Potent possible parallelisms?
Friday, September 13th, 2019[ by Charles Cameron — you know I’m fascinated by parallelisms and analogies — here are some I’ve noticed recently — enough for three fine posts, and you get three in one ! ]
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Parallelisms of interest that have surfaced in my reading recently include:
between Trump speeches and the Crusius El Paso manifesto between Trump’s and Hitler’s uses of language between AQ’s Sami al-Uraydi and French revolutionary Saint-Just between ISIS strategy and use of social media and western Neo-Nazi terrorism between Christchurch and El Paso between the Gildead of Margaret Atwood and the Family of Jeff Sharlet between the Family of Jeff Sharlet and the Muslim Brotherhood between 11 Sept 2001, NYT, and 11 Sept 1683, Vienna
oh, and on a different note altogether, there’s:
between the arts of architecture and cartooning
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El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language:
At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”
Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Sources:
NY Times, El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language< Intercept, After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump’s Role
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A professor of German history explains the true horror of Trump’s response to Charlottesville
We haven’t had a Reichstag blaze, nor a Kristallnacht — not even close!!! — still, if we consider rhetoric alone, there’s food for thought:
“You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”
Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Source:
RawStory, A professor .. explains the true horror of Trump’s response to Charlottesville
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Here’s a nice one observed by jihad-scholar Cole Bunzel:
“Those who make revolution halfway only dig their own graves,” says AQ leader Sami al-Uraydi (of Hurras al-Din) in video message decrying idea of concessions in jihadi revolution. Does he know he’s quoting the French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just? pic.twitter.com/sABdapOllp
— Cole Bunzel (@colebunzel) August 12, 2019
Looks good, though one wonders whether the parallelism comes from the translator’s memory-store rather than al-Uraydi‘s?
Wikipedia quotes St-Just thus:
Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.
and gives the date as January 1793 and the source as Oeuvres Complètes de Saint-Just, vol. 1 (2 vols., Paris, 1908), p. 414.
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Here’s the Stratfor analysis:
Stratfor, What White Supremacism and Jihadism Have in Common
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Like jihadism, the various ideologies driving white supremacism are not going away any time soon, and comparing the two can provide valuable lessons for understanding the ongoing threat. [ more.. ]
I’ll have a separate post on whether white supremacists as well as jihadists should be classified as terrorists — a matter on which opinions are divided..
The other piece referenced in the DoubleQuote above:
Rantt, White Supremacist Terrorists Operate Like ISIS, Trump Shrugs
And here’s an impressive, alternative contrast by Tim Furnish:
Stream, White Terrorists vs. the Sultans of Slaughter
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There’s something akin to a waterfall of manifestos on the supremacist, arguably starting with Breivik, and thence to Christchurch and El Paso:
WaPo, Christchurch endures as extremist touchstone
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In the days after a gunman killed 51 people in March at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, analysts warned the attack could become a rallying point for extremists.It was a high-casualty attack, intended to be imitated by others, live-streamed on social media, accompanied by the release of a white supremacist manifesto decrying immigration and immigrants.
On Saturday, a similar manifesto appeared online, with similar grievances. The author opened by expressing “support” for “the Christchurch shooter.” Within minutes, a gunman opened fire at a shopping center in El Paso, killing 20..
The second quote in this above DoubleQuote says what it needs to say in the subtitle: “the more oxygen these manifestos get…”.
Onwards. Here’s a rather more disturbing aspect of the El Paso > Christchurch parallelism:
WaPo. Two mass killings a world apart share a common theme: ‘ecofascism’
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Before the slaughter of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso this year, the accused gunmen took pains to explain their fury, including their hatred of immigrants. The statements that authorities think the men posted online share another obsession: overpopulation and environmental degradation.The alleged Christchurch shooter, who is charged with targeting Muslims and killing 51 people in March, declared himself an “eco-fascist” and railed about immigrants’ birthrates. The statement linked to the El Paso shooter, who is charged with killing 22 people in a shopping area this month, bemoans water pollution, plastic waste and an American consumer culture that is “creating a massive burden for future generations.”
The two mass shootings appear to be extreme examples of ecofascism — what Hampshire College professor emerita Betsy Hartmann calls “the greening of hate.”
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On the existence of “so much similarities between the family and Muslim Brotherhood: praying groups“<:
OK dear friend I have done a full thread to that in Arabic. I’ll try to make it in English:First major similarity is the refusal to be organised with official presence. The founder and up tell now calling it “Al-gama’a”… And they call each other “Brother”..
[ thread ]
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The Family: More Gilead than Godly:
In both Gilead and Virginia, men in inner circles have been anointed by God to lead. Conversely, those women chosen to be of service remain in the background where they respond to these godly guys’ commands with a heavenly “blessed be.”
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A stunner:
#September11 1683 was far more important than the same date in 2001.https://t.co/9iZ784EB6x
— The Occidental Jihadist (@Occidentaljihad) September 12, 2019
Here’s from the London Review of Books review of Lawrence Wright‘s The Looming Tower:
Wright offers the sense among the jihadis that America was the centre of Christianity, and that the Christian world had been winning the battle of faiths since the Islamic host began to be beaten back from the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683.
I’d be interested if anyone has evidence connecting 2001 to 1683 in the mind of UBL —
— Timothy McVeigh, after all, timed the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to coincide with the date set for the execution of Richard Snell, who had earlier plotted to blow up the same building, also the date of the final holocaust of the Branch Davidians in Waco two years earlier, the 220th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord — the “shot heard ’round the world” –and the start of the FBI’s siege of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord compound in 1985. Quite an impressive concatenation of anniversaries!
Anniversary dating, indeed, is not solely a white nationalist phenomenon. According to Hussain S. Zaidi‘s Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, the principal suspect in the 1993 bombings, Tiger Memon says:
Friday, 12 March, is the seventeenth day of Ramazan. It will be the day when the Holy Prophet fought the first battle of Junge-Badr against the heathens of Mecca and forced them to retreat. The auspicious date will help us achieve success.
Or as Anuraga Kashyap‘s film Black Friday has it:
Tiger‘s memory reaches back to 624 CE.
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And for a sunnier thought..
Here’s a parallelism between architecture and cartooning, courtesy of Bill Benzon:
Scaffolding in making a drawing. When the outline is inked-in, the scaffolding is erased.
Witch Hunt https://t.co/tywDweL3vs via @YouTube— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) August 18, 2019
