Some things I just don't get

Updated CNN had this on Tuesday:

Lyon, France (AP) - Vandals scrawled anti-Semitic graffiti on dozens of tombstones in Lyon overnight, authorities said Tuesday, the third time a Jewish cemetery has been desecrated this year.

Swastikas and inscriptions with Adolf Hitler's name were painted on headstones in de la Mouche cemetery in this southern French city, the same burial site that was desecrated by skinheads in 1992.

I sometimes try to imagine what must go through the minds of such people, but I always fail. What can they be thinking? I mean that seriously. Do they think this accomplishes something? Do they think it's effective intimidation? Is that even the intent? What is the point? Is it a coward's way of expressing hatred, a way to do it without taking any risks?

Does it make them feel powerful? It's always seemed to me that people who hate ultimately feel powerless, that they feel they have little or no control over their lives and the world around them and wind up attributing that to powerful forces "out there" that are to blame. So is the desecration of a graveyard intended to strike the same chord as desecration of the bodies of the dead? Back on April 8, I wrote

I recall reading a while ago that the existence of funerary practices was one of the things that marked the emergence of a culture, that is, one of the things that defined culture was a means of dealing with death. Most cultures - perhaps all, maybe some anthropologist can confirm that for me - have some tradition of respect for the dead, some rite associated with death. To violate those rites, to violate the dead, then becomes an attack not on the individual person (who is certainly beyond pain and unaware of the event) but on the entire culture of which they were part, branding it as something unworthy of notice or the most basic respect. It's an attack on the very core conceptions on which people's views of themselves and the world around them are built. No wonder, then, that desecration of corpses has been used to taunt enemies throughout history and no greater wonder at the visceral reaction such treatment produces.

What that means is that such things as dragging bodies of the dead through the streets or the meant-to-be-horrifying hanging of charred corpses from a bridge are expressions of power, their intent purely psychological. They can be used by the powerful to demonstrate that power or by the powerless in an attempt to assert power (or at least to feel powerful), but the root impulse is the same.

Is that what's going on here?

Alternately, do they really understand the meaning of what they're doing? Is it just the thrill of getting away with something outrageous? French police blame "some" of the incidents on young Muslims. Let's assume those are based on anti-Jewish hatred born in conflicts in the Middle East. But what of the rest? Certainly the 1992 skinheads weren't Muslim, nor are the skinheads and KKK followers here who've done similar things. I recall a case some years ago where a group of teenagers in the northwest US were caught defacing tombstones with swastikas. When questioned by police, they said they had no idea what the swastikas represented, it was just a symbol. As part of their sentence, they were required to learn about Naziism, the holocaust, the death camps. They were, the poor, deluded, ignorant, benighted children, shaken to their very cores.

But I have a hard time imagining that level of ignorance exists in France, not with all the discussion of anti-Semitism events have generated. (Although I suppose we should not underestimate the ability of humans to be astonishingly uninformed. Just talk to your nearest dittohead or freeper, if you can stomach it.) So we're back to the original question: What thoughts go through the mind of a bigot? I still have no real clue.

Updated to say that I realize my reference to hatred being directed at powerful forces "out there" is oversimplified. I was really meaning it to apply to the situation under consideration. But what does seem to be a common thread in all forms of hatred is a perception of threat, of danger, whether that threat comes from, again, supposed conspiracies among powerful forces (e.g., the "international cabal of Jewish bankers") or the "flooding" of one's culture by "aliens" (Asians, Hispanics, whoever), or somewhere else. Indeed, it's probable that a significant part of the hatred of Americans (and yes, it does exist) is drawn from a sense that a globalized, Americanized culture is overrunning, overwhelming, your own traditional ways.

Before I zoom off into an extended philosophical discussion with myself, dragging your along with me, I'll stop.