Ron Dzwonkowski: Murderous war side-effect By Ron Dzwonkowski -
Published 12:00 am PDT Thursday, April 26, 2007
Elliot Leyton closed his final lecture before retiring three years ago from Memorial University of Newfoundland with a warning for America. He forecast that as the war in Iraq dragged on, the United States would likely see a rise in violent crime, even catastrophic mass homicides.
Leyton was not just guessing. An anthropologist, he is an internationally regarded expert on such subjects and the author of a definitive 1986 book published in Canada as "Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer," and in the United States as "Compulsive Killers: The Story of the Modern Multiple Murderer." The book has since been updated and reissued several times, as have other Leyton works, including "Men of Blood: Murder in Modern England" and "Sole Survivor: Children Who Murder Their Families." In short, the retired professor, subject of a 2003 CBC mini-series called "The Man Who Studies Murder," knows something about the kind of horror that erupted last week at Virginia Tech.
Still, he was no less stunned by the toll.
"At one level, nothing surprises me anymore, but when I heard how many, I gasped," he said in a telephone interview from Newfoundland.
"Even though I knew I had said the homicide rate would go up, and we would see an increase in these kinds of especially macabre obscenities." Leyton said the upsurge in American bloodshed could be tied to our endless war. His supposition is based in part on the work of two researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who linked a spike in homicides to wars from 1900-74. For their 1984 book, "Violence and Crime in Cross-National Perspective," Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner spent a decade compiling crime rates from 110 nations and 44 cities. There was always a war-related spike, although most often near the end or just after a war.
In the fourth chapter of their book, the researchers discuss "official violence," that is, when the government does it for a cause, as in war, and they say that "what all wars have in common is the unmistakable moral lesson that homicide is an acceptable, even praiseworthy means to a certain end." Because he killed himself, we'll never know whether or how much Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung- Hui was exposed to media accounts of the war in Iraq. He left an abundance of material behind, including video and an eight-page writing the authorities describe as a rant "against rich kids and religion" that people like Leyton will probably be analyzing for years.
But Leyton said a nation's culture undergoes a change during wartime.
"In peace time," he said, "the efforts of the media and the government are devoted to rewarding progress, building social systems and encouraging people to get along. Once there is war, government needs to recondition people to be willing to kill others and accept the killing of others, on a massive scale, and they begin handing out rewards. ... This message gets out into the general culture. And with TV, it's everywhere. The Iraq war has been covered in obscene detail, glamorized even." And clearly, violence begets violence, or thoughts of it, as shown by the spate of school threats that have followed Virginia Tech, and also followed the Columbine High School killings, if you recall.
Leyton said his research into mass murderers indicates that as their rage develops against a person or a group or an institution, they begin making destructive plans. And then something triggers deadly action that almost always ends in suicide.
"The commonality is first they pronounce their own lives unlivable," he said, "and they blame it on someone else or some institution, and they fantasize what to do about it, and then they build their plan." And inside a twisted mind, the relentless exposure to war may help justify the violence.
So in a sense, could Cho and 32 people at Virginia Tech be more casualties of the Iraq war? That's stretching the point. But we do seem to have developed a resigned acceptance of the daily casualty counts from Iraq, even the 200-plus killed just two days after Virginia Tech. And if the campus slaughter wasn't unnerving enough, consider, as the war goes on, the grim forecast from "The Man Who Studies Murder."
About the writer: Ron Dzwonkowski is editor of the Detroit Free Press editorial page. Readers may write to him at: Detroit Free Press, 600 West Fort Street, Detroit, Mich. 48226, or via e-mail at dzwonk at freepress.com. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.