The Charleston Shootings & the Incoherence of White Supremacy…

The Charlelston shooter, 21 year-old Dylaan Roof, who murdered nine churchgoers in cold blood, has allegedly told police that he almost didn’t go through with the killings because his victims at the church gathering had ‘been so nice’ to him during the hour he’d been in their presence.

Yet he went through with it anyway, which just shows how far gone he already was and how deeply indoctrinated into the white supremacist dogma. Ignoring for now any conspiracy theories (I’m sure many are talking along false-flag lines by now), the 21 year-old claims to have been trying to spark a race war or ‘a civil war’ (in his own words).

Like all ‘white supremacists’, Dylaan Roof’s thoughts and ideas make no sense and are simply incoherent.

“You’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” he says regarding Black people in general (suggesting essentially a deportation to Africa), and then photographs himself wearing the flags of Apartheid South-Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), indicating that he celebrates white-European colonisation and domination of Black Africans in their own lands (and presumably therefore slavery too).

In his case, being an evidently unstable and very young man, you don’t expect a coherent world-view; but older white supremacists are just as incoherent and stupid. You could almost have more respect for such people if they simply just said they were racist and didn’t bother trying to apply confused logical arguments or philosophies to their racism. Because such attempts at logic or reason can only ever come across as retarded. Quite how African-Americans are supposed to be ‘taking over’ is difficult to work out.

Any sense of ‘racial superiority’ is inherently nonsensical of course, but white supremacy has always been particularly stupid in places like America, Australia, Israel or Canada, for example, because white races are all *immigrants* to those lands and aren’t the indigenous inhabitants. The same being the case of course in the historic cases of South-Africa and Rhodesia – both oddly alluded to by Dylaan Roof. The idea that anyone could be the dominant race in a land their immigrant ancestors stole from the indigenous inhabitants (whether it’s American Indians, Australian Aborigines, Arab Palestinians or Black South-Africans) and yet *still* spout stupid nonsense about Black people ‘taking over’ just demonstrates the astounding lack of intellect.

Seriously, it would be better to just declare ‘Hey, I’m racist and hate Black people’, instead of trying to couch it in some kind of intellectual or historical construct.

The whole *point* of America, as I understood it, is that it is supposed to be the great melting pot of immigrants from various origins, who’ve all come to the great Promised Land of opportunity and freedom; any perceived racial identity associated with the ‘nation’ is, again, nonsense, because the Indians are the only ‘native’ race of America,  just like the Aborigines are the only indigenous people of Australia.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist groups in the US, confirms the majority are white supremacist groups. It is estimated that there were 784 such groups active in 2014. In South Carolina alone, there were 19 groups, such as the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the League of the South. ‘Aryan’ and Nazi ideologies underpin the philosophies of most of these groups (along with an unhealthy dose of conveniently-tailored Christianity), who are particularly intolerant of African-Americans but also extremely anti-Jewish, with also varying degrees of hatred for Mexicans, Latinos and Muslims, among others.

The FBI has even warned that law enforcement institutions are being infiltrated by the Far Right; read the PDF here. If true, this might even partly explain some of the police brutality towards African-American citizens.

White supremacist organisations and homegrown terrorism are thought by experts to pose a bigger threat to the US than any foreign-based terror groups such as Al-Qaeda or ISIL, partly because (1) all Islamist-related terrorism is based on grievances in the Middle East and not on domestic American issues and (2) because most Islamist terror plots on US soil have been false-flags. But most of the mainstream media coverage in recent years has focused on the partly illusory threat of international Islamist terrorism on US soil and ignored the domestic threat posed by Far-Right groups and militias; which is why something like the Charleston shooting appears to sneak up on people out of the blue.

Dylaan Roof was clearly highly influenced by the online propaganda of such organisations, most of whose members (being a lot older than him) are probably perfectly happy with the 21 year-old’s actions and with his talk of starting a new ‘civil war’. Most of these, we can assume, aren’t willing to go out and actually commit radical acts, but they nevertheless hold and spread that type of view in the hopes of setting off a violent conflict.

You only have to look at various websites and even more so at comments-sections of various websites to witness this seemingly widespread belief-system, with some even advocating a return to Segregation.

‘I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state,’ the killer writes in his manifesto, ‘and at one time had the highest ratio of Blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.’

Being just a kid, he obviously isn’t old enough to developed a coherent world-view or level of intellect; Dylaan Roof is simply someone who was brainwashed and weaponised by the ideas and attitudes of older Far-Right agitators seeking to indoctrinate. And it is difficult to know for certain how many such people there are; but something like this Facebook group cropping up almost immediately after news of the shootings doesn’t do much to put people at ease.

It also has to be said, in all honesty, that some particularly Right-Wing conspiracy theorist content (of which there is SO MUCH) on the Internet is a significant factor. There is often an underlying xenophobia or racist undercurrent to many Right-Wing conspiracy theorists who frame everything in terms of the white, ‘Christian’ American ‘way of life’ being under threat and so much of the information is bound up in Biblical language and ideas.

This tends, for one thing, to make a great deal of their information virtually unreadable and their thinking unpalatable. It also often plays into (deliberately or not) the Right-Wing supremacist agendas, and in terms of indoctrination it can be particularly effective because a lot of the specific information is often correct (even if the racial, cultural or religious ideas aren’t).

It also never ceases to amaze me how many self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ in America are also racial supremacists, using the cloak of Christianity to somehow include their White Power nonsense; as if there was no contradiction at all in American white supremacists of European descent justifying their hatred by citing the spiritual ideas of a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew and Semite who preached in the Middle East.

Take those famous intellectual vacuums, the Westboro Baptists who’ve gleefully claimed they’re going to picket the funerals of the nine innocent victims of the Charleston shooting. Um… what? To prove *what*? To express… what?

Other than support for the shooter, I can’t work out what else picketing the funerals is supposed to imply? Yet the Westboro comedy troupe, like the KKK and others, have somehow managed to take a spiritual philosophy centered on ideals of brotherhood and forgiveness and use it as a mechanism for philosophies of hate and division.

How did ‘Christianity’ become a weapon of the right-wing in America anyway? Christianity, in its original, purest form, is one of the least right-wing things I can think of at the source; in fact, the ideas of Jesus are about as revolutionary and far-left in spirit as you could get. In theory, Jesus and the Gospels make more sense as a go-to philosophy of the Left, yet instead are typically regarded as the preserve of the Right.

Fittingly enough, however, it was in the reaction of the Charleston shooting survivors and the family members of the victims that we actually saw some real ‘Christianity’; I was watching news coverage and a reporter was talking to two children who’s mother was among the nine victims and they were talking about forgiveness. The reporter was astonished, asking them if they could possibly forgive Dylaan Roof so quickly for murdering their mother.

In that reaction, that sentiment – which I personally cannot fathom – is one of the most clear embodiments of pure Gospel Christianity that I’ve ever come across.

Contrast that to the actions of the Westboro Baptist and other extreme ‘Christian’ groups in the US and it’s almost impossible to imagine they’re both drawing their way of life from the same scriptures.

The hijacking of those scriptures by Right-Wing groups is essentially the same thing as the Koran being hijacked and weaponised by various extremist Islamist groups and ideologies such as Al-Qaeda. As far as this specific mass murder in Charleston goes, it is possible, as some are suggesting, that the shooting was a staged operation by intelligence agencies as part of some broader agenda.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

But whether it was or wasn’t, there’s no question that these Right-Wing militias and white supremacist groups and ideologies exist in parts of America, and that the Charleston shooting is entirely in keeping with their ideologies.

And that therefore events like this are inevitable.