Invariant Grammar: The Structural Logic of Incompatible Movements

Abstract: Structural persistence in political violence presents an analytical problem that ideological comparison alone cannot resolve: how do four identical configurations — identity fusion, grievance inversion, sacralised violence, and cosmic dualism — appear across movements with incompatible ideologies, no organisational connection, and no shared intellectual lineage? Three cases spanning ninety years and three national traditions — Japanese ultranationalism in 1932, Afrikaner nationalism in the 1940s, and the 2019 Christchurch attack — demonstrate that what persists across these contexts is not ideology but structural grammar: a set of psychological configurations whose functional necessity for political violence produces convergent architecture regardless of surface content. Cross-context validation establishes the grammar's structural recurrence while identifying its methodological limits. The enemy-category substitution model reveals what the grammar requires and what it cannot abandon. Detection calibrated to surface vocabulary misses the grammar systematically. Reading the grammar rather than the label is a different detection entirely.