What would you have done?

More criticism of the Mark Steyn/John Derbyshire position on the VT massacre - that the students didn't do all they could have to stop Cho's killing spree - from Andrew Levy and John Podhertz. Levy's main argument:

[Steyn] maintains that "It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act."

And that sentence, more than anything else in the column, illustrates Steyn's wrong-headedness on this issue.

What Steyn apparently doesn't get is that Librescu - by all accounts absolutely the most heroic actor on that horrible day - no doubt understood the obligation to act not "instinctively," but because of prior life experiences.

Because the simple fact is that if you haven't been through something like that, if you haven't seen it before, you more than likely won't know how to act in the face of an insane, yet coldly calculating, killer. Indeed, Librescu was a Holocaust survivor, which in all probability means that back then he didn't fight back. This is in no way a knock on him, but it does give lie to Steyn's argument. And in fact, among the not uncommon response given by Holocaust survivors when asked why they left their houses, or why they got on the trains without a fight, is that they couldn't really believe what was happening, or they knew there had just been some mistake and everything would get straightened out. But how easy it is in hindsight to say "I would never have let them do that to me!"

Which, by the way, is exactly what Steyn et. al. are doing now, and it's quite frankly shameful.

We'd all like to believe we could be heroes if confronted with a maniac shooting up the place, but I'm 99.999999% sure I would have hidden or run away as fast as I could. And so would nearly all of you.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at April 20, 2007 07:35 AM