hankyoreh

John Feffer

When the judge asked the assassin of UK Labor Party parliamentarian Jo Cox to identify himself in court last week, he refused to give his name. Instead, he said, “My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” Thomas Mair had long been linked to various right-wing extremist organizations. By killing Cox, he was expressing his support for the latest right-wing enthusiasm: Britain leaving the European Union. If Mair had possessed more than a knife and a single, old-fashioned gun, he might have achieved mass murderer status, like his fellow fanatic Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.

When Omar Mateen walked into a gay nightclub in Orlando a couple of weeks ago and killed 49 people, his motives were not entirely clear. Perhaps he was anti-gay, or perhaps he had a conflicted sense of his own sexuality. But during the rampage, he declared his solidarity with both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which made no sense given the mutual distrust the two organizations have for each other. But we don’t expect political consistency from a mass murderer. If he had survived the massacre to be put on trial, Mateen also might have declined to state his name in court, instead declaring his opposition to traitors and support for Islamic extremism.

Their names, after all, are not important. Mair and Mateen killed for a cause. And the cause, in both cases, was anti-individualism.

We are witnessing a war between different varieties of lone wolves. Instead of attacking each other, however, they are killing large numbers of non-combatants. In a perverse way, this battle resembles the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. Instead of fighting each other, Washington and Moscow waged proxy wars elsewhere in the world. The proxy wars in the battle of the lone wolves take place in bars, government buildings, and other ordinarily safe spaces.

Right-wing extremists and Islamic extremists might hate each other. But there’s something they hate even more: liberals.

In Europe, lone wolves like Mair and Breivik both took aim at Labor Party activists whom they blamed for the growing diversity of their countries. In their minds, liberals had undermined “national purity” by promoting liberal immigration policies, multicultural educational policies, and generally internationalist approaches to the world.

Supporters of the Islamic State, meanwhile, focus more on the liberal social policies they despise, such as homosexuality and women’s rights. They are uncomfortable with modernity and its emphasis on individual rights. Right-wing extremists imagine a golden age of nationhood that existed perhaps 50 or 100 years ago. Islamic extremists imagine a golden age of the caliphate that existed a thousand years ago.

The problem is that these are not minority views. True, only a handful of people will take up arms to fight for these positions. But the views themselves are becoming more widespread.

For instance, the vote in the UK about whether to stay in the European Union or not has mobilized the anti-liberal constituency. Those who want to leave the EU have voiced their opposition to immigration, to the liberal policies of bureaucrats in Brussels, and to the very idea that the British might want to work in common with other Europeans. This anti-EU sentiment is shared widely around Europe, where a majority of French, Spanish, and Greeks now view the EU unfavorably, according to a recent Pew poll. Even in Germany, the prosperous core of Europe, those who view the EU favorably exceed those who view it unfavorably by a mere two percent.

An important generation gap has emerged on this issue. Young people are more liberal and like the option of traveling and living anywhere on the continent. They grew up in a world in which European integration is a given, like the United Nations or the World Cup. They support the EU in large numbers. The more conservative older generation, however, forms the core of the Euroskeptic movement. These older voters by and large have not benefitted – or think they have not benefitted – from European integration.

Thomas Mair and Anders Breivik used violence to stop immigration, multiculturalism, and the EU. First in the UK and then probably in a series of referenda around Europe, voters may well accomplish what the guns of the fanatics did not.

In the United States, meanwhile, the same constituency of older, conservative men supports Donald Trump and his illiberal stands on immigration, women’s issues, and gun control. In some ways, Donald Trump is also a lone wolf, just a very wealthy one. He is despised by large numbers of people inside his own Republican Party. Because of his wealth, he presents himself as not beholden to any “special interests.” The Islamic State couldn’t come up with a better secret agent to destroy the U.S. political system and turn one part of the country against the other.

Like his Euroskeptic cousins in Europe – Nigel Farrage of the UK Independence Party, Marine Le Pen of the National Front – Donald Trump is a populist. He does not have a clear or consistent ideology. Rather, he appeals to the public by promoting age-old themes of national renewal, the social exclusion of minorities (Latinos, Muslims), and mistrust of economic and political elites.

These populist politicians feed off the frustrations of the populace. It’s no surprise, frankly, when a few individuals translate their hate-inspired rhetoric into hate-inspired actions. And the Islamophobia of Trump and his supporters offers proof to the Islamic State and its supporters that the United States never cared about Muslims in the first place.

In a famous 1959 documentary called The Hate that Hate Produced, journalists Mike Wallace and Louis Lomax described the rise of the Black Muslim movement, for which a young Malcolm X was serving as spokesman. The hatred of white people expressed by the Nation of Islam, the journalists argued, was created by the racism of white America.

Today, we are witnessing another circle of hate. Donald Trump and the Euroskeptics promote hatred of Muslims; the Islamic State promotes hatred of non-Muslims. This time, though, it’s not a war of words but a real war. And the casualties are the people in the middle who want to have nothing to do with either camp.

By John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy In Focus

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.

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