Last year’s report into the Christchurch mosque attacks was met with scepticism and disappointment from many in the Muslim community, and understandably so. Among its findings, one in particular stands out. Regarding the ability of police and Security and Intelligence Services (SIS) to anticipate the perpetrator’s planning of the attack, the report said: “there was no plausible way he could have been detected except by chance”.
Despite also concluding that these same agencies have been characterised by systemic failure, it suggested giving them greater powers and resources. The government has also embraced the treatment of white supremacy as a form of “violent extremism” and Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policies as an antidote. But overseas examples and our own history – including instances where we’ve seen them target specific communities such as Māori and environmental activists as well as refugees and asylum seekers – show us that these are the wrong strategies because they actually end up hurting the communities they purport to protect.
Counter-terrorism as a response to right-wing violence has a long history. After the Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, the Clinton administration passed the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Among other measures, this act reduced defendants’ access to courts; made legal non-citizens liable to automatic deportation for minor offences; and paved the way for subsequent laws that curtailed First Amendment protections. The intent of this was to “strike a mighty blow against terrorism”, but the effect of it was to further criminalise black, brown, and Muslim communities; to erode the civil rights of already vulnerable communities; and to inflate their already ballooning numbers of deportations and incarcerations.
As we know, security agencies took on a new life and a new norm under the “war on terror”, which greatly expanded their infrastructures and their legal, or rather extra-legal, mandates, as well as their international scope. What is of more recent origins is a strategy to further expand and entrench this security-industrial complex under the guise of progressive antiracism, using white supremacy as an alibi to furnish it with greater material and legal resources.
Calls on governments to target an emboldened far right have been growing in recent years, and have issued from a broad political spectrum. After the storming of Capitol Hill by a mob of white nationalists and Trump supporters, Joe Biden renewed the call, promising to pass a law against domestic terrorism. Not long after, the Trudeau government in Canada also responded by adding white supremacist and “hate-based groups” to its list of terrorist entities. Almost immediately, however, civil society, community, and advocacy groups in both the US and Canada released statements warning against such moves. In addition to “weaponising” the incident by using it to criminalise legitimate protest and grassroots movements, they rightly see calls to treat white supremacy as a form of terrorism and violent extremism as instead supporting a framework as superfluous and reactionary as it is specious and harmful.
This applies equally in New Zealand, where the Christchurch report endorsed the adoption of CVE policies.
CVE has acquired global reach because of a supposedly “holistic” approach that goes beyond coercion and criminalisation. Deploying a new vocabulary and drawing on a broad range of agencies, from public relations to youth outreach and education, CVE is an attempt to harness state and civil society sectors together for the purposes of counter-terrorism. Researchers and advocates have described it as the most significant development in the “war on terror”, as well as the most alarming.
The concern here isn’t just about CVE’s anti-democratic protocols, its track record of violating human rights, and its uncritical adoption in different contexts. They are also worried about the way it outsources security to civil society organisations and enlists the public in the task of policing communities. A cursory reading of the Christchurch inquiry’s report is telling in this regard. Beyond recommendations that explicitly call for the implementation of CVE, the authors insist that a “see something, say something” policy is the best safe-guard against future incidents of violence.
They further state that they “wish to see discussion about counter-terrorism normalised”, and for the government to support “the public to understand how to respond when they recognise the concerning behaviours and incidents that may demonstrate a person’s potential for engaging in violent extremism and terrorism”.
In this day and age, it doesn’t take a leap to imagine the consequences of implementing such policies. Encouraging the public to become active participants in the machinery of counter-terrorism would simply place communities of colour under a greatly expanded regime of surveillance and policing. What we see here as elsewhere is the use of incidents of far-right violence to justify and legitimate policies that would essentially achieve the ends of white supremacist groups through different means.
Dismantling white supremacy can not be left to chance, but it also can’t be left to the same apparatus that has been disempowering and devastating our communities for decades. Resourcing our communities and building up the capacity to collectively organise against white supremacy is and always will be the best means of abolishing it.
Faisal Al-Asaad is an Iraqi-born writer and researcher based in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. His main research interests are in social and critical theory.