The Attacks

I don't know what the answer is to the kind of tragedy and horror seen today in New Zealand is, though I've done my best to be and provide some thing of an antidote. But I know damn well what it isn't.

It isn't to step up calls for censorship of the internet. As we all should have seen following the 9/11 terror attacks, the powers that be love to exploit horrific events in order to consolidate their own power. Make no mistake, an internet policed for "hate speech" will likewise be policed for serious criticism and dissent against harmful policy.

It isn't to engage in the mudslinging over who the worse terrorists are: Jihadists or Nazis. Let's agree that they're both abhorrent, and it's logical to assume that each will be more murderous where they have a demographic advantage. Middle America isn't going to see a preponderance of Jihadist suicide bombings, and the Middle East isn't going to see very many alt-right nutjobs shooting up Mosques.

I can't help but wonder if this terrorist shooter had been in Palestine instead of Christchurch, would he have been ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas or something similar? As Eric Hoffer so brilliantly observed, true believers are of a similar sort of nature, however different their beliefs may actually be. Here the similarities are remarkable: young men frustrated by a lack of career and relationship options being exploited and lied to by the elites in their homelands, and so opened to being exploited and lied to by toxic ideologues.

As for the ideologies themselves, they are alike as potently toxic mixes of religious fundamentalism, bizarre conspiracy theories, atavistic tribalism and the most black hearted hatred and bigotry you'd ever cringe were you to be exposed to it. Note the rank antisemitism in both cases. Note also the retrograde and extreme machismo in their constructions and ideas of masculinity and disdain for gender equality and sexual liberty. Having said that, I do agree that the cultural left takes things too far the other way - into a disdain for men and masculinity, which doesn't help. In fact, it hurts. It fuels the underlying sexual anxieties that typify this type of radicalized young man. Feminist pontificating isn't the answer either.

But also, even the worst alt-right and Jihadist nonsense also confronts us with the sins and failings of a globalist imperialist order that has no qualms sacrificing, or at least abandoning, the lives of the kinds of young men who end up radicalized. Among many other lives. While Jihadist terrorism and Neo-Nazism are unequivocally indefensible as belief systems in and of themselves, perhaps there really are underlying factors in what makes these belief systems attractive to certain types of people that are harder to simply dismiss. And maybe they have some legitimate grievances, were they to turn their anger in the right direction and express it in less brutal ways. The right cringes when the left suggests an element of legitimate protest mixed in with militant religious or ideological fervor in the actions of Jihadist terrorists. The left cringes when the same is said of the alt-right. Of course, whatever grievances you may have are lost when you resort to the murder of innocent civilians in the name of whatever cause you happen to espouse.

Which leads me to what I do think the answer is. Not a magic bullet solution, of course. But the best that one person can do in the face of such reckless hate. Against bad ideas that lead to such senseless and tragic slaughter. And that's to use such resources as one has to articulate better ideas. If the perpetrator of this terrible shooting can be said to represent the alternative right, and he most certainly can, then what would its diametric opposite look like?

That's a work in progress, and you can be rest assured that myself and my associates won't be stopping any time soon, and I hope that followers of this blog and its various social media platforms won't either.

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