Nothing is Anybody's Fault: A Riff on Mass Murder and the Execution of John Allen Muhammad

Inevitably, the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the D.C. sniper who murdered ten people in 2002, drew heated protests in recent days. I understand the opposition to the death penalty in general, and am relatively agnostic on the topic. It's a damn sight more than unfortunate that in the U.S.A., capital punishment is applied so easily and broadly, and in a pretty overtly racist and often arbitrary way to boot. Then again, there are capital crimes that are so grotesque and heinous, and the guilt of the perp so completely beyond question, that I can't lose sleep over the killer being given a lethal injection. Yes, putting a man to death is horrible (it is supposed to be), just as I am repelled by the people who celebrate the snuffing out of another human being's life, even if that human being is a mad killer.

That said, I'm glad Muhammad's lawyers got nowhere when they tried to present last-minute evidence that their client had been beaten and generally treated badly as a boy. A shitty childhood neither excuses nor truly explains a single thing — be it failure to obey a stop sign, taking a dump in the cereal aisle, and least of all, capital murder times ten. If it did, we'd be living in a nation of dozens of millions of poor maltreated serial killers (and, I suppose, serial/cereal dumpers).

Similarly, surely tons of sociopaths have enjoyed rather charmed, gilded upbringings. What's their excuse?

A Facebook friend of a friend, D.B., claimed yesterday that my notion is factually wrong:

No serial killer, rapist, dictator, or sociopath ever studied had anything but the most brutal of childhoods.

I don't believe that's true (examples welcome, I'm too overworked to hit Google much right now) — but even if it is, so what? What are we to take away from that? Lots of folks endure loveless childhoods, even beatings, and still make something of themselves. I'm rather attached to the idea that people are responsible for their own actions. If we don't believe that, where does our personal culpability for bad / criminal behavior end? And if "others" are overwhelmingly to blame for how we turn out, couldn't every bully, thug, and killer just insist they wuz robbed — robbed of a childhood with a mom's kisses and a dad's hugs, not to mention teachers' persistent attaboys and apple pie on Sundays and bi-annual family trips to Disneyland?

Yes, they could, and many of them do — or else their supporters and defense attorneys will do it for them.

The nadir of this belated mollycoddling and soft-hearted ueber-tolerance has to be an article entitled The Price We Pay For Shaming Little Boys by Dr. Mary Armstrong, a Canadian pyschotherapist. (D.B. referred to the short essay approvingly to bolster his argument, so I checked it out.) The good doctor's screed qualifies as one of the oddest pieces of failed academic prose ever secreted in the field of psychology, which is quite a distinction in a profession rife with claptrap.

What does Ms. Armstrong set out to do? It's pretty ambitious: She is begging of us to understand that high-ranking World-War-II-era nazis and all their henchmen, right down to the lowliest concentration camp guards, are honest-to-god victims.

That's right. Armstrong contends that because early-twentieth-century German men grew up in a "harsh" child-rearing culture, and were then further cheated out of building "self-esteem" due to the "humiliating and bloody defeat of 1918 and the subsequent shame of Versailles," they couldn't help but take revenge on Jews.

Germans who had been traumatized in childhood took out their rage on Jews and others who reminded them of themselves when they were helpless children. They projected onto others all their own 'bad' qualities which they had never been able to accept in themselves.

Oh, those poor Nazis! Their lack of "self-esteem," fueled by their cold Prussian daddies, caused them to go bonkers and kill six million Jews.

This is, to a T, my problem with the kind of moral relativism preached by D.B. and others; in the end, Armstrong's so-soft-it's-rotting view of human depravity lets even Hitler's mass murderers off the hook. To hear her tell it, any Nazi can claim full-blown "injured-party" status right alongside the gays and gypsies and Jews he and the rest of his Herrenvolk tried so very hard to exterminate.

For his part, D.B. says he is not out to excuse bad behavior, and I believe him. But he's playing a game of dialectics. There's is really only a hairbreadth's difference between explaining why someone is legally but perhaps not morally culpable for premeditated murder or genocide (after all, "they grew up with abusive parents," etc.), and excusing it.

John Allen Muhammad has been dead less than 24 hours, but my thoughts are not with him; he leaves me neither hot under the collar nor cold in my heart. My thoughts are with the families and the friends of the ten people he killed.

I'm sorry if that offends people like D.B., and delighted if that offends crackpot victimology champions like Dr. Mary Armstrong.

Comments

[Mark.V.]

Jews have been badly treated for centuries, suffered pogrom after pogrom and continual discrimination, if ever there was an ethnic group who had an excuse to turn on their tormentors it is the Jews, yet they have not done so.

[Jonathan]

In todays age, everyone is a victim, except for those who truly are. No one wants to be accountable for their actions, so no one does. It's easier to say, "Boo hoo, I had a horrible childhood, pity me because I had to kill 90 people.". I had a pretty shitty childhood also, but I didn't turn out to be a criminal or sociopath. Life is what you make of it.

[Mike]

I always kindof liked a statement Heinlein made in one of his books. I can't remember it exactly but the gist of it was. Perhaps you were insane and this caused you to commit some atrocity, but if we cured you then you'd be fully aware of what awful atrocities you had committed and your only option would probably be suicide. So Capital Punishment just shortens the process.

That said I'm certainly against capital punishment, but only because I don't trust us not to execute the innocent.

[EscapedWestOfTheBigMuddy]

The Heinlein quote comes from _Starship_Troopers_.

[Mike]

Yeah, that rings a bell. I've read them all but quite some time ago, so I can't remember anymore.

[Don]

The part that never worked for me is, the person committing the atrocities claims its because atrocities were committed against him.

Say what?

He believes the violence perpetrated against him was wrong, and rightly so, so his solution is to perpetrate violence against others.

Why can't I get my head around this common theme?