A cloudy Friday afternoon in 2019, for example. An armed man walks into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He walks past the gate into the main hall, shooting anything and everyone in his way. Without really intending to, he leaves some alive or injured. And then, as he is a vicegerent doing God’s work of cleansing Europe of its Black and Brown strangers, he proceeds towards a second mosque to do the same thing: make them make sure not to feel safe in a white country. It happened in 36 minutes; he killed 51 beautiful souls. 

Year 2023. The regurgitated disinformation of that American President, Joe Biden, incites a 71-year-old man in Plainfield, Illinois. Said man stabbed six-year-old Wadea al Fayoume 26 times. Soon after, more such incidents swelled through the US. Fatalistic violence is visited upon otherized bodies. A non-white paediatrician is stabbed to death just outside of her apartment in Conroe, Texas, by a 24-year-old white man. A gunman in Vermont shot three Palestinian students, unprovoked. There was and is a torrent of paranoia that follows these through. It crystalizes the unmistaken consequence of parroting rhetoric that generalize and dehumanize and is, as Soyinka posits, 

a daily reminder never to take any political situation for granted, never to underestimate the focused energy of the quasi-state [and its agents] whose instinctive recourse to the rule of fear as a weapon of struggle drives the best mind of a nation into exile, liquidate others, and paralyzes the creative drive of a dynamic people.  

Another instance. A downcast day, May 2023. The Rapid Support Force (RSF) of Sudan decided to raid a Coptic church complex in Khartoum. They proceeded in their communal formation into the courtyard and announced their presence with piercing gunshots. The leader instructed his goons: he wanted the place cleaned. An armed man entered the church. He shot the clergymen present. Others proceeded to loot the church of its valuables. In the end, they fled the premises with stolen money and the church’s gold cross. The day after this, medical doctor and humanitarian Adam Zakaria Is’haq was killed along with 13 other medical personnel at the health centre in El Geneina by the RSF soldiers. 

Through these events, one thing, as Soyinka puts it, is clear: power is, paradoxically, the primordial marshland of fear, from which emerges the precipitate of man’s neurotic response to mortality. What connects Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the Christchurch terrorist, to Joseph Czuba, the murderous old man, is the same thing that binds Miles Fridrich, the murderer of the Muslim paediatrician, to Jason James Eaton, the Vermont gunman, and the Sudanese war criminals: each of them assumes within themselves the ownership of what Soyinka calls the elemental force of death. It is their way of rationalizing their inhumanity within their own uncritical minds. Their action is simply fatal but also complicated, as their criterion for determining good and evil is on par with psychopathy. 

A semblance is noticeable in their operation. Language, in its most delirious ethos and pathos, is commanded across the board as a self-sustaining motivation. Like the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the oversimplified delirium of ‘they are bad; we are good; they are against us, and so they must die,’ reverberates across spatial and temporal climes. Evidence of this is in the pervasive culture of racially motivated massacres in Europe and North America in the last two decades, where white supremacists author narratives of discontent, share them, and then proceed to end the lives of random Black and Brown people. At the state level, more disturbingly, India and Israel perfect this devilry, as does Syria and ‘The Land of the Free’. These state actors institute hysterical declarations, which are then acted upon by armed state officers or triggered citizens. The reality within these territories is that, as a member of the victimized group, you are guilty until proven innocent: which means sometimes without cause, you can be summarily executed just for being what the state proclaims as bad. 

In a televised national message following the audacious attack on 7 October 2023 by the Palestinian armed resistance group, Hamas, against a number of Israeli Kibbutz, two Israeli government officials addressed their nation. In their message, one, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, invoked the Biblical verse of genocide as he reminded his occupying nation to ‘never forget what the Amalek did,’ and the other, Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, announced that their enemies are human animals who must be treated as such. Well, the consequence of these totalizing rhetorical pronouncements is obvious for all to see. There is no accurate count of how many innocent Palestinian civilians, men, women, children, and the unborn, have been annihilated by the non-stop Israeli bombardment on Gaza ever since—although the reported figure of more than 180,000 is beyond riveting. Babies in their tens of thousands have been and continue to be starved, decapitated, orphaned, and rendered limbless while the Israeli perpetrators reinvent rhetorical fallacies to justify their senseless destruction of innocent lives. These claims, as Soyinka explains it, are: 

Infectious… misleading eruption… that [has] over[taken] radicalized minds all over the world… [and is] characterized by a one-dimensional approach to all faces of reality, however varied or internally contradicting. [Their] most dangerous of these catchphrases [continues to] resurface in the minds of many [today, as such refrains as:]There are no innocents! 

In the instance of Netanyahu, this criminal generalization, predicated on a contentious Biblical verse, reinvigorates anti-Arab and Islamophobic actions and inactions in what is called Israel, and the animalizing rhetoric of Gallant becomes productive in essentializing the disproportionate fatal violence meted out to Palestinians in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Israeli territories, and other locales in the world. Akin to this is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s nationalistic manifestos which proscribe non-Hindus, especially Indian Muslims, as outsiders and infiltrators and emphasize their violent expulsion.