Pathology and Ideology: Major Nidal Malik Hasan and the Case of Leon Czolgosz
The discourse in the public sphere debating the motivation of mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan—the psychiatrist who recently shot forty-three people in Fort Hood, Texas—has taken two primary forms. The first argues he is a lone, depressed, and deranged gunman motivated by the stress of impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. The second claims he is a terrorist motivated by an extremist ideology. Few have noted that he is likely both and that neither case is mutually exclusive.
Pathology and Ideology: Major Nidal Malik Hasan and the Case of Leon Czolgosz
By Evan Matthew Daniel
History News Network
November 16, 2009
The discourse in the public sphere debating the motivation of mass murderer Major Nidal Malik Hasan—the psychiatrist who recently shot forty-three people in Fort Hood, Texas—has taken two primary forms. The first argues he is a lone, depressed, and deranged gunman motivated by the stress of impending deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. The second claims he is a terrorist motivated by an extremist ideology. Few have noted that he is likely both and that neither case is mutually exclusive.
Listening to radio, watching television, and reading the representatives of these two competing perspectives in the media conjures the case of Leon Czolgosz, the self-proclaimed anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley on September 6, 1901. Czolgosz was one of seven children born to Polish immigrants in 1873. His mother died when he was quite young and he entered the workforce to support his family. After working in a glass factory and a wire mill in Cleveland, Ohio, he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1897 and returned home to his family farm. It was at this time that Czolgosz embraced anarchism after reading anarchist newspapers, listening to speeches given by Emma Goldman and other anarchists, and attending meetings organized by a variety of anarchist groups. He even met Goldman, if briefly, as she left her hotel after giving a speech in Cleveland and he contacted Goldman and the publishers of the Chicago anarchist periodical Free Society in July 1901.