Tuesday 21 June 2016

Lone-Wolves and State Warriors


Lone-Wolves and State Warriors

The Orlando Massacre and Scapegoating

A massacre in an LGBT+ space, by a Muslim, with a legal gun, and alleged connections to ISIS. It is easy to see how contemporary American anxieties converge in the political aftermath of the Orlando shooting. The media response to this, the largest massacre in modern American history, exposes the way truth is controlled by the present political regime. Further, it demonstrates an unwillingness on the part of dominant groups to accept responsibility for discrimination, instead finding scapegoats in Muslims, the mentally ill, and even gun legislation.

For those who do not spend their days fretting about radical social discourse, homophobia can be difficult to define. Before Obama legalised same-sex marriage federally, it dominated the media conversation, establishing rights as the fulcrum of group empowerment. While the LGBT+ movement focused on this somewhat symbolic right, statistics revealed that LGBT+ kids across the whole world were entering sex-work and committing suicide at an alarming rate. Neither the media, nor straight people, seemed particularly interested in solving this issue. Securing a fabricated right for homosexual couples was far more popular. If the statistics of less privileged LGBT+ people were ever mentioned, it was to bolster marriage as the unequivocal endowment being denied to the LGBT+ community. The institution Australian Marriage Equality claims that the ‘higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, early school leaving, conflict with peers and parents and suicide ideation [are] all directly related to the discrimination.’[i] Marx might have called this ‘bridal false-consciousness.’

Meanwhile, those of us who were suspicious of the emancipatory potential of marriage, whether for queers, women or the proletariat, stepped nervously into the shadows. Highlighting marriage’s role historically in crafting the patriarchal household, in institutionalising male privilege, its monogamous dictates, and in naturalising the bond between women and the domestic, was tantamount to pissing in someone’s cereal. Even further from sight was the suggestion that marriage functions to protect wealth accumulation and class stagnation. Perhaps most troublingly of all, people had forgotten that marriage fortifies the compounding of church and state. This embeds the religious view of marriage into law, as the paramount format for love and healthy child-rearing; a covert breach of secular principles, so that the state can regulate the so-called private sphere along the vectors of sexuality, race, and caste. Any threesome that sought a marriage license found that their relationship was not up to the government’s standards. None of those advocating for same-sex marriage questioned the fact that marriage is an arbitrary concept, invented by authorities, which permits those authorities to draw the lines between clean and dirty relationships. Marriage is in no way timeless or divine, as Christian conservatives would profess, yet this Tory precept blends into the wallpaper of the LGBT+ headquarters, unnoticed. Simply put, a ‘right’ is an oversimplified legal concept that does not adequately capture the extent of heterosexist domination.

The heterosexist underpinnings of language and media representation go unnoticed by most, and they function to define and buttress male friendships, creating a static and volatile masculinity, constantly fearful and threatened by the tides of progress. From this angle, it is easier to understand how the Orlando massacre could occur, and how implications of the shooter’s bicuriosity could enrich the explanation. Unfortunately, heterosexism as a social system, rather than a legal problem, goes ignored by its very perpetuators.

Just as the gunfire ceased in Orlando, and terrified families awaited news of loved ones, the story was being pushed through the print presses of the New York Times. For those familiar with the media’s disinterest in homophobic violence, it was not surprising that the NYT neglected to mention an LGBT+ space was attacked.

The British press descended on the story, producing similar lapses. On Sky News, sociologist Owen Jones made the case that as a gay man, this kind of event is not entirely alien or surprising to him. Those of us who live as ‘deviants’ know how close we are, constantly, to provoking backlash simply by existing. Jones’ testimony conflicted with the rights-based approach to equality, normally practiced by the media. His suggestion that this was a homophobic hate-crime was not what the presenter wanted to hear. A crime is only relevant if it is ‘against human beings,’ because people at home do not like to hear that they and their gay-bashing uncles are responsible for a larger problem. Hence the presenter declared this a savage assailment on ‘the freedom of all people to try to enjoy themselves,’ a statement that means less and less each time you read it.[ii]

What Jones received was a blank humanism, a universalisation of the attack that erases the identities of the targets, as though invoking someone’s identity to make a point is offensive. Jones’ severe remark, ‘well you wouldn’t understand this because you’re not gay,’ outsteps the individualism of liberal discourse, claiming that being part of a social group gives you vastly different experiential insight. It breaks liberalism’s rights-based notion of homophobia, and replaces it with the more discreet ideological concept of heterosexism. He later explained in an article for The Guardian:

If a terrorist with a track record of expressing hatred of and disgust at Jewish people had walked into a synagogue and murdered 50 Jewish people, we would rightly describe it as both terrorism and an antisemitic attack. If a Jewish guest on television had tried to describe it as such, it would be disgraceful if they were not only contradicted, but shouted down as they did so. But this is what happened on Sky News with a gay man talking about the mass murder of LGBT+ people.

When issues of groups are raised, liberalists rush along to plug up the holes in their philosophy with the first thing they can find. After all, liberalism depends on the sovereignty of the individual. Unless they impinge on the sovereignty of others, the autonomous subject of liberalism has the liberty to buy what they wish, believe what they wish, and say what they wish. The very idea that class immobility, prejudices, religions and gender ideologies can act as hurdles to this “equal” access to “freedom” for certain groups must be ignored, likely because it is an irresolvable criticism. The individualistic language of liberalism allows marriage and rights to be situated at the centre of LGBT+ oppression: if individuals have the same legal rights, then there is nothing else impinging upon their individual freedoms.

The extent of religious motivation behind the attack is not clear. Press accusations about Mateen’s sexuality, his wife’s involvement or ignorance, and various other factors produce a nebulous network of speculation and hearsay. Indeed, for someone looking to be lionised by a homophobic terrorist organisation, some of his claims have not added up. Moreover, it’s easy to internalise cultural hatreds and then invent justifications to act upon them. This phenomenon has been observed by contemporary social scientists everywhere from Nazi experimenters in concentration camps to police violence. Let us not forget our career politicians, who abuse our government and then convince themselves it is in everybody’s best interests. Whether the Islamic State is involved or not, the commercial mass media has successfully narrativised LGBT+ oppression, in a way that cannot be squared with a boots on the ground experience of heterosexism. The fact that straight people everywhere, of all creeds, are responsible for violence towards gays has escaped the conversation altogether. This is to be expected in a post-Thatcher world, wherein there are only individuals and no such thing as society.

Staggeringly, the Right does not afford everyone the same extent of individuality. Appearing on The Colbert Report, Bill O’Reilly declared that this is not ‘a tragedy … like an M Track train derailing. This is a basic uh war we’re in, and I look at the news from not only a contemporary view but a historical point of view.’[iii] What a surprise! The disaster of the uncontrollable individual is nowhere to be found from the Right, for the brown person responsible. Of course, the Right is only interested in contextualising things (falsely) when Muslims are involved.

For O’Reilly and the Murdoch establishment, this gunner is indicative of a bigger problem with Islam. All Muslims get told to up their game and become accountable, as O’Reilly declares that Muslims are enablers in their communities. He further uses this attack as justification for more US military action overseas (because this has gone so well in the past). Alongside their annoying sectarian practice of saving their most ruthless invective for those of a different skin colour, the Right interprets white supremacist criminals as mentally unstable individuals. On the 16th of June this year, British MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in Birstall, West Yorkshire, whilst carrying out constituency work. Multiple witnesses heard Thomas Mair shout ‘Britain First’ as he shot her, and then continued his attack by blade. Britain First is a notorious white supremacist organisation online, which thrives on feeding lies to those acrid and sullen enough not to question them. Britain First disavowed any association with the attack, regarding one witness as ‘a lying Muslim with an agenda.’[iv] As blogger Thomas G. Clark points out, ‘had the murder suspect been a mentally unstable Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar” we can be absolutely sure that Britain First wouldn’t have been so keen to paint him as a “lone wolf” killer, work tirelessly to discredit eyewitness accounts of what was being shouted and furiously attack the mainstream media for reporting what multiple witnesses claim to have heard.’

In the same vein of liberal individualism, the soggy rag The Daily Mail declares Cox’s killer ‘a timid gardener dogged by years of mental turmoil.’[v] Decontextualised, white people’s murders do not have to be social, or involve their racial politics. They’re just mentally unstable individuals. ‘Thomas Mair has been described as a loner who was socially isolated and disconnected from society as a result of long-term mental illness,’ the article begins. Here the white man is literally split from the notion of society. Why, then, does the Orlando shooting by comparison represent ‘a war of attrition’ to O’Reilly and the Murdoch puppet-gang, and warrant comparisons to the ideologies of Nazi Germany? [vi] Could the discrepancy be more transparent between the treatment of white racists who are just mentally ill, and Muslims who are part of a dangerous community? Not only is this bilious nonsense racist, but it depicts those who are lonely and mentally ill as dangerous. Who should be more insulted?

More progressive media figures are also guilty of erasing the heterosexist social context. Colbert, the semi-progressive host, responds to O’Reilly’s vision of Orlando as an Islamic State battleground: ‘well, you have framed the problem in that way. … You can also say the problem is easy access to high capacity, rapid firing weaponry.’[vii] A reframing of this reframing: O’Reilly on the far Right wishes to blame the problem on a society that is different from his own, whereas Colbert is concerned, once again, with rights and the individual. Thatcher herself may have applauded this omission of social influences, and the manoeuvre back to individual rights. It’s as though Mateen’s gun just went off naturally of its own accord, else there is some deep core in humans just waiting to go around killing people. Colbert speculates that this is ‘someone’ who is potentially ‘schizophrenic.’ To Colbert, Islam, like all philosophies, naturally produces some radicals. In this he is correct, but where is mention of the LGBT+ community? Everywhere “natural” causes chain together, and the constructedness of homophobia is nowhere to be found.

As the 20-minute interview draws to a close, Colbert asks if this was a hate crime. O’Reilly pushes past this to the next question by shouting ‘EVERYTHING ISIS DOES IS A HATE CRIME, THE WHOLE THING!’ Conveniently, hatred is a product of ISIS, the identities of the victims are irrelevant, and American resentment for gays and progress is blameless.

If the Left and the LGBT+ community wish to do justice to the victims of the Orlando shooting, they cannot allow the conversation to be dominated by Islamophobia and gun control. The facts and statistics about LGBT+ people are pain-inducing. Further, they must distance themselves from simplistic notions of homophobia overly grounded in abstract rights, stop focusing on middle-class concerns like marriage, and lay to rest the ‘let’s ignore our different experiences’ concept of equality. The LGBT+ movement needs to focus on those enduring the worst struggles, so that the world sees the violence our community experiences every day.




[i] “12 Reasons Why Marriage Equality Matters.” 2015. Australian Marriage Equality.
<http://www.australianmarriageequality.org/12-reasons-why-marriage-equality-
matters/>.

[ii] Jones, Owen. “On Sky News last night, I realised how far some will go to ignore homophobia.” 13 June 2016. The Guardian. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/13/sky-news-homophobia-orlando-sexuality>.

[iii] O'Reilly, Bill. “Bill O'Reilly Weighs In On Orlando.” The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert. 14 June 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hfGaAVloU>.
Said at 1:11

[iv] Clark, Thomas G. “Is this Thomas Mair at a Britain First protest?” 18 June 2016. Another Angry Voice. <http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/thomas-mair-britain-first-protest.html>.

[v] Tozer, James, et al. “Timid Gardener Dogged By Years of Mental Turmoil.” 17 June 2016. The Daily Mail Online. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3645727/Timid-gardener-dogged-years-mental-turmoil-Jo-Cox-murder-suspect-volunteered-special-school-subscribed-South-African-pro-white-magazine.html>.

[vi] O'Reilly, Bill. “Stephen Colbert and Bill O'Reilly Discuss The Political Response To Orlando.”
The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert. 14 June 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsvK2l3b_fE>.
Said at 1:36

[vii] O'Reilly, Bill. “Bill O'Reilly Weighs In On Orlando.” The Colbert Report. Stephen Colbert. 14 June 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66hfGaAVloU>.
Said at 2:08