ATTACK FANS MORE HATE
WHITE supremacist Brenton Tarrant, murderer of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, says he wanted to make us fight each other. It’s working, and God knows where this nightmare will end.
More violence, probably. More identity politics, and less freedom.
“Why did you carry out the attack?” Tarrant asks himself in his 73-page manifesto.
“To incite violence, retaliation and further divide between the European people and the invaders (Muslims)” to provoke “drastic, powerful and revolutionary action”.
Indeed, the Christchurch horror is already inciting even more of the radicalisation and division that helped to inspire it.
In Australia, we’ve had independent Senator Fraser Anning disgracefully rationalise this terrorism by blaming the immigration “which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place”.
He then had an egg pushed into his head by a 17-year-old, who was in turn punched by Anning.
Meanwhile, far-Left protesters plan to drive host Alan Jones off television for having previously called for less immigration.
In the United States, students confronted even Chelsea Clinton, daughter of the former president, and in a video gone viral told her “the 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there”.
When activists misuse this massacre to attack Clinton for opposing the anti-Semitism of Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, you know it’s to Tarrant’s script.
It is risky to treat seriously the “manifesto” of a mass murderer and self-confessed “eco-fascist”, but Tarrant’s is in some frightening ways rational, even if his judgments are evil and paranoid.
Indeed, it mirrors the “Letter to the American People” of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, now dead, explaining why he murdered 3000 people in the 9/11 attacks.
Here are matching manifestos by tribalists who believe killing works and whose grievances include some founded uncomfortably in facts, however twisted their interpretation and sick their “solution”.
For instance, bin Laden said he was attacking the US simply “because you attacked us”, not only because they were unbelievers.
The US backed Israel, he said, and had fought Muslims in Somalia. “Your forces occupy our countries.”
The US had dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, too.
Bin Laden also attacked America’s drug culture, “debauchery” and sexualisation of women. He said its gases destroyed nature, yet “you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement”.
Can you understand why many Muslims, while hating his terrorism, struggled to object to his message? Some Leftists, too.
Tarrant similarly claims to have met violence with violence, having had his views “dramatically changed” when visiting Europe.
“The first event that begun the change was the terror attack in Stockholm (by an Islamic State sympathiser) on 7 April, 2017.” But there was more.
Mass immigration when European women had such low birth rates was “cultural replacement”, he said, echoing concerns by European politicians and writers such as Douglas Murray, in his bestseller The Strange Death of Europe.
Even the title of Tarrant’s manifesto, The Great Replacement, was taken from a work by French intellectual Renaud Camus, a gayrights activist opposed to mass immigration.
But Tarrant went far beyond them, injecting the racism and tribalism made worse by identity politics.
“This is WHITE GENOCIDE”, he said. And then came his evil “solution”: “revenge” for jihadist attacks, with no distinction between guilty or innocent.
Just like bin Laden. Violence begets violence. Tribal politics begets tribal politics. Isn’t dividing ourselves into warring tribes so dangerous?
But there were more similarities with bin Laden.
Tarrant, who said he was a communist by some definitions, said he, too, hated America’s drug culture and wanted to “save the environment” from climate change and overpopulation.
In fact, his manifesto hands weapons to culture warriors of every side, so as many haters as possible fight over him.
To spread his evil, he used the online meme culture, and not just by posting real-time video of his horrific attack.
He mischievously claimed American conservative Candace Owens first inspired his white supremacism, even though she opposes race politics and is black.
But name-checking Owens let Tarrant piggyback on her huge social media profile, as did sarcastically crediting hugely popular internet games like Crab Rave and Spyro.
Likewise, just before he started shooting, Tarrant cried “subscribe to PewDiePie”, the meme of the Swedish game-player’s 90 million online subscribers.
It is so deliberate, and so tragically effective.
We could once discuss our political differences but activists are now exploiting Tarrant’s crimes to further shut down debates that they falsely tag “hate speech”.
We are being radicalised by new tribalists on all sides. No more talk wanted, only militancy.
Tarrant is winning.