Did Virginia Tech Make Seiung hui-Cho?

Leave it to the American Thinker to ask the provocative question on a hideously touchy subject that really does need to be asked. In this case, did Virginia Tech University - not the specific victims, but the irrational, fallen, insanely debased left-wing counterculture that dominates American academia these days - bring last Monday's massacre on itself?

[W]as Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes - did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently - was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Just check out their websites....

Oh, please do, if for no other reason than to keep in touch with the raw sewage our unconscionably overfunded education budgets are subsidizing. You'll see that they touch every base that Mr. Cho cited as justification for his murderous rampage.

Not to let the killer off the hook as a "victim" in classic liberal fashion, but put yourself in the place of a South Korean student who is loopy to begin with who travels to America to attend college, decides to major in English, and finds himself bombarded with an insatiable barrage of grotesque perversion and hate-mongering sedition? You don't have to be loopy to get the distinct impression that the VT English Department faculty hates their own country and wants its student charges to "grow up" to swarm out and overthrow it. Cho just happened to be loopy enough to think that it would be efficacious to take a, er, more direct route to that perceived end.

Which would seem to make last Monday's atrocity a classic case of the law of (perhaps) unintended consequences:

I'm sorry but VT English doesn't look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting ["post-modern"] world, the very words "civilized behavior" are ridiculed - at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.

What's the English Department's official frontpage reaction to the murder of thirty-two students just a few days ago? Here it is.

"We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa
Dying of AIDS
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community
Be devastated for ivory
... Neither does the Mexican child looking
For fresh water
... Neither does the Appalachian infant killed
By a boulder
Dislodged
Because the land was destabilized"

In other words: We didn't do nuthin.' It ain't our fault. It's greedy capitalism's fault. We don't teach civilized behavior, the value of reason, the cultural foundations of Western thought. We teach adolescent rage, because that's how we make a living. We do narcissistic "research" in Marxist analysis of American brutal capitalism. We're good people. See how much we care about AIDS in Africa. Don't blame us. We ain't responsible.

Technically, yes. Seiung hui-Cho was responsible for the murder of thirty-two of his fellow students. Nobody "made" him do that. But would his demons have propelled him over that edge if they had not had such fertile "intellectual" soil in which to germinate? Can it really be surprising that a monopolistic mindset of "post-modernism" that hates reason, will not tolerate debate and genuine academic freedom for all, pushes courses that include in their titles such phrases as "the end of knowledge" - that lives in that famous bubble of unreality wherein their idiotic words aren't supposed to have any actual, genuine, real-life consequences - produced precisely that? And that they who are incapable of taking responsibility for anything once again point their fingers every which way but back at themselves?

No, the American academic collective consciousness isn't directly responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre. But the case is robust that it could scarcely have happened without it.

[h/t: George Merideth]