Monday, August 5, 2019

More mass murder

You've heard of the Terror in Paris in 1794; this is from the White Terror of revenge against the Jacobins in 1795.


So here we are with a big bonanza of mass murder incidents—two in less than 24 hours, one white boy from North Texas who drove down to El Paso to murder a bunch of Mexican people in a Walmart after dropping a white nationalist manifesto on the public, one white boy from the Dayton metro region who drove into the Oregon entertainment district with his sister and her date to murder the two of them and seven other people, a total of six black victims, with no manifesto (but his Twitter feed identified him as a "leftist" and atheist supporter of Sanders or Warren and advocate of socialism and indeed of gun control, according to the pretty trustworthy heavy.com). What they obviously had in common was the race and gender and age group of the killer and weapons capable of filling an unforgiving minute with an awful lot of lethal rounds, and an argument for gun control.

Less than a week after the murder of three people of maybe varied ethnicity at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Santa Clara County, California by a local boy of "Iranian and Italian descent" after he opened an Instagram account complaining about the "hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats" who came to the festival and pushing the ancient anti-Semitic tract Might Is Right by "Ragnar Redbeard", but the FBI is refusing to comment on whether he might have had an ideological motive.

I'm not going to play the game of arguing over whether all three were or weren't really white nationalist hate crimes, though I can't forbear noting that the "leftist" Dayton shooter was remembered by high school classmates as less than woke in regard to girls—


—but I have to insist that our institutional right wing is involved with this, on more than one level; in the first place when there's no claim too dishonest for them to make about the need for gun control:
(You'll note that under those rules there was no ban on semiautomatic rifles, although the laws on carrying said they were only for hunting and guns and ammunition had to be kept separate until the user arrived at the hunting location; as of May, the laws have been revised to put Switzerland in compliance with EU regulations so that it can continue to participate in the Schengen agreement, some semiautomatic weapons are banned, and fairly onerous permits will be required for large magazines.)

But even more in their insistence that white terrorism mustn't be studied or even acknowledged as a thing, that you mustn't "politicize" something even if the perpretator has already politicized it with a political manifesto, that it must be treated as an individual aberration, the fruit of "mental illness" (they don't care how much they stigmatize the real mentally ill), going back at least to 2009, when rightwingers mounted a successful attack on the DHS counterterrorism analyst Daryl Johnson and hounded him out of his job because he was working on domestic terrorists of the right, the ones who have mounted virtually all the terrorist attacks that have taken place in the US for a long time, which never stops looking since the advent of Trump like a confession that there's a relationship: when Trump talks about an "invasion" at the Mexican border and a shooter acts to stop it, and Fox News cheers on the nightmare about how the "white race" is about to be "replaced":

Because nobody at Fox News would ever dream of practicing violence—of course not!—but they just can't stop themselves from talking about the same issues.
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