,
16 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
We can understand neither this massacre nor Trump's election w/out explaining how War on Terror came home to roost. The violence US projected outward ricocheted back—not just on 9/11 but in response to the WoT that followed. The home front was absorbed into the battlefield. 1/
On 9/16/2001, George Bush declared "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." It has indeed: the New Zealand shooter is one of its irregular foot soldiers who, amidst ambient violence of empire in crisis, made WoT's mission his own. c-span.org/video/?c475249… 2/
Sure, after Bush visited a mosque after 9/11. He declared "Islam is peace." But Bush, with bipartisan support, weaved permanent war against Islam into the core of a massive national security state and military machine. Popular Islamophobia was channeled into war—for a time. 3/
As war entered crisis, state lost monopoly on WoT violence/ideology—both ricocheted back into US and Europe, metastasizing throughout a right-wing resonance machine insisting that the war that began with the 2001 AUMF be fought on home front, blurring the far enemy & the near. 4/
As @kathleen_belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement & Paramilitary America, notes: this isn't new w/ WoT. Contemporary white power movement was from early on product of wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Central America ricocheting back home. blubrry.com/thedig/3921719… 5/
The right increasingly began to say the quiet part loud, as Bush had on 9/16/2001. In 2007, Rep. Tom Tancredo said: “If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina.” 6/
As @GregGrandin explains in The End of the Myth, a disillusioned expansionist project turned to the border. 90s anti-Mexican nativism reemerged, blending w mounting Islamophobia that could no longer be neatly channeled into foreign wars that'd lost noble aura amidst quagmire. 7/
In 2005, Houston Republican Rep. John Culberson sent out this Border Security Alert, warning that Al Qaeda were pretending to be Mexicans to infiltrate the United States: 8/
“Al Qaeda terrorists and Chinese nationals are infiltrating our country virtually anywhere they choose from Brownsville to San Diego...a large number of Islamic individuals have moved into homes in Nuevo Laredo and are being taught Spanish to assimilate w/ the local culture.” 9/
But this was logical if cartoonish extension of post-9/11 nat security state idea that immigration enforcement & WoT were *the same*: "We cannot reduce or eliminate illegal entry by potential terrorists without also dramatically reducing illegal migration across our borders.” 10/ 
Or as NZ shooter apparently wrote on guns covered Dr. Bronner-style in reference to "14 words" & names of generals who had fought Muslims: "Here’s your migration compact!"—a UN compact to deal w migration crisis that WoT inflamed, the text of which was opposed *solely* by US 11/
Trump entered political arena accusing Obama of being an immigrant, maybe a Muslim one, and thus an illegal occupant of the White House. 2011: "He doesn't have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim." 12/
Like the man who massacred Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, like nativist movement godfather John Tanton, like Rep. Steve King, the NZ shooter was apparently obsessed with "mass immigration and the higher fertility rates of the immigrants" leading to "The Great Replacement. 13/
After Islamist terrorist attack, it's framed as result of Islamic extremism. When it's a white power attack, it's bc of "hate." Both analyses erase the historical context that unites both phenomena: The War on Terror & Islamist terrorism are locked into a murderous dialectic. 14/
This system of globalized violence provides ordinary young men, white/"Western" *&* Muslim alike, w readymade framework through which disaffection & alienation mostly unrelated to religion can be dressed up as expression of mythologized higher meaning justifying mass murder. 15/
This is, as Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou explains, what Fanon called the "fundamentally dichotomizing nature of colonialism" being "replayed in remixed ways." blubrry.com/thedig/4252047… 16/
