The Tian Mingjian Incident

If my life were ruined by someone, I would kill them. If it were ruined by no one identifiable but obviously affiliated with an organization, I would kill as many random members of that organization as possible.

Ashur was arguing for fundamental nobility of retributive homicide; he wrote in praise of violence both egotistic, serving to quench one's feeling of injustice, and selfless in purging the world that's being left behind of "terrible people".

I really don't care to argue about this ban, or even about his point as it is presented, but I'm inclined to share a story I just became aware of, courtesy of one Kamil Galeev (русскоговорящие: советую следить за кадром; будучи пантюркистом, он предвзят, но имеет интересную перспективу - навроде Разиба. И, к сожалению, так же жаден). Some details are murky, forgive me this; but the overall pathos is clear enough.

Galeev matter-of-factly notes that the Chinese authorities have just allowed their citizens to have as many as three children per family, in a yet another flailing attempt to boost fertility after suppressing it for so long. For reference, permission to have two was issued in 2016. That is, some six years ago, Chinese couples [of Han descent] had the [official; oft-exceeded] right to have a maximum of one child, and this policy was, at least sometimes, carried out with absolute ruthlessness.

For example, in 1994, the wife of a Chinese lieutenant Tian Mingjian had the temerity to write to her husband that she was pregnant with her second child (being of traditional inclination and already having sired a girl, lieutenant Tian, a once-promising officer and something of a brawler, hoped for a male heir). A political commissar, or politruk in our ex-Soviet parlance, who Tian intermingled with to deliver gifts to his wife, and who monitored the military's correspondence, had read the letter and reported it to the local authorities (and, indirectly perhaps, to "birth control officer"), who consequently had the woman undergo a forced abortion on the seventh month of pregnancy, in the course of which she died, along with her unborn son.

The lieutenant, upon learning of this, became somewhat upset. In this case, the cold, indifferent language of Wikipedia is worthy of quotation without commentary:

On 20 September Tian armed himself with a Type 81 assault rifle and killed the regimental political commissar on the drill ground. He also killed three other military officials who were trying to stop him and injured at least ten more before fleeing the military base. While his fellow soldiers were ordered to change into civilian clothing in order to not disturb the public when searching for the deserter, Tian hijacked a jeep and headed towards Beijing. Other reports stated he boarded a bus.[5]

At 7:20 a.m., when approaching a red light in Jianguomen, the driver crashed his vehicle into a tree and tried to escape. Tian killed him, jumped out of the car and started to shoot people at random while making his way towards the embassy district. He thus killed 17 civilians, including Iranian diplomat Yousef Mohammadi Pishknari and his 9-year-old son, while another of Pishknari's sons and his daughter were wounded.

By then thousands of police were rushing to the scene and desperately tried to apprehend the gunman, but were unable to do so, since Tian was an experienced and excellent marksman. Police finally besieged Tian at Yabao Road and engaged in a gunbattle with him, in which an unclear number of policemen were killed. A bus was caught in the line of fire, when the driver in panic stopped his vehicle. Eventually, heavy police fire forced Tian to flee into a dead end where he was killed by a sniper.

The exact number of casualties remains unknown, though in the immediate aftermath 14 people were reported dead, and 72 others wounded, many of them so severely that doctors expected the death toll to rise to 40 or 50.[7] The newspaper Lien Ho Pao reported on 7 December the same year that 15 people were killed, among them six servicemen, and 60 others were wounded.[4]

I wear my sympathies on my sleeve. I have little sympathy for the Chinese regime and understand its faults, but I side with it (to the extent that this matters) as part of a gamble unlikely to pay off, but the only one left to me and my people to check the tumorous growth of the monster you happy lot sustain with the sweat of your brow. Even that doesn't make it easier for me to recognize the error or moral defect evident in Tian's actions. Intellectually, of course, I know that a serious society cannot tolerate such madmen, and he obviously had killed a large number of innocents. But on the other hand, a society that acquiesces to abolition of privacy, de facto rape, murder and infanticide on massive scale, and all that to flail around mere two decades later in futile attempts to boost fertility - that kind of society, clearly, is terrible enough, so terrible that, at least, there arises a reasonable case for terror being a proportionate response; a single cell going amok (as some Asians put it), to rouse the rest out of their moral slumber, to effect a change. Or at least to make it known that such indignation is still conceivable in this culture-population.

It is not always evil to demand mind-boggling sacrifices from the people; that, I strongly believe. It is evil to be casual, dishonest, or bureaucratic about it. But, moreover, it is wrong on a deeper than moral level, on some fundamental aesthetic plane, to allow the sort of creatures who become politruks to sever the family line of a man like Tian.

Naturally I'm biased. The warrior archetype, part myth part truth, is seared deep into European psyche and into the bones of peoples whose lineages start out of Maloross... modern Ukrainian steppe, to the extent that, ultimately, men are evaluated by being better or worse at becoming a faint facsimile of it. It had been progressively getting refined, hammered at from different sides, perhaps reaching its peak in the age of chivalry when it had lost almost all, but not all of its primal brutality and gained more emotional depth; and it was, by and large, buried somewhere on the Somme. There still are people fit to embody the archetype, but even modern army has limited use for it, and outside of armies... well. There are shaky dreams, mirages wandering about the American continent: Sheriffs, vigilantes, superheroes. A certain constitutional amendment makes sure the mirages have substance - to an extent, for a time.

Two thousand years ago, Han Chinese had chivalry of a similar kind; later, the class analogous to knights morphed into scholar-bureaucrats. Maybe it is unsustainable, a mere transitory stage in a civilized subspecies' path towards an equilibrium IQ level of roughly 105 (relative to Western norm), high risk aversion and clearly understood collectivism. Maybe the whites are just late bloomers. Maybe it's not even very good, all things considered. But I suspect that if there were one thing the supposedly creative white people are not doing enough of, it's thinking of how they could preserve that which once made some of them akin to knights; how to fit the modern world into a knight's ethos, not how to cram a potential idealized knight, a man worthy of the authority to apply violence at his discretion to right the clear wrong, into a suit and a pod. This sounds hopelessly naive, I know, and this is but a late night rant; still, I feel this is one of the last interesting things you, and you specifically, have left to tell the rest of the Earth. So I'd be happy to see it.

The Chinese have their own stories, old and new. There's a character called Tian in my favourite (though not unrivaled now) manhua Feng Shen Ji. He shares some traits with that man. I hope it's intentional.