MONSTER’S MANIFESTO OF HATE
Self-confessed ‘eco-fascist’ who travelled the world drew murderous inspiration from Oswald Mosley, Anders Breivik and Finsbury Park terrorist
FOR a terrorist whose acts of violence were inspired by a deep- seated loathing of foreigners, Brenton Tarrant was extremely well travelled.
The 28-year- old Australian gunman has spent most of his adult life backpacking around Europe and Asia, immersing himself in and at times seeming to celebrate the cultures he now claims to despise.
Only last Autumn, the self-described racist was holidaying in northern Pakistan’s scenic Nagar Valley, using a lengthy post on Facebook to urge friends to come and ‘experience the beauty’ of the mountainous destination and dubbing the Muslim country ‘an incredible place, filled with the most earnest, kind-hearted and hospitable people in the world’.
It is, of course, the darkest of ironies that the shaven-headed fitness fanatic yesterday chose to use the same Facebook account to broadcast graphic footage of himself callously taking the lives of so many innocent Muslim men, women and children.
Equally strange (and sinister) is the fact that Tarrant’s decision to visit Pakistan came at a time when he had already decided to carry out the mass shooting.
The white supremacist, who began onandoff travels following the premature death of his father, Rodney, in 2010, claims to have been radicalised during an extended tour of Western Europe in the early months of 2017.
In a 73-page ‘manifesto’, first uploaded to
the internet in January, and edited extensively on Thursday night, he claimed that while visiting Spain, France and Portugal that spring, he came to the view that acts of terror were the only way to prevent indigenous ‘ European peoples’ – by which he means white people – from dying out.
The rambling document, in which he compares himself to Nelson Mandela, quotes Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas, and calls for the execution of Sadiq Khan and Angela Merkel, provides a chilling insight into his twisted worldview.
Calling himself an ‘ eco-fascist’, Tarrant describes Sir Oswald Mosley, the British pre-war far-Right politician, as ‘the person from history closest to my own beliefs’, and writes approvingly of US President Donald Trump as ‘a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose’.
He also writes approvingly of other neoNazi killers, including Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 in Oslo and on the island of Utoya in 2011; Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot nine dead at a black church in Charleston in 2015; and Darren Osborne, who carried out the Finsbury Park attack in 2017.
The ‘ manifesto’ claims that he had ‘brief contact’ with Breivik.
Meanwhile, a Twitter feed which Tarrant created around the same time leads followers to a mixture of white supremacist blogs and newspaper articles about British sex grooming gangs.
In simple terms, his bigotry – which seems to have been crystalised in racist chatrooms on the websites Reddit and 8chan – revolves around dubious demographic statistics, largely sourced from the internet, which have convinced him that white people across Western nations are being ‘replaced’ by immigrants (who he dubs ‘invaders’) with different, inferior and inherently dangerous cultural values.
The alleged trend is, he argues, an act of ‘white genocide’ that must be violently avenged.
Like all true psychopaths, Tarrant regards himself as normal, claiming in the ‘manifesto’ to be an ‘ordinary white man’ who was ‘born in Australia to a workingclass, low-income family’. His parents were of ‘Scottish, Irish and English stock’.
But his family background turns out to have been a degree more comfortable than he makes out. One of two children of the late Rodney, a labourer, and Sharon Tarrant, a secondary school English teacher who Rodney married in 1984, Brenton Tarrant grew up in a tidy two-storey home with a corrugated-iron roof in Grafton, an inland town roughly four hours’ drive from Brisbane.
A childhood photograph which emerged yesterday shows him, blonde and curly-haired, in the arms of his father, a talented longdistance runner who competed in 75 triathlons.
In 1991, the family were sufficiently prosperous to be able to travel to Japan, where Rodney represented Australia at the Strongman Triathlon Championships, finishing 58th out of a field of 1,300.
A couple of years earlier, they had visited Hawaii, so he could compete in an Iron Man race.
During the 2000s, there were mountain bike trips around Tasmania, and New Zealand’s South Island, as well as motor-biking holidays and a trip to Germany to drive racing cars around the Nurburgring.
At high school, Tarrant appears to have been popular among peers, but failed to excel academically, claiming to have ‘barely achieved a passing grade’.
One potential reason for his teenage struggles with schoolwork was a domestic tragedy which destroyed his once-happy childhood, robbed him of a father figure at a formative age, and may yet prove to have played a role in his subsequent radicalisation.
In 2007, when Tarrant was 16, Rodney was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
He died three years later, at the age of just 49.
The cause was asbestos inhalation, which appears to have fuelled
‘I’m an ordinary white man’ ‘Passionate about fitness’
his son’s subsequent mistrust of big business. In an obituary in Grafton’s newspaper, his sister Lauren, a yoga teacher and musician who plays drums in a rock group called Money Shot, called her father: ‘The greatest dad I could ever hope to have the privilege of calling my own.’
By the time of Rodney’s death, Brenton had left school. Choosing not to attend university, he instead found work as a personal trainer at the local Big River Squash and Fitness Centre, where he threw himself obsessively into bodybuilding and began following a closely controlled diet.
‘He would train a lot, and some could say quite excessively,’ his former boss Tracey Gray said yesterday. ‘ But then he was passionate about health and fitness and making those changes in his personal space.’ A local news article from the period says that Tarrant ran ‘athletes hour’ weights programmes for talented teenage sports stars from the town.
By the time he turned 21, in 2012, the Tarrant family appears to have moved out of the childhood home in Grafton (although property records show they still own it). Like many young people, he chose to spend a few years travelling the world.
A Facebook account he opened in 2013 suggests he visited SouthEast Asia, East Asia, and even North Korea, where he was photographed in a tour group visiting Samjiyon Grand Monument.
During this period, he also began dabbling in cryptocurrency trading, making so much cash from buying and selling Bitconnect, a rival to Bitcoin, that he didn’t need to return home to Australia to get a job, but could continue financing his travels. In 2017, he wound up in France during the presidential elections, in which far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen was standing on a racist anti-immigration ticket.
The ensuing debate seems to have struck a chord with Tarrant, who claims that in many of the towns he visited, white people were outnumbered by members of France’s 8.5 million- strong Muslim community.
‘French that were in the streets were often alone, childless, or of advanced age. Whilst the immigrants were young, energised and with large families and many children,’ he writes.
He added that he broke into tears while visiting a First World War cemetery, wondering: ‘Why were we allowing these soldiers’ deaths to be in vain? Why were we allowing the invaders to conquer us? overcome us? Without a single shot fired in response?’
Importantly, the title of his manifesto, ‘The Great Replacement’, is also the name of a somewhat paranoid theory developed by populist French TV philosophers, who were much in evidence on the airwaves during his visit. They believe a global elite is pushing up immigration rates to keep capitalism growing, and often flirt with anti-Semitism by blaming Jews for the world economic system.
During this European tour, Tarrant also appears to have been heavily influenced by the death of Ebba Akerlund, an 11-year- old Swedish girl killed when an Islamic extremist drove his truck into crowds in Stockholm.
She is repeatedly referenced in the ‘ manifesto’, alongside the ‘ reborn Knights Templar’, a far-Right group widely cited by Breivik, which he claims gave him a ‘blessing’ in support of yesterday’s attack.
Whatever his exact allegiances, by the summer of 2017, Tarrant claims to have resolved to carry out a terror attack.
He moved to New Zealand, originally intending to ‘live temporarily whilst I planned and trained’, but soon reached the view that the country’s small Muslim community made it ‘as target-rich of an environment as anywhere else in the world.’
So it went that the twisted young man – whose racist campaign against immigration has caused so much bloodshed – was himself an immigrant to the country where he carried out his vile attack.
‘Trained quite excessively’ ‘Target-rich environment’