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.
<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>.
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
