Another Massive School Shooting -- in Russia

[rogue06]

Reuters just reported 15 dead and another 24 wounded.

Source: Neo-Nazi gunman kills 13 during Columbine-inspired Russian school shooting

A neo-Nazi gunman killed at least 13 people — including seven children — in a Russian school on Monday, while wearing a swastika shirt and celebrating the cowardly Columbine school shooters.

Artem Kazantsev, 34, also wounded at least 21 others, including 14 children, before shooting himself dead in a classroom in School No. 88 in Izhevsk, local officials said.

The mass killer — once a student at the school — was shown lying in a pool of blood, dressed all in black with a red swastika in a circle drawn on his shirt in the attack during Rosh Hashanah.

The weapons found with him had braided keychains that made clear he was inspired by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — who also killed 13 during a 1999 assault on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

One had the word “Columbine” in English, while the other had “Eric” and “Dylan,” according to photos shared by the ASTRA news agency.

He also appeared to have several pistol magazines with him, with the word “hatred” scrawled in red, according to the outlet.

Investigators have said two security guards and two teachers were among the victims, adding that the attacker “committed suicide.”

It was not immediately clear how old the child victims were, but the school has children from grades 1 through 11.

According to investigators, Kazantsev “was wearing a black top with Nazi symbols and a balaclava” and was not carrying any ID.

“Checks are being made into his adherence to neo-fascist views and Nazi ideology,” said Russia’s Investigative Committee, which handles major crimes.

“Currently investigators … are conducting a search of his residence and studying the personality of the attacker, his views and surrounding milieu.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described it as “a terrorist act by a person who apparently belongs to a neo-fascist organization or group.”

“President [Vladimir ] Putin deeply mourns deaths of people and children in the school, where a terrorist act took place,” Peskov said.

“The president expressed his deepest condolences to all those who lost their loved ones, their children in this tragic incident, and wished the soonest recovery to those wounded in the inhumane terrorist attack,” Peskov said.

One of the gunman’s uncles, Mikhail Kazantsev, told ASTRA that the killer “was mentally ill, he was being treated.” However, he refused to elaborate.

The attack came just hours after a gunman shot a recruitment officer at an enlistment center in Siberia, leaving him fighting for life.

In May 2021, a teenage gunman killed seven children and two adults in the city of Kazan. In April 2022, an armed man killed two children and a teacher at a kindergarten in the central Ulyanovsk region before committing suicide.

Russia has seen several school shootings in recent years.


Source

© Copyright Original Source

[*The article above contains graphic although blurred images*]

They didn't mention that the shooter used a modified a pair of flare guns so they would accept and fire bullets.

[Sparko]

Waiting for them to claim he was Ukrainian or a Ukrainian sympathizer.

[seer]

Waiting for them to claim he was Ukrainian or a Ukrainian sympathizer.

Well he was wearing Nazi symbols, and we have Nazis in Ukraine...

[rogue06]

Waiting for them to claim he was Ukrainian or a Ukrainian sympathizer.

Or maybe start addressing their own neo-Nazi issue

Source: Russia's long history of neo-Nazis

ome have pointed out the far right received only 2% of the vote in Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary elections, far less than in most of Europe. Others have drawn attention to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the efforts of the Ukrainian state to protect minorities like Crimean Tatars and LGBTQ+ people, who are subject to brutal persecution in Russia.

What has received less coverage is the Putin regime’s own record of collaboration with far-right extremists. Even as Russian diplomats condemned “fascists” in the Baltic states and Kremlin propagandists railed against imaginary “Ukronazis” in power in Kyiv, the Russian state was cultivating its own homegrown Nazis.

The roots of neo-Nazism in Putin’s Russia

The origins of this relationship date to the late 1990s, when Russia was shaken by a wave of racist violence committed by neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. After Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, his regime exploited this development in two ways.

First, it used the neo-Nazi threat to justify the adoption of anti-extremism legislation, a longstanding demand of some Russian liberals. Ultimately, this legislation would be used to prosecute Russian democrats.

Second, the Kremlin launched “managed nationalism”, an attempt to co-opt and mobilise radical nationalist militants, including neo-Nazis, as a counterweight to an emerging anti-Putin coalition of democrats and leftist radicals.

Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth organisation notorious for its campaign against postmodernist literature, made the first move by reaching out to OB88, the most powerful skinhead gang in Russia.

This cooperation expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called “Nashi”, or “Ours”.

As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.

During 2005, Nashi’s thugs staged a series of raids on anti-Putin youth groups. The most violent attack, which left four left-wing activists in hospital, led to the arrest of the assailants. They were released after a visit to the police station from Nikita Ivanov, the Kremlin functionary who supervised the regime’s loyalist youth organisations.

The resulting scandal provoked a reconfiguration of “managed nationalism”. While Nashi distanced itself from football gangs, its radical militants migrated to two rival Kremlin proxies, the nationalist “Young Russia” group and the anti-immigration “Locals” group. These organisations became bridges between the neo-Nazi subculture and the Kremlin.

Neo-Nazi leaders implicated in killings

As I demonstrated in a recent study of the Kremlin’s relationship with Russian fascists, these linkages made possible a bold experiment to create a pro-Putin neo-Nazi movement.

In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (“Russian Image”, or “RO” for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.

With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media.

Its leaders held televised public discussions with state functionaries and collaborated openly with Maksim Mishchenko, a member of parliament from the ruling party. Perhaps most shockingly, RO also hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin.

The problem for the Kremlin was that RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO’s production of a two-hour internet “documentary” titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime.

But they could not ignore the arrest on murder charges of Nikita Tikhonov, an ex-skinhead and cofounder of RO. Tikhonov was the leader of BORN (“Fighting Organisation of Russian Nationalists”), a terrorist group that committed a string of murders of public figures and antifa militants.

The victims included the renowned human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Tikhonov was convicted of their murders in 2011.

The police investigation revealed that Goryachev regarded BORN and RO as the armed and political platforms of a neo-Nazi insurgency, on the model of the IRA and Sinn Féin in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The court materials show that as Goryachev was reporting to his Kremlin supervisors, he was also advising Tikhonov about the choice of murder victims. Goryachev was found guilty in 2015 of ordering the murders of numerous people, including Markelov.

The adverse publicity wrecked the careers of some of the Kremlin’s Nazi promoters, but veterans of RO flourished in the propaganda institutions of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.

One of them is Anna Trigga, who worked for the Internet Research Agency, the trolling factory that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and tried to foment anti-Muslim hatred in Australia. Another is Andrei Gulyutin, editor of the website Ridus, an important platform of pro-Putin Russian nationalism.

Promoting neo-Nazis overseas

No less important is the role of neo-Nazis and other right-wing figures in Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine.

In 2014, RO’s Aleksandr Matyushin helped to terrorise supporters of the Ukrainian state in Donetsk on the eve of Russia’s proxy war in eastern Ukraine. He went on to become a major field commander.

Today, RO’s Dmitrii Steshin, a celebrated war correspondent for a mass circulation tabloid, disseminates lies blaming Ukrainian false-flag operations for atrocities committed by Russian forces.

The Kremlin’s cultivation of domestic neo-Nazis is matched by its promotion of neo-Nazis in the West. Some have amplified anti-Western conspiracy theories as “experts” on RT, the Kremlin’s cable TV propaganda channel.

Others have served the Kremlin as “monitors” who applaud the conduct of fraudulent elections. Meanwhile, Rinaldo Nazzaro, an American, has been quietly running The Base, the international neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, from an apartment in St Petersburg.

Putin’s weaponisation of neo-Nazis was always a risky strategy, but it was not irrational. Unlike mainstream nationalists, who tend to support the idea of free elections, neo-Nazis reject democratic institutions and the very idea of human equality. For a dictator dismantling democracy and constructing an authoritarian regime, they were ideal accomplices.


Source

© Copyright Original Source

And while everyone focuses on Ukraine's Azov Regiment, nobody says anything about Russia's own "Russia National Unity" (RNU) and their affiliates.

74407e1a-01ee-4c15-84eb-136d80da22de.jpg
Note the Swastikas in their symbol

Since 2006 they have split up into smaller independent groups.

The Wiki entry:

c2ac9e34-b801-466e-bb2a-999366239308.jpg

[Ronson]

Just another reason to disband brick-and-mortar schools. So long as soft targets exist there will be psychotics going after them. This is one soft target that doesn't need to exist.

[rogue06]

Just another reason to disband brick-and-mortar schools. So long as soft targets exist there will be psychotics going after them. This is one soft target that doesn't need to exist.

Classes by computer showed they were a total failure.

[Ronson]

Classes by computer showed they were a total failure.

That doesn't make sense. What was the school district? Who ran it? What was the curriculum? That is one broad brush to say 'all classes by computer are a failure.'

[Sparko]

Classes by computer showed they were a total failure.

Yeah kids need some sort of social interaction. That's why homeschoolers usually belong to some sort of group or chapter so that kids can get together, make friends, etc. Maybe if public school would adopt some of that it would be able to handle remote learning better.

[rogue06]

That doesn't make sense. What was the school district? Who ran it? What was the curriculum? That is one broad brush to say 'all classes by computer are a failure.'

Just look at the results. IIRC, one study found that D and F level work being done rose dramatically for just one thing. And that was from those who bothered. Millions of children just stopped attending.

You can find scores of articles like this

Source: ‘Not Good for Learning’

New research is showing the high costs of long school closures in some communities.

When Covid-19 began to sweep across the country in March 2020, schools in every state closed their doors. Remote instruction effectively became a national policy for the rest of that spring.

A few months later, however, school districts began to make different decisions about whether to reopen. Across much of the South and the Great Plains as well as some pockets of the Northeast, schools resumed in-person classes in the fall of 2020. Across much of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, school buildings stayed closed and classes remained online for months.

These differences created a huge experiment, testing how well remote learning worked during the pandemic. Academic researchers have since been studying the subject, and they have come to a consistent conclusion: Remote learning was a failure.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll cover that research as well as two related questions: How might the country help children make up the losses? And should schools have reopened earlier — or were the closures a crucial part of the country’s Covid response?

A generational loss

Three times a year, millions of K-12 students in the U.S. take a test known as the MAP that measures their skills in math and reading. A team of researchers at Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research have used the MAP’s results to study learning during a two-year period starting in the fall of 2019, before the pandemic began.

The researchers broke the students into different groups based on how much time they had spent attending in-person school during 2020-21 — the academic year with the most variation in whether schools were open. On average, students who attended in-person school for nearly all of 2020-21 lost about 20 percent worth of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

Some of those losses stemmed from the time the students had spent learning remotely during the spring of 2020, when school buildings were almost universally closed. And some of the losses stemmed from the difficulties of in-person schooling during the pandemic, as families coped with disruption and illness.

But students who stayed home for most of 2020-21 fared much worse. On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window.

“We have seen from this recent study just how large the gaps are,” Roberto Rodríguez, an assistant secretary in President Biden’s Education Department, told me.

hFCAFF8C4.png

The findings are consistent with other studies. “It’s pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning,” said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the co-author of another such study. As Matthew Chingos, an Urban Institute expert, puts it: “Students learned less if their school was remote than they would have in person.”

One of the most alarming findings is that school closures widened both economic and racial inequality in learning. In Monday’s newsletter, I told you about how much progress K-12 education had made in the U.S. during the 1990s and early 2000s: Math and reading skills improved, especially for Black and Latino students.

The Covid closures have reversed much of that progress, at least for now. Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian. “This will probably be the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation,” Thomas Kane, an author of the Harvard study, told me.

There are two main reasons. First, schools with large numbers of poor students were more likely to go remote.

17467683-f506-435c-9304-b1cfe379fb4b.jpg

Why? Many of these schools are in major cities, which tend to be run by Democratic officials, and Republicans were generally quicker to reopen schools. High-poverty schools are also more likely to have unionized teachers, and some unions lobbied for remote schooling.

Second, low-income students tended to fare even worse when schools went remote. They may not have had reliable internet access, a quiet room in which to work or a parent who could take time off from work to help solve problems.

944b84d9-a23d-4096-be5b-282abeecad44.jpg

Together, these factors mean that school closures were what economists call a regressive policy, widening inequality by doing the most harm to groups that were already vulnerable.A catch-up effort

Congress has tried to address the learning loss by allocating about $190 billion for schools in pandemic rescue bills. That amounts to more than $3,500 for the average K-12 student in public school.
Rodríguez, the Education Department official, said he was encouraged by how schools were using the money. One strategy with a documented track record is known as high-dosage tutoring, he noted. Sessions can involve three or four students, receiving at least a half-hour of targeted instruction a few times a week.

Kane is more worried about how schools are using the federal money. He thinks many are spending a significant chunk of it on nonacademic programs, like new technology. “I’m afraid that while school agencies are planning a range of activities for catch-up, their plans are just not commensurate with the losses,” he said.

By the time schools realize that many students remain far behind, the federal money may be gone.

What might have been

Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were. Extended school closures appear to have done much more harm than good, and many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020.

In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of Covid was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed. Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks.

In October 2020, Oster wrote a piece in The Atlantic headlined “Schools Aren’t Superspreaders,” and she told me this week that the evidence was pretty clear even earlier. By the fall of 2020, many people were no longer staying isolated in their homes, which meant that reopened schools did not create major new risks.

The Washington Post recently profiled a district in Colorado where schools reopened quickly, noting that no children were hospitalized and many thrived. “We wanted it to be as normal as possible,” Chris Taylor, the president of the school board, said.

Hundreds of other districts, especially in liberal communities, instead kept schools closed for a year or more. Officials said they were doing so to protect children and especially the most vulnerable children. The effect, however, was often the opposite.

Over the past two years, the U.S. has suffered two very different Covid problems. Many Americans have underreacted to the pandemic, refusing to take lifesaving vaccines. Many others have overreacted, overlooking the large and unequal costs of allowing Covid to dominate daily life for months on end.


Source

© Copyright Original Source

And note the paucity of reports and articles saying it was a success.

[Ronson]

Yeah kids need some sort of social interaction. That's why homeschoolers usually belong to some sort of group or chapter so that kids can get together, make friends, etc. Maybe if public school would adopt some of that it would be able to handle remote learning better.

Schooling can take on all sorts of different characteristics. Children from a street can share assignments, or a neighborhood, it can be done with siblings or through a church. It doesn't have to be a single child glued to a pc for 8 hours a day. That doesn't sound like the best setup to me.

My complaint is that the brick-and-mortar schools we have now are run by Leftists with an agenda with teachers unions, with kids graduating that can barely spell but get their gender pronouns right. They're in settings that allow bullying, that can traumatize kids or make them into Columbine terrorists. They are soft targets for psychopaths, and where we lose the most innocent lives that have barely begun. They are costly, they are indifferent to individual needs, they try to make policies where 'one size fits all.'

I would like to see communities start experimenting with different models and see what they come up with.

[Ronson]

Just look at the results. IIRC, one study found that D and F level work being done rose dramatically for just one thing. And that was from those who bothered. Millions of children just stopped attending.

You can find scores of articles like this

...

And note the paucity of reports and articles saying it was a success.

I've only glanced at this so far, but it sounds like a situation where the brick-and-mortar curriculum was simply sent home because of covid. That's not a recipe for success.

I'll look into this some more, but I still believe that there is a better way of schooling than crowding strangers (and I do mean "crowding") into a classroom to be instructed by strangers with unknown motivations.

[Sparko]

Schooling can take on all sorts of different characteristics. Children from a street can share assignments, or a neighborhood, it can be done with siblings or through a church. It doesn't have to be a single child glued to a pc for 8 hours a day. That doesn't sound like the best setup to me.

My complaint is that the brick-and-mortar schools we have now are run by Leftists with an agenda with teachers unions, with kids graduating that can barely spell but get their gender pronouns right. They're in settings that allow bullying, that can traumatize kids or make them into Columbine terrorists. They are soft targets for psychopaths, and where we lose the most innocent lives that have barely begun. They are costly, they are indifferent to individual needs, they try to make policies where 'one size fits all.'

I would like to see communities start experimenting with different models and see what they come up with.

Yeah I agree. At least at home the parents might be able to keep track of what these teachers are doing. I think giving vouchers to families so they can use tax money on private schools might also help. Public schools need some real life competition. That might get them to actually care about education and not just indoctrination.

[Mountain Man]

Classes by computer showed they were a total failure.

It was a failure of the teachers who threw a bunch of web links and busy work at the kids and then made themselves unavailable while they enjoyed an extended paid vacation. At least that's how it went in my school district.

[Gondwanaland]

Well he was wearing Nazi symbols, and we have Nazis in Ukraine...

So do we in the US. And Russia has them too which made that excuse for their invasion fall particularly flat.

[rogue06]

So do we in the US. And Russia has them too which made that excuse for their invasion fall particularly flat.

I read seer's reply as if it were in-between sarcasm tags