John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY SUZIE DAWSON IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“Misguided Spying and the New Zealand Massacre
“While intelligence agencies were looking in all the wrong places, a conspicuous target slipped through the cracks”
I don't find this very enlightening. In fact, not at all.
The man was not a "terrorist" in the strict meaning of the word, and I do think we should keep to strict meanings. We have enough careless language in the mainline press and from politicians around this topic.
The man is a mentally-ill, violence-prone person who has had easy access to weapons and whose thoughts have been deeply stained by the 24-hour-a-day mainline press’s talk of terror and Muslims and migration of groups of people, talk which reflects the very words of some of our most senior politicians.
It is hate-speech in the true sense of the term, and it is not only permitted, it is actively supported at the top in most Western governments today. It is the United States which provides the driving force in this. All of its allies feel the pressure to go along to get along.
Trump deserves direct blame here with his genuinely foul public statements feeding the fires of the press. It does seem to me that the United States has become something of a 24-hour-a-day hate machine, just spewing out filthy thoughts about refugees, migrants, Muslims, Palestinians, and others. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Elliott Abrams, Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham, the late John McCain. There is a long list of such people in high places.
I do think a sick person such as the New Zealand killer – in fact, he is no different to earlier American mass killers in Las Vegas or Florida or the Columbine high-schoolers - might have done something like this, sooner or later, no matter what the target. The human population, as a matter of course, turns out a certain number of such dangerously faulty minds regularly, just as it does people with bad hearts or other grave disabilities.
“Might have,” I stress. Because it is intense hatred and fear which generally tip the potential danger of a seriously disturbed person into certain horror.
It really has nothing directly to do with politics or religion. Politics and religion only feed the fears and provide the targets for such people. And, of course, politics and religion provide the underlying reason why we see and hear so much hatred and ignorance coming from the United States and influencing everyone. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is, why is that so?
It is our political and journalistic environment which causes some sick people to focus on groups like Muslims, and of course our politicians and press never accept any responsibility.
It is not the job of intelligence services to seek out people like this. It never has been. Nor should it be.
That is a completely faulty line of thinking, and indeed it only lends support to further massive intrusion by Western governments into the lives of ordinary citizens. We are already approaching the point where citizens in the West have come to resemble herds of cattle with identifying tags stapled to their ears.
In our Western world of intense and growing disparity, such practices advocated only reinforce the social-control tools of the privileged few who effectively rule over us, and they only further shred what is left of our pretenses about democracy.
Since our world is also one now of almost constant war and threats and destructive acts by the privileged running the United States, such practices advocated also serve to keep supporting the flimsy excuses they use to justify it all.
Local society everywhere should be working at identifying such dangerous people. Identifying them early. Keeping them from weapons. Perhaps treating them to the extent that treatment is possible. I’m sure countless interactions in schools and with police and with others over the years would have made this man obvious.
Psychopaths tend to reveal themselves quite early and in some well-understood ways, two being a fondness for arson and the violent abuse of animals. And why was he allowed access to weapons? And he obviously earlier had practice with his weapons, as at shooting ranges, being quite proficient at his grisly work. Were none of those around him listening or looking?
No, there is no easy way of preventing such events, and advocating for more intelligence intrusion is not an answer. Stopping the violent outpourings of hatred and ignorance with which we live would sure help, besides being a worthy goal on its own, but responsibility for that goes right to the top.
People just seem to miss the fact that what the United States government has done in the Middle East over the last couple of decades is precisely the same kind of behavior as this New Zealand mass killer, only it is magnified tens of thousands of times by the might of the military and security services. Almost no one shows any concern. Nor is there any serious opposition to the horror of a couple of million killed, millions more reduced to desperate refugees, and whole societies left as chaotic, smouldering ruins.
I am reminded of the hideous murder and disposal of Jamal Khashoggi, an intelligent and thoughtful and decent man. He was hit on the head, cut up alive, and burnt in a backyard barbeque – all on the premises of the official Saudi consulate in Istanbul, all of it the work of a gang of high-ranking loyalists to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. We know absolutely who had to order that, even the CIA confirmed that it was so, yet we see the President of the United States and others, smiling and shaking hands with him regularly, and he is at absolutely no risk of facing justice.
That is perfectly symbolic of the entire ethical and moral tone of Western world today, a tone for which the leaders of the United States bear major responsibility in their vicious drive to control the globe. You cannot create wars and coups and terrors, lying about them every step of the way, and not have disastrous effects on almost everything.
Just look at America’s truly ugly behavior right now in Venezuela. The privileged in Washington use every dirty trick they can think of to assist the privileged in Venezuela, even to destroying the food in the fridges of millions of ordinary people and to carelessly taking the lives of the vulnerable with their life-saving machines unable to function at home or in hospitals or nursing homes. Cutting off most of a nation’s electricity for many days literally is an act of terror, genuine terror.
Or how about the week-in, week-out, taken-for-granted extrajudicial murder of legally-innocent people? Again, the work of the United States, and it goes virtually unquestioned.
It’s literally in the air for all of us to breathe, this non-stop bullying and threatening and killing and hate. What would anyone expect its effects to be on violence-prone, sadly unbalanced minds?
