Today I saw the best and worst of what people can be. The best, first-hand; the worst, mostly via Facebook. I live in Dunedin, which is about a five-hour drive away from Christchurch, southward down the coast. I’m going to start with the bad thing, even though it happened later, so that I can end with the good thing. Quite apart from the fact that the good thing deserves the attention more, I believe that’s the way the world is going; courage is, gradually, conquering hate.
Today New Zealand got in the world news for about the worst possible reason. Our decades-long run without a public mass shooting has been broken, and the number of people killed in political terrorist acts in the entirety of our history has gone up from three to over 40. In Christchurch, this afternoon, during the Friday prayer, a white man walked into the Al Noor Mosque in Riccarton in the central city, sprayed the place with bullets, and fled. Soon afterward, a white man walked into the Linwood Islamic Centre a few kilometres across town, and began shooting.
Co-ordinated attacks by two shooters, or did the Riccarton shooter get in his car and drive to Linwood? I’ve heard both, and at a time like this I think it’s especially important to be mindful of the limits of one’s knowledge. The police also found at least one car bomb and defused it. The number of people killed is currently estimated to be in the 40s. Several of them are known to be refugees from the war in Syria, some of them children. One man has been arrested and charged with murder. Three others have also been arrested; last I heard, one had been released and the other two were being questioned. Presumably the police cordoned off the area and took in anyone who happened to have a firearm in their car.
I gather the shooter livestreamed the attack, and also published a manifesto online, just in case anyone was in doubt that the main motive for terrorism is notoriety. I understand that the local internet providers have been working to take them down, and good on them. Let me copypaste a Facebook post by a friend of mine who’s seen the manifesto:
Here’s a few quick facts from this shooter’s manifesto that he published online, so that you don’t have to read his pathetic excuses and unintelligent hate-speech.There’s literally nothing else of value. Don’t read it.
- He isn’t even a Kiwi. He’s an Australian citizen who was here temporarily. A little ironic considering he’s anti-immigration.
- He originally planned to attack the mosque in Dunedin, because of a video on Facebook that he saw from the Otago Muslim Association.
- He was most influenced by Candace Owens. I really hope that she faces the consequences of her disgusting rhetoric over this.
- He supports Trump’s nationalist and anti-immigration stances.
I have not seen either the video or the manifesto. I have seen the shooter’s name. It will never cross either my mouth or my fingers. May it be swiftly forgotten.
Now for the good thing. I didn’t hear about the shooting until this evening because, when it was happening, I was regretfully heading back to work after attending the Dunedin branch of the School Strike For Climate. It was astonishing. I’ve been in many protests in my time, helped orchestrate a fair number of them, and I have never, ever seen one as well-organized and inspiring as this. I’m pretty sure I have, at times in the past, tutted and waxed superior over the maturity of teenagers, for which I humbly apologize. I won’t do it again. I think the last time I saw George St filled like that was when they threatened to take away Dunedin Hospital’s neurology unit, and before that the war on Iraq. And this was put together by high school students.
For all that pundits make money touting this or that existential threat to civilization that we all need to be shaking in our shoes about, climate change is the only one that’s both real and imminent. (Nuclear war is a genuine danger but a remote one. Peak Oil is a secondary consequence of the same institutional stupidities that are causing climate change. Nothing else qualifies.)
It’s already begun; New Zealand has had a “hundred-year flood” every year for over a decade now, two of them right where I live and two more just out of town on the Taieri Plain. I knew when last winter was unseasonably mild that an unprecedentedly hot summer was on its way; I even went around telling people there were going to be big bushfires in Australia. I didn’t predict they would come as far south as Tasmania, and I certainly didn’t count on them hitting New Zealand as well, but both things happened. These events are a tiny foretaste of what is to come if we don’t take drastic action.
New Zealand doesn’t account for much of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but because of our small size we’re a good location for experimental social changes that the world can then scale up from. After both our major political parties embraced neoliberalism in the 1980s, neoliberals elsewhere in the world pointed at us – prematurely, it turned out – as a success story. A decade ago we got the opportunity to lead the way as developers of smart green technology, and we squandered it and hung our economy on milk instead. Can’t we please be world leaders again?
It’s easy to fall into despair over the magnitude of the problem, and that despair is a major contributor to the political inertia that has caused it. That’s why today’s demonstration brought tears to my eyes. Today I saw teenagers with a better handle on grassroots political organization than my generation ever had. Today I saw where the political will can be found to solve this problem. Today I know there is hope.
On this day 2062 years ago, a determined posse of political activists, deeply concerned for the integrity of the Republic of Rome, publicly murdered the man at the hub of the changes that they feared, and so brought about the very crisis they had hoped to avert. Their act fell short, however, of the ineffectuality of terrorism, because Julius Caesar was a genuine centre of power. Terrorism by definition strikes at the powerless; it is the epitome of cowardice. And it never succeeds. Mohandas Gandhi in India eschewed violence, and India broke free of the British Empire. The IRA in Northern Ireland embraced violence, and Northern Ireland remains a British province. The numbers across history bear out the lesson of these two examples; violence, even against legitimate targets, reduces a political movement’s chances of success by over half. Terrorist violence guarantees failure.
So, out of the action today that deserved the world’s attention and the action that hijacked it, I know which one I believe represents the future. I stand for courage, I stand for truth, and I stand for hope.
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