"Joy and pleasure are as real as pain and sorrow and one must learn what they have to teach. . . ." -- Sean Russell, from Gatherer of Clouds

"If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right." -- Helyn D. Goldenberg

"I love you and I'm not afraid." -- Evanescence, "My Last Breath"

“If I hear ‘not allowed’ much oftener,” said Sam, “I’m going to get angry.” -- J.R.R. Tolkien, from Lord of the Rings

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Who Could Have Predicted This?

The white supremacist right wing is insisting that Dylann Roof has nothing to do with them:

“If starting a race war is what this kid is about, he did it in the worst possible way,” said Kirk Lyons, a prominent lawyer who has defended Ku Klux Klan members, supporters of the old southern Confederacy and a notorious Holocaust denier.

“I’m a Christian,” Lyons added. “I consider the congregants of black churches my fellow Christians. These are the last people you want to hurt.”

On far-right online comment forums, avowed white nationalists and white supremacists substantially agreed, worrying that the Charleston killings might become an excuse for the government they hate to arrest them, crack down on gun ownership and suppress public displays of the Confederate flag many of them revere.
(Emphasis added.)

I suspect we can see the real reason they're distancing themselves: they certainly don't want any closer scrutiny.

While they're claiming no knowledge of who Roof was and swearing that he had no association with anyone in their movement, they're dodging the question of who's responsible for creating the environment:

Whether Dylann Roof had a serious agenda or was just a deeply disturbed individual using the language of racial hatred to justify an irrational act, it is little mystery where he derived his ideas. News reports suggest Roof told either his friends or the police he meant to incite a race war – a term frequently thrown about online in response to the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri last year or in Baltimore in April. In the website manifesto, the author referenced the killing of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager from Florida who was shot by a neighbourhood watch leader three years ago.

A picture on Roof’s Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket with flags from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia on the front – an association frequently made by advocates of an all-white America, or an all-white republic within its borders. The website containing the manifesto linked to his name was called The Last Rhodesian.

Where do you suppose he got the idea?

When domestic violence does break out, it reliably sparks panic in groups that skirt close to the wind in their rhetoric but do not want to be identified with acts of gratuitous violence.

Ben Jones of the Sons of Confederate Veterans – a one-time actor who appeared on the TV show Dukes of Hazzard – wasted no time denouncing the Charleston killings as “an act of purposeful evil”. He added: “We must not allow the sickness of one demented individual to become that with which the media and our ‘politically correct’ opponents define us. We are the same good-hearted people that we were last week and last year.”

Somehow, the "good-heartedness" of these groups eludes me. What is in stark relief is their moral cowardice.

Footnote: And why does this remind me of Tony Perkins' reaction to Dan Savage's comment, in the wake of a rash of suicides by gay teenagers, that Perkins went to his office every day and sat on a pile of dead queer kids? As you'll recall, Perkins' reaction was so close to hysterical as to make no difference. I smell a little bit of guilty panic here.



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