49 Dead in Christchurch, NZ Mosque Attack

Mike Dwyer says:

Few observations…

I think it’s fair to say that nearly all mass shootings fall under one of two descriptions.

1) Temporary or long-term mental instability. Whatever justifications they might present via video, letter, statements, etc are ancillary to their mental instability.

2) An act of terrorism. The shooter or shooters present a more developed political justification for the actions and may have some sort of group affiliation linked to that.

Obviously, there is some overlap between the two descriptors but I think in the Western world, if the shooter was ‘one of our own’ and more neatly falls into the second category, this is when we have the hardest time with things, because it’s so hard for many of us to conceive of someone in the West being radicalized to that point. “Sure, it happens in the Third World every day, but those people have terrible lives!” we tell ourselves. “They are easily manipulated by someone offering a political explanation for their suffering!” So how do we explain what happened in New Zealand (and has also happened in the United States)?

Around the world, terrorism can come from both the Left and the Right. I’m sure someone will compare the frequency of Left vs. Right terrorism, but I don’t see much utility in that, other than reactive finger pointing. Looking at solutions, it seems like we can come at this from a couple of different angles. One is to go after guns, which the NZ PM has already signaled she plans to do. Again, this seems reactive to me and offers nothing towards root cause solutions, but people need to feel like they are doing something.

A second solution to the threat of radicalization is to combat these ideologies themselves. Every political ideology has some kernel of truth at its core. History is filled with terrorist groups that had real grievances. And beyond terrorists, there are much larger state-level ideologies that are also problematic but were also built on real problems. German fascism had its start in the way Germany was treated at the end of WWI. Communism was a reaction to systemic injustices associated with capitalism. Because those core complaints were quite literally weaponized by bad actors, we tend to forget that they began as legitimate criticisms.

David Frum has suggested that the reason the West was successful in combating communism was not because they complained about it and said mean things about state actors in communist countries. He suggests that the West was successful because they acknowledged some of the complaints of communism and actually addressed them. They created social safety nets. They attempted to smooth out the volatility in markets. They allowed unions to flourish. These actions took wind out of communist complaints more than any military or diplomatic actions we took during the Cold War.

So, when we look at anti-immigration radicalization, is there a legitimate core complaint? Even though I am pretty much as pro-immigration as one can be, that doesn’t mean that the West has been good at it in the last few decades. The European approach to Muslim immigration has been abysmal. I think we have done much better in the United States, but we are also not perfect. We create the conditions in which Muslims are vulnerable to radicalization and then are shocked when our own people react negatively to that radicalization, as though it happened independent of the conditions we created. Beyond that, the relationship between the West and the Middle East has been bad arguably since the Crusades. Just in my lifetime we have engaged in one ill-advised war after another, with no end in sight to the missteps western countries are prone to making. Muslims have legitimate complaints, which leads to their radicalization, which leads to attacks, which then leads to people in the west being radicalized and now they are attacking Muslims themselves. But the root cause is bad foreign policy in the west. Again, we can do better.

All of this talk about alt-right propaganda and internet radicalization is missing the actual conversation that needs to be had. For every radicalized mass shooter, there may be hundreds more that will never kill anyone but will spread their message to the one person that might. How do we address the actual core complaints of these groups while not actually empowering them or letting ourselves be bullied by terrorism? For me, that is the conversation that should be had, not finger-pointing at the Right or Left for their complicity in the entire situation.Report