Europe is uneasy about migration but won’t say why

On Thursday, a middle-aged German called Tobias Rathjen drove to two shisha bars in Hanau, near Frankfurt, and shot dead nine people, all from immigrant backgrounds. He then went home and shot himself and his mother.

That evening, huge, multi-racial crowds gathered to hold vigils and Germany’s president declared: “We want to live together.”

Meanwhile, political recriminations began flying. The Left blamed the nativist AfD party. Some on the Right argued that Rathjen was a mentally ill loner whose actions mean nothing.

He was certainly a delusional individual. His online activity includes posting a video claiming that the US is controlled by “invisible secret societies” who “kill little children”. Given that his manifesto called for the annihilation of Arab states and Israel and the repopulation of the earth by half a billion “racially pure” Germans, however, it seems a little disingenuous to suggest that extremist, nativist ideologies are completely irrelevant to this event. The German far-Right, we should recall, is by far the country’s biggest source of fatal terrorist activity, whether it is against Jews, Turks, Kurds or pro-migration politicians.

The fact is that Rathjen’s act was dressed in ideology. Fellow adherents range from Norwegian mass-murder Anders Breivik to Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who killed 49 in a rampage at a New Zealand mosque. Like Isil’s apocalyptic creed, this doctrine relies on a theory of epic conflict, in which its murderous acolytes are the brave foot soldiers. The core is an idea called “The Great Replacement”, which argues that the white, European peoples of the world are being systematically “replaced” by an “invasion” of brown and black peoples, amounting to an all-out assault on European religion, culture and racial identity.