Propagandists of white supremacy not free of blame

To the best of our knowledge, nobody ordered Dylann Roof to shoot down nine people studying the Bible last week at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The “manifesto” penned by Roof and the testimony of his acquaintances — “friends” seems like the wrong description for people who should have done more to stop him — point toward a deliberate, carefully planned coldblooded act by a classic “lone wolf” actor in the campaign of hate being carried out against people of color by a paranoid white supremacist movement.

But we should not allow the propagandists of that movement to squirm so easily from the blame they carry for inspiring people like Roof to carry out their dirty work for them.

Like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who apologized for the carnage he inflicted at the 2013 Boston Marathon as he was being formally sentenced to death Wednesday, Roof is 21 years old.

Like Tsarnaev, Roof was passing out of a stage in life when scientists believe the frontal lobes — the part of the brain that considers the consequences of one’s actions — have not yet fully developed.

Unlike Tsarnaev, he did not have an older brother leading him along a path of destruction, but he had been influenced by propaganda produced by older men. While symbols like the Confederate battle flag are finally coming down in a long-overdue recognition of the role they play in homegrown terrorism, those who spread paranoid fantasies about the socalled “white genocide” should be held accountable for their actions.

Inspiring young men to commit atrocities in the defense of white supremacy is an atrocious abuse of our free speech rights under the First Amendment.

It was also a tragic mistake for people who knew Roof was planning an attack to have not done more to stop him.

He is reported to have told friends and neighbors that he planned to kill people because of his beliefs. He decorated a jacket and a car with symbols of apartheid, published a website centered on his message of hate, and wrote about the enlightenment he enjoyed with his discovery of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization obsessed with incidents of “black on white” crime.

There is no excuse for those who witnessed his threats not to have taken action. Neither is there an excuse for the people who inspired him.

The CCC president’s claim that it is “hardly responsible” for Roof ’s actions might be legally correct. But the group’s message — that the black race is “a retrograde species of humanity” and that white people are inherently superior — is morally repugnant, not only for the sheer malice of its message, but also for its potential to inspire people like Dylann Roof to step up and, in his words, “have the bravery to take it to the real world.”

When Roof told his victims that they would have to die because black people were “taking over the country,” he was expressing the malice and paranoia of a troubled young man with a sickness of the heart.

He was expressing his own victimhood, in solidarity of other “victims” in a Europe and America that he had become convinced are being overtaken by high nonwhite birthrates and waves of nonwhite immigration. He knew that was so because his propagandists had told him so.

When he raised his weapon and began to fire, there were fingers on the trigger alongside his own.