‘… and death shall have no dominion’ — Dylan Thomas

March 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - The only way to begin, is by joining in sorrow with those bereaved in Christchurch on 15 March, and remembering and respecting the fellow humanity of those who, so painfully recently, were also living. Of course, we must find a way to comfort those made fearful by this terror: especially since such fear-making was its major purpose.

There are some crimes of such moment that we always remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard. The assassination of John F. Kennedy is one such that is often named; September 11^th is another. The latter was a terrorist attack that was made for showing on television; I heard it on the radio and obstinately refused to watch TV for two days. The Christchurch massacres were made for propagating the terror and ideology via the internet. I am not yet clear about what this means, but it is obvious that it is significant, and that the jumbled ravings of the killer were put together with gleanings from the Web. He says so, in his pre-murder ‘manifesto’. Police and politicians cautioned us not to watch the video footage. Indeed I had no stomach to do so. Yet I spent the night reading the weird manifesto, which was easy enough to get hold of early on.

When I heard the appalling news — somewhat late — I was sitting at my desk, trying to write about Islamophobia. Ironically, the last sentence that I had written, was: ‘There is nothing intrinsically Islamic about these ‘old enemies’ vanquished (eventually, for a time) by the empire; Islam was just part of the package of the otherness, along with non-Whiteness / non-Europeanness, of these brown or black non-Christians who stood in opposition to the empire.’ I was harking back to how the crazed jingoists of the white settlement colony of New South Wales had sent troops to Sudan in 1885 to avenge General Gordon’s ill fate in Khartoum — and it was an immensely popular gesture — invoking, in their recruitment and fundraising campaign, ‘England’s and all Christendom’s old enemies, the Saracens’. The anti-Muslim racism was bound up in empire, I was arguing.