More on Red Lake
I have two things I found related to Monday's tragic events, and I wanted to put them up in the blog because it's shocking and saddening, and as educators, it's something we may have to consider, though in truth, there are those 299 kids who didn't do this. So I ask myself--how much energy do we need to spend on worrying over the "bad seeds" (and would he have been bad if someone in his life had done something?) and how much of ourselves do we have to give up when becoming teachers?
I thought I would share this article from the NY Times:
Eerie Parallels Are Seen to Shootings at Columbine
By JODI WILGOREN 
Published: March 23, 2005
e is said to have worn a trench coat and listened to Marilyn Manson, the Goth icon. He expressed his admiration for Hitler on a neo-Nazi Web site. And in the midst of a murderous rampage at his high school, Jeff Weise asked a classmate if he believed in God, then shot him, one student recounted in a local newspaper.
As details begin to emerge about Mr. Weise's shooting spree on an Indian reservation in northern
At Columbine, the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, belonged to the "Trench Coat Mafia" and loved all things Goth. They sometimes did a Nazi salute while bowling and planned their attack for Hitler's birthday. Before killing one student, witnesses said, one of them held a gun to her temple and asked if she believed in God.
"My heart just sank, like 'Oh, my God,' I thought of that day," Tom Mauser, whose son, Daniel, was among the 15 people killed at Columbine, recalled of his reaction upon first learning of the Minnesota massacre. "We just kind of knew there was a good chance it was going to happen again."
Describing Mr. Weise's black, spiky hair and black Goth clothes, Ashley Morrison, a fellow student at
Beyond these particular similarities, experts on school shootings said Mr. Weise appears to fit squarely into a pattern of disaffected youth who struggle to fit in at homogenous schools in rural or suburban areas, then erupt in violence to seek attention, enact revenge and gain power over people who have taunted them. They interpret his Internet postings as an outcast's quest to belong to something larger, another common thread in school shootings. Reports of Mr. Weise drawing gory pictures in class were classic warning signs of what was to come, they say.
"It typically happens in small, remote towns because the protagonist is a boy who is socially incapable in many ways," said Katherine Newman, a sociologist at
While the Columbine killers came from stable families in a well-off suburb, Mr. Weise, who the authorities said was 16, lived on a reservation where 40 percent of the people are poor, and without his parents. His race belies any pattern: 27 of the 28 school gunmen from 1992 to 2002 were white, said Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, who studied them.
In 34 postings to www.nazi.org, a forum operated by the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, that the authorities said Tuesday they were investigating for hints to motive, someone identifying himself as Jeff Weise, a high school student on the Red Lake Indian Reservation, expressed frustration at the lack of racial purity and pride among his people. Calling himself "NativeNazi" or "Todesengel," German for "angel of death," Mr. Weise said he had found few sympathizers for his racial views and had sometimes been persecuted for them. "I already had a fist fight with a communist not too long ago over me being what I am (I also won), but it was worth it," he wrote on May 26 at 2:27 a.m.
In another post, Mr. Weise complained that "less than 1 percent of all the people on the reservation can speak their own language," and said that his peers eschewed their culture to emulate rappers. He said his parents were American Indians, but that he had German, Irish and French-Canadian ancestry as well, and that when he had spoken of the need for his tribe to have "more pure bloods" he was called a racist.
Mr. Weise also frequently contributed to stories about zombies on an Internet forum called "Rise of the Dead," according to The Associated Press. Parston Graves Jr., a Red Lake student, told The A.P. that Mr. Weise had displayed a sketch of a guitar-strumming skeleton captioned, "March to the death song 'til your boots fill with blood," in class, and had shown off his drawings of people shooting each other.
Paul Viollis, author of the 2001 book "Avoiding Violence in Our Schools," said "the Nazi issue is a collateral issue," a way for someone not on the football team or in the popular clique to find an identity. "This individual found some type of solace," he said.
People who monitor neo-Nazi groups said the Libertarian forum frequented by Mr. Weise is a little-known Internet-only organization with no known links to violence, whose niche is to welcome people of all races who oppose race-mixing.
As for the unlikely prospect of an American Indian Nazi, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said African-Americans, Jews and gays have all been members of racial hate groups. "Kids like this feel extremely powerless, and they want to associate with the oppressor, not the oppressed," he said. "That's where you get this bizarre phenomenon of people joining movements that aim to exterminate them, or people like them."
In an article posted Tuesday on www.nazi.org, the group "refused to wring hands" over the shootings, instead saying, "Such events are to be expected when thinking people are crammed into an unthinking, irrational, modern society."
I was curious, so I checked that group and read their posting about the events. I find it disturbing:
LNSG condemns modern society in school shooting
LNSG condemns modern society in school shooting
by Steve Martinez
Tue, Mar. 22, 2005
Nationalist News Network
"We knew [Weise] briefly through 34 posts he made on the forum," said LNSGP forum administrator Atem. "He expressed himself well and was clearly highly intelligent and contemplative, especially for one so young." Weise participated in the forum in part because, unlike "white nationalist" or "white power" movements, the LNSG embraces all races as part of its vision of world nationalism. His statements on the site reflected a frustration with the populist politics and materialistic arrogance of modern society.
Weise most clearly expressed his philosophy in the following statement of frustration with the raceless, cultureless void of liberal industrial society: "The Natives you've known to be sympathetic to the cause are probably ones who've experienced firsthand what kind of problems cultural and race mixing can cause. As a result of cultural dominance and interracial mixing there are barely any full blooded Natives left. Where I live less than 1% of all the people on the Reservation can speak their own language, and among the youth wanting to be black has run rampant. Under a National Socialist government, things for us would improve vastly... That is, if we haven't already become too soft from the way this materialistic life-style has made us, and that is why I am pro-Nazi. It's hard though, being a Native American National Socialist; people are so misinformed, ignorant, and closed-minded it makes your life a living hell."
National Socialism is a philosophy that, unlike the beliefs of modern society which are founded in material technology and abstract moral ideas about what should be, is based in the realism of nature. Each tribe must separate itself genetically from all others in order to survive, as otherwise it is assimilated; further, National Socialism recognizes that the individual comes second to the collective, comprising both human society and the natural environment that supports it. As a result, National Socialists are willing to engage in eugenics, racial separation and removal of elements hostile to a healthy society.
Modern society, in contrast, is based around the belief that the individual alone is supreme - a belief system that finds no opposition among the masses, who often fear their own inadequacies. Such societies turn toward liberal democracy, and thus permit public image manipulation to determine their course, while behind the scenes an oligarchy of the international wealthy manipulate politics and social trends for their own profit. The result is widespread environmental destruction, loss of ethnic-cultural heritage, a dysgenic program of rewarding the most subservient, and dominion by mass tastes that contradicts any thought of doing what is right for the whole.
Modernity is insane. The constraints of modern societies like the
The school shooting in
About the LNSG
The LNSG recognizes that modern, liberal democratic industrial society is the cause of its own enduring and pervasive problems. We believe in a resurrection of traditional values, including naturalism and nationalism, in order to end domination by material motivation and the "empowerment" of the individual. Our party operates at this time as a think tank for environmentalist and nationalist ideals, and can be found online at www.nazi.org.
About Nationalism
Nationalism is the belief that for diversity to exist, each ethnic-cultural grouping of human beings must isolate itself to prevent assimilation by the mass of cultureless proletariat produced by industrial society. It encourages a return to pre-industrial revolution traditional values, including a demotion of the individual to status as a method of achieving goals, and not a goal in itself.
NATIONALIST GROUPS
Indian
http://ecofascist.blogspot.com/
Hispanic
http://www.aztlan.net/
African-American
http://www.blackpanther.org/
Japanese
http://www.nsjap.com/
FORUM POSTS
Posts on LNSG Forum by Jeff Weise
Archive of posts quoted in AP Wire story
CONTACT
Steve Martinez
info@nazi.org
http://www.nazi.org/
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