Two Years Since Christchurch

In memory of the victims of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, and recent gun violence victims  in Atlanta, Georgia, read an excerpt from From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter by Seamus McGraw, out April 2021.

Chapter 4

“'Tis Not Alone My Inky Cloak”

He had nothing to fear. And he acted as if he knew it. As if he was sure that no one was likely to confront him, and even if someone tried, it would be futile. He was ready, and no one was going to have the power to stop him. He was sure of it. It’d be like blasting away at a flock of magpies dozing on a wire. There’d be dozens of people in that building on this beautiful early afternoon on one of the last few days of antipodean summer, on their knees, huddled together, murmuring prayers in a foreign tongue. So many targets he wouldn’t even have to aim. But not one of them was ever going to shoot back. He was certain of that. Even if one of them had been armed—and none of them were—he’d have the element of surprise and enough firepower to drop them by the dozens before they had time to look up from their prayer mats. He’d be as safe in there as he was in the stark monk’s cell of an unfurnished half-duplex that he called home.

And he knew it.

You could tell that by the easy way his right hand—in those fingerless gloves that are so often a part of the costume—skimmed around the edge of the steering wheel of his aging, car-lot Subaru. There was no tension in his hand as he drove, confidently, but carefully, down the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand. He didn’t speed. He obeyed every traffic signal. Wouldn’t want a ticket. He even pulled over for a moment—as any responsible motorist would—before turning his camera around to take a selfie. He struck a pose, mixing just the right measures of Mad Max menace and faux military bearing, as if he’d practiced it in the mirror. It’s just the sort of thing that a narcissistic, unemployed, friendless gym rat would do, second nature for someone who spent hours almost every day obsessively humping four-hundred-pound weights to flog his body into something more than it really was. And then, taking care to signal, he eased back into the light Friday afternoon traffic.

He had been humming along to the cheery strains of an up-tempo folk song from Serbia, first recorded in 1993. It’s not at all clear that he understood a word of the language, but he certainly understood the gist of the song. It was a sickly sweet tribute to Serbian strongman and convicted war criminal Radova Karadzic, a paean to ethnic cleansing and genocidal mass murder accompanied by the merry trilling of a concertina. “Beware the Ustasha and the Turk,” the song goes.

He wouldn’t be the first to appropriate the mien of the ultranationalist Serbs to cloak his murderous urges.

Some five years earlier, a scrawny young man from Pennsylvania had proudly posed for a picture sporting the combat uniform of the Drina Wolves, a unit of the Serbian Army that massacred 7,500 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.1 Not long after the photo was taken, that imaginary soldier skulked into the woods across the road from a remote state police substation and under cover of darkness opened fire, gunning down two troopers at shift change, killing one and critically wounding the other. Neither one of them was an Ustasha or a Turk. And three years before that, a thirty-two-year-old Internet troll had also wrapped himself in the bloody flag of Serb nationalism, and he still fancied himself some kind of “knight” when he was convicted of murdering seventy-seven people—most of them children, and most of them looking much like him—in a bombing and a sneak attack on an island camp in Norway. In a pretentious, rambling, self-referential 1,500-page manifesto, that killer uses the word “Serb” 341 times. It was eclipsed only by his use of the words “America” or the “United States”—in case there’s any question about his other source of inspiration—which appear in one form or another 726 times, by my own counting.

That killer in Norway had become a hero to the young man in Christchurch. He would even claim he had spoken to that killer. And before he climbed into his rattletrap Subaru that afternoon, the aspiring killer in Christchurch had mailed his own seventy-four-page imitation of that manifesto to, among others, the prime minister of New Zealand. It was shot through with sarcasm and adolescent asides. It railed against indolent immigrants from elsewhere, though the aspiring killer in the Subaru was himself an immigrant from Australia who’d quit his job back home as a personal trainer and squandered the small inheritance his father left him after his suicide on a jaunt through Eastern Europe, among other places. In his imitation screed he tries to figuratively dress himself in the grandiose armor of mythic characters of the ancient past, leaders who fought against invaders from Turkey hundreds of years ago and whose exploits have been exploited ever since by tiny men to justify great atrocities against Muslims in that corner of Europe, in places like Srebrenica. It doesn’t fit this killer well. It doesn’t fit any of them well. They all look small and ridiculous.

The song was over by the time he eased his hatchback into the parking lot of the Al Noor Mosque. Now his tinny speakers struggled to hold a bravely chipper martial air more fitting to his Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry: a fife-and-drum song, “The British Grenadiers,” a toy soldier of a tune that conjures gauzy images of lost empires for those who indulge themselves in such nostalgic fantasies.

The lot was crowded, but he quickly found a space, and of course, even though the spot was perfectly flat, he remembered to engage the emergency brake.

One can’t be too careful.

There was no urgency, no sense of alarm as he casually wrapped his hand around the receiver of a black semiautomatic rifle he had kept on the passenger seat in plain view. It was one of those weapons that Adam Lankford tells us are so often fetishized by these killers, engineered to kill efficiently and designed and marketed to appeal to some soldier-of-fortune fantasy.

Of course it was.

The killer had decorated it, if you can call it that, with white supremacist symbols and the dates of great battles between the West and Islam more than half a millennium ago. In sloppy white paint he had scrawled the names of those ancient generals in that fight, along with the name of a more recent victim of a terrorist attack in Stockholm. It was as if he was shamelessly pilfering her pain and pirating their exploits for his own self-aggrandizement.

He eased out of the driver’s seat and ambled to the back of the car. With his free hand he opened the hatch to expose, again in plain sight, two crudely fashioned improvised explosive devices, another semiautomatic rifle (similar in many respects to the one already in his hand), and a shotgun, also black and also covered with slogans scrawled in a childish hand in white paint. He chose the shotgun and sauntered off at a steady, but not in any way frantic, pace toward the front door of the mosque.

He didn’t even bother to close the hatchback.

He didn’t need to.

He had nothing to fear. And he knew it.

What followed over the next six minutes and thirty-nine seconds was a wholesale atrocity as horrible as any ever committed, anywhere; as vicious as the mass murder of children at West Nickel Mines and Sandy Hook, as murderously theatrical as the massacre of theater goers in Aurora, Colorado, by a killer who had adopted the visage of a cartoon villain.

We know every heartbeat of this part of the mass murder because in an act of supreme narcissism, the kind of narcissism at the heart of many mass shooters, the killer had live-streamed every second of it from the moment he first climbed into his Subaru.

The killing began when he was greeted at the door by a young worshipper who apparently didn’t recognize the menace in the costume the intruder was wearing—the black tunic, the off-the-rack tactical vest—or who didn’t see the garishly decorated killing machines in his hands, one of them fitted with a strobe light to blind and disorient the worshippers.

The young man welcomed the stranger, calling him “brother.”

The killer murdered him where he stood.

It ended—or this part of the attack did, anyway—minutes later as he sauntered back to his car, past a young woman who, wounded, made it as far as the street. “Help me!” she cried as she lay facedown in the gutter. “Help me!” He stepped to the curb and fatally shot her. In the back.

In between, while firing at up to three rounds per second, he killed forty-two innocent, unarmed people, most of them as they huddled together in corners of the mosque.

At one point during the attack, a young man, a head shorter and a stone lighter than the killer, jostled him. Perhaps, as the young man’s family later said, he was indeed making a heroic attempt to grab the murderer’s gun. Or maybe it was an accident. The video evidence is unclear. In any case, the young man bumped into him with no more force than might be expended by a retiree who elbows you while reaching for the second-to-last Christmas turkey in the frozen food section of Pak’nSave. It is clear that the killer was certain that he had nothing to fear.

The killer shot the young man from an arm’s length away. The young man died soon afterward. For the remaining minutes he spent inside the mosque, the killer faced no other resistance, and he seemed to revel in that, to bask in it.

Q&A with Mohsen Mobasher about the Iranian Diaspora

Written by leading scholars of the Iranian diaspora, the original essays in Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher's new book The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations seek to understand and describe how Iranians in diaspora (re)define and maintain their ethno-national identity and (re)construct and preserve Iranian culture. They also explore the integration challenges the Iranian immigrants experience in a very negative

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context of reception. 

Combining theory and case studies, as well as a variety of methodological strategies and disciplinary perspectives, the essays offer needed insights into some of the most urgent and consequential issues and problem areas of immigration studies, including national, ethnic, and racial identity construction; dual citizenship and dual nationality maintenance; familial and religious transformation; politics of citizenship; integration; ethnic and cultural maintenance in diaspora; and the link between politics and the integration of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants.

We talked to Professor Mohsen Mobasher about the new book and how Islamophobia in the United States impacts Iranian Americans.

How does your new book, The Iranian Diaspora, expand or update the research you published in your 2012 book, Iranians in Texas? 

The Iranian Diaspora goes beyond the United States to look at eight other countries with a relatively large Iranian population and examines some of the same theoretical arguments that were developed in Iranians in Texas. Much like Iranians in Texas, The Iranian Diaspora suggests that Iranian immigrants in other coutries are not only demonized, stigmatized, and politicized but also are victims of discrimination, prejudice, exclusion, social isolation, and restrictions because of the actions of their national government. The Iranian Diaspora demonstrates that Iranophobia and small- and large-scale discriminatory practices against Iranian immigrants are not limited to the United States. However, as indicated in The Iranian Diaspora, Iranians in different countries not only mobilize different resources for coping with the onging Iranophobia and Islamophobia in the West, but also find novel ways of negotiating and redefining their ethno-religious, as well as their national Iranian, identity.

What do you wish your average Anglo Texan understood about Iranian migration and identity? 

First, I hope the average Anglo Texan realizes that Iranian immigrants are a diverse group religiously, politically, ethnically, and economically; and, much like most other immigrant populations, they continue leaving their country for educational, political, economic, social, and familial reasons. Second, I wish the average Anglo Texas or American to understand the devastating impact of large structural political forces and narratives on the lives of millions of Iranians who live outside of their country, and the ways in which these individuals are victims of political tensions between the Iranian government and the Western powers. I wish for an average Anglo Texas to understand that Iranian people and Iranian immigrants are not what the media depicts, and that these media stereotypes have major social and psychological consequences for Iranians and their foreign-born children, many of whom see themselves as belonging in their new host country.

How have the current debates over the Iranian nuclear deal and Trump-era Islamophobia impacted the diaspora in Texas?

The current debates over the Iran nuclear deal and the Muslim ban have had a huge negative impact on Iranians in the United States. This is particularly the case for thousands of Iranian students who receive funds from their parents in Iran to support their education, as well as Iranians who are seeking medical treatment in the United States. The current debate over the Iranian nuclear deal has made it almost impossible to obtain a non-immigrant US visa or to return home for a visit if you hold a temporary visa.

In your courses, how have students engaged with your research? What surprising perspectives have you gained from teaching your material? 

Students in my upper-level world migration course have engaged with my research in many different ways in their own research projects. Some use the same framework that I employed in my book, applying it to other Middle Eastern immigrants and examining the interrelations between political discourse, media images, and ethnic relations. Others are more interested in examining the nature of ethic identity and the ways in which Muslim and Middle Eastern immigrants maintain and (re)define their ethnic, national, and religious identies in light of the ongoing Islamophobia.

The surprising perspective that I have gained from teaching my material has been how little students know about immigration dynamics in general, and Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States in particular. Given the persistence of immigration to the US throughout history and the prevailing immigration debate in the United States, it is surprising to see how ill-informed students are about the social, political, cultural, and economic aspects of immigration, and how strongly they believe in inaccurate facts and myths about immigrants.

Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher is an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Houston–Downtown. He is the author of Iranians in Texas: Migration, Politics, and Ethnic Identity and coeditor of Migration, Globalization, and Ethnic Relations: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

www.utexaspress.com

Making America Confederate Again

Mississippi and Alabama officially observe Confederate Memorial Day. Recently, a candidate for Virginia governor was endorsed by a prominent neo-Confederate at the 'Old South Ball'. Accounting for the rise in hate crimes and racially-motivated incidents since Trump's election, we're looking back at a piece of scholarship with alarming relevance today. 

In 2008, Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, published a groundbreaking book, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, that described a fringe movement of political activists who promoted an ideology of Confederate nationalism. Advocating for the secession of fifteen states to form a new Confederation of Southern States, neo-Confederates advanced a politics that was at its core anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic). Of course, almost ten years later secession has not happened, but as many scholars have long suggested about political movements, what purports to be new can

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often be found by taking a deeper look at the recent past. Indeed, as President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future.” It is this understanding that makes Neo-Confederacy a prescient guide to what was to come. As Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich noted, neo-Confederate activists at the end of the twentieth century wanted nothing less than “to change the [U.S.] social order,” arguing for a need to transform “American cultural, educational, political and religious practices.”

As Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction describes, this meant valorizing whiteness and “Anglo-Celtic” culture, praising violence and masculinity, while simultaneously rejecting “political correctness” and international governmental collaborations, vilifying ethnic and sexual minorities, vociferously opposing non-European immigrants, and questioning American democratic processes of both the electoral system and the franchise. Neo-Confederacy wrapped these positions up in an appeal to Constitutional orginialism, “orthodox” Christianity, and a demand for national self-determination for the US South. Revisiting the book almost a decade after its original publication, one cannot but think that the collection’s assessment of this political fringe describes a phenomenon that, albeit perhaps now ostensibly detached from its forthright advocacy of a new Confederate nation-state, has moved powerfully into the mainstream of American politics. As esteemed historian James Loewen noted in the foreword, in examining neo-Confederacy, “Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich have done the heavy lifting... they have created an essential tool for those who work to bring justice and healing across racial and sectional divides in America.” Given the current state of US politics, Neo-Confederacy is an urgent primer for our new reality.

Dr. Euan Hague is a Professor of Geography at DePaul University, and Edward H. Sebesta is an independent researcher. We asked them to comment on how this 2008 collection, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, resonates with the rhetoric and policies advanced by the new Trump administration.

Dr. Michael Hill speaking at a Confederate Memorial Day Parade, Northport, Alabama, 26 April 1997. (Photograph by Gerald R. Webster)

A Nationalist Call to Arms

Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta

Like many American magazines in January 2017, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture had on its cover a photograph of Donald Trump: “Time to Begin” read the caption. This was not the first time that we had encountered Chronicles or its publisher, the Illinois-based Rockford Institute. In the 1990s, Chronicles had led an ideological charge that rejected much of US domestic policy as unconstitutional, lamented US foreign policy and transnational organizations, decried ‘activist judges,’ and railed against multiculturalism. Its editor, and lead contributor at the time, was Thomas Fleming. Fleming had also been a cofounder of Southern Partisan magazine in 1979, an imprint of the Foundation for American Education, which regularly published interviews with leading figures of the Republican right such as Trent Lott. At the Rockford Institute, Fleming invited colleagues from his Southern Partisan days to write for Chronicles and, in June 1994 alongside twenty-six others, he helped establish a new political party: the Southern League (which was renamed as the League of the South in 1997). Influenced by growing right-wing ethnic nationalism and nationalist leaders in Europe, such as those contributing to the collapse of Yugoslavia and Umberto Bossi in Italy, a year later Fleming and Southern League President James Michael Hill issued their nationalist call to arms in The Washington Post. On 29 October 1995, “The New Dixie Manifesto” set forth a Confederate nationalist agenda that argued for devolution of federal power to the states, local control over schools and education policy, and for the right of peoples to pursue and preserve their “authentic cultural traditions.” The Manifesto questioned the very concept of “America” as a united country of states and lamented that “national uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.” What was needed to challenge this US “multicultural, continental empire, ruled from Washington by federal agencies and under the thumb of the federal judiciary,” was an emboldened populace that would reject both the Democratic Party and craven establishment Republicans, and instead elect bold representatives that would reject federal regulations and interventions in state and local affairs. Those leading this charge would “insist upon a strict construction of the Constitution” and be “real people” from “the provinces, the sticks, the boondocks,” in particular the former states of the Confederacy. The manifesto envisioned a nationalist party, the Southern League, to advance these aims. This nascent right wing ideology gained supporters as Southern League members contributed essays and political analyses to websites, newsletters, and conservative talk radio stations. Advocates outlined their ideas in numerous books, often published in their tens of thousands by small, specialized presses that could maximize sales online to a dedicated audience of enthusiastic supporters. Some contributors were faculty members at prominent institutions in Georgia and Alabama; others, as Neo-Confederacy:A Critical Introduction documented, were white nationalists, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and members of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Neo-Confederacy aligned with ideological positions, such as those proposed by Samuel Huntington, that understood the United States (and the Western world more generally) to be engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’ with Islam and the Islamic world. Within such a conceptualization of global geopolitics, neo-Confederate organizations like the League of the South demanded that a person’s ethno-religious identity is their primary basis for belief, and echoed this perspective in the United States by valorizing a “white, Anglo-Celtic” ethnic group and its “orthodox Christianity.”

An Afrofuturist Guide to the Cosmos

By Paul Youngquist

He came from Saturn. He traveled the space ways. He created better music for a better world. Sun Ra’s reputation as an inspired musician is finally on the rise. But Sun Ra was much more than that: a poet, a prophet, and an activist whose medium was sound. “I

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would hate to pass through a planet,” he once said, “and not leave it a better place.” He did just that, if the stunning body of recording he left behind is any measure: hundreds of LPs, miles of tape, and countless fan recordings of concerts, radio broadcasts, and interviews.

He created a cosmos of sound. A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism explores its origins and aims: the places that inspire Sun Ra’s music and the spaces it opens for new ways of living, especially for African Americans. As a black man from Birmingham, Alabama, who moved to mid-century Chicago (to speak in earthly terms), Sun Ra experienced first-hand the indignities of racism and segregation. He created a better future by composing music and writing poetry. His glorious achievement makes him the granddaddy of Afrofuturism, the contemporary cultural movement dedicated to imagining new black worlds.

The only way into the future for Sun Ra is through space age sound. This playlist follows the long arc of his career with the “Arkestra,” the name he gave his shape-shifting band. From inner city to outer space: Sun Ra’s exploratory music moves from the familiar to the otherworldly and back again. It was always a collaborative voyage involving diverse musicians, audiences, and supporters, financial and spiritual. You’re part of it now. Listen with an open heart. Imagine a better tomorrow.

“Super Blonde”: The Sun Ra Arkestra’s very first release, a 45 rpm single appearing in 1956. “Super Blonde” reappears a year later on El Saturn’s first LP, Super-Sonic Jazz. The tune announces the arrival on planet Earth of a formidable ensemble, skilled in the herky-jerky rhythms of bebop. The harmonized head, coming after Sun Ra’s mid-tempo piano intro, is pure Charlie Parker. Boppers beware!

“Spaceship Lullaby”: Rehearsal tapes contain wonders, and Sun Ra always had tapes running. In the mid-fifties he coached several doo-wop ensembles. The singers here called their group The Nu Sounds, and Sun Ra arranged their harmonies. In this case he wrote their lyrics too, including phrases appearing again in later Arkestra recordings: “zoom, zoom, up in the air,” and “interplanetary melodies.” The Nu Sounds’s space trip takes a dangerous turn when the singers must fly through the sun to arrive at Saturn.