate of satanist incidents, especially in Thuringia, where graveyards and churches are regularly desecrated, had similar origins.
At the time of communist East Germany's collapse, the Rev. Theo Lehmann, then senior youth minister of the territorial Lutheran Church of Saxony, told United Press International that U.S. satanist groups were extremely busy doing "missionary work" among young people in his region.
"Under the noses of communist guards, they have even managed to infiltrate the jails," said Lehmann, one of the leaders of the Christian resistance against East Germany's pro-Soviet regime.
"Don't get me wrong, we are not blaming America for what's happening here," the Rev. Richter in Leipzig told UPI Friday, "nor am I opposed to globalization.
"It's just that we should not only pay lip service to the globalization of values. Our Western values are a commodity that one should be able to globalize like any other commodity.
"That's why I feel that we must give the greatest urgency to glorifying those, rather than murder and mayhem, via the international media."
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