Eyes gouged out, bodies hanging from hooks, and fingers removed with pliers’: Horrific claims of torture emerge as soldiers reveal gory Kenyan mall massacre details

Headline – Kenya mall attack torture claims emerge from soldiers: ‘Eyes gouged out, bodies on hooks, fingers removed’ | Mail Online 9/26/2013.

Psychopathic people and behaviour are found within all cultures and religions. But one tops them all — by many lengths.

Lead – Nicolai Sennels: Psychology: Why Islam creates monsters – Jihad Watch, 9/27/2013.

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint.

Lead – I’m sorry, but we have to talk about the barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism – Telegraph Blogs, 9/28/2013.

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Many years ago and with reference to Al Shabaab, I have mentioned the unbridled aspect of a force of nature that may cloak itself in some kind of program but that in reality has no program apart from its own hypnotic inclination to indulge itself in mayhem, murder, and sadism beyond all limits.

Has Islam helped them along?

Probably — certainly no other major religion today supports the breadth, frequency, intensity, and undeniable and inexhaustible sadism associated with atrocious acts of violence committed most often against unprepared innocents with the war cry, “Allahu Akbar!”

With twisted political force, double-binds, intimidation and darkly teased loyalty one may warp the child whose greatest possession would seem to become his hate and his liability, equally consuming, his inability to contain it.

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Hitler exhibited many psychiatric symptoms, including extreme paranoia and defenses that ”could fill a psychiatry textbook,” he most likely was not truly mentally ill. Hitler’s paranoid delusions, Dr. Redlich writes, ”could be viewed as a symptom of mental disorder, but most of the personality functioned more than adequately.” Hitler, he added, ”knew what he was doing and he chose to do it with pride and enthusiasm.”

Insane or Just Evil? A Psychiatrist Takes a New Look at Hitler – New York Times, 11/17/1998.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve an expanding toolkit built around “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“, and it seems to be working just fine with such as Adolph Hitler, Al Shabaab, and Charles Manson.

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With every “Islamist” attack, Islam draws greater scrutiny, and even though as a class Muslims may not identify with terrorism or terrorists, especially with themselves comprising the vast majority of victims of this brand of criminal behavior, the same may taint them.  This, of course, is part of “shimmer“.  The more murder that takes place beneath the banner of Islam, the more conflict generated in its name, the more breathtaking — or numbing — the violence indulged, the more difficult it becomes to claim cultures associated with it equal, noble, or virtuous, their children and their doings becoming the most important gauge of their acumen and success.

Manson relocated the Family to a ranch near the Simi Valley owned by a friend of one his followers. Life there was dominated by rules meant to render Family members — particularly the women — enslaved and dependent. Suddenly, no female was to ever carry money. At the two daily meals, men were served first and “the women got what was left.”

‘Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson’ draws portrait of psychopath as a young man – NY Daily News, 8/28/2013

Has the treatment of women in, say, Saudi Arabia, been so much different?

Notably for Americans, Manson occupies his one legendary true-crime space.

The assorted criminals and nut sacks associated with similarly outrageous crimes have no central connection to him apart from their recognition as comparatively isolated psychopaths.

What Al Shabaab does — and Al Qaeda and Taliban and . . . . well, you get the point: it’s a little different, more tied together across time and space and shared gruesome fantasia.

The reason one may note how Charlie Manson treated women and ask whether similar arrangements have not been as true of Saudi Arabia is that with the unnatural horror unleashed in Al Shabaab’s mindless zombie attack in Nairobi, the Manson and the Tate-LaBianca murder comes naturally to mind.  It’s not only a convenient analog — again, one an isolated American lunatic crime (knives more than guns, if any, in that one too): the other as lunatic but predictable given the many nations hosting each a part of the Islamic Small Wars and how often similar mayhem occurs — but a key also to what the two entities may have had in common in part: a narcissism similar in its contemptuous and malignant aspects.

and why is that?

To shake the head and not understand seems only that much more dumb given what happened in Kenya at whose hands and with the authority, at least in their own heads, of what book beneath what banner associated with whom and what.

Whatever it is, it is not primarily “the west’s” fight.

Additional Reference

Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet: Fritz Redlich: 9780195057829: Amazon.com: Books (1998).

The Making of a Serial Killer | Psychology Today, 12/7/2012.

Official Tate-LaBianca Murders Blog, 9/25/2013

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