Shanmugam said: “When you see the face of the person who was alleged to have committed the crime (terrorist attack), I think you see the face of evil.”
The law minister’s word echoed in my cerebral chamber for quite some time this morning, in particular, “I think you see the face of evil.”
I always wonder, how does the face of evil look like?
Now, it’s easy to connect the act to the perpetrator and come to that conclusion. The trail of murdered innocent and defenceless lives, especially young children, can’t be any clearer. That’s unmistakably the foregone conclusion.
But, if you look squarely at the NZ shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who engineered the mass shootout from day one, even authored a 74-page manifesto of the whole plan which took about 2 years, you will be hard pressed to single him out from the crowd of ethno-nationalist ecofascists.
What makes it even harder to identify is that Brenton, 28, had no criminal record and “was not previously known to investigators who follow extremist groups.”
He described himself as “a regular white man, from a regular family.”
After his father, who worked as a garbageman and was a competitive triathlete, died in 2010, Brenton used his father’s inheritance money and “spent several years travelling around the world, to places where a white Australian was a distinct minority, and a white supremacist surrounded by people he considered lesser than him.”
This “regular white man” visited Pakistan and North Korea, and in a Facebook post, wrote that Pakistan was “an incredible place filled with the most earnest, kind-hearted and hospitable people in the world.”
But this is also the same “regular white man” who declared himself as a “racist” and in his manifesto, it contained “a compendium of slogans, poems and diatribes against immigrants, Muslims, Jews and religious converts.”
He called them “invaders...who colonise other peoples lands.”
So, before the commission of the heinous act, if you like Shanmugam (doing a similar ”minority report” but without the three “precogs” psychics) are hunting down terrorists planning a mass shootout, you will have to look into the faces of tens of thousands of so-called “regular white men” in an identification parade to smoke that one evil racist out - and good luck with that search!
This reminded of what political theorist Hannah Arendt once observed about Adolf Eichmann, who organised the transport to send millions of Jews to the concentration camps in what Hitler called The Final Solution.
After she saw and studied Eichmann, she came to this conclusion about the banality of evil: -
”I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.“
“Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”
In her thesis, Arendt wrote that ”Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on cliché defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional.“
Lesson? ...
There is not much of a lesson to be learned here. Brenton is a right-wing extremist, a “regular white man”, and when asked about this growing threat around the world, President Trump has this to say: -
“I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. It’s certainly a terrible thing.”
Yes, it is certainly a terrible thing...
And it is rather unfortunate that the commander-in-chief of the current global order doesn’t appear to know how evil like that of Brenton‘s was incubated, encouraged, empowered and launched with complete senseless carnage.
It cannot be denied that acts like that of Brenton’s do not stand alone or exists in a social, political or ideological vacuum.
Brenton in fact wrote that his aim was to “defend our lands from invaders, to reduce immigration rates and to deepen division and start a civil war in the United States.”
And the statistics are stark on this. “The fact is right-wing extremists collectively have been responsible for more than 70 per cent of the 427 extremist-related killings over the past 10 years, far outnumbering those committed by left-wing extremists or domestic Islamic extremists” (Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League).
This whole evil process that leads to the deranged psychology of mass killing is what some political scientists call dehumanization. And the words of Aldous Huxley put it most aptly about the role national propaganda (like the one Trump unwittingly represents) plays in this dehumanisation process: -
“Most people would hesitate to torture or kill a human being like themselves. But when that human being is spoken of as though he were not a human being, but as the representative of some wicked principle, we lose our scruples...All political and nationalist propaganda aims at only one thing; to persuade one set of people that another set of people are not really human and that it is therefore legitimate to rob, swindle, and even murder them.”
Here, recall that Brenton did say that immigrants were “invaders...who colonies other peoples lands.”
The word “invasion” ought to sound quite familiar to most of us by now. If a cryptic metaphor helps, here goes: For a fire at the top of the pyre is always more visible, even miles away, as compared to an isolated spark on the ground, right?
But, be that as it may, let me end this post not with dehumanization, but heroes, heroes of humanity. They too are regular men who confront evil in the face and never flinched. In fact, they are prepared to give their lives to save others, even strangers.
Our first hero is Adeeb Sami, 52 yrs old.
He is a father of twin children and he came to NZ with them to celebrate their birthday. It was supposed to be a surprise.
Alas, the surprise turned into horror when Mr Sami “ended up in surgery to have a bullet removed from his spine after he dove in front of his two sons to protect them from the gunman who stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch last Friday.”
His daughter said: “My dad is a real hero. He got shot in the back near his spine in an attempt to shield my brothers but he didn’t let anything happen to them.”
Another hero is Mr Naeem Rashid, 50 yrs old. He was a teacher.
“The video of the shooting shows Mr Rashid approaching and trying to stop the gunman, who opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.”
This is what his sister-in-law said: “When Rashid attacked him, he shot him. Our Imam, I think he saw him, he said his face was towards the sky, and he didn’t know whether he was dead or not.”
Yet, another hero (among many) is an unnamed young man.
One eyewitness saw him tackling the gunman. “The young guy who usually takes care of the mosque...he saw an opportunity and pounced on (gunman) and took his gun. The hero tried to chase and he couldn’t find the trigger in the gun...he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car and he (gunman) fled.”
Now, heroes come in many forms too. When something like this happens, the community of love and compassion comes together, and at this moment, across NZ, the crowdfunding effort has raised NZ$3.2 million within 24 hours of the shootings.
In one Facebook post, a Wellington native Ms Lianess Howard wrote: “If any Muslim women in Wellington feel unsafe right now - I will walk with you, wait at the bus stop with you, I’ll sit on the bus with you, or walk with you while you do the groceries.”
Pausing for thought, I feel that there is no better way to end this post than allowing heroes above to bring it home.
While dehumanisation is the process of reducing a human being into a category of subhuman to be hated, the acts and words of the heroes above effectively arrest that process and transform it into spontaneous acts of upholding and uplifting a soul into a community of unconditional love, sacrifice and hope.
And while we cannot with certainty identify the face of evil in a crowd, we can always know with anchored assurance that when evil washes over, love will raise a mighty tide to douse, quench and crush it.
For where evil rears its ugly head, love will break the neck that supports it. And where evil takes the first strike, love is there to heal the wounds, raise broken spirits, and restore hearts with greater strength than before.
Love thus not only overcomes, it also prevails in the community with resilience and hope. Amen.
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