Oslo Shooter Uploaded His Manifesto to 8chan

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

Merely his writings propose that the white nationalist ideas behind violence and attempted violence in the United States and elsewhere influenced him deeply.

The shooter reportedly left behind a 74-page manifesto. It'due south the kind of document instigators of mass violence often write to inspire copycat attackers (which is why I chose non to link to information technology).

Even so, 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 earth.

In February, a "white nationalist" Declension Baby-sit lieutenant in Maryland was accused of planning attacks on members of the media and left-leaning politicians. (The attacks may have been stymied considering of his web searches related to drugs and tearing 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 utilise of horrific violence in the furtherance of white nationalism.

A word on terrorist manifestos

The reason information technology'south important to both understand the Christchurch shooter's manifesto and turn down to spread its contents without context is that a manifesto is a published and public declaration of intent or belief — and the critical term to remember is "public." The Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto with the clear intention of it being shared widely after he committed an act of mass murder.

That means that historically, terrorist manifestos have never been accurate documentation of either their belief organization or the planning that went into their attacks. The principal intention of terrorist manifestos is non to assist everyday people understand how they became terrorists — it is to create new terrorists.

In this particular manifesto, the author is non attempting to provide a fully factual history of himself or his reasoning behind his actions. Much of the showtime 10 pages of the manifesto are the shooter responding to questions he'southward posing to himself well-nigh who he is ("just an ordinary White man" and why he decided to kill ("to show the invaders that our lands volition never exist their lands, our homelands are our ain and that, as long as a white man yet lives, they volition NEVER conquer our lands"). The manifesto intersperses details about why the shooter targeted New Zealand with self-aggrandizing rhetoric most the shooter's own personal bravery.

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

For instance, the Christchurch shooter mentions a pop YouTube personality and a pop American right-wing figure earlier joking that he was radicalized in reality by the game Fortnite, which taught him to "floss on the corpses of my enemies" (flossing existence a dance move that the game helped popularize.) He also describes himself as an skillful in "gorilla warfare." Many people reading the manifesto jumped on those mentions immediately, which is, as Robert Evans, a journalist and expert on far-correct terror advice argued, exactly the point.

While "shitposting" is a common thread in far-right online civilisation — 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 too.

In short, everything in the Christchurch shooter's manifesto is what the Christchurch shooter wants us to know about him. Like 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 point of these manifestos is not to exist factual or realistic about the inner worlds of their authors. In Mein Kampf, Hitler portrays himself as a talented creative person and lover of compages. In Kaczynski's manifesto, he portrays himself equally a man greatly concerned about the fabric problems of industrial society. Manifestos aren't honest. Manifestos are for mass consumption.

But that doesn't mean they aren't useful for people who study terrorist movements, especially white nationalism. Rather, connections betwixt 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 mutual language of white nationalism and white supremacy

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

While it has its own American history, white nationalism is an inherently global movement. Every bit researcher J.Thou. Berger detailed in a paper on the impact 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 "cosmic war". For jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, this belief is articulated as a global "state of war on Islam". For anarchists and socialists, a fascist oligarchy controls gratuitous market societies. In the instance 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 equally European past blood considering Australia is "only an off-shoot of the European people" right alongside his discussions of eco-fascism. The Coast Guard lieutenant who planned to kill politicians and media personalities felt very much the same. In a deleted email recovered from his calculator, he wrote:

Liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples esp white. No manner to counteract without violence. It should push for more cleft downwardly bringing more than people to our side. Much claret will have to be spilled to get whitey off the burrow. For some no amount of blood will be plenty. They will dice as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise. Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes or whatsoever land that despises the w's liberalism. Excluding of form the muslim scum. Who rightfully despise the west's liberal degeneracy.

It is clear that the author is non thinking of himself as an American citizen simply as a white person, united with all other white people against anybody else.

On Friday morn, I spoke with Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and writer of Bring the War Dwelling , which traces the white supremacist movement's human relationship with the Vietnam War. She told me most how white nationalist groups similar Aryan Nations sent their materials around the globe, and how groups similar Wotansvolk and the World Church of the Creator fix upward chapters in dozens of countries — mainly those with big white populations, including Canada, France, and yep, New Zealand.

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

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

The common language of white nationalism is rife throughout the Christchurch shooter's manifesto. For example, alongside Nazi imagery, the Christchurch shooter made frequent reference to the concept of "white genocide," writing of clearing every bit 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 clearing or mixed-race relationships that result in multiracial children poses an existential, genocidal threat to white people effectually the earth — was coined by an American white supremacist named David Lane. As 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 merely a euphemism for genocide." He later shortened his three-folio manifesto to 14 words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a futurity for white children." Three decades later, the term "white genocide" is the single nigh pop hashtag used by white nationalists on Twitter.

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 fourteen fatigued on it on Twitter.

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

And The Turner Diaries was also allegedly office of the inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered more 75 people, generally teenagers, in a series of terror attacks in Oslo, Kingdom of norway in 2011. Breivik also wrote a manifesto to "explicate" his actions, a certificate that stretches more 1,500 pages. Parts of information technology are extremely similar to passages from the Diaries (while also citing Kaczynski'south manifesto as well). And now, Breivik has become an inspirational figure himself, with his name reportedly cited by both the Christchurch shooter and the Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant.

The Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant reportedly used Breivik'due south manifesto as a guide to help program his attack on political figures and media members, even using Breivik's nomenclature arrangement to make up one's mind his "priority targets," in Breivik's terms. And in the Christchurch shooter's manifesto, he describes Breivik (or as he writes, "Knight Justiciar Breivik," nigh likely an elaborate joke aimed at his friends on 8Chan and Reddit) equally a figure taking a stand against "ethnic and cultural genocide." Another person listed as an inspiration in the manifesto: Dylann Roof, an American white supremacist who murdered eight black people in a Charleston, Due south Carolina, church in 2015 and has now go a sainted effigy in some right-fly circles.

The role of America, and America'due south racial past

America has a central role in the Christchurch shooter'south manifesto. He claims he used guns to stir up America's argue over gun rights versus rubber in hopes of dividing the country over racial and cultural lines, writing, "This balkanization of the US volition not only result in the racial separation of the people within the United States ensuring the future of the White race on the N American continent, but also ensuring the decease of the 'melting pot' pipe dream." (He also expresses some acrimony about the Us' 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 among white Europeans beyond the continent. But America — alongside New Zealand and Australia, to some within the movement — is viewed equally perhaps the last hope for white nationalists to create an idealized "white homeland."

Over the last 50 years, those ideas have been further developed with a surprising degree of specificity. David Lane, whom I mentioned before, was in favor of the so-called Northwest Imperative, the white nationalist thought of creating an "Aryan homeland" in the Pacific Northwest. The human being who stabbed two people to death on a train in Oregon in May 2017 was reportedly an adherent of this idea, posting on Facebook before the set on that America should be "balkanize(d)" — the same discussion used by the Christchurch shooter.

And the Coast Guard lieutenant who allegedly planned attacks made like points in an email to white supremacist Harold Covington, writing, "How long tin can we hold out there and prevent niggerization of the Northwest until whites wake upwardly on their ain..."

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

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 United kingdom, Italia, 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 ability movement in the US was heavily influenced by inflows like British Israelism (from Canada) and skinheads (from Great Britain). But in part because of the power and forcefulness of its activism in the period I study, [the white power move in the Us] also became a huge exporter of white ability activity 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 like 8Chan that concenter an international audience of shitposting racists who view racism and white nationalism as both a worthy cause and a hilarious chance for memes.

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 racist violence take continually used. And through his manifesto, the Christchurch shooter, similar the Coast Guard lieutenant, hoped to do 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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