First, consider breaking news: Thursday evening, a lone gunman calmly approached the screening area outside the Pentagon and opened fire. According to officials, the shots grazed "two Pentagon police officers before they returned fire".

This incident occurred around 6:40 p.m., according to Pentagon Police Chief Richard S. Keevill. Keevill also stated that the gunman, with "no real emotion in his face", approached the officers outside the Pentagon Metro station. As the officers asked him for his entrance pass, the man produced a weapon from his pocket and started shooting at the officers from a few feet away. "He drew a gun," Keevill said, "and just started shooting immediately."

The two Pentagon Force Protection Agency officers returned fire with the suspect, critically wounding him. Keevill commended the police officers for acting "quickly and decisively to neutralize him as a threat" without hurting anyone else. The incident is currently under investigation by the Pentagon police department, the Arlington County Police Department, the US Secret Service,  as well as the FBI.

Multiple news sources have since identified the gunman as John Patrick Bedell. According to the Washington Post:

Bedell left behind numerous written, video and audio manifestos on the Internet. In an audio address, he suggested that the U.S. was infiltrated by a cabal of gangsters called the "coup regime" after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He believed the group was probably behind such things as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Iraq war, and continued to manipulate the country "up to the present day."

For the moment, officials are assuming Bedell's conspiracy theory of a "coup regime" served as the motivation for his attack at the Pentagon.

Now, second, consider another recent report: Just before 10:00 am, on February 18, a man named Joseph A. Stack  flew his single-engine aircraft into the Echelon building in Austin, TX. Stack died in the crash, and his attack wounded two others. The Echelon Building Stack crashed into houses the offices of the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), the US tax collection service. And apparently, the motivation for Stack's attack on the IRS was similar to Bedell's at the Pentagon. Both men were driven by political frustration, resulting from a government they perceived to no longer serve in their interests.

In regards to Stack, the Times Online has reported:

In a lengthy manifesto posted on a website [Stack] administered, he recounted his numerous struggles with the IRS and concludes: "I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well."

The remainder of the manifesto reads like the angry, frustrated ramblings of a man who felt ignored by his Government and the people who were supposed to represent his interests. Mr Stack cites the government bailouts of banks and auto companies and the "murdering [of] tens of thousands" by the greedy insurance companies while his government representatives sit idly by and only help the rich.

Mr Stack added: "I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say [...] I know I'm hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand," Mr Stack wrote before declaring: "I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure [sic] nothing will change."

We should be extremely careful, here, when trying to make sense of these two, unconnected, yet similar cases. US officials have labeled both cases acts of terrorism, which they rightly are. But the articulated motivations behind them are different from Islamic fundamentalist rationalizations of terrorism. There obviously is no religious rhetoric in the cases of Bedell and Stack.

What does exist in the two above cases, and what Bedell and Stack's rationalizations share with other terrorist rationalizations for violent acts, is a sense of despair. And "despair", here, is meant in the psychoanalytic sense.

To say this plainly, "despair" is a psychological state, which results from a sense of meaninglessness, coupled with a sense of being unable to change one's existence into a meaningful one, in any way.

The result is what Viktor Frankl calls, "existential frustration". Such "frustration" is experienced as intense anxiety, that results in aggression-which can then result in violence if unaddressed, as per the extreme cases of Bedell and Stack.

As Frankl says, "When there is a sense of meaninglessness, people do meaningless things." And violence is the "meaningless thing", par excellence, which can result from such despair. Here is Frankl, on American television, discussing these matters:

All this, of course, does not excuse Bedell and Stack's violent actions. We are each responsible for the consequences of our own actions.

But personally, I have spoke in previous articles, about the need to have a public discussion about human psychology. And I have spoke, too, of what the resulting conclusions would demand, for changing society accordingly into a saner one-one which meets the needs of human psychological development.

And the very lack of such a discussion is exemplified perfectly in the attacks by Bedell and Stack, as well by the phenomena of terrorism in general. At this moment in history, though, I do not see governments as being able to provide such a sane discussion. It must come from a cultural change from the "bottom up", so to speak.

Until then, we should expect to see more violence, as a tragic symptom of our faltering society.

Source: News Junkie Post

3.21 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."