[Peace-discuss] NYT op-ed on shootings etc.

[David Green]

I do consider the gun culture and the easy availability of guns to be a
relatively primary cause, co-terminus with USFP and the culture of
militarism that goes along with it (many shooters got their training in the
U.S. military.

On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 12:19 PM Brussel, Morton K <brussel at illinois.edu>
wrote:

> This is a complex issue. Belew is not all wrong. incidentally, she never
> alluded to Ruby Ridge or Waco in this piece. There certainly seems to be a
> thread of fear among some of our  (white) population that people of color
> are displacing the purity of “our” stock. Then there is the gun worshipping
> culture amongst our population. The domestic, seemingly mad violence, of
> the recent horrible events may be linked not only to our militarism and
> foreign policy, and from the noxious behavior of federal and state
> agencies, and even from notions of male toughness, but also from our myths
> of “cowboys and Indians” and the thrust for new frontiers. It seems to me
> that there is no single truth here. The reasons for why the U.S. is so
> exceptional in these matters relative other developed countries/populations
> needs to connect many “dots”.
>
> On Aug 5, 2019, at 11:00 AM, David Green via Peace-discuss <
> peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>
> I read this historian's book a couple of times earlier this year,
> perplexed by her recognition that "the war comes home" but her lack of
> clear recognition that our warmaking and USFP are problematic for that
> reason. Thus, it's all about white nationalism. Her description of Ruby
> Ridge places no responsibility on our government's (FBI) aggressive
> policies. She had no particular critique of the FBI's criminal behavior at
> Waco, where many non-whites were killed by the government. Thus, her
> understanding of Timothy McVeigh is lacking; not that such an understanding
> serves in any way to excuse his crime. I fear that the foundational
> emphasis on white nationalism betrays a lack of analytical integrity,
> similar to the manner in which anti-semitism is used. While U.S. warmaking
> and general gun culture provide the context for mass shootings, not to
> mention the entire neoliberal disaster, our mainstream media and historians
> such as Belew seem much more fascinated by the perversities of ideology.
> That's how you make a name for yourself as an establishment historian in
> this political context, and get yourself published in the NYT.
>
>
> *The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism*
>
> Attacks like that in El Paso are not an end in themselves. They are a call
> to arms, toward something much more frightening.
>
> By Kathleen Belew
>
> Dr. Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement
> and Paramilitary America.”
>
> Aug. 4, 2019
>
> Like a number of recent mass shootings, the one in El Paso on Saturday
> came with a manifesto. While authorities are still working to verify that
> this document explicitly was indeed written by the attacker, the evidence
> seems clear: It was posted to 8Chan minutes before the attack, by someone
> with the same name.
>
> By manifesto, I mean a document laying out political and ideological
> reasons for the violence and connecting it to other acts of violence. We’re
> familiar with those. We can recite them. And yet our society still lacks a
> fundamental understanding of the nature of this violence and what it means.
>
> Too many people still think of these attacks as single events, rather than
> interconnected actions carried out by domestic terrorists. We spend too
> much ink dividing them into anti-immigrant, racist, anti-Muslim or
> anti-Semitic attacks. True, they are these things. But they are also
> connected with one another through a broader white power ideology.
>
> Likewise, too many people think that such shootings are the goal of fringe
> activism. They aren’t. They are planned to incite a much larger slaughter
> by “awakening” other people to join the movement.
>
> The El Paso manifesto, if it is verified, ties the attacker into the
> mainstream of the white power movement, which came together after the
> Vietnam War and united Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead and other activists. That
> movement, comparable in size to the much better known John Birch Society,
> never faced a major prosecution or crackdown that hobbled its activity. As
> a result, it was able to sink deep roots into society, largely under the
> radar of most Americans.
>
> This movement is often called white nationalist, but too many people
> misunderstand that moniker as simply overzealous patriotism, or as
> promoting whiteness within the nation. But the nation at the heart of white
> nationalism is not the United States. It is the Aryan nation, imagined as a
> transnational white polity with interests fundamentally opposed to the
> United States and, for many activists, bent on the overthrow of the federal
> government.
>
> The white power movement imagines race war, incited by mass violence among
> other strategies. The core texts of this movement, like “The Turner
> Diaries” or “Camp of the Saints,” aren’t just quaint novels, but rather
> provide a road map to how such violence could succeed. To call them manuals
> is too simplistic: They provide the collective ideas and vision by which a
> fringe movement can attempt a violent confrontation that could lead to race
> war.
>
> These ideas run from the earlier period directly into today’s manifestos.
> Dylann Roof’s document discussed his desire to provoke race war. The
> Christchurch manifesto used images and phrases from the earlier movement.
> In the El Paso manifesto, the anti-immigrant rhetoric is thoroughly
> ensconced in other white power ideas.
>
> To be sure, mass attackers today have a new set of coded phrases, such as
> “replacement,” as a code for racial annihilation through intermarriage,
> immigration and demographic change. But the idea of that threat has been
> central to white power activism for decades.
>
> To people in this movement, the impending demographic change understood by
> many commentators as a soft transformation — the moment when a town, a
> county, or a nation will no longer be majority-white — isn’t soft at all,
> but rather represents an apocalyptic threat.
>
> In a decade of studying white power movement activism, I have learned that
> much of this follows a strategy. First, it claims a state of emergency and
> gives a rationale for the act of violence.
>
> But critically, it also issues a call to action for others. The El Paso
> manifesto does so overtly, and offers tactical details about the attacker’s
> weapons, meant to instruct others. It has specific advice about how to
> choose targets. It has paragraphs that give rote gesture to not being white
> supremacist, even as the document invokes phrase after phrase, ideological
> marker after ideological marker, of the white power movement. These are all
> markers of the genre.
>
> As horrible as the El Paso attack was, this movement is capable of even
> larger-scale violence. The Oklahoma City bombing, its most horrific act to
> date, was the largest mass murder on American soil between Pearl Harbor and
> 9/11. Not only do we still lack a widespread understanding of that bombing
> as an act of political violence, but we fail to reckon with the many
> activists that create shrines to Timothy McVeigh and hope to follow in his
> footsteps.
>
> The history of the white power movement shows us that what seems new in El
> Paso is not new at all. This movement is not newly dangerous because of
> social media; it has been using the internet and its precursors in
> precisely this way since 1984.
>
> Neither is this movement newly anti-immigrant, despite the current
> politics that have inflamed anti-immigrant fervor. White power activists
> have been mapping white homelands and attempting migrations to and defense
> of those spaces for decades.
>
> What is new here is the widespread effectiveness of these actions, the
> technologies of killing that increase the body count and the frequency of
> mass violence.
>
> It is not enough to dismiss mass shootings as horror beyond our
> comprehension. It is our duty to understand their meaning and confront the
> movement that relies upon them.
>
> Kathleen Belew is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and
> the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and
> Paramilitary America.”
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