by AW Siddiqui
A mass shooting at the Al Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killed at least 49 people and injured dozens on Friday. A 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, who claimed responsibility, is in custody.
There is a lot still unknown about haw many are involved and what motivated the 28-year-old terrorist but his writings suggest that the white nationalist ideas behind violence in the United States and elsewhere influenced him deeply.
Tarrant posted a white nationalist manifesto on Twitter and the extremist forum 8Chan, before opening fire. He provided a link to his Facebook page, where he broadcast the attack live. In order to get the disturbing footage, the gunman appeared to have worn a helmet camera.
Tarrant’s manifesto, titled The Great Replacement, is 87 pages and 16000 words, hate-filled, document, suggesting neo-Nazi ideology and immigration to Europe had spurred him into action. The unsigned document is Tarrant’s explanation of why he committed this horrible terrorist attack.
The document repeats popular far-right conspiracy theories about how white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants.
According to NDTV, the title echoes a book by French writer Renaud Camus which has popularised the idea of "white genocide", a term used by the Christchurch gunman in the document which includes a question-and-answer session with himself.
The self-described "ethno-nationalist" also took "inspiration" from other right-wing extremists including racist Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011 motivated by his hatred of multiculturalism.
He describes Oswald Mosley, a notorious British fascist leader and anti-Semite from the 1930s, as "the person from history closest to my own beliefs", reported NDTV.
The "manifesto" also assails the United States for leading the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1999 to end its war against Kosovo.
NATO intervened to stop Bosnian Serbian forces slaughtering Bosnian Muslims during an ethnic conflict that left 100,000 dead after the break-up of the state of Yugoslavia.
The conflict included Europe's worst atrocity since World War II in Srebrenica when around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were shot and killed.
Reports by NDTV say that the gunman listened to a Serbian song called "Karadzic lead your Serbs", a reference to Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic who was convicted over the Srebrenica massacre.
Images of the Christchurch attacker showed the names of two historical Serbian and Montenegro leaders written in Cyrillic on the magazine of his gun, reported NDTV.
According to an article by Jane Coastonjane published in Vox, there are similarities in the manifesto by other white terrorists or those who have attempted shootings in recent cases in the United States and around the world.
In February, a “white nationalist” Coast Guard lieutenant in Maryland was accused of planning attacks on members of the media and left-leaning politicians. (The attacks may have been stymied because of his web searches related to drugs and violent extremist acts.) The Christchurch shooter and the Coast Guard lieutenant used similar language, made similar references, and most disturbingly, revered the same people for their use of horrific violence in the furtherance of white nationalism, wrote Coastonjane.
Coast Guard lieutenant made his points in an email to white supremacist Harold Covington, writing, “How long can we hold out there and prevent niggerization of the Northwest until whites wake up on their own...”
“I never saw a reason for mass protest or wearing uniforms marching around provoking people with swastikas etcc. I was and am a man of action you can not change minds protesting like that. However you can make change with a little focussed violence”, wrote the Coast Guard lieutenant.
Much of the first 10 pages of Tarrant’s manifesto are the shooter responding to questions he’s posing to himself about who he is (“just an ordinary White man” and why he decided to kill (“to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands”)). He also describes himself as an expert in “gorilla warfare.”
Like Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber who killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign from the 1970s to the 1990s and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf published in 1925, everything in the Tarrant’s manifesto is what he wants us to know about him. But manifestos aren’t honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.
Modern white nationalism has a common history and a common language that transcends borders. The Christchurch shooter’s manifesto uses it, as do others who have either committed or attempted to commit mass violence in the name of white nationalism, wrote Coastonjane.
And the Christchurch shooter notes this in his manifesto, describing himself as European by blood because Australia is “simply an off-shoot of the European people”. The Coast Guard lieutenant who planned to kill politicians and media personalities in US felt very much the same.
It is clear that Tarrant is not thinking of himself as an Australian citizen but as a white person, united with all other white people against everyone else.
David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984, wrote a 14 words “White Genocide Manifesto” - “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”.
The 14 words; also of apparent importance to the Christchurch shooter, who recites them in his manifesto and reportedly posted images of a gun with the number 14 drawn on it on Twitter, wrote Coastonjane.
Anders Breivik, who murdered more than 75 people, mostly teenagers, in a series of terror attacks in Oslo, Norway in 2011, also wrote a manifesto to “explain” his actions, a document that stretches more than 1,500 pages. And now, Breivik has become an inspirational figure himself, with his name reportedly cited by both Tarrant and the Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant.
Another person listed as an inspiration in Tarrant’s manifesto is Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist who murdered eight black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015 and has now become a sainted figure in white supremacists circles.
All of these ideas have been shared and combined, with concepts created by white nationalists in the United States spreading to white nationalists living in Britain, Italy, and South Africa, and vice versa.
“The white power movement in the US was heavily influenced by inflows like British Israelism (from Canada) and skinheads (from Great Britain). In other words, white nationalism has been internationalized, wrote Coastonjane.
The Christchurch shooter was seemingly influenced by dozens of other white nationalists before him, whose names and ideology created the common framing he and other committers of white terror have continually used. And through his manifesto, the Christchurch shooter, like the Coast Guard lieutenant, hoped to do the same for someone else.
But by taking such a terrorising action “To show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people”, Tarrant and other white nationalists forget that “white people” are the ones who colonised and took over the lands and riches of others in the first place.
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