Trump’s role in this ‘sickness’

II’d like to have been prime minister for 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes would have coincided with Donald Trump’s phone call offering condolences for the recent massacre. I would have got some bitter pleasure from replying with a pair of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.

Trump isn’t responsible for the Christchurch massacre. But he represents the sickness that caused it. The murderer put together a manifesto of sorts, a rambling self-justification drawn mostly from the internet. He wrote of ‘‘invaders’’. That’s Trump language. Trump speaks daily of the invasion of the USA. Half an hour after talking to our prime minister he was back at it. ‘‘People hate the word invasion,’’ he said, ‘‘but that’s what it is.’’

Trump may be too stupid to know what he’s doing. He knows no history. He knows no literature. But the murderer knew exactly what he was doing. He was killing, as he saw it, lesser beings. The oldest instinct of our species is that the alien is both inferior and a threat. The instinct lurks in even the nicest of us and it won’t go away. It’s what gives pep to an All Blacks test.

And it’s the easiest instinct to inflame politically. Trump’s done it. But have we forgotten when it happened here? Have we forgotten the 1996 election when NZ First brought 20 MPs into Parliament on the back of anti-immigrant rhetoric? And look where Winston Peters is now.

I used to go out on the town sometimes in Auckland with an Indonesian friend. I was astonished by the casual abuse he suffered. ‘‘F...ing Asian’’ was a common epithet. ‘‘Chink’’ was another.

So while everyone’s been quick to stress that the killer wasn’t bred here, he could have been. We’re no better or worse than, say, Norwegians, and they produced Anders Breivik. So more important than dodging blame is preventing another massacre.

Gun control, as the prime minister said, is the obvious place to start. There will always be bastards so let’s make it hard for them. No-one needs a semi-automatic rifle. A ban is overdue. And then attention should pass to the internet. If this newspaper published a torrent of inflammatory racist falsehoods it would be held responsible. But internet platforms never are. They profit hugely from enabling the spread of material. They should be held responsible for its consequences.

Beyond that there’s not much the authorities can do. If a fanatic wants to kill he’ll find a way. A terrorist in Nice killed 86 with a truck. You could kill dozens with just the family car.

Authorities can only ever react, and by definition they are cumbersome. Our ‘‘terrorist threat level’’ was officially raised to high only when 48 people lay dead and their murderer was in custody. The horse of threat could not have more emphatically bolted. That’s not a criticism. It’s just the way things are.

The massacre was genocide. I’d be happy to see the perpetrator swing for it. But that wouldn’t suppress the global white supremacy movement. (Nor would pointing out the grim irony of its name.)

What might make a difference would be seeing their global poster-boy arraigned, seeing Trump in handcuffs, minus his tan and his hairspray, his suits and his sycophants, exposed for all the world to see as the lying cheating stealing greedy stupid sickening bigot that he is. And while we wait for that, yes, the Crusaders should change their name. It was always ill-chosen. They should adopt a name explicitly Islamic. Let that be the murderer’s legacy.