Possibly Relevant

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From Radio Free Europe in 2002,

The Chechens of Russia’s North Caucasus region are a tight-knit society based on extended families, or clans, guided by a council of elders. These clans, which traditionally lived together in a single village, are called “taips.” During Stalin’s infamous deportation of Chechens to Central Asia — and even now, as war and social unrest have forced thousands of Chechens to leave their home villages and scatter throughout the republic or abandon the region altogether — the links remain strong between members of a single taip.

…Chechnya’s younger people, Arutyunov continues, are disoriented, and are now looking for new authority figures — a search that in many instances leads them to the radical Wahhabi Islamic sect or leaders of criminal rings. The generation gap has gotten so severe, Arutyunov says, that there have been several reported cases of young Chechen men beating their fathers to death. Just a few years ago, this was the strictest taboo in the Chechen social code.

Pointer from Mark Weiner, who must have stumbled on my blog posts on his book and sent me an email.

5 thoughts on “Possibly Relevant”

  1. So, unfortunately… this is just another chapter in the feud… as you say, ‘have a nice day’…

    • AB, I’m hoping you’re trying to be clever. If not, then you misunderstood. The ‘wish’ was for white males who were not otherwise connected to a group with clan-like thinking. These boys may have been acting independently, but I am skeptical of that assessment, due to their background and their apparent association with radicalized Islamic groups. So, no, he did not.

  3. Some interesting thoughts here from Juan Cole:

    http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/fathers-sons-chechnya.html

    “This sounds to me like a classic father-son struggle, and a tale of adolescent rebellion, in which radical Muslim vigilanteism appears mainly as a tool for the young men to get back to their father, and perhaps to wipe off the shame they had begun feeling about the family having been on the wrong side of the Chechnya fundamentalist uprising.”

  4. Compare the reaction of the mother’s of the Newtown shooter, Oikos shooter and Virginia Tech shooter to the reaction of the Boston Bombers’ mother.

    “They were framed”! Therefore killing or arresting them was unjustified and their death and capture must be avenged.

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