Tech firms scramble to take down footage of massacre
THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE INTERNET’S TROLL CULTURE
There is a dark and terrible line between a rant and a manifesto and it increasingly seems to be mass murder.
The gunman who killed at least 49 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, allegedly mapped out his five-step process: train, plan, settle affairs, write a manifesto, then kill.
He wouldn’t start killing without one.
A manifesto was so important to him, he wrote 240 pages and then, in a spasm of self-doubt, deleted it and began again, two weeks before his rampage. Or so claims the 74-page document Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old Australian, allegedly released online shortly before the shooting started.
And so we have “The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society,” a digital document titled like a political science treatise, looking like a high school journal, positioned as an ideological manifesto but coming off as a cut-and-paste online rant.
It reads exactly like what it appears to be: the weaponization of the internet’s culture of trolling, ranting, “shitposts” and memes, the culmination of long, demoralizing hours watching online videos, reading anonymous forums, following conspiracy theories and conferring with selected Wikipedia entries.
He even presents much of the material in the form of a FAQ, one of the oldest internet conventions of asking and answering your own frequently asked questions.
“From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs?” he asks himself. His answer couldn’t be less surprising: “The internet, of course. You will not find the truth anywhere else.”
And the power of what he found is clear. He recounts his own radicalization to the white nationalist cause and encourages others to fan the flames of race war online through mimicking what he is himself mimicking in an echo chamber of racial violence.
“Create memes, post memes, and spread memes. Memes have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto,” the Christchurch treatise says.
He takes his own advice, deviating occasionally from pseudo-serious lecturing to cut-and-paste internet insider jokes, sarcasm and even repetitive joke-replies from the online forums he frequented.
Alongside the written manifesto, the gunman left a selfie video by livestreaming his attack on the internet and, reportedly, starts with one of the biggest throws in today’s internet culture by reminding viewers to “subscribe to PewDiePie,” a huge but controversial YouTube star.
And his chosen forum for distributing his manifesto was also the world he apparently inhabited. It was uploaded to 8chan, an Internet forum where anonymous posters create their own content threads with immense leeway over subject matter. 8chan was created to combat censorship in other online forums.
The manifesto spends pages describing the intent of his attacks, a chronicle of grievances that boil down to fear of non-European immigrants, characterizing it as “an invasion.”
“Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic binds, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples,” it says.
“If not combated” it “will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
He gallops from writing of a “civilizational paradigm shift” to the hysterics of all-capital letters rants of “This is WHITE GENOCIDE.” He complains of Westerners converting to Islam, calling them “blood traitors to their own race,” which evokes both Hitler’s policies and Harry Potter subplots.
And in case there is any doubt, he recites (a slightly misquoted) version of the notorious “14 word” slogan of the white nationalist movement: “We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.” He says he is neither a Nazi nor a neo-Nazi but is a fascist.
His writing is a roadmap to his version of his radicalization
FROM WHERE DID YOU DEVELOP YOUR BELIEFS? THE INTERNET, OF COURSE.
story. Fuelled by what he found attractive online and making some money dealing in cryptocurrency, he says he travelled widely.
His hatred burned when he visited France and saw Muslim immigrants “in every french town…no matter how small.”
“WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING?” he writes. “WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?” He started thinking he would be a man to take violent action to help spur a race war, he writes.
He drew inspiration from others in his milieu, including other notorious mass murderers who had similar motivations.
The Christchurch manifesto directly refers to him reading the manifestos left by Anders Breivik, a Norwegian far-right anti-immigration terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, and Dylann Roof, an American who shot and killed nine people in 2015’s Charleston church shooting in South Carolina.
Breivik’s manifesto, presenting like a university thesis, stretched to 1,515 pages.
In Friday’s manifesto, the two prior killers are admiringly called “ethno soldiers” and “freedom fighters”, and he claims he even received “a blessing for my mission” from Breivik.
He also gives a qualified nod of approval to U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Are you a supporter of Donald Trump?” he asks himself. “As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no,” he answers.
It all shows how action and words can inspire others to emulation, even when the outcome is a horror show of pain.
He also shows his inspiration, both in his chosen title but much of its content, from right-wing French polemicist Renaud Camus who, in 2012, published Grand Remplacement, or “Great Replacement” in English. It outlines his view on how the ethnic French are being ousted and replaced by immigrants from the Middle East and Africa.
“It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates,” says the Christchurch manifesto, echoing Camus’ premise.
He says at the start of his manifesto that if people remember only one thing, it must be that the Western world’s lower birthrate means it is being subsumed by mass immigration and higher birthrates of “the immigrants.”
Camus, now 72, told The Washington Post Friday that although he condemns the Christchurch attack, he is glad “that people take notice of the ethnic substitution that is in progress in my country.”
The manifesto fits a pattern of extremists, say scholars of extremist violence.
“Many attackers across the ideological spectrum have left manifestos of some form — whether written documents or videos. But far-right attackers do have a tendency to write very long screeds,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue at the University of Waterloo.
“They exist largely to articulate the reasons for their actions for new audiences who are desperate for motive, make a bunch of disparate and nebulous ideas coherent for supporters, and leave a written testament so they will be remembered.”
Simplified messages gussied up in flowery language or academic presentation are appealing to those already sympathetic to their cause, said Kamran Bokhari, a lecturer on countering violent extremism with the Center for Global Policy in Washington and the University of Ottawa.
“Extremist groups are not in the business of conversation they are in the business of staking out their ideas, stoking fears and apprehensions,” said Bokhari.
“They need to justify their action. How? They are not going to appeal to broader society but that’s not their target audience, you think they are a hopeless cause. You want to be able to at least tell people who think like you, or somewhat sympathetic to you.”
Despite his jokes and internet savvy, the manifesto’s author offers a dark and stark coda for his actions.
“Do you feel any remorse for the attack?” he asks himself.
“No, I only wish I could have killed more invaders, and more traitors as well.”