Who's the Korean Tipper Gore?
David Weigel | April 18, 2007, 10:33am
The fact that Cho Seung Hui was not a white suburbanite or an angry Muslim has mercifully cut down on the psychobabble and generalizations that usually follow these tragedies (not counting the rumor-mongering by the odious
Debbie Schlussel). Since no one can blame filthy Hollywood movies for the massacre,
Steve Sailer picks up the baton and bashes Korean movies:
South Korean movies and music (e.g., hip hop by returning Korean American rappers with street cred in Asia because they grew up on the mean streets of San Marino or wherever) are super cool now in Japan. The trendier Korean movies are, I hear, awfully violent. I made it through about ten minutes before fleeing of the popular South Korean film "Oldboy," which makes Quentin Tarantino's movies look like Erich Rohmer's. It's part of a series with "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," which I managed to avoid completely. (Not all South Korean films are quite so carnage-filled.) I have no idea if the shooter was a fan of pop culture developments in the country he left when he was about ten, but it's a possibility.
At the WashTimes,
Eric Pfeiffer runs down the top four massacres of all time and notes that none were committed by those rotten,
Grindhouse-watching*,
Grand Theft Auto-playing American citizens.
- South Korea, 1982. Woo Bum-Kon killed 57 and then himself, using grenades and a high powered rifle
- Australia, 1996, Port Arthur massacre. Martin Bryant, using two semi-automatic weapons, a CAR-15 and an L1A1 SLR, killed 35
- United States, 2007. Virginia Tech student Cho Seung-hui, a South Korean, killed at least 33, including himself
- Japan 1938, Tsuyama massacre. Mutsuo Toi, using an old Japanese rifle and swords, killed 29 and then himself.
None of this is meant to minimize the massacre or the evil of Cho Seung Hui. Thankfully, the culture marms who'd be doing that right now have been caught flat-footed. (Caveat: I'm waiting for
Dr. Phil's researchers to reveal what video games Mutsuo Toi used to play.)
*well,
not really Steve Sailer | April 19, 2007, 2:21am | #
Well, it looks like I may have been right in my shot-in-the-dark guess about the influence of the movie "Oldboy" on the killer:
This evening, the New York Times' blog The Lede writes:
Updates on Virginia Tech
By Mike Nizza
An Image’s Ties to a Dark Movie
8:07 PM ET
Inspiration for Cho's Images? A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie ‘Oldboy.’
The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study.
Following is The Times’s plot summary: The film centers on a seemingly ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik), who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage, seeking answers and all manner of bloody revenge.
In a Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film’s “body count and sadistic violence” mostly appealed to “cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.”
A Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, alerted us of the similarity between images in the hope that it would shed some light on what led Mr. Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself.
Alan Andrews | April 19, 2007, 12:35pm | #
Actually, there does seem to exist an "angry Muslim" angle. From TCSDaily.com, by way of Lawrence Auster's View from the Right (http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/007678.html):
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=041807B
Ismail Ax: The Shooter Was Another 'Son of Sacrifice'
First it was Johnny Muhammad, now it was Cho Sueng Hui aka Ismail Ax. Precisely how many mass shooters have to turn out to have adopted Muslim names before we get it? Islam has become the tribe of choice of those who hate American society. I'm not talking about people who grew up as Muslims, confident and secure in their faith, good fathers, sons and neighbors. I'm talking about the angry, malignant, narcissist loners who want to reject their community utterly, to throw off their 'slave name' and represent the downtrodden of the earth by shooting their friends and neighbors.
This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn't seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, "Didn't any of you guys go to Sunday School?"
The story starts with a man named Abraham. He is the father of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians. He was born in Iraq, the son of a wealthy idol manufacturer. He came to believe that there was only one true God and, according to tradition, took up his ax and destroyed his father's idols.
Eventually he left Iraq and moved to what is now known as Israel. He had a son with his concubine whom she named Ishmael. The Muslim world prefers the Arabic spelling of the name: Ismail. Eventually Abraham had a son by his rightful wife and named the son Isaac. Ishmael and his mother were disinherited and sent out into what is now Saudi Arabia. Isaac became the heir.
Eventually, God decided to test Abraham by telling him to kill his son, Isaac. Abraham took up the knife, but God stopped him at the last moment. Isaac lived and eventually became a man of great wealth. Ishmael became a desert warrior chieftain.
The Jews are the descendants of Isaac, the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael.
In the 7th Century, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, re-wrote the story, claiming that Ismail was the true faithful descendant of Abraham and that it was he, not Isaac, who God told Abraham to sacrifice. Ismail was the one saved. For Muslims, Ismail (not Isaac) was the true 'Son of Sacrifice.' In the original version of the story, Abraham used a knife, in some of the later Muslim versions, he used an Ax.
Flash forward 1,400 years: a sullen, angry young man who rages against rich people and apparently against Christians, writes a play in which a mother and son try to kill his step-father, but in the end the boy (age about 13, the age many think Ismail was when he was exiled) is murdered by the step-father with 'a deadly blow'. Father issues? Yeah, I think so.
Cho Sueng-hui cum Ismail Ax hated the American society to which he had been brought 15 years earlier. His play McBeef (a poor pun from an English Lit major on Macbeth) is one endless screed against the corruption of American culture. A cheesy re-telling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it involves a young man abused by his step-father, a former NFL football player. The son, throws epithets at his father calling him a 'Catholic priest'. And makes derisive comments about McDonalds. It seems that none of the foundational structures of Western Civilization, Christianity, capitalism, family, are spared his rage. In other words, he really meant what he said in his last words: "you (that is us, America) made me do this."
