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The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

I did not have this on my fuck 2024 bingo card.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

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T R E 4 5 O N

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

So many bastards, so little time.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

This really is a full service blog.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Long Read: “The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev”

Long Read: “The Fall of the House of Tsarnaev”

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Rather a grandiloquent title for what’s presented as a sad band of feckless dreamers and failed hustlers, but full marks to the Boston Globe for putting in the time and effort and money that led to this report:

… Federal investigators have suspected that Tamerlan, the 26-year-old boxer from southern Russia who is believed, along with his brother, to have set off the deadly Boston Marathon bombs in April, was motivated, if not deliberately directed, by real life jihadist revolutionaries on the other side of the globe. But an investigation by the Boston Globe suggests that Tamerlan was in the perilous grip of someone far more menacing: himself.

The Globe corroborated with several people who knew him just how plagued Tamerlan felt by the inner voices. Some family acquaintances feared for his mental health, among them a doctor concerned it could be schizophrenia. The Globe’s five-month investigation, with reporting in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, and the United States, also:

■ Fundamentally recasts the conventional public understanding of the brothers, showing them to be much more nearly coequals in failure, in growing desperation, and in conspiracy.

■ Establishes that the brothers were heirs to a pattern of violence and dysfunction running back several generations…

■ Casts doubt on the claim by Russian security officials that Tamerlan made contact with or was recruited by Islamist radicals during his visit to his family homeland.

■ Raises questions about the Tsarnaevs’ claim that they came to this country as victims of persecution seeking asylum. More likely, they were on the run from elements of the Russian underworld whom Anzor had fallen afoul of. Or they were simply fleeing economic hardship.

In any case, the family from which two alleged bombers emerged very likely should not have been here at all. But once they arrived the promise of a fresh start quickly soured; the chaotic ways that had long marked this clan only intensified…

Taken together, these findings suggest that the motivation for the Tsarnaev brothers’ violent acts is more likely rooted in the turbulent collapse of their family and their escalating personal and collective failures than, as federal investigators have suggested, on the other side of the globe. It is a portrait that makes the plot that yielded the carnage of April 15 seem less complicated, and the horrific outcome less preventable.

If the truth is that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his rangy teenage brother acted out of private motives, reinforced by the fervent entreaties of the Muslim militants whose voices and images boiled on their computer screen, they would join the ranks of homegrown murderers such as the Colorado movie theater shooter and the Oklahoma City bombers…

The report presents the elder Tsarnaevs as the kind of marginal, alienated losers we’d call ‘trailer trash’ if they were born in America. People who loudly dream of moving beyond their humble beginnings by any means necessary, legal or illegal, but whose achievements can’t stretch beyond flashy clothes, imprudent couplings, substance abuse, and local notoriety. Not exactly a ripe target for the OMGmuslinterristsgonnaeatourbabies!!! alarmists… but I guess it will make the anti-immigrant paranoids happy.

Reader Interactions

96Comments

  2. 2.

    PsiFighter37

    Excuse me, there’s no way young brown men couldn’t have set these bombs off without being terrists. DUH.

    PF37 +5

  4. 4.

    some guy

    just sad all around, and considering how many people had to die and suffer permanent injury due to domestic dysfunction, even sadder.

  5. 5.

    Belafon

    OT: Guess who was going to say this:

    But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality . . . At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the single greatest threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

    .
    .
    .
    John F Kennedy. This was part of the speech he was going to give on the day he was assassinated. Some things never change.

  7. 7.

    Betty Cracker

    My guess is a fairly high percentage of people who commit acts of theologically or politically motivated terrorism are sad losers / garden variety psychos. They just managed to find an ideological framework to drape their psychosis on.

  11. 11.

    Fuzzy

    With NSA knowing everything useful how are these Russian “trailer trash” not on the no fly list or even allowed in this country. I have to go through all the bullshit at airports and these folks just waltz in and out? WTF. Another example of an NSA failure.

  12. 12.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev first heard the voice when he was a young man.

    It came to him at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice “felt like two people inside of me.”

    As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlan confided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were.”

    At the risk of playing armchair shrink, this certainly sounds like schizophrenia, and the brothers could have been a classic folie a deux. People toss that phrase around lightly but it was used to describe a real psychosis, in this case possibly the variety called a folie imposée, in which one is really the carrier, as it were, affecting the other. With that type sometimes when they separate them, one gets better, and one doesn’t.

  13. 13.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    Poor people don’t give a shit about a couple of dudebros with head trash!

  14. 14.

    Villago Delenda Est

    but I guess it will make the anti-immigrant paranoids happy.

    I dunno…these two kids weren’t brown enough, were not Hispanic, and their Muslimness probably wasn’t strong enough to make the case for a Crusade against whatever little enclave they came from in the former Russian Empire.

  15. 15.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @efgoldman:

    The willing media is a major part of the dysfunction of this society. Infotainment for the masses! Get those ratings up, or you’ll swing!

  16. 16.

    James E. Powell

    @Betty Cracker:

    My guess is a fairly high percentage of people who commit acts of theologically or politically motivated terrorism are sad losers / garden variety psychos. They just managed to find an ideological framework to drape their psychosis on.

    That’s a description that matches Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan B. Sirhan. Just add easily acquired weapons and you get what we got.

  17. 17.

    max

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: So it’s sorta like a Good Will Bombing?

    David Brooks is ringing you:

    The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.

    In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever. In the fading of the light, he is gravely concerned about the way everything is going to hell.

    Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is beyond the battle for attention. Death approaches. Cruelly, it smells like reverence.

    max
    [‘My. Written like a middle-aged thought leader indeedy.’]

  18. 18.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @max: That’s some pretentious word salad you got there.

    ETA: Or it is the pretentious lament of someone who has realized that he is irrelevant. Or both.

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Betty Cracker:

    That was the case when we had an OMG MOOSLIM TERRAIST at LAX a few years ago who shot up the El Al counter and got himself killed. Poor employment history, wife had just taken the kids and moved back to Egypt, and it was his birthday. But he was a Muslim who attacked an Israeli target, so OMG MOOSLIM TERRAIST!

  20. 20.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @efgoldman: I had a friend in law school who put as many snippets from country music songs as he could into his final exam for Jurisprudence. It was a take home exam and he did in a bar. He got a B+; he insisted that I would have been an A if he had started drinking an hour before the exam rather than when he started it.

  21. 21.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    I think “thought leader” fits David Brooks pretty well, in the sense of being a parallel to “loss leader”. His choice of topic makes you think (sometimes anyway) “Oh that could be an interesting thought” but once you start reading it you realize it’s empty calories, a bunch of vapid waffling that’s only there so he can make some idiotic conservative point at the very end.

  27. 27.

    dmsilev

    This part of the story always gets to me.

    On Sept. 12, 2011, Mess, and two of his friends, Erik Weissman and Raphael M. Teken, were found brutally murdered in the apartment, their throats slit and their bodies sprinkled with marijuana. Authorities suspected from the start that the murders were drug-related; they have now also come to suspect that Tamerlan might have been involved in the slaying.

    Rafi Taken was a high-school classmate of mine. We weren’t all that close, but I certainly knew him.

  29. 29.

    srv

    Bill Donohue is on CNN defending White Jesus.

    “The great artists did not depict him as a Chinese guy”

  30. 30.

    Petorado

    @Bill E Pilgrim: Half of it reads like he’s trying to skewer Krugman, the other half reads like Brooks’ own conscience eating away at himself (“he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.”) Poor David really sounds like he has some voices screaming away inside his own head. That was not the column of a well man.

  33. 33.

    Eric U.

    I have always wondered if we were a little too loose with the control of which Russians we let into the U.S. Our area has had a couple of crime sprees perpetrated by Russian immigrants. One of the crime sprees was far more brutal than what the native-born criminals usually come up with. We may be backwards here in Pennsyltucky, but even the criminals are fairly considerate of others.

    @Petorado: the last thing a man like brooks needs is to lose sight of the con. He’s supposed to be a reasonable conservative that somehow always comes to the same conclusions as the rabid mob.

  35. 35.

    Heliopause

    Rather a grandiloquent title

    And completely inappropriate. In my dictatorship reporters will be required to submit 5000 word essays justifying their literary allusions.

  39. 39.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Petorado: Well, I’ll need a few minutes to process this. The heady elation at being recognized by one of the President’s favorite columnists is gone but the sting of the remarks cutting a little too close to home remains.

  40. 40.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Still, one rarely finds an octogenarian with status anxiety. He is beyond the battle for attention.

    John McCain is only in his late seventies.

    I can’t tell, maybe because I couldn’t read much past the third paragraph, but is Brooks trying to be funny in that piece?

  42. 42.

    Petorado

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:

    “Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.”

    That? You? … But Brooksie is ripping off your nym. You should sue.

  44. 44.

    Mandalay

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    That’s some pretentious word salad you got there.

    Your hero John Kerry also does a pretty tasty word salad these days…

    “We don’t have any meeting with anybody who has something to do with Iran or an approach to Iran where we don’t talk to them about how we might be able to find not just Mr. Levinson, but we have two other Americans that we’re deeply concerned about,” Kerry said

    Iranian translators must have put in some overtime making sense of that pearl of wisdom.

  45. 45.

    Mike G

    @dexwood:

    And a willing media to assign motives that do not exist, to bump up a terrorist narrative.

    If they were trash from Dorchester instead of Chechnya, they’d just be portrayed as troubled loners acting out personal demons. Because only foreigners can be “terrists”.

  47. 47.

    max

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I can’t tell, maybe because I couldn’t read much past the third paragraph, but is Brooks trying to be funny in that piece?

    I believe Brooks has given up on politics. He’s going to do social satire without the political slant.

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Wait, Brooks wasn’t talking about me?

    He was giving you a life of failure to shoot for! He’s trying to mentor you, man!

    @Omnes Omnibus: That’s some pretentious word salad you got there.

    He was keeping up with the Douthats. Kinda like Dick Clarke, but without the charm or good looks.

    @efgoldman: just counts the words to make sure there’s enough in the paper.

    Kinda like Friedman but without the cab drivers.

    @Omnes Omnibus: ETA: Detroit has lost. Ha!

    The Ravens should just change their name to the Baltimore Clutch. They don’t look good, and they don’t look like winners but they manage it just the same.

    max
    [‘Detroit should be the ‘Bad Karmas’.’]

  49. 49.

    Betsy

    @max: wait, I smell a rat! Alex pareene is doing the year’s 10 Pundit Idiots in the style of their own writing — first releases were nooners, the Friedman unit, and gladwell this morning.

    You try to tell me this is not one of them!!

  50. 50.

    Suffern ACE

    Well I read the whole piece. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The writer likes to see emblems and portents and probably believes in magic of some sort. I’m confused about what exactly the Russians told the FBI, how they obtained that information and when it was conveyed. But then I don’t have much sympathy for the main characters.

    And now I have to read brooks to get in on this thread? Christ almighty. The voices are telling me to say goodnight.

  51. 51.

    Bob In Portland

    Any mention of Uncle Ruslan, who married the daughter of an Iran-contra figure (Graham Fuller) and lived in his home? Or that Uncle Ruslan used to front a CIA charity for the Chechen rebels?

    Because if I were investigating this family that’s one of the first things I’d look into. I mean, if you doubt the Russian story what about Graham Fuller and Uncle Ruslan?

    Here among other places.

  52. 52.

    Suffern ACE

    @Mike G: ummm. I know life is unfair, but I think if your definition of terrorists is so tight as to exclude losers who drop a bomb in a crowded square, I think you might need to twerk that definition a bit.

  55. 55.

    Suffern ACE

    @Bob In Portland: yep. Although I think the silly “why was this family granted asylum?” confusion in the article would be explained by Uncle Ruslan, who wasn’t interviewed much for this article.

  58. 58.

    mclaren

    So, as in most of these trumped-up bogus cases misnamed ‘terrorism,” it’s a mentally ill violent loner who commits a crime — which then triggers mass hysteria and gets blown wildly out of proportion by a panicky frantic fear-crazed public.

    The so-called War on Terror is a fraud.

    It’s nothing but a giant feeding trough for the military-industrial complex now that the Soviet Union has collapsed.

    There is no danger from Global Terrorism. So-called ‘terrorists’ are nothing but criminals, and should be dealt with using existing criminal laws (we don’t need Joe Biden’s fucking unconstitutional and grossly illegal 1995 Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act which morphed into the illegal and unconstitutional USA Patriot Act after 9/11) and existing criminal agencies (disband the DHS, the FBI is perfectly adequate to deal with loners setting off bombs).

  59. 59.

    CaseyL

    Psychotics are, usually, terrified of themselves. I can barely imagine what it’s like to distrust your own brain, your own self, day in and day out. The psychotics who aren’t inherently suicidal must wind up turning the fear outward – so that they become a danger to others instead of to themselves. It’s a coping mechanism. A lousy one, but still a coping mechanism.

    It’s becoming more and more obvious that extremism (of any variety) is either a symptom of mental illness, or a mental illness in its own right. I wish more research was being done in this area. The political organizations that feed off extremism – particularly the GOP grifters – ought to be exposed as not only parasites, but criminal enablers of the tragedies they trigger; as accessories before and after the fact.

  60. 60.

    Mandalay

    Glenn Greenwald isn’t very high on the list of people I want to kick in the nuts, but he went up a rung or two after watching this video.

    He barely suppressed a grin for most of the interview. Or maybe he was just baring his teeth while he rag dolled that smug elitist authoritarian prick Jeff Toobin, who is pretty near the top of my nut kicking list.

    What a pair of self-important twerps (though that is probably why CNN plonks them in front of cameras).

  61. 61.

    PurpleGirl

    @srv: The great (and not so great) artists painted Jesus in the form and colors of their cultures. Look at the icons of the Eastern Orthodox churches: Jesus looks like he comes from those traditions. He is still “white” but you know the painting is not from England or France or Italy. That man is so stupid.

  62. 62.

    Citizen_X

    If the truth is that Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his rangy teenage brother acted out of private motives, reinforced by the fervent entreaties of the Muslim militants whose voices and images boiled on their computer screen, they would join the ranks of homegrown murderers such as the Colorado movie theater shooter and the Oklahoma City bombers

    No! No! Those are lone nuts, who the lamestream liberal media desperately try to connect to true American patriots! Nothing like the Muslim foreign terrorists at all!

  63. 63.

    fuckwit

    @Suffern ACE: Yeah, I did too, and I’ll never get those 2 hours of my life back again. I’m bitter about that. WTF?

    This looks like an attempt at a literature narrative, and it doesn’t make any sense. A few new facts I’d not read before, but mostly just useless attempts to tie the whole thing together into some kind of coherent story. And they don’t have all the facts yet. Most of those won’t come out until the trial or possibly a report afterwards; the article is premature, ultimately.

    The bit about Tamerlan’s schizophrenia is interesting, if incomplete. The debate about mental illness versus crime is at least a generation or so old, is not really concluded with any consensus AFAICT, and the author doesn’t appear to have the backround in either psychology or criminology– or the inclination to learn– to dive into it. As is the debate about family history and nature vs. nurture in criminology (the book Fortunate Son attempted to lay the blame for Shrub’s sadism and sociopathy on his parents, his dead sister, and his grandfather, and was much better researched, footnoted, and written, than this… and still came up ultimately feeling kind of uncommital in that argument).

    The reality is: even a politically-motivated or socially/racially/religiously-motivated crime is underpinned by mental illness. Almost by definition. Mentally well-adjusted people don’t take those issues to the level of violence.

    Arguing about politics/religion/culture is what normal, healthy people do. Killing people over it is what mentally sick people do. How they get sick, and how to prevent it from happening, or halt it once it does, is a fascinating, important, and useful topic that the author simply doesn’t seem interested in exploring any farther than is necessary to weave some kind of narrative.

    Looks like more intellectual laziness from our paid chatterers. If they’re just going to throw out random guesses, hell, we can (and do!) get that here for free.

    The more I look at human history, and even human current events, it’s so littered with systemic levels of evil everywhere. That’s neither an excuse or an explanation, nor is it terribly interesting. I’m more interested in: how can we get past that? What can we do to improve ourselves? I didn’t see any answers, or even hints of them, in this article.

  64. 64.

    Mandalay

    @mclaren:

    So-called ‘terrorists’ are nothing but criminals, and should be dealt with using existing criminal laws

    Ironically, John Kerry was a strong proponent of that viewpoint until he got promoted to head drama queen and promptly unlearned everything he knew to be true…

    “We hope that this makes clear that the United States of America will never stop in the effort to hold those accountable who conduct acts of terror,” Kerry said. “Members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations literally can run but they can’t hide.”

    Kerry vowed the United States would “continue to try to bring people to justice in an appropriate way with hopes that ultimately these kinds of activities against everybody in the world will stop.”

  65. 65.

    PurpleGirl

    Barbara O’Brien (The Mahablog) linked to a report/article at Slate for the Sandy Hook anniversary, saying that Adam Lanza was seriously disturbed young man.

    The Slate piece:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/12/warning_signs_for_school_shooters_what_parents_who_own_guns_should_look.html

    The Mahablog post (Guns and Crazy):

    http://www.mahablog.com/

    The report at Slate has a lot of good detail that points a way for parents and neighbors to monitor suspected mentally ill people.

  66. 66.

    Anne Laurie

    @Bob In Portland: Uncle Ruslan gets a drive-by, washing his hands of his luzer brother who married that Azar slut & went downhill from there.

    Back in May/June, Mark Ames had a couple long articles at the (sadly defunct) NSFWCorp site talking about the CIA’s long, ugly history of ‘assistance’ in Chechnya, including Graham Fuller.

    Ames also said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was considered a PTSD sufferer by his middle-school teachers, before he came to the US, which certainly could’ve exacerbated any familial tendency towards paranoid schizophrenia…

  68. 68.

    Anne Laurie

    @Suffern ACE:

    The writer likes to see emblems and portents and probably believes in magic of some sort.

    Multiple writers, which I think explains some of the ‘flat affect’ unevenness. And I suspect different levels of you-can’t-print-that edits from the various security & legal teams involved on all sides didn’t help. But it’s a very different take than the standard BAD MANS TEERRRISTS! non-explanation that got shoveled out immediately after the event, part of what I assume will be an evolving narrative.

  69. 69.

    Suffern ACE

    @Anne Laurie: I did read it. And getting past the odd symbolism of the grandfather’s grave, it was also a useful article pushing back on some of the other narratives. Especially when it comes to the younger brother, who was very unfairly portrayed as an innocent, assimilated baby, a zombie following evil muslim older brother (who was conveniently dead and therefore easy to throw under the bus).

  70. 70.

    JustRuss

    I have a close relative who, many years ago, killed a law-enforcement officer to kick off his revolution against the US government. He’s nuts, of course, but I have no doubt that if he were brown and had committed his crime recently he’d be quite famous, an icon in our War On Terror.

  72. 72.

    fuckwit

    @CaseyL: Nice, I just posted something almost identical in spirit before seeing your comment. Indeed, maybe one possible solution is to treat violent extremism as a disease and find ways to help people recover from it.

    There really are interesting questions about crime and mental illness, related not only to street crime, but to terrorism, and also to gun violence (especially meaningful a year after Sandy Hook).

    Also hinted at in the article, but not adequately explored, was the poverty and hopelessness of the Tsarnaev family. The links between poverty and desperation, and crime, have long been known, but I don’t know if we even fully understand that yet– at very least the article didn’t even try to.

    But it’s more than just mental health or economics or family history or any one factor. The reality is that massive fuckups are always, in my experience, the simultaneous failure of several broken/creaky systems all at once. That’s what makes them massive fuckups! If all the systems didn’t fail at once, the fuckup would be not massive, just an ordinary fuckup, and wouldn’t make headlines. In the Tsarnaevs, we see the failures of maybe a dozen different systems, across two continents and several cultures, at scales ranging from multinational to local. If the cracks are there, people will fall through them, and if all the cracks align in exactly the wrong way you get a spectacular fuckup.

    It’s possible we as a country are ready to have this discussion, looking at violence of all kinds and how to reduce it, and look at the studies that have been already been done, to put more effort into doing more new ones, and try to find some better solutions. At very least, it can be argued that it’d help to have more economic security, better mental health care, better gun safety, stronger local communities, a more cooperative relationship with other nations (and their security forces and immigration bureaus), etc.

    At times when I’m more hopeful, I think maybe we can overcome this… eventually.

  73. 73.

    Roy G.

    I wonder what Tamerlan’s FBI handler has to say about this topic. It was probably seen as a bonus.

  78. 78.

    Mandalay

    @Omnes Omnibus: In and of itself it is not a problem, except while that is going on the US government, and Kerry as SoS, repeatedly pleaded with the Taliban to hold peace talks, even after the Taliban attacked US interests, and told the United States to get the fuck out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    Well if you are going to mouth off that you are committed to ending terrorism all over the world, then don’t kiss and make up with the Taliban while they spit in your drink and fuck your wife in the ass. And please spare us pompous bullshit about eradicating terror while you genuflect to the Taliban.

    Because then it starts to look like you are not committed to eradicating terrorism at all. It looks like you are happy to send drones to villages in the middle of nowhere, and weddings out in the desert in the name of fighting terrorism, killing innocent people.
    And when terrorists actually stand up to the US, and tell the US to fuck off in front of the world, Kerry smiles and looks the other way and pretends it didn’t happen. That’s the fucking problem.

    The US has become the Taliban’s bitch, and Kerry’s pompous pronouncements only make things worse. He has zero credibility in the Middle East.

  80. 80.

    grishaxxx

    Good long read, and thanks, AL. The piece is rich background, and – properly, I think – avoids speculations of motive. Maybe the trial will produce evidence of that.
    What struck me, particularly, was how isolated this family was, how tiny the Chechen community with which they had any connection once they immigrated, and how they kept shuttling back and forth from the new to the old country, unable to root in either. Quite apart from individual psychopathology, or screwed family dynamics, or warring cultural forces, you come down to a couple of guys so alienated from the world they’re living in that blowing part of it up (part of their new home town, in fact), and taking a few hundred bystanders as collateral damage, is a gesture they are willing to make.
    I say gesture advisedly; drone killings that take innocent lives when they hit false targets, and which so infuriated the Tsarnaev brothers (as they should us, too), are not random gestures. Drone war failures are tactics gone horribly wrong. The more we know about the Boston bombings, it seems that tactics had nothing to do with them, and war even less.

  81. 81.

    grishaxxx

    @fuckwit: The cracks can be chasms for some. On a student job at university I worked with a woman who, with her husband, had escaped Hungary in 1956. He had been a lawyer or academic – I forget, but they had had a very comfortable life – and immigration destroyed their confident world. She was a supervisor in the microfilm department of the university library, and had learned English on the fly. Her husband, she told me, had basically refused to learn much English, and worked in a stockroom somewhere, bitterly. Lots of pride, lots of clinging to the old ways (she was a closet anti-Semite). I don’t think they ended their days happily, and at some level I don’t think they wanted to.

  82. 82.

    Thlayli

    @Mandalay:

    Why are you focusing on Greenwald’s personality? You are trying to distract people from The Real Issue, which is the NSA is listening to my thoughts through the fillings in my teeth.

    PS: I am not a crank.

  83. 83.

    WereBear

    @Betty Cracker: My guess is a fairly high percentage of people who commit acts of theologically or politically motivated terrorism are sad losers / garden variety psychos. They just managed to find an ideological framework to drape their psychosis on.

    A recent book, The Myth of Martrydom, claims that a great many of the suicide bombers are mentally ill and intent on suicide before they get recruited to fulfill their wish in a dramatic way.

    And when I found out that the older one was a failed athlete; it was all clear. This was a crime motivated by spite, not politics.

  84. 84.

    NonyNony

    @WereBear:

    This was a crime motivated by spite, not politics.

    As I’ve gotten older and my youthful optimism has fallen away I’ve realized that for a large number of people all over the world there is no difference between politics and spite. Or rather, many people take political stances so that they have a way to justify the actions that their spite drives them to do anyway.

    Religion is much the same way. In fact, religion is probably the oldest form of both politics and justification of actions taken out of spite on the planet.

  86. 86.

    Tone In DC

    I’ve realized that for a large number of people all over the world there is no difference between politics and spite. Or rather, many people take political stances so that they have a way to justify the actions that their spite drives them to do anyway.

    I disagree that the failed athlete Tsarnaev’s failure was a motivation for his actions. I think there was a large outdoor event with thousands of people, much like the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, and it was simply convenient.

    I agree with spite being a strong motivation for extremists/sociopaths/just plain foul people in general.

  87. 87.

    Kent

    No one else has mentioned this but the guy these Tsarnaev brothers reminds me of most is Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic Bomber. Not only were the methods essentially identical, but they were both loser white trash types who then went on the run. Rudolph was just a lot more successful at the “on the run” part because he was born and raised in the backwoods Appalachia whereas the Tsarnaev Brothers had no clue about how to go on the run in the US.

  88. 88.

    Another Holocene Human

    And if Waltham PD hadn’t botched a fucking triple murder investigation, then none of this would have happened.

    Waltham sucks, but the taxes are low. Hope you’re happy, Waltham!

  89. 89.

    Paul in KY

    @James E. Powell: I think James Earl Ray was paid good hard cash (or thought he wqas going to be paid). He was also a virulent racist too, but I think his main motivation was money.

  94. 94.

    Paul in KY

    @Thlayli: Technology has been around for 40 or more years, but they can listen to conversations from the vibrations of a window (if you are in room with a window).

  96. 96.

    priscianus jr

    Sounds like they were just a couple of lone nuts. Losers. You know, like their CIA uncle said. Wait a second … haven’t I heard that somewhere before?

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