A weird form of lumpenism is making its way into nooks and crannies of the world. With bridges burnt and the ‘middle’ smothered to silence, it’s just binaries around. The result: ghettoization of our ‘thought’ and ‘being’, a gaint leap backwards. Each one of us runs a risk of getting caught up in a crowd (that bunch of hoofing locusts ready to devour the seemingly ‘other’). Amidst all this what has been lost is mental freedom (including the thinking individual himself) and what has come to fore is a ‘cult of stupidity’–hackable, manipulable and programmable. It is a bodeful sign. The moderate ramifications are already well known: Trump phenomenon, Brexit saga, emergence of neo-nazi groups like ‘Generation Identity’ in France, cow vigilantes in India etc. And now the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand is a telling illustration of what the worst consequences could look like.
Clash of Civilizations
With the crisis of ‘liberal story’ intensifying, Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory is gaining more currency among many Western politicians, pundits and plebeians alike. Based on the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ it regards the clash as ‘inevitable’. Now that Fascism and Communism have been brushed towards the ideological fringes, a new form of confrontation is supposed to be in offing: ‘Western Civilization’ versus ‘Islamic Civilization’. As much as that, the ‘conventional understanding’ of the issue ends exactly here for the crowd (thus stoking thoughtless action and retribution). What the crowd in West fails to appreciate is its culpability in pillaging the Islamic world under the pretext of democratization, liberalization and human rights. Obviously the wily project boomeranged badly, leading to devastating wars, instability, sectarian clashes, messed up economies and polities apart from generating a huge wave of Muslim immigration into ‘white man’s land’. Today if a white man throws multiculturalism to wolves or peddles xenophobia/Islamophobia he should not to be dubbed as naive but as apathetic and hypocrite.
Internet culture
The New Zealand mosque attack suspect Brenton Tarrant’s live-streaming of the attack on Facebook demonstrates how internet goes into scripting of a tragedy (propagandization and radicalization) and then how it dramatizes and sensationalizes it. Once again it proves that instead of uniting mankind internet has in fact ensconced civilizational biases. The idea of ‘global community’ as envisaged by Facebook seems farfetched. Rather social media has exposed the sheer rawness of human psyche, sparked off self-fulfilling prophesies and reinforced the feeling of vulnerability–real or imagined–among communities. There is a famous experiment in social psychology called Stanley-Milgram Experiment which proves that people can agree with opinions that aren’t their own. Internet has further facilitated this ‘instantaneousness of opinion formation’ and fickle-mindedness of people. In turn–from Trump’s America to Modi’s India–the politics that divides and draws sustenance from myths and emotions has received a shot in the arm. It is a dangerous trend.
Failure to condemn from the top
This is the result of populism. Populist politics is not detached from a rabble, it identifies with it and speaks its language. There is a wilful amnesia towards nuance and a criminal apathy towards appreciation of complexity and diversity. For populists climate change is a Chinese hoax and all economic woes are due to immigrants. Take the case of Trump. He no doubt criticised the dastardly Christchurch attack but it sounded like plain lip service, given his consistent anti-Muslim rant and hatred for immigrants. It is not a coincidence that Brenton Tarrant was consistently trying to convince many Americans to carry out the attack. As Aljazeera reported, Brenton wore a grin at the courtroom. What does it signify? Mental derangement or lack of fear or supposed political acquiescence/patronage? Probably all of these at the same time. When people commit crimes with such impunity the politics needs to turn the searchlights inwards. Such an introspection today exposes the ceremonial silence of leaders (their delayed responses as well). Unless unequivocal and timely condemnation comes from the top we may not see an end to political violence anytime soon.
All said and done, this act of barbarous wickedness displayed at Christchurch should be condemned tooth and nail. At the same time it should be underscored that there is no ‘Islamic peril’ that the West needs to be saved from. It is all fiction, a slyly hatched plot. Terrorism is terrorism, it can emanate from any side and rather than challenging mere Western Civilization it challenges the Global Civilization as a whole.