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In one of my early Belmont Club posts, a few years after 9/11 I predicted if terrorism and the clash of cultures could not be stopped someday people I didn't know would lynch me for reasons they themselves couldn't explain. People in uncertainty and fear will do anything.
Maybe that was because, as a young man in Mindanao, I went through towns where complete strangers killed each other because one was Christian and the other Muslim. It wasn't personal, you see, just the continuation of unfinished business.
News that up to 50 people were killed in 2 New Zealand mosques by what will probably be a neo-Nazi cell or persons strongly suggests that that the terrible tribal score settling and grievance mongering is here.
Who's to blame? It's a consequence of everything: European colonialism, Islamic slave trading, 9/11, the War on Terror, multiculturalism, populism. You can spend your whole life assigning guilt, but that is far less important than the fact that we're here.
In retrospect it's clear that it was bound to happen. Europeans couldn't snatch up colonies nor the former colonized flood into the West without result. With any luck politicians will understand what's at stake now. But in all likelihood each side will trot out the same lines.
No matter. The politicians were always pretty useless anyway. For most the problem will be simple. How to survive in a world where things "aren't personal" and stuff happens simply because.
