Motus Mentis

I’ve just read an item at American Greatness about the Christchurch massacre. The article is by Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of medieval history who keeps an excellent blog called Fencing Bear At Prayer. I am an admirer of Ms Brown’s — there are many reasons for me to be — and her essay rightly chides those of the commentariat who have tried to read a clean and Narrative-friendly ideology into the shooter’s manifesto:

They have opined on its citations of Sir Oswald Mosley and Candace Owens, parsed claims that it makes about the shooter’s ideology, and declared the shooter’s ties to 8chan are clear evidence of his right-wing extremism. They have described the manifesto as “a document of the utmost single-minded clarity.’ And they are certain it says something about the “extreme right,’ particularly in its references to medieval European history and the Crusades.

Their confidence in their reading would be laughable if it were not so biased by their own ideological preconceptions. To put it bluntly, they have been pwnd.

Ms. Brown thinks they expect rather too much from the man behind the slaughter. Describing the manifesto as incoherent, she writes:

The whole document reads like a series of red herrings strewn about the pages of a thriller by Dan Brown. Even attempting to parse this cut-and-paste nonsense is to fall into the trap.

Nevertheless, she parses the screed in some detail. For example:

The historical ignorance on display in such gestures would be breathtaking if it were not so banal. Perhaps if the journalists and their fellow handwringers knew a bit more medieval history they would not fall so easily into the trap. The actual Crusaders, including the Knights Templar, had far more respect for their Muslim opponents as Muslims than any hand-wringing multicultural apologist does today. As one aristocratic Arab-Syrian Muslim famously recorded in the mid-12th century:

Whenever I visited Jerusalem I always entered the Aqsa Mosque, beside which stood a small mosque, which the Franks had converted into a church. When I used to enter the Aqsa Mosque, which was occupied by the Templars, who were my friends, the Templars would evacuate the little adjoining mosque so that I might pray in it.

The Templars even chastised a newly arrived Frank when he attempted to remove the gentleman from the mosque.

Professor Brown is quite right — as we should expect! — in her critique of the document, and of those who expect too much of it, and read too much into it. It is, however, the idiomatically perfect expression of a certain enthusiastic type on the new Right, one that I’m afraid to say I know rather well: the giddily reactionary “shitpoaster” whose head is filled with a vague, quasi-historical pageantry of thrones, altars, Crusaders, feudal lords, Civil War generals, and thumbnail images of legendary defenders of the of the West such as Charles Martel and Holger Danske. He is young, and beyond his comic-book version of history, he is ignorant. He knows things have gone horribly wrong in the modern world (as they have), knows that secular, multiculturalist universalism is a dangerous pathology (as it is), and knows that mass importation of Islam into Western nations is suicidal folly (right again). He knows little else — other than that, at this point, everything his eye lights upon has got to go. He feels all the excitement that action, however destructive, offers the supercharged thumos of a twentysomething male. Most such young men find some other outlet for this sort of thing, but every so often there is one who just bursts. When I said in my earlier post that I did not think this man was insane, I meant that he was not incapable of reason — but clearly he had a pathological lack of restraint.

Ms. Brown hints at the possibility of conspiracy:

The one thing that the shooter’s manifesto makes clear is that somebody out there wants a race war and that somebody wants both Christians and Muslims to bear the blame, even as decades of attacks against Christians””and Muslims””of all races have failed to spark this war. Somebody out there is confident that an attack on the right group of innocents will spark the conflagration, if only the proper trigger can be pulled.

Maybe that somebody is a person””or persons””with considerable economic and political power.

She concludes with this:

But that anybody, even for an instant, took this manifesto seriously as anything other than an effort to provoke violence? That is far more worrying than anything one might find in the manifesto itself.

Indeed, that’s all it was. And what’s more, it said so. Pace Ms. Brown, however, the manifesto did show a “single-minded clarity” in its statement of intent, and that alone. It stated very clearly that the purpose of the attack was to provoke a civil war — which, in the shooter’s imagination, would summon the avatars of the warrior heroes of the West, and would bathe this weak and corrupted world in purifying flame. All that blather about religion and The People’s Republic of China and Pope Urban was just froth and effervescence.

Read Ms. Brown’s article here.