**** Warning to readers. Before turning to the words below, please read the following disclaimer,

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/07/how-many-times-do-i-have-to-saay-it.html

It anticipates a number of stupid and false attacks which will be made on me by people determined deliberately to misunderstand my point. If you turn out to be one of these, please just go away. And no, as well as not seeking to excuse Islamist murder, I am not seeking to excuse Neo-Nazi alleged murder either; though it is indeed hard to imagine why anyone should seek to do both these things at once. This article is only for intelligent and thoughtful readers. ****

*******

The stain of darkness and decay spreads everywhere these days. It would have been horrible anywhere, but it gives me the shivers to see violent death come to Charlottesville, an American college town which I know and much like.

It is normally a relaxed and pleasant place, close to Thomas Jefferson’s delightful country house at Monticello, and graced by the handsome and venerable original buildings of the University he founded there. I once spent quite some time there on assignment, following the very sad riding accident which befell the Superman actor Christopher Reeve. He was, to begin with, treated in the hospital there.

I’ll come to the politics of the event later, but first a little detailed examination of an aspect of the alleged killer which has (as usual) not got much attention.

First, the method. There is an increasing number of murders and other attacks in which cars, vans or lorries are used as weapons. Many of these are classified as terror attacks. See the killing of Lee Rigby in London (the attack began when Fusilier Rigby’s killers ran him down in a car, though this is surprisingly seldom mentioned, perhaps because of the horror of what they did later) to Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu_ramming_attack

via Nice and Berlin to the recent running down of soldiers near Paris by a man in a car http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/09/french-soldiers-hit-vehicle-paris/.

Though some are not attributed to terrorist motives, such this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/18/times-square-speeding-vehicle-strikes-pedestrians-new-york and this http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/29/british-man-arrested-mowing-pedestrians-spanish-resort-puerto/

Interestingly, this trend has not resulted in any major campaign for increased restrictions on car ownership, though motor vehicles are in fact the most dangerous weapons in common use, and the most readily available, apart from knives, in the modern world. I happen to think that such restrictions would be an illogical and time-wasting response to this development. But it would not be much less stupid and pointless than most of the official, publicly accepted responses to terrorist crime now in use. One can only assume that the universal political fear of upsetting car owners has strangled any such idea from the start.

Yet, judging by the gullibly passive (it’s essential for security, innit?) public response to nonsensical and disproportionate ‘security’ measures imposed on millions of air travellers, maybe they are too nervous.

As usual, the one thing nobody is noticing is the thing these car killers appear to have in common.

Let us examine, for instance, the hideous events in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

See this report https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/13/charlottesville-james-fields-charged-with-was-pictured-at-neo-nazi-rally-vanguard-america

One of a small minority in the UK which mentioned the fact that the alleged culprit, James Fields, has suffered in the past from mental illness. In the above report it is stated as follows ‘Derek Weimer, who taught Fields history when he was a student at Cooper high school in Union, Kentucky, told the TV station WCPO that he remembered a boy who was “very quiet and very bright,” but one who believed in white supremacy and the Nazi ideology.

Military records appear to show that Fields served in the US army between August and December 2015. (PH: You’re right, that’s not very long. They turned him down).

Weimer said he recalled Fields had wanted to join the army after graduating but had been turned down because the teenager had been prescribed medicine for a psychotic disorder.’ (My emphasis).

In Metro, http://metro.co.uk/2017/08/14/charlottesville-car-attack-suspect-idolised-hitler-says-former-teacher-6850414/

we read that Mr Weimer also mentioned that Fields had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had been prescribed an anti-psychotic medication as a result. Likewise in Mailonline we read more or less the same thing (attributed to the Press Association newsagency) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-4787226/Man-charged-white-supremacist-rally-car-incident-hate-group-s-emblem.html

One has to wonder how a teenager in the modern western world might conceivably have become ‘schizophrenic’ in the first place. Is it thinkable that Fields might have been a consumer of legal or illegal mind-altering drugs, whose use is increasingly correlated with mental illness? Perhaps we will find out. Or perhaps we will not. Sometimes in such cases medical records are sealed. Sometimes past use of illegal drugs cannot be established, especially since the police have more or less stopped pursuing this offence. The lack of interest in this aspect of the case is, as usual, almost deafening





I found this detail of the alleged Charlottesville killer’s past because, as usual in such cases, I was looking for it.

Readers may enjoy this extract from the classic Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze:

‘Holmes took the bag, and, descending into the hollow, he pushed the matting into a more central position. Then stretching himself upon his face and leaning his chin upon his hands, he made a careful study of the trampled mud in front of him. "Hullo!" said he, suddenly. "What's this?" It was a wax vesta half burned, which was so coated with mud that it looked at first like a little chip of wood.

“I cannot think how I came to overlook it,” said the Inspector, with an expression of annoyance.

“It was invisible, buried in the mud. I only saw it because I was looking for it.” (My emphasis)

“What! You expected to find it?”

“I thought it not unlikely.” ’

In none of the accounts of this dreadful event in Charlottesville does the alleged culprit’s history of mental illness appear prominently. In many media it has yet to appear at all as the story dissolves into a row about the typically oafish response of the disastrous current President of the United States. In none of these accounts is it given one tenth the significance accorded to Fields’s loopy, half-witted, historically ignorant and deluded so-called ‘political’ so called ‘views’. The line has been settled upon, and the pack will follow it. This is all about white supremacists. Well, of course it is *partly* about white supremacists, but these hunched, lumpy inadequates do not commonly do as the alleged killer did.

I personally think that to call these swirling, incoherent ravings ‘political’ or ‘opinions’ is greatly to dignify the contortions of an overthrown mind.

Note here: No, I am not trying to excuse the alleged killer from his alleged crimes. As far as I am concerned, the use of illegal drugs (if this is the case here, which is one of many things we do not yet know) does not excuse the user from crimes he may commit due the disturbance of his mind which results from that crime. The position is different, obviously, in the case of lawfully prescribed medicines taken in the instructions of a qualified doctor.

I suppose quite a few people hold such views, though not that many. But such opinions are pretty invariably the mark of loners, obsessives, and people who join movements to dissolve their personal misery and outcast status into something larger.

I pointed out in the case of the Leytonstone knifeman (so far from reality that he literally believed Tony Blair was his guardian angel), that unhinged persons often identify with wider political or religious movements. http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/08/the-man-who-thought-tony-blair-was-his-guardian-angel-yes-really.html

I am as revolted by Neo-Nazi white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis as anybody. I think they illustrate that rare but important combination – people who are simultaneously dangerously nasty and pathetically personally inadequate.

I do not doubt that white supremacists are capable of serious violence, while wholly sane and sober, especially against defenceless and outnumbered persons. We have evidence of this going back for centuries. But they generally prefer to do it in the dark, or in remote places where they can’t be seen or traced, and where the forces of law are either absent or under their control.