A few thoughts on the mass murder in New Zealand.
It is ultimately too much to expect coherency and consistency from a racist murderer, but given that the individual, like most of his ilk, felt compelled to produce a written manifesto to explain his crimes, his words are still revealing of something.
For one thing, it’s been pointed out that the killer praised Donald Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” What’s less emphasized is the full quote. Asking himself the question, “Are you a supporter of Donald Trump?” he answers, “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.”
So consider that even one of the radicals inspired by Trump and the alternative-to-being-right can see that Trump is great as a race agitator but knows he is a terrible leader and policy maker. Would that the Republican Party had as much integrity and common sense as a murdering conspiracy theorist.
The killer refers to his philosophy as “eco fascism.” The use of such a label is considered by some ecology activists to be a smear on the movement, but as with much else in the manifesto, such language itself implies an intention to antagonize – to troll.
Journalists had detected a similar intention in the racist’s inspiration by YouTube star PewDiePie and American alt-right activist Candace Owens (who is black). Again, there is a lack of coherency and consistency, but there is still a common element. This radical Right philosophy, especially in violence, serves to both support and undermine the concept that radicals of both Left and Right have a common philosophy. Both extreme leftists and extreme-right racists hate the generally liberal center more than they hate each other. Liberalism – both the right-wing “classical liberalism” and the more leftist sort developed through social democracy – endorses a marketplace that both socialists and racists find alienating. More than that, the marketplace philosophy is an outgrowth of Western individualist philosophy that both extremes find alienating and destructive to both the community and the ecology. In that regard, the killer’s philosophy has a certain theme in theory that breaks down in practice, as where he says the government system he most admires today is the Communist government in China, which (largely for political expediency) is one of the most business-oriented, and thus most polluting countries in the world, and has taken this course for the sake of preserving their collectivist political system.
However, the shooter’s actions also reveal a certain difference between the two political camps. The shooter claims to represent a beleaguered minority that can only achieve change through violence whereas more and more socialists embrace the “democratic” label in the hopes of achieving change through the political process.
That right there is another area where the shooter’s stated intentions contradict his actions. The killer, an Australian, said that he deliberately used guns to kill civilians in order to spark a gun-control debate, especially in the United States, hoping to radicalize white people who feel their gun rights are under assault. But to make this provocation, he went to nearby New Zealand, which already has strict gun laws. If anything, the point he makes to right-wingers is that this is what happens when a population can’t defend itself against a guy who didn’t care about the intent of gun laws, indeed, at the second mosque attacked, the shooter was driven off by a guy with a gun. (Granted, it WAS one of the killer’s empty shotguns, that a worshiper picked up and ended up throwing through the window of the shooter’s car.)
But even so, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern did call for new bans on semi-automatic weapons in the country. Now did this massacre on the other side of the planet affect the Second Amendment debate in America? Uh, no.
And that’s because, after Sandy Hook, liberals seem to have figured out that the issue is less a debate on the need for gun rights or even the efficacy of gun control. It has to do with the fact that the Republican Party policy is arm-in-arm with the National Rifle Association, which is now more about selling weapons to civilians than protecting the Constitutional right to bear arms. The fact that our debates are more about transient politics than eternal principles can be demonstrated by the point that in 1967, Republican Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed the Mulford Act, which prevented the carrying of loaded firearms in public. At the time, this was supported by the NRA. But then, the radicals with guns were Black Panthers.
The fact of the matter is that the people who agree with the shooter are getting what they want through the political process in the United States, or at least they were before the 2018 midterms. And if such people wish to condemn democracy as flawed, they have a point, but not the one they intend.
So once again, there is a schizoid discrepancy between philosophy and actions, the only common element being a hatred of modernity and the conflation of ethnicity with culture.
On Friday’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, Khizr Khan, Pakistani-American and father of a fallen solider, said, “In this division and hate, there is a foreign hand. Our adversaries wish to sow this hate and this division so that we will continue to fight this for many years to come.” https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/khizr-khan-trump-politically-expedient-for-minimizing-white-nationalism-in-new-zealand-attack-1459232323610 (4:20 into the tape)
Now, Chris Matthews didn’t think to ask Mr. Khan what he meant by a foreign hand. But we can ponder which foreign power would have cause to pursue such a grand strategy. It would have to be a country that, like the white reactionaries, is objectively powerful but considers itself persecuted and outnumbered. It would have to be a country with no sympathy for “cosmopolitan” Western values, instead oscillating between radical autocracy and radical Marxism (and back). It would have to be a country that sees its foreign policy goals as threatened by the Western alliance and the global order it organized, and therefore seeks to undermine that system wherever possible. To that end, it not only would sponsor political parties abroad that seek to end association with the European Union, it would fund gun-rights lobbies, not because they actually care about gun rights in their own country, but because they see that as a wedge issue with high potential to cause division and violence.
Which country would that be? As Nathan
Lane would say, “Do the math.”
And with that –
since this is St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a song to get your Irish up.