September 22, 2013.

Kenya Mall Attack: Death Toll Rises to 59

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

NAIROBI, Kenya----The terrorist siege of an upscale Kenyan shopping center by a group of gunmen, already responsible for 59 deaths, continued into a second day Sunday as soldiers and police tried to corner the attackers inside the mall while evacuating the wounded.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

Kenyan officials said that they were making progress in securing the building as the death toll rose. Occasional gunshots could be heard throughout the morning.

He picked up the children's history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you----something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?

Saturday's attack started shortly after midday when about a dozen gunmen burst into Westgate mall in the capital, opening fire and throwing grenades in a terrorist attack claimed by Somalia's al-Shabaab militant group.