It is now over week since the Christchurch mosque killings in New Zealand. While not much has changed in the larger world, where hate and fear are still the depressing norm, you do have to be amazed by the people of New Zealand. The Kiwis have come together with amazing speed, toughness, and tenderness.

In only a matter of hours after the murders, New Zealand’s government had acted to outlaw military-style assault weapons. The nation’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, addressed parliament wearing a traditional headscarf, and refused to ever speak the killer’s name, thus to deny him the fame he desired. Thousands of other New Zealanders, meanwhile, expressed solidarity with their Muslim neighbors, and many stood guard around mosques to protect worshipers.

Particularly remarkable, even the nation’s biker gangs got into the act (see below). Club members staged ceremonial Maori haka dances at mosques to show support for Muslim New Zealanders, and also to warn would-be attackers that any aggression would be dealt with most severely.

As an aside, the present writer has seen a haka performed by the All Blacks, New Zealand’s rugby team, just before a match in which they stomped their opponents into the ground. The haka, and the team, scared the godamn bezeeus out of the present writer. And, if he may be so bold as to offer advice, he would modestly suggest that any White Nationalist considering an act of aggression in the face of such people might want to rethink the whole damn-dumb idea.

It would be a lot healthier.

 

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Michael Jay Tucker is the “sort of volunteer editor” of LR Net. He is also a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Tucker’s most recent book is Padre: To The Island, a meditation on life and death based on the passing of his own parents.

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