School attack in Britain

A 15 year old girl testifies about being taunted and then attacked and stabbed in the eye by other girls in school. But you have to get to the penultimate sentence of the article to find out what sort of attack this really was.

Also note the strangely simplistic and passive way the story is written, as if by one of the anomic 15 year olds it tells about, without context or framework, as if there were no reality, no society, and thus no moral order, outside the words of the girl who was attacked, so that the attack on her has no meaning, and she seems alone and meaningless and without protection in an empty cosmos. It’s a news story that might have been written by Samuel Beckett. And it’s from the “conservative” Telegraph.

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Dmitri K. writes:

I like your post and your analysis of the coverage. That reminds me of a Soviet poet and dissident Alexander Galich. He wrote a song about such way of presenting events, which was also used in Soviet history textbooks. I will try my best to translate without losing the content. First, he presents a imaginary phrase from a textbook about a hystorical event that happened 1,000 years ago, the war of the Russian ruler Oleg against Khazars:

“Once a guy called Oleg attacked someone for unknown reason…”

Then he continues, as if addressing a person from the Eastern block:

“And this Marxist approach to history
It was very useful in our country
And you can use it in your country, too
Because we all are in the same s**t”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 31, 2006 10:08 AM | Send