The world is aghast today at the news of a massacre in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter was a white Australian; the victims were Muslims. As I write the death-toll stands at forty-nine. This is a horror, a sickening atrocity.
It is important to try to understand what happened here, especially as both sides of a deeply divided civilization begin to apply their spin. The shooter left a seventy-four page manifesto, which I have just read. There is clearly a lot of irony and sarcasm in it, and a lot of trolling and “shitpoasting”, but for readers who know the argot of the darker corners of the Internet it hangs together well enough, and authentically enough, that for the purposes of this post I will take it at face value.
First of all: it is accurate to call this massacre “right-wing terrorism”. The gunman’s manifesto is a screed against demographic and cultural entropy, and as such it is of the Right. Some on the Right have already tried to paint him as a man of the Left, based on his self-identification as an “eco-fascist”; he is not. Nor is he, however, a “white supremacist”; he is an ethnic/cultural/racial separatist, who expresses explicit approval of a diversity of peoples and cultures living in separate homelands, including Muslims. Nor is he a “conservative”, in anything remotely resembling the NRO/WSJ sense. (Indeed, he mocks such “conservatives”.)
Nor can we say, in any strict sense, that he is insane, if we define insanity as an incapacity for reason. His manifesto is lucid and literate, and follows its axioms consistently. You can say, if you like, that those axioms mark him as insane all by themselves, or that only an insane person would do what he did, but he certainly was not incapable of reason. There will be no insanity defense.
If we take the manifesto seriously, his motivation was explicit: he is an accelerationist. He saw Western civilization — the “extended phenotype” of the European people — as being under assault by an entropic pathology, and believed that the only way out was to arouse a revolt that would force people to choose sides. He makes clear that he committed this atrocity in order to arouse such a heated backlash on the Left — in particular, to provoke an anti-Second-Amendment firestorm in the United States — that civil war would become inevitable.
This is not the work of a simpleton or a lunatic; this is someone who understood very well what he wanted to accomplish, and how to set about it. I should not be at all surprised if his crime does indeed provoke exactly the anti-gun, anti-Right frenzy he hoped for, which in turn will have precisely the incendiary effect he wanted. (The Left, meanwhile, will seek to blame as much of this as they can on Donald Trump — which is just another part of what the shooter was hoping for. But that has it backward: Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause.)
In short: the shooter saw the West, as a living organism, succumbing to a wasting autoimmune disease. By exacerbating the symptoms, he hoped to provoke an immune response, in the form of civil war. His murderous rampage will almost certainly push things in exactly the direction he says he intended.
I could be wrong about all of this. The manifesto could be a sham; the shooter could be a false-flag plant, or an agent of some murky conspiracy. I’m only trying to make sense of this story as best I can, in its immediate aftermath. Such a thing wants explaining, and simply invoking Evil won’t do, not in this case — although evil it most certainly was.
Also: none of what I have written here is intended to excuse or justify this horrific crime. Do not be surprised, however, if we see more and more such savagery, from both sides of this deepening divide.
11 Comments
Always worth a reread after some right winger wastes his life and does something stupid : https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/07/right-wing-terrorism-as-folk-activism/
Thanks, Magus.
In the linked post, Moldbug says this about right-wing terrorism:
The difference between this and the Breivik assault that Molbug critiques is that the NZ terrorist did see himself aligned with a latent military/political force — the armed traditionalists of the United States — that could only be awakened in response to an excessive Left reaction, which his massacre was intended to provoke.
Well said, Malcolm. It was a sickening atrocity in a world which has far too many of them.
Thanks, Peter.
NP, Mac.
There’s been a lot in the news lately. Perhaps you will have time to devote a post to the current scandal where brainiacs take SAT tests for dimwitted students.
Maybe so.
re: “…where brainiacs take SAT tests for dimwitted students.” the one eyed man says
This is nothing new.
In 1958, when I was in 11th grade, I knew both individuals where one took the SATs for the other. Neither were caught. They looked close enough alike (ht., wt., complexion, hair style, general appearance) to pass the surveillance at the time which if I recall correctly were minimal–a photo of the test taker certified some how & some ID.
Dan Kurt
I’ve removed a comment. (I don’t often do that.) I have no problem with contrasting viewpoints, or even harsh criticism, but I don’t feel any obligation to publish vulgar and barely coherent rants.
Dan,
I’ll just say (following on OEM’s comment) that I’m personally aware of that having happened once as well, when I was about sixteen.
Looking over his manifesto, especially the diagram in the beginning, it is clear that he supports environmentalism, the welfare state, and the promotion of White interests. This pretty much puts him in Mussolini’s camp, and “eco-fascist” is a good short-hand description of his beliefs.
I don’t know…I’m not sure any reaction is necessary to “news” of an “atrocity” from known liars in media and government. There’s really no way to be sure this happened. It’s just a question of “believing” “authorities” or not.