The macabre harvest of innocents, this time claiming fifty lives in two mosques, in Christchurch, New Zealand, is a double-edged form of madness. It is both the product of an absence of human empathy and a drain on the reserves of those who possess it: decency these days requires the ability to stare barbarism in the face, repeatedly, randomly, intensely, without ever becoming inured to the ugliness of its features. Terrorism hopes to inspire fear and confusion, but its most pernicious impact begins the moment that people no longer feel either of those things but, rather, simply a grudging acknowledgment that this is the way we now live.
We have seen so many of these atrocities that they can be put into subcategories. The attack in Christchurch exists in the company of other attacks on houses of worship: the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in 2012; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, in Charleston, in 2015; the Islamic Cultural Center, in Quebec City, in 2017; the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh. Live like this for long enough and you end up with a sample size sufficient to discern patterns among the antagonists: the circular reasoning of their rationales and the shared sense of themselves as vectors of great change.
In 1840, Thomas Carlyle declared that the course of history was set by humanity’s great men, and, for a great while, that view of the past held sway. But, as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressed, the influence of Marxism and other strands of social history inverted that narrative: it was the mass of people and their collective interests, not the whims of a small number of extraordinary individuals, which drove history. Still, recent years have seen something of a resurgence of the belief in the supreme role of great men—of heroes—and it seems to have taken a particular, perverse hold among zealots, notably those of the white-nationalist persuasion.
Most of the men who committed these recent acts of terror composed manifestos, like self-decreed heroes setting down their own origin stories. A sense of history turning on the fulcrum of a single man’s actions is a theme within them. The authors also rely on the distortion of facts to support their homicidal crusades. Brenton Tarrant, the twenty-eight-year-old Australian who is accused of the killings in Christchurch, reportedly travelled to New Zealand to attack an immigrant population he described as “invaders.” He cited as inspirations Dylann Roof, the then twenty-one-year-old South Carolinian who killed nine African-Americans in the basement of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and Anders Breivik, who, in 2011, murdered seventy-seven people in Norway, many of them members of the governing Labour Party’s youth wing, because he thought that they were encouraging a “Muslim invasion.” Tarrant wrote that he hoped that his actions would incite violence and retaliation in a cycle of conflict that would stoke division between white Europeans and immigrants.
On a blog titled “The Last Rhodesian,” Roof lamented that there were not enough proactively violent white people in the world. He raged at the thought of imperilled whites in suburbs, hiding from the growing black populace of the cities. He wrote that he chose to attack Charleston because the city “at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country.” Robert Bowers, who is accused of murdering eleven people in the Tree of Life synagogue last October (he has pleaded not guilty), posted a message on the social-media network Gab, saying, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” He, too, rued the unwillingness of white people to act. He purportedly attacked the synagogue as a means of intimidating Jewish charities involved in refugee-resettlement efforts, and indulged the widely disseminated but utterly false claim that white Americans are being murdered wholesale by immigrants.
Tarrant fulminated about hordes at the gate from Australia, where white settlers first established a colony in 1788, and, over the next century, proceeded to murder, kidnap, and subjugate the Aboriginal population. He apparently felt compelled to go to New Zealand in order to protect whites there from the actual fate that had befallen the Maori when white Europeans arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. Roof fretted about being outnumbered by the descendants of people who had been brought to the United States against their will. The ratio of blacks to whites in Charleston was the product not of black invasion but of the colonial greed of white slave traders.
This skewed sense of history is not unrelated to a fixation with reproduction. Like earlier versions of white nationalism, the current strain is obsessed with fertility and birth rates—and the so-called replacement theory—a tendency that, as the Times reported, provides a segue to the anti-feminism that is prominent in far-right circles. There are no plans afoot to “replace” white people—an undertaking as absurd as it is impossible—but that fact has not interfered with the hysteria raging in white-nationalist circles. Tarrant began his screed with the words “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.” Roof suggested that white women who have children with black men are “victims.” As Adam Serwer has written, such concerns about population have often reinforced other forms of prejudice. The assorted racists who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, wed their demographic anxieties to anti-Semitism, chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” even though Jews represent only a small part of the U.S. population and, of course, many of their forebears came here specifically to escape persecution and murder at the hands of white Europeans.
The demographic paranoia is simply another form of projection that is starkly at odds with actual history. Indeed, it’s not as much paranoia as a fear of a specific kind of historical karma—one that sees in immigration a mechanism by which what has been sown now will be reaped. Aboriginals constitute just three per cent of Australia’s population. The Maori are just fifteen per cent of the population of New Zealand. (The Charlottesville marchers might have taken a moment to consider the American equivalents: native Hawaiians account for just six per cent of Hawaii’s population; Native Americans represent just two per cent of the United States’.)
The supposed defense of white people in New Zealand—or in Pittsburgh or in Charleston—highlights another presumption of the white nationalists: the right of whites to exist in safety anywhere in the world and the simultaneous belief that no nonwhite group should have that same right. The nationalist convulsions in France, Germany, and elsewhere embrace the same contradiction, and a steadfast refusal to recognize that Europe’s current diversity is, in some measure, a product of its centuries of colonial rule around the globe.
The significance of what happened in Christchurch cannot be understood outside the context of a growing transnational movement of epidermal fanaticism. It is the kind of fury that was foreshadowed two years ago, when a man who made racist statements and was lauded by white nationalists was elected President of the United States. It is the validation of the alarms that sounded for those who looked at Charlottesville, where esprit de corps grew among zealots led by charlatans, and recognized that they would be further emboldened. It is difficult to overestimate the threat that this poses. The individual does not drive history, but the actions of individuals have consequences for the rest of us—sometimes devastating ones. Rather than share the world, the extremists would content themselves with the lion’s share of its ashes.
