INSIDE MIND OF A KILLER
FROM QUIET KID TO A SICKENING SHOO TER
BRENTON Tarrant lost direction in life after his father Rodney, a fiercely competitive marathon runner, died from cancer in 2010.
He embarked on a world tour for several years soon afterwards, telling his family he needed time to himself.
He boasted to anyone who would listen he was “top of the class in marines”, a “sniper” a “kebab seller” and in the “US armed forces”.
Tarrant travelled more frequently in the last two years on what he boasted were reconnaissance trips to mosques, working out which to target, according to a detailed manifesto he wrote spelling out sickening reasons for the mass Christchurch executions. He even planned his own demise online: “Goodbye, God bless you all and I will see you in Valhalla.” One friend said Tarrant was obsessed with TV series Vikings, watching repeats for hours. Australian police are now probing his background to piece together what triggered Tarrant, a shy, yet friendly, young man born in Great Marlow near Grafton, to become an angry extremist intent on wiping out “non white” cultures. His mother Sharon, an English teacher at Maclean High School, would admit to friends that growing up her son struggled to integrate with pupils at Grafton High while his more outgoing sister thrived. A neighbour in Morrison St, Grafton, where he grew up, recalls an affable young man who was “friendly enough but very quiet”. “He always said hello but he would never look you in the eye, he always walked with his head down,” said Mr Fuller, who asked not to give his first name. In October 2018 Tarrant pasted a bragging Facebook account of his visit to Pakistan in which he claimed to ingratiate himself with the locals writing: “Pakistan is an incredible place filled with the most earnest, kind hearted and hospitable people in the world, and the beauty of hunza and nagar valley in autumn cannot be beat (sic).” But in his manifesto, he claims he wishes different people of their world all the best regard-
less of their ethnicity, race, culture or faith — but adds, “if they seek to come to my peoples lands, replace my people, subjugate my people, make war upon on my people, when I shall be forced to fight them, and hold nothing in reserve”.
A supporter of Donald Trump and “renewed white identity” then justifies killing children. “Children of invaders do not stay children, they become adults and reproduce, creating more invaders to replace your people,” he writes.
By his own admission he was an “ordinary white” Aus- tralian from a working-class family, with a regular childhood — but he claims dropping birthrates and fertility levels in “white nations” was allowing for “ethnic replacement” by immigrants, labelling it “white genocide”.
The Black Sun symbol is reproduced within the manifesto, a symbol employed by neo-Nazis and used by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS in Nazi Germany and one of the key architects of the Holocaust.
Tarrant describes himself as a “nationalist” right-winger who carried out his terrifying attack in his own name with no direct influencers but it was that holiday that changed his views.
To the question of why he targeted Christchurch, he writes: “They were an obvious, visible and large group of invaders, from a culture with higher fertility rates, higher social trust and strong, robust traditions that seek to occupy my people’s lands and ethnically replace my own people.”
This is a shared tragedy, of the type that we Tasmanians know too awfully well.