Dylann Roof ‘ s manifesto has surfaced. There is, of course, a big probability it’s not really his. We will be seeing tons of copycats and crazies using the situation to hide behind Roof and express the hatred they otherwise don’t dare to show.
The manifesto is way too articulate for this fellow.
Probably nothing could be done to prevent this manifesto from appearing, but it’s still a pity that it did. The murder was done to spread this poisonous message, and it succeeded from Roof’s pov and, most importantly, from pov of potential future ‘Roofs.’
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I believe that it should be read as widely as possible. Read and discussed. I’m sure he’s not the only young man who has gotten into this way of thinking. And if we don’t acknowledge that this exists, we will never eradicate it.
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I don’t think it was that articulate. In South Africa a lot of the intellectual justification for apartheid was done by actually smart people with PhDs. They were wrong. But, they were not stupid. One thing that they did is follow the Soviet and Israeli models of defining race along cultural rather than biological lines in order to distance themselves from the discredited Nazi regime. They also never talked about superiority or inferiority for the most part in an official capacity, but rather on how different cultures had different levels of development and needs. The real racial sciences were never genetics or biology. They were anthropology, ethnography, and sociology.
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If he dropped out of 9th grade, then it is a very unexpected degree of literacy.
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It may be his text. You have to consider that before writing it, he has been reading numerous similar texts on Internet hate sites for months. Even a very stupid person would’ve learned a few pages by heart after all that effort.
I read it, and the bit about ‘man hit dog’ vs. ‘dog bit man’ reads like a funny parody.
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Dylann Roof may have been radicalized by the website of a group associated with southern GOP politicians
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[the Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) website] is a hodgepodge of re-written media stories with facts either twisted or fabricated to give the viewer an impression that there is a constant barrage of black-on-white crime.
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The SPLC procured a list of 38 politicians, most of whom are from Mississippi and all but three of whom are Republican, who had been involved with the CCC between 2000 and 2004. Some, like Republicans John Moore and Dean Kirby of Mississippi, are still in office.
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/dylann-roof-was-radicalized-by-the-website-of-a-group-that-has-been-associated-with-gop-politicians/
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Well, it’s not like he came up with this shit all on his own. Everything he wrote about is standard discourse on white-power websites.
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We don’t know how well this guy did in school before he dropped out. Just because the guy managed to sound coherent and produce a clean document with very few errors in syntax and grammar doesn’t mean he’s articulate.
If you want to see what racism with a Ph.D looks like, go look at Charles Murray, Razib Khan, phrenologists, the guy who invented drapetomania, etc. Without exception, the works of intellectuals trying to prove some kind of innate racial hierarchy are intellectually bankrupt and fatally flawed.
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I read the writing of college students every day, and from that experience, I can say that it’s extraordinarily rare for young people to write this well.
There is a lot of effort going into presenting this man as a loner. He’s alone in all of the photos, he’s completely alone in this text. And I’m just not convinced. I’m not saying it’s entirely impossible that he got all his ideas from the Internet and existed in extreme isolation. Yes, it’s possible. But it’s also possible he was part of something bigger. If there is anybody else involved, I’m sure we’d like to find out and see them punished.
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This guy dropped out in ninth grade. I bet this “manifesto” is plagiarized.
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Or dictated to him by somebody. Or written post factum to throw everybody else off.
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I agree. This writing looks way more polished than what I would expect from a high school dropout. In fact it is more polished than texts produced by many college students I know. Of course, I am in the sciences so our college students are not that great at writing, but still.
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I’m in the humanities, and I only wish our students could write this way. And obviously I don’t mean ideologically or in terms of content. Just the mechanics of writing is too good to be believable as a product of an isolated loner who didn’t even finish high school.
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Honestly, the ideas contained therein are so unoriginal, stale and bankrupt that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s plagiarized. It’s the same shit we’ve heard millions of times from racists of various intellectual capacities and education levels. The more educated ones tend to resort to pseudoscience and cherry picked studies and use more million dollar words. The less educated ones resemble YouTube comment sections.
It’s well within the capacity of a ninth grade dropout.
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The cultural references to Rhodesia, melting pot America, and suburbs all seem dated, like the text was written in the 1980’s or by someone well over forty. Even the selection of a typewriter-style font seems like something an older person would do.
I wonder who took the pictures. Someone would have noticed if Roof bought a tripod or even a phone / camera stand, and the pictures are from too far away and at too good of an angle to be selfies.
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I’m also very surprised that this guy knows about Rhodesia and identifies with it so strongly. And your point about the photos is very important, too.
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Rhodesia has been a trope among white supremacitst for a while. The fact that the transition from white minority rule to black majority rule has ended up with the awful government of Mugabe is the major factor. But, the UDI in 1965 against the UK was done specifically to maintain a white minority government. There is also the fact that Rhodesians unlike South Africans were always presented by themselves and their supporters as cultured English speaking people. That makes them easier for Americans and especially the British to identify with than the culturally very different Afrikaners.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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