“Know the enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles there will be no danger” -Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”





“What do you want? We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children.” -Brenton Tarrant, in his manifesto “The Great Replacement”

Brenton Tarrant, currently in custody for his involvement with the murder of 50 Islamic worshippers on Friday, is a fascist. His manifesto does not shy away from that label, in fact he embraces the term “eco-fascist” to describe his politics. He, apparently working with at least two others according to the most recent reports, entered two mosques over a short period on the afternoon of Friday the 15th, killing 41 at Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, then moving on to Linwood Avenue mosque and killing 7 more. Two more people died in hospital, and a total of 42 people were admitted for gunshot wounds, out of the 48 wounded survivors - including a critically injured 4 year old. He released a manifesto online before the attack, as well as boasting of his plans online on the 8chan board /pol/, and livestreamed 17 minutes of footage of the attack as he carried it out. I have read the manifesto, which is now restricted and largely inaccessible online, and saved a copy, for the purposes of accuracy in writing this refutation of his ideology. I intend to clearly undo every argument he constructed and leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that his was an act of needless and nonsensical cruelty, accomplishing nothing worthwhile, with none of the heroism or glory that he has self-ascribed. Tarrant is not a martyr; he is a self-pitying coward lashing out at a world he has absolutely failed to understand. I hope to discover his errors, learn from his mistakes, but also uncover what made the attack – in some ways – tactically successful. In doing so we will build our knowledge as revolutionaries, insurrectionaries, anti-fascists in the world, learning and growing in capability as defenders of what we value – we will defeat the fascists and frustrate their plans every time their tumour of an ideology makes itself known.

I will briefly make my own biases clear. I am an anti-civilisation anarchist, a post-leftist, so when I use the word “leftist” in this writing I do not refer necessarily to my own opinions – my agreement or disagreement with the statements should be fairly clear from the context. I benefit from white privilege, I live in New Zealand, I am a pagan, and I am a man. My biases, privileges, and experiences will naturally shape this response, and I welcome feedback and criticism – the dangers of fascism and white supremacy must be combated collectively, and words in a vacuum will not accomplish this. I have, when I was younger and just getting into politics, been sucked in by some of the apparently easy answers Tarrant put forward in his manifesto; wanting to be a “real man”, wanting to protect the environment. A significant part of my desire to write this response came out of the hope that it might reach other young men who are compelled by the narratives of environmental defence and strong community that Tarrant has claimed to embrace, and clarify the deeply ugly and hateful truths of his position. I also hope to present an alternative, and I believe significantly more honest, view of the problems facing the world and its communities than the horribly warped explanations he offers.

Death to fascism.

Part One: Ideology

Immigration and White Genocide

His manifesto begins with a rant about falling “fertility” rates among Europeans (an ethnic label he expands to include the USA, his home country of Australia, and New Zealand). To him, the “failure” by white people to reproduce creates a crisis exploited by capitalists and immigrants:

“We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally. Invited [sic] by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labour, new consumers and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive.”

This paragraph interested me as it reads similarly to the basic leftist understanding of immigration. It’s a discussion I’ve heard reasonably often, but twisted, acknowledging that desperate immigrants from impoverished countries are ushered in to destabilise the labour force and create easy pickings for capitalists, undercutting the power of unions and diminishing the ability of the working class to organise, a story that’s been played out over and over in labour struggles throughout Europe, but now grossly distorted by Tarrant through the lens of white victimhood and racialist pseudo-science that “The Great Replacement” oozes. The left usually adds on to this analysis with a materialistic, historically-based understanding of the European capitalist rapacity that caused the impoverishment to the immigrants’ home countries to begin with, the history of colonialism and settler-imperialism that has dominated the majority of the non-white world, glaringly absent from his discussion. On the front cover of his manifesto is an image of the Black Sun symbol, surrounded by a selection of values he attaches to his ideology; one, disgustingly and ironically, is anti-imperialism.

It has been widely recognised that fascists, when they’ve got their anti-capitalist hat on, will attempt to steal elements of leftist theory, lending credibility to what would otherwise be nothing more than hateful drivel and allowing them to slide in some gentler-seeming racist claims that can be made to appear more justified when obscured with, for example, half-truths about capitalist usage of immigration. It’s not been necessary for every white terrorist to be a sparkling intellectual for them to leech off socialist and anarchist theory – it’s in the culture of the right wing to warp, debase, and troll the successful practices and ideas of genuine radical and anti-capitalist movements. This has been better discussed elsewhere, but I will briefly say that we must always be cautious in our theorising and propagandising on incendiary issues like immigration to never leave ambiguous and potentially race-related doors open, as others have been quick to take advantage of our failures in this area. Successes by the right wing in recruiting among the white working class are, I believe, largely owed to simple, but deliberate and calculated, misrepresentations like those in Tarrant’s own manifesto – once workers are divided by race, with white workers feeling victimised by immigrant “job thieves” and “welfare parasites”, not to mentioned feeling all fired up over the destruction of their environment (which I will discuss shortly), it’s a few short steps to ignite racial conflict and terrorism like Tarrant’s. Blaming immigrants for the capricious manipulations of cynical capitalists is an easy scapegoat, apparently, allowing as it does the continued benefits of white privilege by furthering and playing off the structural racism of Western societies. On a different but related topic, Tarrant does not read like someone well informed on the issues he discusses, and the level of connection to right-wing meme culture in both the manifesto and the livestream suggests that the internet, particularly right-wing blogs, vlogs, and forums, has been his primary source of information. It’s fairly clear to me that he is a young man radicalised by online propaganda and white-identarian talking heads, who does little but regurgitate the poorly-argued points of other fascist “thinkers” throughout his own writing. From the “FAQ” of his manifesto:

“From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs? The internet, of course. You will not find the truth anywhere else.”

An attempt at meta humour for his fans, but also probably true.

From later in the same section:

“By living in New Zealand, weren’t you an immigrant yourself? Yes, and it seems we immigrants seem [sic] to bring a whole host of issues. Nah, not really. An [sic] Australian living in New Zealand is much the same as an Austrian living in Bavaria. They aren’t going to ethnically replace the people, nor change the nations culture.They [sic] are the same people, they are the same culture.”

Overlooking the sick joke, one of the less horrific but still genuinely sad parts of white identarianism is the tendency to totally erase cultural differences between people of similar skin tones – he self-identifies as of “Scottish, Irish [sic] and English stock” and I am confident his Irish ancestors would have noticed a change in the “culture of their nation” after English imperialism. People with lighter skin are not homogenous, we have our own unique cultural legacies and histories of cultural development and change, as well as being colonised, usually by the English. As a first-generation child of Welsh immigrants (or colonists, I should say) I have three things to say on this subject – firstly, claiming white people are guiltless in terms of colonisation, even among other people with pale skin, is just a flat-out lie: as always, ffyc y Saes. Secondly if he genuinely wants lands returned to their “original inhabitants” I’d say all us Homo Sapiens had best head back to Africa and leave dear old Europe to the Neanderthals to which it rightfully belongs – or is that before the arbitrary cut-off date? The history of the human species is a very mobile one, and migrations and colonisations are overwhelmingly common – this isn’t to say that colonisation shouldn’t be resisted, but that also brings me neatly to my third point: migrants and refugees aren’t colonists. There’s a world of difference between colonisation (noun: the action or process of settling among and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area) and refuge-seeking (refugee, noun: a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster) or immigration (noun: the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country). The people Tarrant blames for his problems have either harmlessly moved in the world in pursuit of a better life, or fled countries torn apart by imperialist wars and are seeking a fresh start, and neither are the predatory heralds of the death of the white race. Our species has ebbed and flowed over the earth too many times to count, and buying into absurd fear-mongering about “replacement” because people are, shock and horror, moving around is just ridiculous.

Back to the question of colonisation, though, his wilfully blinkered avoidance of the settler-colonialism that created both Australia and New Zealand becomes clear:

“Why do you care so much about Europe, aren’t you an Australian? Australia, just like the rest of the colonies of Europe, is simply an offshoot of the European people. A finger on the hand of the body of Europe. The origins of my language is European [sic], my culture is European, my political beliefs are European, my philosophical beliefs are European, my identity is European and, most importantly, my blood is European.”

It’s stunning to read his blasé use of the word “colonies” only a few ranting pages after this absolute blinder: “all those who colonize other peoples [sic] lands share guilt”. His ideals demand retention of the racist status quo – lands colonised by European imperial powers must remain in the possession of their conquerors, indigenous peoples utterly erased, and, suddenly blameless, these European lands must rise up and defend themselves against the Islamic hordes trying to destroy their traditional way of life. Incoherent is too gentle a word. Like all white identarians, his apparent interest in racial harmony and equality is crowd-pleasing gossamer over nothing but a desire to see the Aryan race continue putting the rest of the world under its boot.