You'll think I'm dead, but I sail away on a wave of mutilation...

June 10, 2009 12:31 PM

It's been announced that the suspect in today's tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is 89-year-old James W. von Brunn, a right-wing, white-supremacist. His online bio, available in reproduction here via Talking Points Memo (TPM), boasts of his attempts in 1981 to carry out a citizen's arrest on the then acting Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve only to be thwarted by "a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and... a Jew Judge."

TPM has begun compiling a collection of von Brunn's online writings, which help to put these recent events in some context, here.

posted by saulgoodman (18 comments total)

This is a better post than the other one.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:32 PM on June 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Well, thanks FoB, but... I got beat to the finish line.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:34 PM on June 10, 2009

I flagged this but think the earlier one should be deleted for its speculative and gratuitous link to the Westboro Baptist Church crazies. Unfounded and not helpful.
posted by foxy_hedgehog at 12:36 PM on June 10, 2009

Apparently, James W. von Brunn is a World War II veteran.

It's unclear which side he was on.
posted by mattdidthat at 12:36 PM on June 10, 2009

Well, I guess it is a good thing I now know his political affiliation and motives because I was having a hard time figuring out whether this was a tragic event I should play up until I knew how it fit into the appropriate pigeon-hole.
posted by dios at 12:36 PM on June 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Nicely constructed. A shame it's going to disappear. :(
posted by zarq at 12:37 PM on June 10, 2009

foxy_hedgehog, i couldn't agree more.
posted by zarq at 12:37 PM on June 10, 2009

On December 7, 1981, a man named James W. Von Brunn pulled out a sawed-off shotgun at the Federal Reserve Board headquarters, claiming to have planted a bomb and threatening to take members of the Board hostage.

Ah, I bet that's they they've closed off all the streets in the area, including one of the major arteries out of DC into VA, the 14th Street Bridge. The cameras at Trafficland are showing gridlocked traffic now, can't imagine what it'll be over the next few hours. Every Wednesday for the past 10 years, I've driven out of DC to VA to have dinner with my daughter, from whose mother I'm divorced; I've already called and cancelled tonight.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:38 PM on June 10, 2009

So, after the Tiller murder and now this, can we get some retractions from the folks who thought it was horribly offensive that DHS issued a report about potential problems with right-wing terrorism?
posted by Pater Aletheias at 12:39 PM on June 10, 2009 [2 favorites]

Oh dios. You so funny.
posted by and hosted from Uranus at 12:39 PM on June 10, 2009

Man I hope this one stays. (no offense meant, Father Dagon)
posted by boo_radley at 12:39 PM on June 10, 2009

I flagged both 'cause we should know better than to do newsfiltery stuff like this.

Also, what dios said.

While I'm at it, "get off my lawn."
posted by notyou at 12:40 PM on June 10, 2009

Well, I guess it is a good thing I now know his political affiliation

Yes, it's completely irrelevant that a white supremacist should choose the Holocaust Museum as opposed to, say, Chuck E. Cheese.
posted by Combustible Edison Lighthouse at 12:42 PM on June 10, 2009

Yes, it's completely irrelevant that a white supremacist should choose the Holocaust Museum as opposed to, say, Chuck E. Cheese.

MURDER IN THE BALL PIT.
posted by xmutex at 12:43 PM on June 10, 2009

Well, I guess it is a good thing I now know his political affiliation and motives because I was having a hard time figuring out whether this was a tragic event I should play up until I knew how it fit into the appropriate pigeon-hole.

Yeah, you're right. Let's leave his political motivations out of this. Maybe his motivation to open fire in the Holocaust Museum was something completely unrelated to politics. Christ.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 12:45 PM on June 10, 2009

Well its still here.

as someone who grew up next door to our wonderful muslim neighbours who just happened to have an extensive collection of writing on the holocaust thus reading Babi Yar at age 9,

.

that is all

I'm tired of prejudice, small mindedness, racism, casteism, xenophobia, and utter sheer stupidity of easily available firearms (how many families have been shot by their sires?)

the world is fucked as we know it, the media is desperately holding up a potemkin village pointing to the slightest rise in the Hang Seng or a drop in oil prices as a sign

come now, lets get real here in the matrix

"what is good for GM is good for the country"

remember that?

well, lets take that as a signal of "no, it fucking ain't gonna get well until we all do some serious overthinking of the plate of beans we call our global society and its frameworks, principles and fundamental assumptions and redesign the obviously broken systems"

meh
posted by infini at 12:46 PM on June 10, 2009

In related news:

Wright: "Them Jews" won't let Obama talk to me
posted by Joe Beese at 12:47 PM on June 10, 2009

I have to say that I just don't get this country anymore, and what's worse is I don't much care to. 89 years-old? Shouldn't you be nursing one or more aching body parts and taking a personal inventory of a lifetime of regrets at that age, along with an appreciation of those times when fortune has fallen your favor?

Shit and damn.
posted by metagnathous at 12:48 PM on June 10, 2009