Domestic Terrorism, the Internet, and Racism

1. The attack in New Zealand

On March 15, Brenton Tarrant, an Australian, 28 years old, carried out the cruelest and bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of New Zealand. He attacked two mosques, killed 50 people, wounded 50 more while livestreaming it on Facebook. In addition to the video, Tarrant explained the reasons for the attack through a manifesto loaded with anti-Islamic arguments, racism, and memes. International media quickly recognized it as a white supremacist attack. The local mainstream press, on the other hand, in its eternal degradation and without the most basic ability to read a text, pushed the old and dear idea that the attacker was just a "lunatic" hooked on "video games."

The New Zealand attack is not an isolated case. It is a phenomenon spanning at least two countries and has the capacity to go "global." It can strike any country at any time. The first thing to understand is that this case is linked to a similar one: the massacre at Utoya.

2. Breivik: the first ethnosoldier

Anders Behring Breivik perpetrated the worst terrorist attack in Norwegian history on July 22, 2011. As a distraction, he set off a bomb at the seat of the Government, which detonated and significantly damaged the building. While the police were busy with this "detail," Breivik headed to the island of Utoya where he killed 69 young people who were participating in a camp organized by the Social Democratic party. The entire youth leadership of the ruling party, the future administrators of the Scandinavian state.

Breivik accompanied his attack with the manifesto "2083: A European Declaration of Independence." During the first part of the book, he analyzes what he considers the current state of decay of European and Western society, a product of years of nihilism, consumerism, and loss of the cultural traditions proper to each nation. According to Breivik, this process coincides with the seizure of political power by an elite forged in cultural Marxism that installed multiculturalism as the hegemonic ideology. The nail in the coffin of traditional Europe would be the mass immigration of Islamic Arabs to the central countries of the West. Under the policy of integration between Europe's native culture and Islam, Breivik sees a hidden process of extermination of Europe's "indigenous peoples." This infamous idea is known as white genocide.

Breivik's narrative is clear: Europe must launch a new crusade against Islam. But this time, on its own territory. If the medieval crusades were played "away" to recover Jerusalem, the new crusade will be played at "home" to protect the motherland. The Utoya attack is inscribed within this narrative. It was not a random shooting like those at schools and universities in the United States. While it's very possible that many factors behind those attacks and Breivik's overlap, the latter had a specific aim. The Utoya attack was a political act. Breivik defends the idea that Europe is a biological concept and considers himself a crusader, a paladin, a defender of that order. In the words of Tarrant, Breivik's best disciple to date, an ethnosoldier.

3. A strategy for ethnonationalism: the decentralized Templar order

Reading Breivik's manifesto is a complex task. It requires patience and a strong stomach. It's a direct trip into the mind of a killer. The book has two very clear moments. The first part is the framing of the "problem" facing Europe and a possible solution. The second part is an intimate diary of how he prepared the attack. A sort of record that can serve as an instruction manual for future terrorists. This part includes various tips, from where to get weapons (legal or illegal), how to make friends in the Russian criminal underworld, and how to set up a front company to obtain, without raising suspicion, the necessary elements for making explosives.

Additionally, Breivik proposes as a solution to the white genocide the creation of a knightly order that takes seriously the task of destroying the Islamic enemy. The order lacks a central command, must work in a decentralized manner, and cohesion is ideological. Every soldier who joins the ranks and embraces the objective of destroying the Islamic invader on Western territory and the ideology that enables it becomes part of the order. In other words: terrorism and self-management. The order's objective is, on one hand, to strike the enemy hard and use acts of violence as a weapon to spread this method across the world, which is why each attack is a vector for reaching the next recruits.

The text is a call to direct action: assassinations, bombs, and sabotage, whatever is necessary. Any enemy, whether an invader or an ally of the invader (cultural Marxism), is a valid target. The order considers itself the last barrier between the "Islamic invader" and the remaining Caucasian indigenous people of Europe. This is the response to years of progressive integration policies. It is ground zero for the rise of a new right-wing reaction against globalism and its acolytes.

4. Brenton Tarrant: the first disciple

On March 15, Brenton Tarrant entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and killed 50 people and wounded 50 more with his automatic weapon. Before going into action, the attacker made a post on 8chan where he linked the livestream of the attack and left a manifesto. Unlike Breivik's, there is not as much analysis of the philosophical and political causes of Western-European decline, but rather a compendium of simple ideas. Written in plain English, he laid out each of his reasons for the attack. The narrative coincides with Breivik's, whom he called "his greatest inspiration": it is an attack framed within the crusade between the European ethnic collective and the Islamic one. It is not an ordinary attack; it is a partisan act against the Islamic enemy and its allies. An attack against an "occupying force" in Tarrant's words.

"I was truly only inspired by Knight Justiciar Breivik"

The connection between both terrorists is key to understanding the objective of the attacks. With Tarrant's attack, the "Breivik doctrine" ceases to be a simple theory, the delusion of a deranged nerd, and becomes the roadmap of a new movement: ethnofascism. The importance of a second attack is that it functions to legitimize, in the eyes of society, Breivik's reasons. Pay very close attention to the following video.

Until last week, Breivik was an anecdote, a number, a madman without explanation. From today on, he is a leader, and if we follow the video's logic, we are just one attack away from this becoming a movement.

5. All power to the memes

"Memes have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto"

If there was one thing Tarrant was clear about at the time of the attack, it was the power of memes. The manifesto he wrote is a meme, filled with memes, and even the attack video is a meme, with more memes inside. Did I say meme too many times?

What Tarrant is saying is that memes created on 4chan have more reach than any other cultural phenomenon when it comes to replicating, like a virus, the ideas of the far right. This idea is itself a meme known as "meme magic". I already talked a bit about this topic in my two previous articles. But beyond that, Tarrant filled the attack with "viral" content. First, the attack went out on Facebook Live, which meant that the entire attack would be replicated through the sheer morbid curiosity that drives people. He wasn't wrong. Yesterday, Facebook took down more than 1.5 million copies of the attack video uploaded to its site. Nice. Second, in the video he said "subscribe to PewDiePie," the most famous YouTuber at the time. And third, in the manifesto he left several easter eggs like references to anime, Spyro 3, Fortnite, and the Bitconnect Ponzi scheme.

Tarrant was not wrong, and each of these pieces contributed to making his attack one of the most popular news stories in recent days. But not only that, the controversy around video games and PewDiePie helped achieve one of his objectives: polarizing public opinion.

6. The attack on "public opinion"

"I chose firearms for the effect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the effect it could have on the politics of United States and thereby the political situation of the world. With enough pressure the left wing within the United States will seek to abolish the second amendment, and the right wing of the United States will see this as an attack on their very freedom. This attempted abolishment of rights by the left will result in a dramatic polarization of the people in the United States and eventually a fracture along cultural and racial lines"

Beyond being prepared for the attack, Tarrant calculated the effects of his actions on public opinion. Inspire fear, polarize society, and fragment. Each of these obstacles must be overcome. If there is something that Tarrant and Breivik discovered, it is how to exploit the ideological asymmetry between the progressivism of the elites and terrorism. Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison under a regime that allows the sentence to be extended indefinitely. Meanwhile, he lives in the comfort of a Norwegian prison and communicates regularly with others by letter. Breivik and Tarrant alive are a constant danger.

Yesterday, on Twitter, many progressives celebrated the speed with which the state of New Zealand repealed the sale of semi-automatic weapons to citizens. However, this type of response was precisely what the attacker sought to provoke. Why? To increase the persecution paranoia on the more traditional right and deepen the polarization between left and right in every corner of the planet.

"It is preferable to survive than to die in order to spread my ideals through media coverage and to drain the state's resources with my own imprisonment"

Alive, as they themselves express, they can continue causing harm. In this case, any government should consider the possibility of using the death penalty.

7. "Radicalization is the rational response to degeneracy"

"To give momentum to the swinging pendulum of history, to destabilize and polarize the West with the aim of destroying the nihilistic, hedonistic, and individualistic disease that took Western thought by storm"

The emergence of what we could call the armed wing of the far right adds a new problem to our political context. Today, the extreme right poses a fierce opposition to the political establishment. The proliferation of memes and ultra-right (or plainly Nazi) think tanks creates a favorable context for the radicalization of isolated, angry, and/or disappointed people with the current political system. Of course, between someone who posts a picture of Hitler and someone who plans for two years how to kill 50 people, there is an abysmal difference. But the more the first group expands, the more chances there are that more radical subjects will appear. We are no longer facing a political force composed exclusively of fans of authors with shaky epistemological criteria. Now, we have to deal with the possibility that thanks to that marginal, edgy group, or whatever we want to call it, every now and then someone emerges who kills 60 people just for considering them his enemies.

I believe the worst mistake that can be made is to look the other way. The only way to stop this advance is by destroying, or weakening, the conditions that allow these people to be formed, to act, and to spread their ideas. I fear it is a problem that exceeds the state's capacity to respond.

[Update: 08/04/2019]

During the morning of yesterday, a young 21-year-old American, Patrick Crusius of Allen, murdered 20 people with his AK-47 at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. In a three-page manifesto uploaded to the site 8chan, he made it clear that the inspiration for his attack had been none other than Brenton Tarrant. And he used the same conspiracy theory about "the great replacement" to justify the attack. Thus, what seemed like excessive alarmism when I published the first version of this post, today is nothing more and nothing less than a confirmation of the trend.

[Update: 05/16/2022]

On May 15, 2022, Payton Gendron perpetrated an attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. In the attack he wounded thirteen people, eleven of whom died. The perpetrator livestreamed the entire attack from his Twitch channel and left a 180-page manifesto. Within the manifesto, he names Brenton Tarrant as his inspiration, from whom he also copied the customization of his Bushmaster XM-15 rifle. The objective of his attack was defined with clarity: to stop the white genocide.