Thread: Lone gunman: The Ecole Polytechnique massacre was a freak tragedy.

Lone gunman: The Ecole Polytechnique massacre was a freak tragedy.
So why is every man made to feel guilty for it?
Barbara Kay
National Post

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Seventeen years ago today Marc Lepine killed 14 women and himself at the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada's worst mass murder. From this human tragedy of no inherent political significance, a political industry emerged, which produced in the massacre's name: gun control laws, lavish public spending on women's causes, feminist-guided school curricula and a high tolerance for overt misandry.

In the massacre's wake, ideologues elevated Lepine's rampage from a random act by one disaffected individual into the gender equivalent of Kristallnacht or 9/11. A narrative evolved in which every woman became a potential victim of an organized, hate-driven enemy -- like the Nazis or al-Qaeda -- with the massacre as an ominous harbinger of more aggression to come.

Both male and female feminists colluded in promoting the myth of lone killer Lepine as the symbol of all males' innate hostility to women, however dormant it might appear. In a shameful, inflammatory broadside affirming generalized male responsibility, for example, a group called Montreal Men Against Sexism responded to the massacre with self-hating stereotyping inconceivable in the context of a similar crime committed by, say, a black or a Muslim: "Men kill women and children as a proprietary, vengeful and terrorist act ... with the support of a sexist society ... As pro-feminist men, we try to reveal and to end this continuing massacre."

What "continuing massacre"? Women have been subjugated by men throughout history, but organized massacres of women by their own culture's males? Never.

In an equally specious analogy, career arch-feminist Judy Rebick commented: "If [Lepine had] killed 14 Jews, he'd have been seen as ... anti-Semitic." Yes, and rightly so, because anti-Semitism is a historical syndrome involving a litany of actual massacres by organized Jew-haters. But no similar historical record exists of organized women haters or of women-specific massacres.

Such rhetorical duplicity, endlessly replicated, has resulted in harmful social fallout. Amongst other unjust and gender-divisive consequences, the "White Ribbon" educational movement, initiated in 1991 as a direct response to the massacre, and now integrated into more than 100 schools across Canada, sponsors a biased, error-riddled curriculum on domestic violence (read "violence against women by men"). A freak tragedy has thus become the misandric lens through which many Canadian children are taught to perceive gender relations.

Publicly endowed grievance rites like the annual Dec. 6 vigils are inappropriate responses to isolated acts of violence. National mourning ceremonies should consecrate events that have shaped our civic character. Honouring the dead should draw people together -- the whole country, not half -- either to heal historic wounds, acknowledge sacrifices made on all our parts and strengthen our sense of national purpose, or to affirm solidarity in the face of calamities inflicted by a real, external enemy.

The Montreal Massacre commemoration industry, whose emotive effect depends on scapegoating men, is having the opposite effect: For the sins of a few, the nature of half our polity is often falsely maligned, breeding suspicion and hostility in women, needless shame and guilt in all men and boys, and mutual resentment and mistrust between the sexes.

Ritualized violence against women, such as wife beating, bride burnings or honour killings, is a function of retrograde cultural notions of sexual relations. If such abhorrent behaviours were officially tolerated or encouraged here, then politicizing a particularly egregious example would be justified in order to end the practice.

But the complete reverse is the case. Officially and unofficially, virtually to a man and woman, Canadians schooled in our heritage culture utterly repudiate violence against women. Proof lies in the fact that while many gendercides in history have targeted males, none preceding or following the Montreal Massacre in the West has singled out women.

Most people assume Lepine's rage was entirely focused on women. In fact, the perpetually troubled misfit entertained serial and disparate revenge fantasies. An earlier ambition, noted in his suicide note as one of several "projects," was to join the Armed Forces as an officer cadet, gain access to the arsenal and embark on a shooting rampage. In that case, those murdered would have been males, and Marc Lepine, along with his victims -- their names inscribed on a commemorative plaque in the armory perhaps -- would by now have faded from our national memory. Something for Canadian "equality" buffs to ponder at the vigil tonight.

bkay@videotron.ca

Click here for the article.

This used to annoy me to no end, now I look forward to it as an annual recruitment drive for MRA. It smacks of Ian Paisley and the Orange order insisting on marching through Craigin and other catholic enclaves in Belfast so that folks who had no involvement whatsoever in the event being "celebrated"could get to know the joy of having their noses rubbed in it. Each year this time more and more young men show up at MRA boards fed up and ready to fight back.

But it is true, Marc Lepin is to the feminist commandeering of Canadian poitics as Martinus Van der Lube is to Naziism being made supreme as an emergency measure which did not go away until the Russian led Mongols took the eagle down from the Reichstag.

The first school shoot up was a 16 year old girl from San Diego named Brenda Spencer who didn't like Mondays, but other than Bob Geldof singing about it, it faded from memory.

I think it safe to say that there are more young men in Montreal this year who "haie les feministes" than there was the year it happened. The impotence of the gun registry was made painfully evident this year with the shooting rampage at Dawson College...all with duely registered firearms....gender indiscriminant...and apparently with no motive other than this kid was really starved for attention. You cannot babyproof the world with legislation.

Back when it happened, I had been warning people it was going to happen (and I figured Montreal was a very likely place for it) but nobody would listen.

If you young guys in the third wave think the fembots and manginas are dogmatic and doctrinaire now...you should have been around back then.

Surely all of the parents concerned, Madame Lepin included, must be weary of having their children's bodies being used as a soap box.

And can any of the feminist genius, more highly evolved, Phds who comment on and analyse this, explain how it is that a slap on the face that Marc proportedly received from his father at about age four (an event most children would not even recall) would have any bearing whatsoever on Marc's animosity towards feminists?

I say it was the way he was being made to pay for the sins of his and everyone else's father.

In the weeks following the shooting spree some feminist wacko was threatening to go around to the neo-natal units of Montreal hospitals and kill any male baby she could "so that they would never hurt another woman again". The hospital nurseries actually got rid of any "pink/blue bootie"system of marking the babies gender and it was not posted on their charts.Hospital security had to be beefed up. Only got mentioned in the news once.

This used to annoy me to no end, now I look forward to it as an annual recruitment drive for MRA. It smacks of Ian Paisley and the Orange order insisting on marching through Craigin and other catholic enclaves in Belfast so that folks who had no involvement whatsoever in the event being "celebrated"could get to know the joy of having their noses rubbed in it. Each year this time more and more young men show up at MRA boards fed up and ready to fight back.

But it is true, Marc Lepin is to the feminist commandeering of Canadian poitics as Martinus Van der Lube is to Naziism being made supreme as an emergency measure which did not go away until the Russian led Mongols took the eagle down from the Reichstag.

The first school shoot up was a 16 year old girl from San Diego named Brenda Spencer who didn't like Mondays, but other than Bob Geldof singing about it, it faded from memory.

I think it safe to say that there are more young men in Montreal this year who "haie les feministes" than there was the year it happened. The impotence of the gun registry was made painfully evident this year with the shooting rampage at Dawson College...all with duely registered firearms....gender indiscriminant...and apparently with no motive other than this kid was really starved for attention. You cannot babyproof the world with legislation.

Back when it happened, I had been warning people it was going to happen (and I figured Montreal was a very likely place for it) but nobody would listen.

If you young guys in the third wave think the fembots and manginas are dogmatic and doctrinaire now...you should have been around back then.

Surely all of the parents concerned, Madame Lepin included, must be weary of having their children's bodies being used as a soap box.

And can any of the feminist genius, more highly evolved, Phds who comment on and analyse this, explain how it is that a slap on the face that Marc proportedly received from his father at about age four (an event most children would not even recall) would have any bearing whatsoever on Marc's animosity towards feminists?

I say it was the way he was being made to pay for the sins of his and everyone else's father.

In the weeks following the shooting spree some feminist wacko was threatening to go around to the neo-natal units of Montreal hospitals and kill any male baby she could "so that they would never hurt another woman again". The hospital nurseries actually got rid of any "pink/blue bootie"system of marking the babies gender and it was not posted on their charts.Hospital security had to be beefed up. Only got mentioned in the news once.

thanks Tyrael, I'm sick of this Lepine story, it just feeds into the prejudices of spoiled (and fearful) middle class women and their rad-fem mentors

thanks Tyrael, I'm sick of this Lepine story, it just feeds into the prejudices of spoiled (and fearful) middle class women and their rad-fem mentors

An idea from another forum: if we'd want to be consistent about the Lepine thing, then women should be kept as far away from children as possible. Haven't you heard of Andrea Yates?

An idea from another forum: if we'd want to be consistent about the Lepine thing, then women should be kept as far away from children as possible. Haven't you heard of Andrea Yates?