This may have nothing to do with anything, but yesterday I made an off-hand comment that in my area of California, Sikhs control a significant percentage of the trucking business -- among other businesses and industries -- and I got to thinking....
The Sikh Temple shooter was described as a truck driver in several reports. I don't know whether Sikhs have significant control of trucking in Wisconsin, North Carolina, or Colorado, but it wouldn't surprise me if they do. They work their damn butts off in the trucking business.
Could be Mr. White Supremacist Shooter got his panties in a wad because he found that "even in Wisconsin" -- so white it shines -- Sikhs were running the trucking business and he felt slighted and shut out.
From what I've seen about him -- and he apparently had quite a public presence through his bands and interviews and so on -- dude was no slack-jawed dummy. He would not have mistaken Sikhs for Muslims and gone to a gurdwara to shoot the people he did because he thought they were Muslims. I wouldn't be surprised if he knew exactly who he was shooting and why.
It may be conventional wisdom to think he was too stupid to know the difference, but there's no sign at all that he was that dumb. There are signs that he was smart, talented, and a risk-taker -- as well as a white-supremacist fascist/nazi -- who had fallen on hard times (his house in NC was foreclosed, among other things, [adding: after he was fired by the Iowa trucking company he was working for in NC, because he got a ticket for driving while impaired in his own vehicle on his own time]) and decided he knew who to blame and punish for his misfortune.
I could be wrong, of course. But it's just something else to consider.
If he had been a Software Engineer White Supremacist (trust me, a large number of scary Neo-Nazi types in Software Engineering), I wouldn't even have questioned his targeting of Indians, so this makes a certain amount of sense too. Since I wasn't aware of Sikh presence in other industries, I wasn't sure.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it's also important to point out that whatever else Sikh's are, they are not White, and isn't that all a Neo Nazi really needs?
they are not White, and isn't that all a Neo Nazi really needs?
ReplyDeleteIt can get complicated. It seems to me it's not so much their failure to be White (though many Punjabis I'm sure can pass), it is that they have things and they're doing things that aren't their "right" -- they run businesses (trucking, for example) they have no "right" to run; many of "them" live well, and they have no "right" to live that way. But the worst of it, to a white-power addict, is that everything the "mud people" have they have because they've "taken" it from some deserving White Person.
That's the resentment that leads to shoot 'em ups and eventually to genocide. It's not just because Sikhs aren't White, it's because they have something the Nazi-fucks think they have no right to and must have stolen from some worth White folks.