Läs American Conservative´s svar på Tarrants manifest:
One of the biggest lies we hear whenever there is a mass terror
attack, such as the one against New Zealand’s Muslims, is that the
killing was “senseless.” It’s not without reason when ISIS does it, and
it’s not without reason when people like
Brenton Tarrant, the alleged NZ shooter, do it. The acts are
evil,
but not senseless; there is a rationale for what they do. To be clear:
do NOT read me as saying Tarrant’s acts “made sense” in the general
sense of the term; I’m speaking narrowly here, to mean that causation is
at work. We need to know this so we can better combat things like this.
I read Tarrant’s manifesto, which is easy to find online, though I’m
not going to link to it here. It’s a chilling document, for a couple of
reasons. First, it’s grounded in both paranoid, racist grievance, and
legitimate, realistic concerns. Second, as with ISIS videos and
propaganda, the Internet distributes this stuff worldwide; we may be
certain that Tarrant’s manifesto will strike many resonant chords with
murder-minded fanatical racists like himself.
Though I don’t want to be part of spreading the manifesto, I do want
to talk about a few parts of it, including parts you may not hear about
in the media reporting. It’s important to talk about it. I will say here
clearly that any reader who in any way attempts to justify this
atrocity in New Zealand will NOT be posted. It was a despicable act, and
if you pray, join me in praying for the souls of the murdered, and the
families they left behind.
That said, some comments on the manifesto (you can read
a general NYT report on it here).
I read it in the same vein as I read the bloodthirsty Islamist fanatic
Sayyid Qutb’s work: as something that we have to understand, because it
articulates quite clearly what we’re up against — and that it’s not mere
psychotic raving:
- Tarrant identifies himself as an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist.” He
says he was first a communist, then an anarchist, then a libertarian,
and finally an eco-fascist. He’s 28. This is not a stable person.
- He despises conservatives for having conserved nothing.
“Conservatism is corporatism in disguise, I want no part of it,” he
writes. He adds, in all caps, “CONSERVATISM IS DEAD, THANK GOD.” He also
despises France’s National Front, or whatever it’s called today. He
calls them “milquetoast.” He praises the emergence of Trump as a sign of
hope, but mocks Trump too. He says his idea leader is Oswald Mosley,
the 20th century British fascist. Point is, the idea that Tarrant has
any meaningful connection to the mainstream right is nonsense. The man
is true radical.
- He says his aim is to accelerate history by frightening people and
creating conflict. In particular, he wants to cause the US to move to
take away people’s guns, and the Second Amendment supporters to respond
to this violently.
- He wants the US to be balkanized into warring racial and regional
factions, to destroy the ability of the US to project power around the
world.
- He was radicalized by traveling in Europe and seeing immigrant
crime, by seeing how many immigrants are present, and how the dispirited
native populations are dying out. Overcome by emotion, he decided that
he must do something about it.
- He said he chose the firearms for his attack specifically to incite
an argument within the US, leading to the left attempting to confiscate
guns, thereby starting a civil war.
- He says he is not a Nazi, but it’s hard to know what to make of his
politics except to say that he is a national socialist obsessed with
race, and hating capitalism. Plus, he loves the environment (“there is
no traditionalism without environmentalism”).
- This was a brutal slap: “Above all, don’t be stale, placid, and boring. No one is inspired by Jeb Bush.”
- He praises the People’s Republic of China as his ideal state.
Here’s the most important line in the manifesto, one that the rest of
us had better have a good answer to, because this assertion, in some
form, is going to be with us for the rest of our lives:
RADICALIZATION IS THE RATIONAL RESPONSE TO DEGENERATION
What is “degeneration”? According to the manifesto, it consists of:
- The decline in native European populations, and native European
stock in the US, in terms of numbers relative to non-Europeans within
those societies.
- Politics and policies within European countries (that is, countries
with ethnic European majorities, including the US and Canada) that
disempower native Europeans.
- Widespread drug use.
- The loss of worker rights and stability under the reign of globalist capitalism.
- Environmental degradation.
- The collapse of Christianity (which he seems to value only as a force ethnically binding Europeans)
- Rampant hedonism
Here’s the chilling part:
Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true.
You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good
thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really
is happening. So are all the rest.
In no way do I see “radicalization,” at least not
remotely
in the violent terms conceived of by this mass murdering scum, as the
answer to the disintegration he identifies. There is never, ever any
justification for what he did. But if we are going to figure out how to
stop these things, we have to take seriously the roots of it — this, in
the same way we have to recognize the roots of Al-Qaeda and ISIS in
specific experiences of Arab Muslims in late modernity. In fact, what
Tarrant did, and what the Islamist terrorists do, intersect insofar as
they are responses to the profound displacement of peoples and
traditions in the modern world.
We are no doubt going to see more Tarrants emerge from the masses of
angry young white men radicalized by the world they live in, and from
living online. Again, the emergence of the same kind of men from the
stresses of Arab Muslim society is entirely predictable.
The temptation many here will have in response to this obscene attack
is to deny that it is based in any kind of reality. To do that, though,
requires closing one’s eyes to actual conditions in the world. It would
be like Russian aristocrats, circa 1900, telling themselves that the
communist and anarchist revolutionaries committing acts of political
murder have nothing to do with social, political, and economic changes
roiling Europe and Russia of the era. That they are just inexplicable
acts of savagery caused by the reading of revolutionary tracts.
Ian Bogost has
an interesting piece
explaining why it is impossible to say for sure what Tarrant really
meant in this manifesto, and what is sarcasm (e.g., he baited the black
American right-wing commenter Candace Owens in his manifesto). Bogost
points out that social media, though, is made for creating chaos.
The world is undergoing unprecedented upheavals caused in part by
technology, and certainly amplified by technology. This is only going to
get more severe. We also live in a time in which masses of people have
genuinely been uprooted from all sources of stability. The greatest task
for political leaders, it seems to me, is to figure out how to keep
society relatively stable during this long period of tumult. Encouraging
identity politics and mass immigration, especially during a time of
rising social instability, are suicidal for stable polities.
It seems clear to me that it in no way requires one to endorse
Tarrant’s vile crimes to recognize that like splitting the atom, the
unwinding of Western civilization is going to release some extreme
energies. It already is. It is simply bizarre to think that all
Europeans are going to acquiesce gently in the overwhelming of their
nations by immigrants in this century. Most will, I think, but it is
reasonable to expect that more and more violent fanatics like Tarrant
and his hero Anders Breivik will arise. I believe we should take Tarrant
seriously when he says that what radicalized him most of all was
traveling to Europe and seeing with his own eyes the withering away of
the continent’s ancient peoples. His way of responding to it is demonic —
but what he is responding to is real. Douglas Murray’s great and sober
book The Strange Death Of Europe is the thing to read on this topic.
One last point. In his manifesto, Tarrant says that it’s “laughable”
to expect immigrants to the West to assimilate to a decadent, dying
culture like ours. This brought to mind something I heard in New York
last week. A man told me that two Romanian immigrant friends of his are
thinking of returning to Romania to educate their children because they
don’t want their kids infected with the decadence transmitted by the US
education system. I don’t blame him at all. I think of Mark Bollobas’s
decision to move to Hungary, the country from which his parents defected
in the 1960s. Excerpt from
something he wrote for this blog late last year:
Like many children of immigrants, I was raised to know
that I have to work harder, and be better everywhere than those who were
“local” to get ahead. And it’s all true. But I was also raised in a
Hungarian household. While my parents made every effort to assimilate, I
was raised in a household that took pride in being Hungarian. I didn’t
support Hungary in sports or anything tribal like that, but I was proud
when Hungary did well. I appreciated the poetry, the folk music, the
heritage, the history, and so forth. And every time I went back to
Budapest, I felt so so comfortable. No one asks “where are you from?”
because although I don’t sound like I am from here (I have a British
accent in Hungarian), I am from here, and people recognize that.
My decision to move back here to Hungary — I say that even though I
wasn’t born here — has been reinforced by this fact: Hungary understands
that holding on to its cultural identity is essential to its existence
as a society we can understand.
Culture changes over time, of course, but it normally does it slowly as we creep towards a more civilized future.
England doesn’t feel more civilized — quite the opposite. It feels more feral. And the UK has just accepted its fate.
And so, Tarrant’s line — radicalization is the rational response to degeneration
— played out in a different way in Mark Bollobas’s life. He moved to
his ancestral homeland, where he would be poorer in material ways, but
richer in many other ways. In my case, I propose the Benedict Option,
and live in consciously countercultural ways, trying to be more and more
like this in the face of this increasingly repulsive culture. For his
part, Brenton Tarrant became a fanatical racist, fascist, mass murderer.
Radicalism takes many forms. We have to resist the berserker form, but
resisting it cannot mean pretending that the society and culture we are
creating is good and healthy and worth defending. It’s not. I mean, for God’s sake, just look. I see Tarrant as a manifestation of the same diabolism.
It’s more radical to work to build the kind of culture that is
life-giving, and to create new forms within which it can be lived out,
than to give your life over to murdering innocent men, women, and
children. This is true whether you are an ISIS terrorist, or a white
nationalist terrorist. Those devils bring nothing but pain and death.
They are no solution.
Finally, on the concept of degeneration, look at this old song by a French Canadian band. The song is called, of course, Dégénération. It’s about generational loss of spirit and culture:
Some people who live through this turn into bloodthirsty maniacs,
like Brenton Tarrant. There is a better way. There has to be. It’s not
going to come through the Democratic or Republican parties, and it’s not
going to come through the established institutions of the church or
academia. Nor can you buy it on Amazon.com. The materials are there to
make it ourselves, but it requires discipline and community. As I’ve said.
