I like this discussion in that it is getting rather profound about how we go about the killikng of other people. So I thought I should share some thoughts I have about it. I have been reluctant to do this, because it involves introducing a real life mass murderer and a rather fresh massacre:
Anders Behring Breivik (ABB) from the Utøya massacre 22 July 2011, where he shot and killed 69 unarmed and defenseless persons trapped on a small island with him during a one hour and twelve minutes long operation.
Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård gave a speech at the One Year Memory Event after the massacre, and he also published an article in Swedish
Dagens Nyheter and German
Der Spiegel where he discusses the background for the attacks.
In the paper, he also touches upon how killing another person is against man's true nature, and how that resistance must be overcome in order to do it. Among other things, he refers to US Army Forces in Europe during WWII, where it was discovered that only 15-20% of the soldiers firing at the enemy actually tried to kill, the majority only pretended to. They deliberately aimed past enemy soldiers because the resistance towards killing another person was too strong. This problem was much less prominent in the navy and air force, and other situation where you kill from a distance, because then you don't recognise the enemy as single persons.
After the war, a Govermental program developed a highly successful training program against this, which in short involves creating a necessary distance to the opponent through mental training. The other person becomes reduced to a target in the soldier's mind, and must not be thought about as a fellow human being. This is of course old knowledge, Hitler used it when he imprinted his entire people that the enemy is an "Untermensch". Religious fundamentalists/extremists also use this technique regularly when they firmly believe some Deity has chosen them to deal with said Deity's enemies, which then effectively becomes distant and impersonal, reduced to someone without faith and hence without any real value.
There are two way of doing this, either you separate the human beings you are going kill from your world, or YOU choose to leave THEIR world. Anders Behring Breivik (and most school mass killers, I guess) ended up with the second option. Knausgård concludes that ABB must have left our world to be able to massacre 69 people, because it is very unlikely that a person present in our world can bring him/herself to actually do it. In ABB's world, and only there, his actions at Utøya was perfectly logical, even imperative.
Now, metoo, having read Knausgårds paper, mailed me, because in LTROI Oskar also leaves the world. He leaves it order to go with Eli, which also happens to be a mass murderer, and Eli is already separated from the world. Hence there is a possible parallel between Oskar and real life ABB, making FF writing a highly unpleasant task.
My reply to metoo (from the top of my head) was that Oskar leaves our world to enter Eli's. He doesn't choose to kill, he chooses Eli, another person. But still, in his new world he might be turned and becoming part of the perpetual massacre himself, or remain unturned as a close part of it without actually doing it himself (or what do you think, sauvin
).
I have realised that Knausgård actually put words on my own thoughts about LTROI and LS. The stories are not part of our world, they are fiction, part of our imagination and phantasy world. Which is a very different thing. Only if we fail to separate them, things are starting to get dangerous. JAL will of course never kill another person, even if he has an extremely competent imagination about how to do it. On the contrary; his reflections on the topic only serve to strengthen his contact with the real world, since he has reflected so deeply around it.
Knausgård also kills people in his books, he even kills God in one of them (now we are talking nihilism!
), and now his reflections on the topic suddenly serves to strengthen an entire nation's connection to the real world, through pointing out the profound aspects of the differences between the real world and our imagination.
So when people here are able to root for Eli, Theres and Teresa, I believe it's the same thing, people will grown from their reflections. I remember TA's last words in the dvd comments: "If you ever spot Eli, keep her at a distance. She is dangerous."