I recently happened upon a troubling news story about Jean-Claude Rochefort, a Canadian man who was arrested for felony blogging. Most of the reports were pretty vague about what his crimes involved, but the basic story is that he operated a blog that made threatening statements to women… in general.
Luckily, his blog is still intact and largely in English. It’s quite obvious he’s guilty of being a horrible blogger and writer, but from everything I’ve read (which could be after he deleted things), he made no threats to women, either specifically or generally. I normally wouldn’t shy away from defending any victim of authoritarianism, but this story gives me pause. While I didn’t see anything resembling direct threats, it’s perfectly clear that this person is deranged. He sounds dangerous. Given the choice, I’d sooner want him locked up than on the streets, but I’m not sure that gives anyone the right to do so, or that society’s attempt to do so will yield positive results.
Rochefort’s blog is a tribute to Marc Lépine, a Canadian who murdered fourteen women in a desperate bid to enact vengeance on feminism, which he blamed for ruining his life.
“Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite” -Marc Lépine
A rational person, be they educated or not, could clearly see that feminism had absolutely no bearing on the life of this awkward, unpopular young man. In a world full of people grasping at straws to find meaning and something to fight for, feminism (or women, in general) is one of the more absurd scapegoats. This draws comparisons to Valerie Solanis, whom Jean-Claude Rochefort repeatedly references in his blog. At one point, he justifies Lépine’s shooting spree by saying, “And when Marc Lépine opens fire, what were these 14 young, pure and innocent girls doing? No doubt they were reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto and planning a genocide”.
Lou Reed sums up the driving force of Valerie Solanas’s attack against Andy Warhol as “idiot madness”, and I feel this same characterization could be made about Lépine and Rochefort. This form of criminal behavior is the most angering, because it has no justification.
There is some justification, however unacceptable, to crimes committed out of the acquisition of wealth, addiction, psychopathic compulsion, and revenge. For this reason, it wouldn’t hurt to reclassify hate crimes as “unjustifiable crimes” or simply apply use of the word hate correctly. That would encompass what we already consider hate crimes (racism, homophobia, anti-semitism), but also terrorism against civilians, deranged attacks such as Solanas’s, and so on. Basing harsher criminal penalties on a connection to destructive idiocy makes a lot more sense than harsher penalties for crimes against groups someone has listed as minorities.
Language, as always, plays an integral role in all of this. From what it looks like, Lépine’s hurried suicide note/manifesto is riddled with errors, even though it’s in his native French. I can’t help but wonder if there’s any correlation between violent behavior and people not feeling able to express themselves properly, be it venue (Ted Kaczynski) or simple fluency in a language. When you publish your thesis on the subject of fluency and violence, be sure to dedicate it to me.
Based on the tone of the random samplings I read of his blog, my guess is that Rochefort will be acquitted or forced into brief psychiatric counseling. I’d also guess that following all of this, his chances of actually acting out violently will increase dramatically. Aggressive and authoritative prevention methods always scare me, not only because I’m quite libertarian, but because it always feels like the set-up for a self-fulfilling prophecy.
