Where Can I Read the New Zealand Shooters Manifesto

There is a lot nosotros don't nevertheless know nigh what motivated the 28-year-old man charged with murder in a shooting that killed 50 people and injured at least 50 others in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

But his writings suggest that the white nationalist ideas behind violence and attempted violence in the Usa and elsewhere influenced him securely.

The shooter reportedly left behind a 74-page manifesto. It's the kind of document instigators of mass violence oftentimes write to inspire copycat attackers (which is why I chose not to link to it).

Withal, the document is worth understanding in context. There are throughlines in the manifesto that are similar to the ideas described by other shooters 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 near disturbingly, revered the same people for their use of horrific violence in the furtherance of white nationalism.

A give-and-take on terrorist manifestos

The reason it'due south of import to both sympathize the Christchurch shooter's manifesto and reject to spread its contents without context is that a manifesto is a published and public declaration of intent or conventionalities — and the critical term to call up is "public." The Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto with the articulate intention of it being shared widely after he committed an human activity of mass murder.

That means that historically, terrorist manifestos have never been accurate documentation of either their belief arrangement or the planning that went into their attacks. The main intention of terrorist manifestos is not to help everyday people understand how they became terrorists — information technology is to create new terrorists.

In this particular manifesto, the writer is not attempting to provide a fully factual history of himself or his reasoning behind his deportment. Much of the first 10 pages of the manifesto are the shooter responding to questions he's posing to himself nigh who he is ("simply an ordinary White homo" and why he decided to kill ("to show the invaders that our lands volition never exist their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man nonetheless lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands"). The manifesto intersperses details about why the shooter targeted New Zealand with self-aggrandizing rhetoric about the shooter'south own personal bravery.

And it's also worth mentioning that a lot of the certificate is akin to what'due south known as "shitposting" — intentionally throwing out red-meat content to readers to distract them or draw them deeper into the same online pits where he himself was radicalized.

For example, the Christchurch shooter mentions a pop YouTube personality and a popular American right-wing effigy before joking that he was radicalized in reality by the game Fortnite, which taught him to "floss on the corpses of my enemies" (flossing beingness a trip the light fantastic motion that the game helped popularize.) He also describes himself as an good in "gorilla warfare." Many people reading the manifesto jumped on those mentions immediately, which is, as Robert Evans, a journalist and expert on far-right terror advice argued, exactly the signal.

While "shitposting" is a mutual thread in far-right online culture — meme-ing racism and anti-Semitism is how white supremacists hope to spread their credo — jokey characteristics of the manifesto are in line with similar language used in older far-correct groups as well.

In short, everything in the Christchurch shooter's manifesto is what the Christchurch shooter wants us to know near him. Similar Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who killed 3 people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign from the 1970s to the 1990s, or even Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, published in 1925, the indicate of these manifestos is non to be factual or realistic about the inner worlds of their authors. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself equally a talented artist and lover of architecture. In Kaczynski's manifesto, he portrays himself every bit a man greatly concerned nigh the material problems of industrial society. Manifestos aren't honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.

Merely that doesn't mean they aren't useful for people who study terrorist movements, peculiarly white nationalism. Rather, connections between manifestos and the terrorists who write them — what they say, how they say it, and who they mention — tell us about the international flow of white nationalist credo.

The common language of white nationalism and white supremacy

Modern white nationalism has a mutual history and a common language that transcends borders. The Christchurch shooter's manifesto uses it, every bit practice others who have either committed or attempted to commit mass violence in the proper name of white nationalism.

While it has its ain American history, white nationalism is an inherently global movement. As researcher J.1000. Berger detailed in a newspaper on the bear on of the white nationalist screed The Turner Diaries on the movement:

Most extremist movements believe their waking reality has already become dystopian and they are participants in what Mark Juergensmeyer calls a "catholic war". For jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, this belief is articulated as a global "war on Islam". For anarchists and socialists, a fascist oligarchy controls complimentary market societies. In the case of white nationalism, the "white race" is threatened with extinction due to widespread miscegenation and the erosion of white supremacist social norms.

And the Christchurch shooter notes this in his manifesto, describing himself as European by blood because Commonwealth of australia is "only an off-shoot of the European people" correct alongside his discussions of eco-fascism. The Coast Guard lieutenant who planned to kill politicians and media personalities felt very much the aforementioned. In a deleted email recovered from his calculator, he wrote:

Liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples esp white. No way to counteract without violence. Information technology should push for more crack down bringing more people to our side. Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch. For some no amount of blood volition be enough. They will die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise. Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes or any state that despises the westward's liberalism. Excluding of course the muslim scum. Who rightfully despise the west's liberal degeneracy.

It is clear that the author is not thinking of himself equally an American citizen but as a white person, united with all other white people against everyone else.

On Friday morning, I spoke with Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and author of Bring the State of war Home , which traces the white supremacist motion's relationship with the Vietnam State of war. She told me about how white nationalist groups like Aryan Nations sent their materials effectually the world, and how groups similar Wotansvolk and the World Church building of the Creator set up chapters in dozens of countries — mainly those with large white populations, including Canada, French republic, and yes, New Zealand.

"Equally you can see," Belew said, "these places map on to an thought of whiteness that transcends national boundaries, which is part of why I fence for calling this "white power" rather than white nationalism. The nation in white nationalism is the Aryan nation, not the US or New Zealand."

She added, "Scholars have documented how these flows took materials, propaganda, grooming, language, and weapons to other countries, often those, like New Zealand, considered by the movement to exist role of a white earth that could be salvaged from racial others."

The mutual language of white nationalism is rife throughout the Christchurch shooter's manifesto. For instance, alongside Nazi imagery, the Christchurch shooter made frequent reference to the concept of "white genocide," writing of immigration as an "assault on the European people" and adding, "This is ethnic replacement. This is cultural replacement. This is racial replacement. This is WHITE GENOCIDE."

The concept of "white genocide" — the idea that nonwhite immigration or mixed-race relationships that result in multiracial children poses an existential, genocidal threat to white people around the earth — was coined by an American white supremacist named David Lane. Every bit I wrote last year:

David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984, wrote the "White Genocide Manifesto" while in prison, arguing that "'racial integration' is only a euphemism for genocide." He later shortened his three-page manifesto to 14 words: "Nosotros must secure the beingness of our people and a future for white children." Three decades subsequently, the term "white genocide" is the single most pop hashtag used past white nationalists on Twitter.

The xiv 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 fatigued on information technology on Twitter.

David Lane was himself inspired by William Pierce, an American white supremacist and author of The Turner Diaries, a volume that has become a white nationalist staple since its publication in 1978. (Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in Apr 1994 in Oklahoma Urban center past bombing a federal building, was a huge fan.)

And The Turner Diaries was besides allegedly part of the inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered more than 75 people, mostly teenagers, in a series of terror attacks in Oslo, Norway in 2011. Breivik also wrote a manifesto to "explain" his deportment, a document that stretches more ane,500 pages. Parts of information technology are extremely similar to passages from the Diaries (while likewise citing Kaczynski's manifesto as well). And at present, Breivik has go an inspirational figure himself, with his name reportedly cited by both the Christchurch shooter and the Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant.

The Maryland Declension Baby-sit lieutenant reportedly used Breivik'south manifesto as a guide to help plan his set on on political figures and media members, even using Breivik's classification system to determine his "priority targets," in Breivik'south terms. And in the Christchurch shooter's manifesto, he describes Breivik (or equally he writes, "Knight Justiciar Breivik," nearly probable an elaborate joke aimed at his friends on 8Chan and Reddit) every bit a figure taking a stand against "ethnic and cultural genocide." Another person listed equally an inspiration in the manifesto: Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist who murdered eight blackness people in a Charleston, Due south Carolina, church building in 2022 and has now become a sainted figure in some right-wing circles.

The office of America, and America's racial past

America has a cardinal role in the Christchurch shooter'southward manifesto. He claims he used guns to stir up America's fence over gun rights versus safety in hopes of dividing the land over racial and cultural lines, writing, "This balkanization of the US will not but result in the racial separation of the people within the The states ensuring the future of the White race on the North American continent, merely also ensuring the death of the 'melting pot' pipe dream." (He besides expresses some anger nigh the United States' involvement in the 1990s war in Yugoslavia.)

In general white nationalist rhetoric, Europe is "lost" in racial terms because of nonwhite clearing and low birthrates amidst white Europeans across the continent. But America — aslope New Zealand and Australia, to some within the movement — is viewed every bit peradventure the last hope for white nationalists to create an idealized "white homeland."

Over the terminal 50 years, those ideas accept been further adult with a surprising degree of specificity. David Lane, whom I mentioned earlier, was in favor of the so-chosen Northwest Imperative, the white nationalist thought of creating an "Aryan homeland" in the Pacific Northwest. The man who stabbed 2 people to death on a train in Oregon in May 2022 was reportedly an adherent of this idea, posting on Facebook before the assault that America should be "balkanize(d)" — the same word used by the Christchurch shooter.

And the Declension Guard lieutenant who allegedly planned attacks fabricated similar points in an email to white supremacist Harold Covington, writing, "How long can we concur out there and prevent niggerization of the Northwest until whites wake upward on their ain..."

From the government's motion for detention pending trial, Feb 19, 2019.

All of these ideas accept been shared and combined, with concepts created by white nationalists in the United States spreading to white nationalists living in United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, Italy, and South Africa, and vice versa.

"One thing to consider is that transnational flows of ideas and materials work in multiple directions," Belew told me. "The white power motility in the United states was heavily influenced by inflows similar British Israelism (from Canada) and skinheads (from Swell Britain). Only in function because of the ability and force of its activism in the flow I written report, [the white power move in the Usa] as well became a huge exporter of white power action in the 1990s."

In other words, white nationalism has been internationalized, with adherents finding inspiration in figures ranging from American neo-Nazis to Norwegian mass murderers, and finding common cause on forums similar 8Chan that attract an international audience of shitposting racists who view racism and white nationalism as both a worthy cause and a hilarious hazard for memes.

The Christchurch shooter was seemingly influenced by dozens of other white nationalists before him, whose names and ideology created the mutual framing he and other committers of racist violence have continually used. And through his manifesto, the Christchurch shooter, like the Coast Guard lieutenant, hoped to practice the same for someone else.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/3/15/18267163/new-zealand-shooting-christchurch-white-nationalism-racism-language

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