cosmopolis. Colour of terror

If we didn’t know it already, we must know it now. Violent white nationalism is a global menace and one of the greatest threats to supposedly liberal western societies. It struck mercilessly in Christchurch in New Zealand on March 15 with the massacre of Muslim worshippers in two mosques. The attack has prompted much grief and condemnation around the world. But if it doesn’t provoke a real reckoning with the murderous ideology behind the killing, then we will only see more atrocities of this kind in the future.

When it comes to far-right white nationalism, some media in the West treat its motivations as mystifying and inscrutable, the work of madness and individual perversity. But we know exactly what lies behind these attacks because the killers tell us. The Christchurch gunman posted a screed to the internet before launching his rampage. It echoed the so-called “manifesto” of the Norwegian killer Anders Breivik, who slaughtered 69 children affiliated with the left-wing Labour party in 2011 to “defend” Europe from the pox of multiculturalism and Muslims. The Christchurch gunman claimed to be protecting his “homeland” from “invaders” (ironic, considering both Australia and New Zealand are settler societies where the indigenous peoples have been marginalised or eradicated). He scrawled the names of Luca Traini and Alexandre Bissonnette on his gun, referring respectively to the Italian man who shot six African migrants in 2017 and the Canadian man who killed six worshippers in a mosque in Quebec the same year. He claimed these men as his grotesque comrades in an apocalyptic struggle.

On his gun, the murderer also wrote curious invocations to medieval battles along Christian Europe’s frontier with the Ottoman Empire. He saw himself as a modern-day paladin in an epochal fight not just against Islam, but against those dark-skinned outsiders threatening “Europe”. Much in the same way that Islamic extremists recall ancient battles and prophecies, white nationalists also place themselves in a cosmic, zero-sum war against an implacable “other”.

Islamophobia is a real and deadly force in the West (as it is in India). And it has the tacit approval of leading politicians and public figures, the same people who cried ritual crocodile tears in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Donald Trump is quick to tweet and inflame his followers about the smallest Islamist outrage anywhere in the world; he has never tweeted about white nationalism, nor has he ever repented for bald statements like “Islam hates us” or his endorsement of neo-Nazi marchers as “good people”. Many right-leaning pundits and media celebrities in the US and UK routinely inveigh against Muslims and their faith, arguing that Islam is uniquely ill-suited for the modern era, that Muslims cannot easily fit into modern western societies (despite the immense evidence to the contrary). But more damningly, many writers and intellectuals who have substantial liberal followings are also complicit. The atheist crusader Sam Harris has insisted that “we are not at war with ‘terrorism’, we are at war with Islam”.

But Islamophobia is only one strand in the hideous web of white nationalist pathologies. Recent years have produced a slew of violent killings in places of worship: Sikh worshippers mowed down in a Wisconsin gurdwara in 2012, black parishioners slaughtered by a racist white nationalist in a church in South Carolina, the 2018 killings in a synagogue in Pennsylvania. White male attackers have also targeted migrants (the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla after Trump’s election made headlines in India), women (a Florida man killed two random women in a yoga studio in 2018 in a vengeful, premeditated act of misogyny), and refugees (in 2016, a group called the Crusaders plotted to blow up a housing complex for Somali refugees in Kansas).

This is just a sampling of attacks and plots, and only in the US. The list grows longer when it includes incidents in Europe. They are symptomatic of the rise of far-right political forces in the West, groups and parties that may not preach any gospel of violence, but who peddle the same ideas (for instance, the fascist notion that a “white genocide” is taking place, that whites are in danger of demographic annihilation) that animate murderous zealots. American congressman Steve King famously derided immigration by claiming, “We cannot restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies”. It is precisely that kind of hateful thinking that festers in the minds of today’s white nationalist killers.

Apologists for the far-right point to the neo-liberal economic conditions of the last 40 years (in which incomes for the middle and working class in the West have stagnated and inequality has widened) that have pushed many disgruntled people into the arms of white nationalists. Yes, we should be aware of the material factors that contribute to this sickness. But it is important to confront the ideology head-on.

White nationalism doesn’t just insist that whites are superior to non-whites. It doesn’t just paint non-Christian faiths as alien and unwelcome. And it doesn’t just see harbingers of the apocalypse in every mixed-race couple or Muslim skullcap. At its root, white nationalism derives from the belief that different people cannot live together. Our shared humanity is just a platitude; real identity and community lie only in the tribe.

If societies cannot find solidarity in difference, bigots of this ilk will win.

Kanishk Tharoor

Kanishk Tharoor is the author of Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, a collection of short fiction.

@kanishktharoor

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