\u201cIn the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers\u2019 broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cExtremism is so easy. You’ve got your position, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.”<\/strong><\/p>Clint Eastwood<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

False Prophets of Hope and Ineffectual Shortcuts to Happiness \u201cExtremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.\u201d Milan Kundera So I made the mistake last night of reading the 180 page manifesto written by the 18-year old man-child who murdered 11 people and wounded 3 others in Buffalo, New York two days ago. He supposedly explained why he did it, and I was curious. I knew it would probably be a mistake, and it pretty much was. \u201cHow much are you really going to learn from this kid barely out of high school ranting about race and Jews and whatever?\u201d The answer is \u2013 not much.  But then how much did I learn from reading the Unabomber Manifesto \u2013 not much. I vaguely remember reading his lengthy screed against technology and modern society. It was twenty-seven years ago. How much did I learn from the manifesto of that former LAPD officer back in 2013 who was finally cornered and killed up in the Big Bear wilderness \u2013 I learned that he was a weirdo and an outlier. But there were a few passages which gave me insight into the man behind the violence \u2013 and I have remembered them. How much would I learn from perusing all the videos about race and whatever by that guy who shot up the Bronx subway four weeks ago? I didn\u2019t even make the effort. I am not going to spend a full hour watching videos. (I might spend ten minutes scanning text.) Would I learn anything by watching the infamous \u201cbasement tapes\u201d filmed by the Columbine High School shooters? No. Even if I could, I would not want to watch them. That would be spiritually akin to watching a snuff film. I suspect it is almost always a mistake trying to find too much cogent reasoning in the musings of psychopaths. Such writing belongs more in the realm of deviant psychology than political science.  But, despite my better judgment, I took a look at Buffalo shooter\u2019s words last night. It took me about 30 seconds online to find and download his manifesto. What does it say? Well, the Buffalo shooter rants about \u201cwhite people being replaced\u201d and has pictures of Jews with big noses \u2013 embarrassing stuff. He examines firearms specs. It is execrable. It is the nightmare of any responsible parent to see their child descend body and soul into this sewer of racial hogwash and Jew hating. Vast stretches of the manifesto are inane memes and lists of gun parts. But in the last few sentences of his \u201cconclusion,\u201d he gets back to the tribalism of being a member of the white race involved in a struggle to survive. He claims he is a warrior in the fight of good against evil \u2013 he must struggle as a warrior in a valiant fight, and suffer to bring about a better tomorrow. He will be tested; he must sacrifice. The battle could go either way, and there is no time to lose. \u201cThe best time to attack was yesterday, the next best time is today.\u201d So he must kill black people. Time for drastic action to make the world a better place, as he sees it. So he took that action last Saturday. Clearly, someone somewhere filled this man-child\u2019s head with poisonous gibberish which most full-grown adults could identify as lazy nonsense in less than fifteen seconds. But he is hardly alone. Over 1.5 million foreigners volunteered to fight for Deutschland \u00fcber alles in Adolf Hitler\u2019s Wehrmacht, strange as that seems to us. Some of them I\u2019m sure did not want to serve the Third Reich and were pressured into it, but many freely chose to fight for the Nazis. Hitler had the momentum, he was performing great feats. Why not join the bandwagon? In similar fashion, many in the West declared capitalism to have \u201cfailed\u201d during the the Great Depression and chose to emigrate to the Soviet Union to \u201cbuild the future which is communism\u201d a few years before the Nazi invasion amidst Stalin\u2019s show trials. In retrospect, that was an unwise choice, to put it mildly. If you were \u201cidealistic\u201d you could volunteer to go fight for the socialists in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, or travel to Cuba during your summer vacations to help harvest sugar cane for Fidel Castro in the 1960s.  More recently thousands of Muslims around the world heeded the siren song of the Islamic State and ran away from their families, who often would have physically restrained them, to travel to Syria and fight for ISIS. They responded to online propaganda urging loyal Muslims to join the struggle to build the prophesied new Caliphate by becoming an ISIS combatant (if you were male), or marrying an ISIS combatant and becoming pregnant with his baby (if you were female). It did not go well for them. If you were male and an ISIS fighter, you were most likely killed in combat (good riddance). If you were female, you were probably widowed and in jail with young children (who nobody wants to repatriate). That was probably not the future they had envisioned for themselves. But it was the reality they found when they joined what was essentially a death cult. There is a real if perverted form of idealism in all this, exploited by false prophets. Young people, and they are mostly young, often have a real desire to serve and build a better tomorrow. Yet they often have poor judgment on exactly how to do that. It reminds me of the Aristotle quote of Odysseus warning his son from rash and over-emotional efforts at striking back against injustice. \u201cAnger is easy and anyone can be angry. But being angry with the right person at the right person at the right time in the right way is not easy and not everyone can do it.\u201d The same goes for idealism and trying to change the world for the better. This kid who perpetrated the Buffalo shooting, from the last two pages of his manifesto, is trying to get what all of us want: to belong to something greater than himself, to have a life of meaning, to labor and sacrifice to improve the world, etc. He invested his passion \u2013 his life, really \u2013 into something utterly not worth it. What he is now? A convicted murdered and lifelong prisoner, like the Unambomber. Was that young man who shot up the synagogue in Escondido, San Diego in 2019 (killing one person and wounding three) operating in the same fashion? Did someone help him to fall in love with anti-semitism? Did it happen online? And was he too young and inexperienced to really know what he was doing? To understand the tragic context of the history of anti-semitism and the sloppy politics of blaming Jews for everything? Were his parents shocked and surprised to see what finally happened? That their son, too, had joined a death cult? Well, it is too late for him now. The Buffalo shooter concluded melodramatically his manifesto by saying he will \u201csee us in Valhalla.\u201d What romanticized stupidity. No, he won\u2019t die in valiant combat only to dwell in Valhalla with Odin and the other heroic warriors awaiting Ragnar\u00f6k. No, something much more sordid and mundane awaits him. The Buffalo shooter will live out the days of his life with other vicious convicted criminals in the Maximum Security Ward of the Attica Correctional Facility of New York State \u2013 or some such similarly horrible place. In prison this man-child will become a mature man, then a middle-aged one, and then an elderly and infirm old man \u2013 all while living in a grimy cage. He will most likely die there (good riddance). Those he murdered will not even have that much. All ten of them are dead. What a stupid waste \u2013 on about four different levels. But I will say this loudly and clearly: whenever someone tells you they dislike you because of your race, religion, or whatever external factor \u2013 look at that person with a suspicious eye. But the opposite is also true: if anyone tells you that you are better or more valuable because of your skin color or religion or whatever, be equally suspicious towards that person. The Buffalo shooter man-child\u2019s writing reeks of the idea of \u201crace essentialism\u201d \u2013 that you, and other people, are defined by your skin color. His is a \u201czero sum\u201d game of race warfare. I have seen this idea of race as the overwhelming factor in a person\u2019\u2019s life not only from white supremacists but from Black race warriors, too. I have also seen a variant of it with militant feminist lesbians, who seem to think they and their ilk are among \u201cthe chosen people\u201d who should \u201cstay with their own kind.\u201d It is rank tribalism, a simplification and distortion of a complicated world. It might temporarily satisfy a psychological need, but it is a fool\u2019s gold which ultimately won\u2019t satisfy.  You have value because you are you. It has nothing to do with any accident of your birth whether it be skin color, family religion, gender orientation, or national affiliation. If you think you are special because of some external trapping which you have no control over, then one day you might wonder if you have done anything really to warrant feeling special. Maybe you are just a boring black person? Or an underachieving transgender womyn? Maybe that has everything to do with your individual nature. You can\u2019t put on the trappings of your \u201cidentity\u201d and puff yourself up. Life is just not that easy. You might borrow strength in need from your racial\/religious\/political allegiance, but you can\u2019t own it. You were born alone. You will leave this world the same. In the end, we are all individuals before we are members of a tribe. How do you feel about yourself when you are alone and look in the mirror? Do you need alcohol or drugs to deaden the pain? Do you distract yourself with technology so as to avoid having to sit alone with your thoughts? You might run away from yourself temporarily, but you are still trapped in your own skin. This Buffalo shooter found meaning, belonging, and direction in white supremacy, anti-semitism, and violent action. He claimed in his writing he was willing to kill and die for it. (He lived up to the first part of that promise.) In his manifesto the Buffalo shooter claimed to have \u201cstarted browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid,\u201d and I believe him. He was searching for a savior in a time of severe personal need, and he found it. But the salvation message is almost all bullshit. That Buffalo shooter man-boy is still alone; he is not saved. He lives in a prison cell alone. Maybe he will find fellowship and meaning in belonging to a race-based prison gang. I guess if that is all you have, it is something. But it is not much. This guy could have found value and substance in so many better places. Instead it appears he fell into various rabbit-holes of white supremacy online like \u201c4chan\u201d and was radicalized, and the rest is history.  My God, I bet if I had twenty minutes to talk with this kid I could have changed his mind. But I didn\u2019t. I bet his parents didn\u2019t either. As he wrote, \u201cI was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth.\u201d He encountered \u201cthe truth\u201d online. He was alone out there on the Internet during quarantine while enduring \u201cextreme boredom\u201d and thereby encountered false prophets promising a high-minded crusade he could join. He \u201cdrank the Kool Aid\u201d \u00e0 la Jonestown, circa 1978. He was obviously in a state of poor mental health, like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7326,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/dumbfuck.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9GRdY-1Uc","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7328"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7362,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7328\/revisions\/7362"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rjgeib.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}