By Biko Agozino
The massacre in a Christchurch Mosque raises doubt about the
applicability of the theory by Martin Luther King Jr. that injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. White supremacists have been
reported celebrating the shooter as a hero while the shooter hailed Donald
Trump as a hero of white nationalism. Perhaps, white supremacist terrorism is
an exception to the universalistic Ubuntu thesis of Desmond
Tutu which states that I am because we are. Chinua Achebe
also saw postcolonial genocide as a contradiction of African traditional preference
for tolerance of difference.
On further reflection, however, it is clear that
racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence has repercussions that are felt by all
across the world, though not in equal proportions. The white supremacist
terrorist travelled from Australia to go and commit the massacre in New Zealand
and so it may be a good idea to look at conditions in Australia that may have produced
that level of hatred and intolerance and how the repercussions are felt by all to
different extents.
In June 2018, media reports indicated that Australian troops
in Afghanistan displayed
a Nazi flag on their tank and collected killings as trophies. The terrorist
shooter in Christchurch may be the same age as the Australian troops who
identified with Nazism and could admire them. Officials were reported as saying
that such white supremacist ideologies were not consistent with Australia. But
indigenous peoples in Australia say that they have been at the receiving end of
such genocidal
white supremacist violence institutionalized by the settler colonial state
and supported by individual genocidists for centuries.
Irene
Watson applied the indigenous Australian
story of the giant frog to legal theory as an explanation of the survival by
those who governed the land cooperatively for thousands of years prior to being
buried alive by colonizers. Moana
Jackson applies Indigenous Maori theory to critique imperialist scientism
that attributed to Indigenous peoples, ‘warrior genes’, when they were
gardeners without repressive fetishes like the prison for thousands of years
before being criminalized. Chris
Cunnneen, Juan Tauri, Harry Blagg,
and Thalia Anthony, among others, condemn the over-incarceration of Indigenous
people and call for the decolonization of the justice system and the entire
society. Deathscape focuses on the mapping
of Indigenous deaths in custody.
It is a fact that the white male terrorism that claims many
lives around the world also claims hundreds of white Christian lives just as
ISIS violence also claims Muslim lives. That is right, terrorist white men tend
to kill many white men in settler-colonial locations. They also kill white women
and rape them in large numbers in militaristic Australia, the US, Russia, etc.
Homicide being intracultural more than intercultural in most
cases, Indigenous people also kill fellow indigenous people in large numbers
more than they kill people who are not indigenous but they kill fewer
indigenous people than white male terrorists kill fellow white men. Often the
victims are intimate family members, friends or acquaintances with few being
random strangers.
Official reports show that homicide rates in Australia
occurred mainly through stabbing (38%), beating with fists (24%), other means
such as poisoning claimed 15%, while gunshots claimed 13% and 8% of homicide
victims died of unknown causes from 2012 to 2014.
This indicates that the banning of assault weapons by the
government may not be enough to address the threat of white supremacist
violence that has a long history of being institutionalized. Mass violence is
not mainly a problem of individual attitudes or choice of weapons but also a
problem of institutionalized ways of doing violence that brutalize the
conscience of white supremacists who may seek to strike again even against
fellow white men. With 64% of homicide victims in Australia being men who are
also six times more likely to commit homicide compared to women and with 45% of
the killings taking place at home, racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence is a
systemic threat to all.
There were 91 deaths in custody in Australia from 2016 to
2017 with men making up over 90% of the victims and non-indigenous people
making up 60-78% of the deaths in police and prison custody. Indigenous
Australians are over-represented in prison custody at 27% of all prisoners but
non-indigenous Australians make up over 70% of the prisoners.
If angry poor white male Australians knew this, they would
join the struggles to end the colonial system of mass incarceration and oppose imperialist
militarism, racism and sexism which are articulated to escalate intolerance at
the expense of all. Part of the solution may be the establishment of Love
Studies to replace military academies, to study the decolonization paradigm,
and to support reparative justice for Indigenous peoples in the interest of all.
Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana
Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA.
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