What if I take my problem to the United Nations?

[sovay]

This is a political post, because I am slowly catching up on the news. My month of crashing health has culminated in a sinus infection and I spent a lot of yesterday either talking to doctors or playing phone tag with them. Today I am just wiped.

I was really, really not all right with Dzokhar Tsarnaev not being read his Miranda rights when he was arrested. That worried me deeply, especially when I heard the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts defend the decision on the grounds of terrorism. So I am glad to see that he was read them in hospital. Anything else, I would have had to start figuring out who to write letters to, wondering if it would make any difference in a world where terror is apparently a country with citizens we can all recognize on sight.

For similar reasons, I am glad to see that he will be tried in a civilian court, not as an enemy combatant. I was not all right with the Tsarnaev brothers, presently and posthumously, being treated as some kind of junior-grade al-Qaeda because they used bombs rather than automatic rifles. I do not want to downplay the atrocity of targeting a sports event—a pride of bodies—with weapons intended to maim even more than murder. But it seemed to be one of the contributing factors in their othering, as though the bombing was not American, as a gun massacre would have been. I kept thinking of anarchists as they turn up in late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction, so often from Russia or other foreign countries where bomb-throwing is a thing. I really wish my book about Émile Henry (The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009), John Merriman) was not in a box somewhere. Its point is that explosions are quite easily homegrown. We have had them in this country before.

That said, I do not understand the charge of using a weapon of mass destruction. I do not think it is possible to level a city with a pressure cooker unless you're xkcd. Everyone on the internet before me has already agreed that school shootings and mall shootings and shootings in movie theaters add up to higher body counts than the toll on the Marathon, sickening and shocking and long-echoing as it will be. So maybe we are back to the foreignness of a bombing after all, the people on the other side of the war from us, whose weapons we would never use (even if we do); this is just the way of getting it in. And the death penalty. I am not surprised to see it in the conversation, but I don't know what it's going to do, other than give me another reason to loathe social media if that is the outcome of the trial. Massachusetts took it off the books in 1984. That's within my lifetime, all right, but I'd like to keep it that way.

I don't think I have anything profound to say. I am glad our judicial system is not as badly broken as I'd been assuming it was. The other thing in the news right now is the funerals of the marathon dead and the MIT police officer who turned out to live in Teele Square, which I hope are easy on their families and friends; it's not my grief and not my place to say anything for them.

Stay away, Adresteia.

Comments

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

I hope you feel better soon.

Thank you for this post. I wonder what defines a weapon of mass destruction. Many people were killed, but so many were injured. Is death or intent to kill outright the specified destruction? I am asking in earnest and have not followed the media closely on discussions of this.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's a combination of the potential for mass destruction and the political impossibility of classifying any sort of gun as a WMD that makes a bomb a WMD and a gun not one.

That is, it's not unreasonable to call a bomb a WMD. Had those bombs been placed differently (like higher up), had medical personnel not been on site already, and had Boston hospitals not been fantastic, it's easily possibly that the death toll could have been in the hundreds. A WMD doesn't have to level a city, it just has to have the potential to kill a lot of people.

The potential for mass death and destruction is what makes a WMD, not the actual results. Releasing harmful biological or radiological or chemical agents in a public location is a WMD attack, regardless of how many people actually died - even if that number is zero.

Had the brothers sprayed the crowd with gunfire, the death toll also could have been at a WMD level. But guns cannot be classified as WMD for political reasons.

Totally agree on the basic issue, though. Newtown is considered a criminal act but not one of terrorism, even though it created plenty of terror and no one has any idea why the guy did it - his motives certainly could have been political - but the murderer was a white Christian and he used a gun.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Your last paragraph--that's the thing that gets me.

[sovay]

The potential for mass death and destruction is what makes a WMD, not the actual results. Releasing harmful biological or radiological or chemical agents in a public location is a WMD attack, regardless of how many people actually died - even if that number is zero.

Thank you for the clarification. I had been thinking of WMDs primarily in terms of biological, radiological, or chemical warfare, or larger-scale efforts like firebombings.

but the murderer was a white Christian and he used a gun.

This is a real question: is "Chechen" not presently seen as "white"? Or is just that the Tsarnaevs are Muslim and to most of mainstream America that disqualifies them straight off?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I suspect that being Muslim trumps everything else, including race. They're also immigrants. So yes, if you asked most Americans their race, they'd probably say "white," but they're not what many Americans think of when they think of "white."

[sovay]

So yes, if you asked most Americans their race, they'd probably say "white," but they're not what many Americans think of when they think of "white."

My mother, on any form that asked for her ethnicity, always checked "Other" and then wrote "Jewish."

[sovay]

Had the brothers sprayed the crowd with gunfire, the death toll also could have been at a WMD level. But guns cannot be classified as WMD for political reasons.

The New Yorker is now writing about this.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm glad someone is.