Roof’s roommate told ABC News the next day that he was “big into segregation and other stuff” and “he wanted to start a civil war.” And this is America, where we have the freedom to manifest our lethal fantasies.
But this is bigger than racism and the pathetic monster of white supremacy. Racism is a name for one of the currents of righteous hatred that coils through our collective unconscious, and over the decades and centuries it has motivated terrible crimes against humanity. But the “civil war” that Roof participated in is, I think, much larger and much more meaningless. And not all the participants are loners.
America, America, land of the mass murderer.
Mass murders have increased 14-fold in the United States since the 1960s, sociologist Peter Turchin wrote two and a half years ago, after the Sandy Hook killings. In his essay, called “Canaries in a Coal Mine,” Turchin made a disturbing comparison: Mass murderers kill the same way soldiers do, without personal hatred for their victims but to right some large social wrong. He called it the “principle of social substitutability” — substituting a particular group of people for a general wrong.
Dylann Roof had a toxic “cause” — to reclaim the Old South, to reclaim the country, from an unwelcome human subgroup — but the solidarity in which he acted wasn’t so much with his fellow racists as with the strategists and planners of war. Any war. Every war.
Perhaps this is why, when I hear Obama laud “the outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love” in the wake of the Charleston murders, I feel only despair as deep as a knife wound. War, not love, is structured into the nation’s economic and social fabric. We invest trillions of dollars into its perpetuation, across Central Asia and the Middle East and wherever else the strategists and planners see evil, which is to say, opportunity.
Every murderer believes the violence he is wielding is “good violence.” Think Timothy McVeigh, whose fertilizer bomb killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. He called his victims “collateral damage,” co-opting the official language of the Gulf War in which he served. Mass murderers mimic and find their inspiration in the official wars we wage as a nation. Take away the massive public relations machinery that surrounds these wars and the deaths they cause are just as cruel, just as wrong. The abstract “enemy” dead, in every case, turn out to be human beings, who deserved to live.
And every war and every mass murder spreads fear and hatred — and inspiration — in their aftermath. We can’t go to war without spawning imitators. The next day, USA Today reported, the vigils at two South Carolina churches, in Charleston and Greenville, were disrupted by bomb threats and the churches had to be evacuated. So did Charleston’s county building.
Until we begin demilitarizing our relationship with the world, such words uttered by presidents are as empty as the words Dylann Roof uttered in prayer at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that fateful night.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning Chicago journalist and editor.