#peter hitchens
“Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. The White House spokesman invokes the silence of traditional in religious ceremony. “It is not the time” to question Moloch. No time is right for showing disrespect for Moloch.
(…)
Molochism is the one religion that can never be separated from the state. The state itself bows down to Moloch, and protects the sacrifices made to him. So let us celebrate the falling bodies and rising statues as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.”
Why don’t they ask whether these mass killers are on drugs?
“The story is always reported in the same way. The horror is described. Grieving families are interviewed, though I personally would be glad to spare them the ordeal. Major politicians — often the President himself — join heartfelt calls for gun control. Then, after a few days, interest fades, except in the place where the murders took place where the pain endures for decades.
Yet here is a fascinating fact. The U.S. has been full of legal guns since it came into being. If anything, its gun laws are more restrictive now in some States than they have ever been.
But mass shootings of the sort we now see all too often are quite a recent problem. They only really began in the 1960s. Can anyone think of anything else that only got going in Western societies in the 1960s?
I can. It is the widespread use of legal and illegal drugs to alter our mental state. And a careful look at many of these mass shootings shows that — where the information is available — the shooters very often took such drugs.
(…)
They were not exceptional. As an experienced Paris journalist said to me recently: ‘After covering all of the recent terrorist attacks here, I’d conclude that the hit-and-die killers involved all spent the vast majority of their miserable lives smoking cannabis while playing hugely violent video games.’
(…)
My experience in this country is that the police are very reluctant to discuss the role of illegal drugs in violence. This is, I think, usually because I am the only person asking and they do not want to discuss it. So they do not have to. Yet an appalling number of violent crimes are committed in this country by drug abusers, especially marijuana abusers, as Ross Grainger’s website documents in grim and growing detail. Mr Grainger has repeatedly tried to get official inquiries to take note of his survey, but with little success.
I have even sought the help of the Information Commissioner to get police in this country to admit that they aren’t much interested in drug abuse by the perpetrators of extreme, crazy violent crimes. They aren’t. But they should be, and if more people in the media were interested, the police too would have to be more interested.
But I suspect that, having given up enforcing the laws against such drugs, they do not much want to know if this arrogant decision to stop doing what they are paid for has had any bad effects.
(…)
I hold the old-fashioned view that people who intoxicate themselves or consciously wreck their brains for fun are fully responsible for all the horrors that follow.”
