Suspected killer a product of our culture.
Today’s killers seek an audience as sick as they are
It was 35 years ago that the Canadian anthropologist Elliott Leyton sat down to write the “acknowledgements” for his book, Hunting Humans, that was first published two years later, in 1986.
After all the thanks, he apologized to the reader for the human suffering and degradation he or she was about to endure.
“We can only bear it if we remind ourselves that the eradication of a disease requires the intensive study of all the disorder’s pus and blood and deformed tissue.
“So far, the only reliable cure we have discovered is madame guillotine.
“Regrettably, while her use may provide us with some arcane satisfaction, she can do little on her own to staunch the outbreak of this most modern and virulent of social epidemics.”
A central thesis of Hunting Humans, subtitled The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer, is that serial killers and mass murderers aren’t freaks or cultural outliers, much as people may wish them to be.
Rather, Leyton says, “they can only be fully understood as representing the logical themes in their culture — of worldly ambition, of success and failure, and of manly avenging violence … they can only be accurately and objectively perceived as prime embodiment of their civilization, not twisted derangement.”
And so to Christchurch, New Zealand, where Friday a 28-year-old Australian terrorist who used the name Brenton Tarrant online shot up two mosques, killing 49 people and injuring scores of others, some critically.
Most of the victims died at the Al Noor Mosque, where the gunman came in shooting, roamed about the lovely prayer rooms, then briefly left to return to his car and change magazines or weapons (it’s not clear to me which he did).
When he returned to the mosque a second time, he shot even more deliberately, targeting anyone who appeared to have survived the first assault, or who was audibly moaning.
An older man, atop a pile of other people and caught against a wall of the mosque in a corner, appeared to be alive when Tarrant shot him, whether this was for the second time, and he was either missed or wounded the first go-round, wasn’t clear.
And when Tarrant left the mosque the second time, he shot a young woman on the street who had apparently escaped.
As she lay on the edge of the road close to the sidewalk, she cried three times, “Help me, help me, help.” He shot her in the head.
All of this was caught by the camera Tarrant wore strapped to his head as he went about his terrible mission, and which was livestreamed on Facebook, so people could watch him at work, so to speak.
And watch they did: 8chan, an anything-goes platform of the dark web where Tarrant appears to have also given friends a heads-up about the attack (“Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out and attack against the invaders and will even live stream the attack via facebook”), was filled with exclamations of anonymously posted delight, from those who had gone to Facebook to watch, that this was real.
At one point, after the horror with Tarrant back in the car and enroute presumably to the next mosque, he said aloud, with admiration for what he’d just done, “to run along in the middle of a ---ing firefight.”
Er, no: A firefight is when there’s an armed enemy, shooting back at you, not praying in a place of worship.
Yet, “Nice shooting there, Tex,” said one 8chan poster. “Brenton Tarrant is a f---ing hero,” said another. “Heil Tarrant,” said a third. On and on it went.
Users on other social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit copied the footage, posted and “shared” it to such a degree that even after Facebook tried to remove it, the massacre remained all over the internet for hours.
In an accompanying 74-page manifesto that was also posted on 8chan, Tarrant declared himself proudly anti-immigration (especially immigrants’ high birth rates), called immigration “white genocide” and acknowledged his was a terrorist attack, though he preferred to call it “a partisan action against an occupying force.”
The manifesto itself, which is called The Great Replacement, features a faux-interview with Tarrant, who described himself “an Eco-fascist by nature” and identified China as the country “with the closest political and social values to my own.”
He identified with other “ethno soldiers,” such as Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine African-Americans attending church in Charleston.
Similarly, on some of his weapons and ammunition, he scrawled in white paint some of the same names, among them Alexandre Bissonnette, who murdered six people at a Quebec City mosque in 2017.
Lawyers for Bissonnette, who was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 40 years, released a statement to the media Friday, saying he was troubled that his name was invoked during the Christchurch killings.
This is the modern culture, where lawyers for a convicted multiple murderer feel compelled to issue press statements on behalf of their killer client.
In Hunting Humans, Leyton quoted a fellow criminologist, William Bolitho, who wrote about for-profit killers but in Leyton’s view had a sophisticated recognition of the importance of culture in the making of a mass killer.
Bolitho was commenting on a serial killer named Fritz Haarman in Germany between world wars and he said: “The State had used all its best tools upon him: church, prison, army, school, family, asylum — it can hardly disclaim direct responsibility from the result.”
Replace “state” with “culture” and you have our world.