Using undeniable Nazi-inspired imagery, that is how humanity's fate was described in James Cameron's original Terminator film by the character Kyle Reese.
The idea gave me nightmares. The cold precision of describing how sentient supercomputer Skynet "decided our fate in a microsecond" and acting as a Nietzschean superman divorced from any system of morality, "rounded us up" to be run through a human slaughterhouse factory of death. The exact process of our demise Reese left to the viewer's imagination, which made it that much more horrific.
The process used by would be superman Dylann Roof was not left to anyone's imagination. The deliberate act of terror by which Roof slaughtered 9 people in an historically significant Church in Charleston was not a logical act of orderly disposal. He left one person alive to tell the story. As Dean Obeidallah correctly assesses, this was an act of domestic terrorism, but to what end? To intimidate? Certainly. Coerce a population or a government? Less clear. To do what? There have been too many incidents of police brutality and execution of African-Americans for there not to be some element of policy involved. For the evil white supremacist, has this slow-motion genocide not been enough? Do monsters like Roof have any policy in mind for the African-American community beyond simply ceasing to exist?
The latest news report from CNN released Roof's statement that he hoped to spark a race war. There is also implied or inferred speculation that he wanted to do something to stir up tension and anger in the way Trayvvon Martin's death spiked confrontation between whites and blacks. This would indicate his mass murder was a means to another means, desiring a war means desiring to win that war. And victory would mean an end game of orderly disposal far greater than anything the African-American community currently faces.
Humans have been killing each other since the dawn of civilization. The Old Testament is filled with stories about how God commanded the Hebrews to annihilate other tribes and other genocidal events. The orderly disposal of despised populations occurs in history infrequently however, this may be due to the fact that total human population was always less than a billion until around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Now that we are packed onto this little blue marble almost seven times tighter than when Andrew Jackson was implementing his policy of Indian Removal, are genocides going to be carried out with greater frequency? Roof said during his attack that "you [African-American men presumably] rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go."
Guns, racism, eliminationism; and fascist conceptions of unity, harmony, homogeneity, and purity are viruses implanted deep in the dark corners of human civilization. We need to be realistic about them and understand that they are never going to completely disappear. The fact remains that a dirty soup of evil ideas had to combine and fester in Dylann Roof's mind. From the beginning and most simple. Guns; if Roof had not been able to legally acquire a firearm he could be as racist as possible and those people would still be alive. Finally getting serious about background checks and straw-buying would substantially cut down the number of orderly disposals in America. But this would treat the symptoms rather than the disease. And of course, racists and fascists will always argue against anything that might prevent them from their own glorious day of violence against all sorts of enemies. You never know when you might want to exercise your option to carry out your own blood-soaked rampage. Racism; Roof was 21, anyone who read his manifesto should put to rest any pie-in-the-sky laziness about demographics leading to eventual triumph for enlightenment. There will always be angry young men, it is part of the nature of being young. Roof apparently had black friends and acquaintances, so his racism did not grow out of detached ignorance. Something larger framed his perception.
It will take hard work and determination to build influences of tolerance, humility, and plurality that can compete with those of hatred, discrimination, and violence. Fascism has no problem with violence in service of purifying society or enforcing unity by suppressing dissent. But in a democracy dissent and disagreement among heterogeneous communities is desirable for progress. The two are incompatible and this is why, liberal democracy will always try to accommodate elements within that desire nothing less than the complete elimination of liberal democratic values.
Reinhold Niebuhr knew this when he wrote about the Children of Light's inability to confront real evil in the Children of Darkness. Only through constant vigilance can a democratic society reject fascist elements. The Union got distracted and did not follow through after defeating the Confederacy, therefore the slave power was able to reassert its power. Liberals got distracted and lost focus after the Civil Rights Act and after Roe v. Wade, allowing fascist intolerance to chip away at the progress made through those struggles.
A truly strong voice for tolerance, humility, and plurality that understands the tenacity of fascism could diffuse and defuse the power of hate and authoritarianism. Instead we have a "conservative" movement preaching the values that led Roof to reject the idea that all people are flawed but have the capacity for kindness. Instead, the influences in his life framed bad behavior in different ways according to the color of the perpetrator's skin, reinforcing the "us vs. them" view. Under such conditions, a troubled young man can overlook white people acting badly and black people acting nicely. Obviously this is just speculation and personal observation though.
Will the tension between fascism's relentless push for violence, hate, and intimidation and democracy's desire for compromise and accommodation lead to more acts of terrorism like Charleston? Will these attacks increase with population pressures and competition for resources? There really is no historical analog for these questions. In previous cases of demographic change, people could emigrate to the Americas from [relatively] overpopulated European countries. Will the pressure lead to violent revolution and repression or evolutionary progress? Or will the struggle continue until Skynet gains self-awareness and solve the problem for us through "orderly disposal" of all of us? Reese also said, and science fiction usually follows, that: "The future's not set. There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." Nothing is inevitable. Niebuhr always believed that, a war can always be stopped if we want it to.
It may be a positive portent that instead of a race war, there is a vigorous debate over the persistence of the confederate flag's presence in society after this heinous act of terrorist violence and hate.
