Jo Cox death: Thomas Mair, accused of murdering MP, gives name to court as 'death to traitors, freedom for Britain'
Orlando gunman Omar Mateen raged against 'filthy ways of the West'
When someone carries out an atrocity, why do we take their
stated reasons as gospel? If someone who shoots up a gay club is solely a
homophobe, or an Islamist, or if someone who shoots an MP is just a right wing
xenophobe, then you are selectively choosing to politicise those actions. If
those minds are as reeling as any mind who can carry out those kind of acts
should be, the fact that their brain can land on a political motivation one
minute means as much or as little as the unintelligible gibberish they might
say a minute later. Even a lost mind can pick up the odd quote and mimic the
context now and then.
These killers are not freedom fighters, they are not world
changers; they are people who can’t cope, and who can brutally trample on other
people through cruelty and intellectual laziness and mental infirmity.
“My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”
Thomas Mair, who shot Jo Cox. They are not even his words. It’s just something
that’s bubbled up to the top in a confused, angry mind. He’s heard similar
phrases bandied about generically and tried to attach a specific, personal
meaning to them.
What does ‘freedom for Britain’ even mean? Freedom from
other countries and cultures? Freedom from complications? From nuance, from
being wrong, from learning, from other people’s opinions, from having to
understand, freedom from reality (freedom from
Britain).
It’s freedom to rubber stamp and act quickly, easily,
selfishly and self-absorbed, and not feel guilty about it. Freedom, or a
mandate, to think that you represent people’s opinions, over and above others,
to a bloody conclusion.
Jo Cox was killed outside Birstall library as she was about to hold a constituency surgery – come one, come all, and tell me your problems, whether macro or micro. It’s as direct as our democracy gets. And here’s all that civics and philanthropy and cooperation being broken. Almost broken: beautifully, MPs still don’t think we should have knife arches and US-esque security filtering the contact time.
Shot three times and repeatedly stabbed. The hatred, the
punch bag repetitive outlet of that. I don’t have the time, brain, personality
or concentration to work out my problems thoughtfully, so I kick ass to pump
some new chemical feelings into my experience instead.
As the law has it, it’s not about the personal for Thomas
Mair. He’s being charged within the legal framework surrounding Terrorism,
which the law has as its goals: “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.” It’s where his ideas
meet a wider conceptual framework, that’s what he’s up for. Not for his
personal motives.
Protect me from what I want.
Mair had a haphazard interest in white supremacy. “Despite everything I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and South Africa.” Prevail against the
liberal media, prevail against the white traitors letting the movement down.
Mair took an interest in white-abulous movements in both SA and the US in the
1980s and 1990s. From 1999 - 2003 he spent £400 on literature from the largest neo
Nazi group in the US. Explosive and gun making manuals, it seems. But these
activities are short-lived wherever the facts are grounded with dates.
Then there’s the other Thomas Mair. The sufferer of mental
health problems also had a quiet way of living with and dealing with things. He
was a reserved neighbour offering gardening tips (neighbours can’t equate the
man they knew with these acts). Back to the library again – he loved books, his
house was full of them, “he practically lived in the library.” Mair’s
brother had not noticed any particular political leanings, let alone extremism.
The man volunteered at a country park to help his mind,
there are quotes:
“I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world. […] Many people who suffer from mental illness are socially isolated and disconnected from society, feelings of worthlessness are also common, mainly caused by long-term unemployment.”
No troubles with articulation and composition of thoughts
there.
It’s all a soup, all interlinked, you can’t have one without
the other – except in law and the media, I suppose. The negative card-carrying
highlights make more sense of a person’s awful actions than the conflicting
context. If he was unhinged with an interest in the far right – that’s easier
to digest. Mental illness can be an insult when the bastard’s evil. Otherwise
there would be some nasty logical extensions.
Omar Mateen
So you might be gay and you might not be. You don’t understand, you’re afraid, you’re angry, you’re lying to your family and your dad and your dad is standing up for you (and killing you) in the only heartbreaking way he knows how. Then you decide to shoot the people you are but don’t want to be, assuming other people can be you in the first place. BANG a beautiful teenage brain full of heart and hope goes all over the wall before he gets to tell mom he loves her BANG another BANG BANG BANG BANG mother fucker. Visceral pleasure, totally blind, totally false, totally cruel.
You can’t have what you want, you won’t let yourself have
what you want, and so you disprove what you want. You make it something that’s
wrong, you make it ugly, but you prove you still want it by killing it,
blasting it out of life, rather than walking away indifferently.
It’s only dilemmas that make people rant.
All those dicks you like, those beautiful bodies that mean
more to you than all the hate inside and what do you do? You shoot them because
they are wrong, because you think they are impervious to the homophobia you’ve
experienced and internalized, because they rejected you (yes, all of them),
because you think they think they are better than you, because the US invaded Afghanistan, because
whatever.
Nothing really adds up, other than a problem with other
people. Either a problem connecting with them, or a problem with being nice to
people. Mateen would linger around women, unsettling them, he would
stare impassively at aggrieved husbands, beat his wife, go to gay clubs to either flirt with men or
hurl abuse about homosexuality, and a few minutes before pulling triggers, he
said it was all in the name of IS.
Islamic State even played along, calling Mateen, ‘one of the soldiers of the caliphate.’ But
then “Mateen also appears to have been a deeply conflicted and possibly self-loathing homophobe who drank heavily, took drugs, dated men, frequented the same club he later attacked, Pulse, and used a gay dating app.”
Quite a blemished Islamist.
Mateen’s ex wife, describing the beating and the violence,
and the bipolar shifts, was backed up by her fiancé: ‘I hear the media trying to make this about Isis or Islam…but it is about imbalance, it’s about society, it’s about parenting, accepting each other.’
How do you call it with mental illness? How does either the
good or the bad win out, and define the person or their motive/actions when you
want to sum up. What’s so wrong with a killing being done for complex,
conflicting personal circumstances? Is that less of a crime, or less of a death
for the victims? Why do we like a mental illness to be coupled with unpleasant
political affiliations, so it is more definitely the killer’s fault? Do we need
to be angry at them, rather than at a situation, where there would be nothing to
grab hold of?
Because it’s not as if there isn’t a situation. It’s not as
if the sick (mentally ill) thought processes that have gone on here aren’t
terrifying exaggerations of sick (fuckwit) thought processes that go on in the
minds of non-criminal people every day:
Shooting, killing, obliterating someone for having a
different opinion to you. Blaming them for all the manifestations in reality of
the things you dislike theoretically. Wow. So mad you need to stamp on
something. So mad and incapable of understanding. That’s why you get mad enough
to kill someone. Your whole life is frustration because you don’t understand
anything you profess to hate with knowledge/experience. You grab at random bits
of it for a quick fix. If only we could leave Europe… You hate the gays, you
hate the people letting in the immigrants, you hate the Western powers, you
hate the Muslims. Everything in your life would be alright if they could only
just fix this one problem you see.
You align your anger, which is personal, which is your problem,
with a cause – which has nothing to do with your inability to cope with the
world without stamping on people and things. If you’re not careful (and if your
mind’s like this you’re not going to be careful) you’ll get recruited to a
cause that is led by people who are more rational than you and who want to feed
on/exploit your anger and set you off, while they take the leadership credit.
They might run a political party or movement; they might lead a terrorist cell.
They might not all condone your killing, but they’ll happily make use of your
anger and deny any responsibility for it – or its consequences.
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