Remembering the Montreal Massacre

[HerBeatitude]

Just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention.

We should remember them

God I remember this

I was horrified, bewildered and fourteen years old when this happened

i remember exactly that sickening lurch my stomach did when I heard the news

I remember

Thanks for this thread. I had never heard of it before.

How on earth could it not be seen as political? He didnt just happen to kill these women did he? He chose to kill them for the reasons given above.

Good point about if this was a shooting of 14 black men, or 14 gay men, or even 14 members of UKIP

Thanks for the link to that site, I hadnt heard of it and it looks interesting.

Just for balance, I will post my own links.

www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/montreal-massacre-death-cult/article1392013/

and

www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=75e56e58-5238-4d65-82ff-e87f841303e3

absolutely, Prolesworth, just what I was thinking. It seems there is only one view that is acceptable in this topic. I'll fuck off now.

Fuck me I kneeeew before clicking that the Mop & Pail link would be a Margaret Wente article

Typical for her

Meh

it isn't a one off, there have been other well known tragedies like this one. They are always treated as one offs and very little attempt is taken to join the dots.
Why did he think that the women took his space, as opposed to blaming the other men that took up many more places? Where did he get the entitled attitude that no woman deserved to be there when he had been rejected?
of course it's political, and I don't think it's hi-jcking to start to observing the patterns apparent in these types of crimes.

Thanks for drawing our attention to it HB - I will make sure I remember the women tomorrow.

I am still stunned by the no more killers who targeted women comment though. Really?! I'm not in the business of naming them, as I don't want to give their names as it makes them become 'iconic' 'legendary' figures, but really? You can't think of any? Stunned!

And of course it's political. His intention was driven by his politics.

TooPragmatic: if you thought you could make us view what happened in a different light merely by asserting it, without providing better arguments and evidence to back up your claims, then you were indeed naive.
The feminist world view concerning violence against women is, unfortunately, based on extensive evidence.

I did not get the firsd article, it starts by saying all the right things and then ends up saying it is not a mysoginistic massacre. how do you go in the same article from:

""It won't have escaped you that Sunday was the 20th anniversary of the Montreal massacre ? that horrific day when a man walked into the city's l'École Polytechnique, separated out the female students, screamed ?You are all a bunch of feminists!?""

To that:

"By all means, let's mourn the exceptional young women whose lives were cut short one awful day in 1989. But let's stop insisting they were victims of deep-rooted cultural misogyny. There's plenty of that in the world already. In Afghanistan, women are routinely killed for defying men. In South Asia, vast numbers of female fetuses are aborted, and girls are routinely neglected in favour of their brothers. In Canada, it's time to get a grip and move on."

Also is there really different grades of woman hatred? is killing a woman only because of the fact that she is a woman in Canada less bad than in Afganistan? if so could you explain why because I really do not get it.

My computer would not let me open the second link, what was it about?

the only explanation I can think of gorionine is that some western cultures want to believe they're superior to other, "primitive" cultures. It's racist as much as anything else, because it depicts the western male as benevolent liberals. Scratch the surface of any patriarchal society, though, and the seedy underbelly is revealed.
The other explanation is that if the focus is perpetually on "other" injustices "elsewhere" then feminism stays stuck in a rut and never moves on because women in the West are not allowed to identify male violence against women as a political tool to keep them down. they're prevented from mobilizing. I think it's pernicious.

I think you hit the nail on the head Sakura and for some reason it makes me very sad.

What an interesting thread. I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of this event before.

Of course it was political - the women died because they were women. Any campaign against violence against women runs in to the same opposition doesn't it - that the problem doesn't exist, that it's caused by something ese, that men suffer too. I think as a society we absolutely run away from that knowledge. As a student I did some campaigning using the Zero tolerance campaign materials and we had exactly the same reaction as Toopragmatic has shown here.

I don't think the fact that gunmen often have mental health problems makes it less of a political issue. Having a mental health issue doesn't suddenly make a person outside of the influences of our culture. Mental health issues manifest themselves in ways that are culturally influenced.

UNfortunately, a lot of people have what Dworkin called " a steadfast refusal to see "
Confronted with overwhelming evidence that male violence against women is a gendered issue, they continue to deny

I am gobsmacked that those two articles posted by TooPragmatic have been seen as truthful, let alone useful, by anyone.

Many many serial killers have targeted women, as have the men who commit acts of domestic violence (including killing) on partner after partner. And this is quite aside from the soldiers who repeatedly target women to rape/kill. Are people's memories really so short?

One of the articles makes the point that we should not regard the killer as a "normal" person, because he grew up in the supposedly extraordinary circumstances of being beaten and then abandoned by his father. In fact, this makes him a pretty normal product of society. MN is pretty full of women who were abused as children, and there is a whole raft of campaign groups, organisations, and the police who all confirm that domestic violence is rife. We are supposed to regard the killer as some kind of aberration because his background was so extraordinary? I don't think so. And of course the fact that his father thought it was ok to beat up his partner and child is nothing to do with misogyny in society either, is it? Father beats up women and children, son murders women and bystanders. All part of the violence against women happening every sodding day in the world.

As for this: "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." - surely you cannot call it a "gendercide" if the ones doing the killing are of the same gender? Many men in history have massacred huge numbers of people, whether children, women or men. This doesn't make those acts "gendercides".

I'm thinking of these women today.

"surely you cannot call it a "gendercide" if the ones doing the killing are of the same gender?"

no, you can't. The article is lying.

TooPragmatic - I know it is difficult to accept that women can be killed because they are women, as black people must find it a hard pill to swallow. However, this is happening. If this guy had gone in and shot people discriminately then I would agree with you. However, he did not and he searched out the women he executed. The men who started the White Ribbon Campaign definitely saw it as political and wanted to do something about it, or at least accept it for what it was. By the way, as TooPragmatic said, the women murdered probably would not call themselves feminists, maybe so maybe not. However, it was feminists that gave them the opportunity to study where they did. There will have been a time when women were not accepted. Do you think that one morning the patriachy woke up and thought 'Oh that is unfair that women cant study engineering we should accept them'. I doubt that very much, some woman/women will have had to fight for that.

Also, your remark to Sakura came across as a little crass and sarcastic. Sakura comes across as a realist. I feel it is because some women tend to ignore what is right under their noses that the men who are violent etc get away with it. I am not saying all men are mysogonists but society today is very mysogonistic. Take the stat that only 1 out of 20 rape complaints ends in a conviction. Does that mean we believe that 19 out of 20 women are liars!

Thank you for posting this - I wasn't aware of this massacre and will be thinking of these women today.

Of course it is political and of course the killings were gender based. I am not sure how you could argue against it when the perpetrator himself tells you that is the reason .

Whether the perpetrator was mentally ill or not is irrelevant. I agree that as a woman it is very difficult to come to terms with the fact that people will want to kill you solely because of your gender and I think it is easier to focus on the fact that the perpetrator was mentally ill. It enables people to think that only people with mental health issues commit violence (or indeed think about) against women and thereby exonerating male family and friends from such thoughts and feelings.

I think its right to remember the poor women who died. It is terrible what happened to those innocent lives. Maybe the killer was insane, but society failed to protect these women.

We should also remember alongside them little baby girls in China who are murdered each year. Foetuses who are aborted for being female. Women or girls in Afghanistan who are murdered for wanting to learn to read and write.

Or maybe women who die of easily curable diseases because of lack of medical care and women being seen as a low priority.

We cannot bring back the dead, but we can prevent future trageties.

I hate it that there are this many examples of a man killing women and girls, but in 2006 ten Amish schoolgirls were shot by a man.

Yes, Lio. I knew there was a school shooting that targetted girls but had forgotten the details. :(

And I've noticed that the men who kill their families, usually only target the women and young children. They never seem to go for their brothers, BILs, FILs etc, it's always their wife, SILs, female friends of the wife etc.

They hate women basically. Fucking scary. :(