This article isn’t a criminal ballistics analysis of another U.S. based white supremacist act of terror. It’s not about the names of the shooters or the victims. This article is about the conscience of the soul of a nation numbed to state-sponsored terrorism, the complicity of the body politic. This is about complacency, plain and simple.
Let’s start with three prefacing points. In January 2016 we published an article on Youth Ki Awaaz, Obama’s Move To Control Illegal Gun Sales Is Welcome, But Here’s What It Completely Misses – in it, we enumerated the same talking points that are being peddled today and exactly why they wouldn’t work. What we failed to mention in the aforementioned article was duly pivotal and criminally overlooked in the discourse. In August of 2012, WIRED published an article regarding then Obama’s U.S.Department of Homeland Security dismantling the committee to oversee right-wing, more so “white-” wing domestic terrorism: DHS Crushed This Analyst for Warning About Right-Wing Terrorism.
Then-President, Obama, didn’t have any affiliation or constituency extending from any right or white wing cells. Obama and the Democrats in the U.S. Congress simply folded under the pressure of the Republican who spun the reports which indicted segments of their white wing constituencies. At the time, there was barely a whisper about this cowardice nor was there any meaningful amplification of the prospect of violent white misogynistic extremists which had already had swelling rosters and acting out lethal violence.
Who Came First – The Chicken, The Egg Or The Rapist?
Now, when the current occupant of the White House with multiple rape narratives against him (one might use the designation “allegations”, but let’s commence from a culture of believing women) did the same thing to a previously defunded DHS domestic terrorist unit, the news was everywhere. Who came first the chicken, the egg or the rapist? Perhaps, the United States spends so much time looking outside of itself that it might be high time for some introspection. This is a good commencing point for our journey into the nexus between the War on Terrorism but, for the purpose of this introspection, we’ll don it as the Terrorist War On Humanity, the military-industrial complex, the 2nd Amendment, the violent fanatic response to Feminism (s), the new wave of Black power, U.S. corporate neoliberal media, activism and performance branding and White Terrorism.
How Old Is White Terrorism?
Maybe two more caveats. This is important or nothing moving forward will make any sense. White Terrorism, in multifarious alabaster spectrums of domination, is more than four hundred years old in the colony of what is now the United States. The fact that the United States exists is the bare minimal support in substantiating this claim.
The second is that this is a warning. Do not fall for commercial based party-driven media trending optics. Do not allow the United States lens into how it controls the body politic through the minds of the masses to become your outward view, as often as the yardstick for the U.S. becomes the stick, the rest of the world is beaten over the heads with. The U.S. provides a lot of sticks to states throughout the world, and where sticks don’t work, it provides automatic weapons. This connects to the essence of the 2nd Amendment – fear of oppressed identities rising up and claiming liberation from their oppressors.
It sounds historically abstract but, in reality, it finesses cohesive complacency like no autocratic state could ever dream of coalescing. Don’t believe me, wait for three weeks from now and aside from electoral talking points, swing back around to inspect if there have been any alterations to the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, four senselessly ideological acts of madness within seventy-two hours. These are only the ones covered by the media. They do not account for lethal intimate partner violence, the murder of Trans, Indigenous women, Black and women across melanin-rich diasporas in the United States.
Despite four acts of terrorism in three days, there are no travel warnings to the United States.
Do Something: Another White Misogynistic Terrorist Massacre
Our first – and last speech to the U.N., was delivered on the threshold of the 2014 Isla Vista misogynist massacre, where numerous women at University of California Santa Barbara were assassinated by an entitled white male, who murdered random women because women he forced interaction with denied him access to their agency, time and bodies.
Perhaps, in memory of this, we might commence with an epos in tribute to the enduring legacies of those cut down by anthologies of gun violence since that 2014 meeting. A meeting of complacency was held (nothing was accomplished). Despite all the recognizable faces, groups with a mass agency, who showed up to take selfies convertible in an engagement where the backdrop offered a sense of legitimacy, nothing was accomplished.
We called for the indictment of the United States and a Convention Against Femicide and an Anti-Misogyny Treaty.
There was no support whatsoever. Instead, there were lots of hashtags. How many forgotten hashtags in that country – the United States adorn forgotten public memories of the entire lives abridged between 2014 and today. Today, we stand in witness of the dawn of other people’s tragedies. Colleagues, neighbours, friends, lovers, partners, families, waking up to the first day where the bridge between the possibility of now and the previous day shattered expectation in the infamy of misery. Human beings. Let’s say it again. Human beings. Not headlines. Not talking points. Not opportunities for signalling. Not polling points. Human beings. In such maybe we start with the gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin massacre. Trayvon Martin. Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha.
It Didn’t Start With Trump
It started two hundred years ago. The modern epidemic also didn’t start with Trump; it started with the ‘War on Terrorism’ or the ‘Terrorist War on Humanity’. It started with the incubators of what the media donned “the refugee crisis,” which would become a tacit moniker for xenophobic justification to stockpile arms, offsetting that both Democrats and Republicans had configured and continued international trade policies of mass exploitation, in return for the occupations exported in international free trade zones, foreign direct invest supranational extralegal sweatshops, they didn’t tell the people they were going to leave in paucity.
Instead they, Republican and Democrat, in typical fashion offset the poverty inducing policies on the “other.” Those who would be fleeing the violence in those zones as we listed in a Youth Ki Awaaz expose four years ago titled When Companies Fighting For The Cause Of Girls End Up Destroying Them:Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano in “Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas“, the social program that lost all funding because of these programs, in conjunction with the loss of minimum wage labour for survival fuelled slave wage jobs, induced poverty, with no safety net for social security leading to Violence Against Women and transgender people in both Guatemala and Mexico.
Let’s go back to the Terrorist War on Humanity in conjunction with the variable proxy conflicts, which incubated mass displacement of the vast majority of Muslims.
You remember the one where Bill Maher relentlessly propagated the idea that “Muslims” couldn’t assimilate to the so-called Western culture–no word about the four centuries in an eon of white imperialism and colonialism, forcing Black and people of color under violent imposition to learn the violence of the white man, in their own lands or the mass kidnapping, forced resettlement of the Transatlantic slave trade, now that trade has evolved and exported. The animus though remained home for the Black and Brown identities, framed as “entitled” a pejorative for those necessitating “entitlement” programs, meaning basic social services for their displacement in the U.S. economy. Women of colour make up two-thirds of the working poor.
(In between today’s domestic white supremacist massacre in El Paso, Texas and the succeeding paragraph, there was another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, nine people murdered and twenty-seven injured in a white supremacist misogynist terrorist attack in minutes).
Continuing from the propaganda misogyny of the Terrorist War on Humanity, with the transcendence of preeminence in global waves of mediated Feminism in response to reclaiming narratives from the racist xenophobia and Islamophobia, where “other’ ing” amalgamated brown skin as a collective identity for “terrorist.”
The feminist groups utilized literary publications, blogs, cinematic culture, and social media, where the cyber-terrorist misogyny reverberated in renewed licences, in fear of losing the position in a culture of entitlement. There was objectification and dehumanization of women’s agency, self-determination and autonomy of physical, psychological, emotional, ideological and spatial boundaries, i.e. basic human rights.
The largest modern wave of contemporary Feminism turned commercial whitewashing, which thrum’d rejoinder in a renaissance in resistance coalescing intersectional overlaps between third-world feminists, pan-African and Pacific Island, South, Middle Eastern and Pan-Asian feminists, post-colonial feminists, Black feminist, Muslim feminists, Indigenous feminists, (Afro-) Latinx and Chicanx, Labor feminists, LGBTQ+ and Trans activist/feminists, across globalized and international distinctions. Then, there was one massive paradigm shift where anti-occupation Palestinian feminist could not be contained to alienated fringed margins. Sequentially, one phrase incited the white mass-misogynistic terrorism like no other: “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
Even tonight in the United States, CNN’s acting journalists such as Jack Tapper are comparing the murder–the consistent savagery of white misogynistic terrorism to the anti-apartheid movements in Occupied Palestine.
Let’s return to the feminist uprising, preface every elemental prodigy of the modern socio-cultural architecture aforementioned liberation struggle in the U.S. by the design of Black, Indigenous, diasporas of women of colour. Black and women of colour, making up the majority of the world. Add the fight against sexual violence, rape and rape culture, introduce self-determination of ones correct gender pronouns, against the backdrops of social medias inaction to address misogynistic terrorism–then MRM’s and MGTOW. Factor FOX, U.S. white-wing, alt-white commercial medias amplification of white supremacist misogynistic ideologies and entitlements you have the foreground.
Republican treason to domestic terrorism. Democratic placation to Republicans. The idea of middle ground negotiating on elemental first generation basic civil, political and economic human rights issues–in combination with special interests backing, incubated the space that ideological terrorism has a rationale that goes beyond oppression.
Then, you have I.S. without correlating suppositional conception to the Terrorist War on Humanity. Neoliberal exploitation of the blowback of neoliberalism’s wars.
Here, you have a redacted summation of the equation that gave birth to what we see before us today — unabridged mass impunity for white entitled domestic terrorism.
Follow the same trajectory virtually anywhere, supplanting the movements with domestic feminist groups/liberation movements, the neoliberal incubated hysteria of mass invasions of refugees and look at the conclusions: England, Cameron, May, Johnson; India, Modi; Brazil, Bolsonaro; Italy, Five Star; Egypt, el-Sisi; Kenya, cont, undemocratic rule of Kenyatta. The list goes on ad nauseousness.
White supremacist institutionalism will not abate white supremacist nationalism, will not prevent white supremacist terrorism. White supremacy in misogynistic spectrums between neoliberalism, colonial complexes and realpolitik enforcement do not cancel one another out. They are mutually dependent polarities that combine in U.S. white exceptionalism(s): social-Darwinism, gentrification, gender white racial patriarchy, protected by the military-industrial complex and its social anxiety-inducing propaganda wing of the NRA. Now, everyone has a gun.
In totality, you have multifarious socio-cultural and economic controls of inequality of access, predatory inequity of sustainability, disenfranchisement, marginalization, mass policing, commercial incarceration, misrepresentation of narratives, the whitewashing of recent history and current affairs, all mutually dependent in reinforcing the illegitimate justifications for the use of violence.
While there’s many comparisons and juxtapositions of Trump to Nazi, Germany, this to is somewhat counter-intuitive in revising the U.S. long, long his-story of pseudo nativist– settler violence, and continuing from a culture of impunity in which all the illegal violence, tragedies, massacres of the Terrorist War on Humanity have yet to see any accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity, lending the way for a culture of complacency to U.S. aggressions.
Number 45, the contemporary occupant of the White House, is a racist but that determination doesn’t go far enough. Acknowledging why it is merely the surface recognition without acknowledgement of the depth of scope, is part of the problem and solution.
Racism is a violent world view of pseudo-nativism objectified memory enacted in the depraved opportunism of the white elites ego. It trickles down to control the variable stratus of spectrums of whiteness. Enacting, a violent white worldview, enabling a violent worldview, to incite the violence necessary to reinforce the predominance and domination of that white upper-caste worldview in ideological self-determination, by inspiring those who would premeditate extralegal violence in support of that worldview, that’s another word. It starts with a “T.”
That’s another designation. That’s another indictment. That’s another reason to impeach. Yet, still waiting on the opposition.
When that word combines racism in treason toward the protection of the entire body politic in upholding the (small c) U.S. constitution, playing off of years of neglect to the cultural infrastructure of the U.S. (small c) social conscience, that becomes an entirely different jurisdiction of obligation for the masses.
It places upon those empowered an obligation to check power from within the prescribed powers of the U.S. constitution. When those with such responsibility within the scope of their elected position fail to exert that power, well, that is also racist.
So we can’t pretend in the United States that we didn’t arrive where we are without a century of tepidity to the cause which racism underwrites which is violence for the purpose of subjugation and objectifying exploitation nominally defined as “privilege.” More so criminal extortion. Words matter.
Here, we find ourselves again at this crossroads of a racist, treasonous and terrorist chapter in the history of U.S. impunity to abate or halt such racist, treasonous violence.
Yet, this is also our moment in that history to conclude that codex holistically.
Our Fourteenth Amendment moment. Our Fifteenth Amendment Moment. Our women’s suffrage moment. The deviation is that instead of passing an amendment, to enact a restraint, we are called upon to overturn one in extension with the previous contentions born out of settler histories never extended to the protections they supposedly were codified to guarantee.
Whereas the Thirteenth Amendment gave birth to new modalities of tortures enacted by de jure and de facto forms of upholding white supremacy through Jim Crow, Jane Crow, Ze Crow, industrial, commercial mass incarceration, labour exploitation, extrajudicial violence, we are expiring these manifestations of the state.
Where women’s suffrage never contended with the disenfranchisement of Black, Indigenous Womxn and Womxn of Color even today–we are going all the way.
Where the Civil Rights Act, Great Society, Title XI, Americans with Disabilities Act, Affirmative Action and Violence Against Women Act, decades later after they were fully enacted, failed their promised purpose of accessibility and equity within the spirit of the law, we are now called to make a consummate and holistic change that extends to the incongruent statutory nature of these laws for the whole protection of the most vulnerable people by a criminal element within and outside of the government.
In the purpose of preserving the civil, political, economical and above all the innate human rights of individuals and communities, of all identities residing in the United States, we must act and must not expect anyone but, the oppressed to act.
We must not fall for the charade of those in power, those empowered by those in power or those with a mass agency, underlined by financial largess, special interest, corporate interest, commercial media interest, party interest, to live up to the obligation of the people’s interest, the oppressed people’s interest. If they were to act, they would have acted, but they refused to act, so let’s not pretend that they will, because it’s an election year. If they needed an election to protect, to act logically, to go beyond the call of duty they demand on the oppressed to exert, they’ve had ten elections since the 1960’s the beginning of the year of the gun, to act. They haven’t.
We are called not to reform a system of oppression or who it preserves the right to enforce disenfranchisement upon, through diverging power dynamics, enforced through lethal force; we are called to abolish its mechanism of enforcement of that violence.
We are called to uproot the means in which the system empowers extralegal, extrajudicial, ideological and terrorist facilitation of the most violent of its founding modalities.
Save the soundbites.
Conserve the talking points. Save the lists of nations that don’t suffer from three mass–four mass misogynistic massacres three by white supremacists in one week. Not even considering that two Chicago based women who were grassroots activists were also gunned down this week, among other overlooked depravities of gun violence this month.
Save the pretence that this is all just a contemporary machination and that it was better before or that it will defuse itself with an election.
Reserving all the polemics about the logical inference is the variation between dependent and independent clauses in historical interpretations and applications of the 2nd Amendment.
We won’t even approach the censorship by omission between the state of white supremacy, gun violence, misogyny and the military-industrial complex.
Earmark the historiography on why the United States needed the 2nd Amendment in the first place and how that superstructure connects to the violence witnessed in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In Gilroy, California, twenty people, so far, have been murdered in an anthology of cold blood in El Paso.
Save it all, because you will need these talking points again and again, and again.
You will need them because children being gunned down in school isn’t enough to inspire the conscience of a nation–nothing will. Aiyana Jones, Tamir Rice, Sandy Hook. Nothing.
Don’t expect an enumerated list of juxtapositions between mass shootings, dates or body counts.
So long as we expect those in power to do something, those who benefit from the privilege and the luxury of their position to expect the status quo, confined to the rules and etiquette of the system, to do something, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Brutality reinforces a point that shouldn’t have to be made twice.
In Sudan, the cost of bread and fuel inflated (one-dimensional analysis), they recalled the government. You don’t have Omar al-Bashir saying, well the government needs to do something. You don’t have his henchmen saying, “Well, those with some power should do something.” You don’t have people saying will a cabinet minister spoke to the ministry, and we’re waiting for Omar al-Bashir, who has not acted in the interests of the people in two decades to do something in the people’s interest. They, the people of Sudan, acted. They paid a heavy price for their actions with their bodies, but they were consistent, strategic and persistent in their action. They didn’t expect a dialectical with their oppressors to bring about an ethical change of heart. They didn’t say well; the rent is due in a week–this isn’t even acknowledging that Sudan doesn’t have a celebrity-based activist infrastructure that funnels millions of dollars in pseudo commercial advocacy–all of which is money that could be paying the rent of those who will do something consistently.
Nike isn’t going to pay the rent of those who would put their bodies in front of the batons. “Sacrifice everything” is a mantra of commercial product consciousness, where the articulation is the extent of the marketing nexus. Puerto Rico, the corrupt and impotent governor, makes remarks that illuminate him for who he is, he gets pulled through interminable, relentless action of the people. In the United States, you have three epidemic underpinnings of the status quo brutality in one week, yet people are relying on those who have done nothing–when we position nothing, I mean nothing to correspond strategically, sustainably, equivalently, to the level of violence, intelligently to commensurate the savagery of white misogynistic supremacy in logical actions.
Let me save you the repeated ad nauseam equivocating of mainstream media.
The gun’ man’ used the same gun as the previous shooter, who used the same gun as the previous shooter, of which the next shooter will use the same gun as the next shooter, all of which pointing out hasn’t stopped a single shooter or sale. Most of these white supremacist mass misogynists have legally stockpiled their weapons. Psychological background checks work, maybe in a country where people have access to comprehensive, affordable mental healthcare and qualitative intervention. Most of the mass shooters do not have extensive psychological background registers that would prohibit them from purchasing weapons. Apparently, according to a source that went to high school with the Dayton shooters, he had a “rape and kill” list as a student, and not accessible notation was registered.
Close the gun show loophole; they’ll purchase weapons in conventional legal establishments or from the shadow economy, where there is no shortage of access to firearms. The fact that Texas allows automatic open carry, means nothing, because California, where the previous shooting happened this week, doesn’t have the same policies, nor did New York, Chicago, Connecticut, or Florida (Pulse/Parkland). The shooter carried a self-styled white supremacist manifesto, reading it, of similar scripted codexes in the anthology of violent hate crimes, and it has done nothing to stop it–sharing it is irresponsible because that is exactly what the shooter wants.
Come the next workday, sharing Bill Maher’s neoliberal white supremacist drivel in one-dimensional political analysis, sharing Hassan Minaj’s analysis, sharing Trevor Noah’s, Stephen Colbert’s monologue, Anderson Cooper’s editorial, has not stopped a single shooter yet. In fact, if any and all of these men refused to return to work, galvanizing the same of their colleagues, which sequentially culminated into mass action, it would do more than hearing the same talking points again and again. Marketing moral efficacy, the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth time around, will not stop it, in fact, it becomes, sadly desensitizing creating complacency when the same action that has done nothing is employed the ninth time around.
Lastly, lawmakers, those who are in a position to do something, elemental to this equation, who have volunteered the power through the invested interest of the people to do something, need to do something more than saying we have to do something.
Positioning that one side is blocking anything from happening two, three, decades on, means that these lawmakers lack the courage to do something big enough to stand up for the value of lives lost. We need something that hasn’t been done. We need lawmakers to take a stand, beyond the performance floor sit in a pizza party. We need them to stand outside of the U.S. Congress, every day, all day, until the other side moves, because the symbol of their action inspires the indemonstrable resolve of the cause.
If you need to shut down the government, shut it down. Don’t talk about what is so-called rational when you sit back and rationally watch innocent people gunned down, again and again, doing nothing, again and again. If doing the same thing, over and over, is your definition of “rational” then you know where we stand. If they need to sit out, to sit in, every day on the front stairs of the House, in every House and Senate across the country as a united front than so be it, do it. Do something.
Shut It All Down
Isn’t that what they do when they pass sanctions to “inspire” the body politic of another nation–in the hope that it drives the citizenry of that country to stand up and move on their government. Well, let’s skip a step in the equation and have those who never feel the pain of that burden take on that burden, putting their money where their mouths are.
It’s not a “tragedy” that we stand here, again, it’s a human rights scandal of mass proportion.
The only difference between Assad, Bashir or some autocratic regime, is that where they do the ordering themselves, indicting themselves in the face of the global community, illuminating themselves for who they are as opportunist tyrants, the United States, the duly elected and appointed government, incites and allows extralegal violence to do the work so they, as a system, never stand indicted for the crimes of history they commit against their own people and the people of the world.
Our tenth time calling for so-called leadership to assemble a strategic economic strike and consistent, sustained action with demands over the course of ten years hasn’t worked.