Brenton Tarrant, who stands accused of killing 50 adults and children at two mosques in New Zealand last week, wants us to know what inspired his actions. Before livestreaming his massacre of Muslim worshipers, he composed a lengthy document that proudly advocates the murder of innocent people in the name of racial purity. The manifesto is predictably disturbing. It is the work of a nihilist who sees a world so bleak and hopeless that it could be improved through acts of mass murder. There is one word in the 74-page document, however, that stood out to me: “invader.”
Tarrant’s words are both lucid and chillingly familiar. His references to immigrants as invaders find echoes in the language used by the president of the United States and far-right leaders across Europe. And that is why it would be a mistake to dismiss them as the incoherent ravings of a madman.
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/18/new-zealand-mosque-shooter-manifesto/
In the faces of immigrants trying to raise families and build peaceful homes, Tarrant sees unarmed invaders bent on conquering his racially pristine homeland. There are no individuals in his worldview, just faceless masses of “us” and “them.” The latter group is to be kept at a distance at all costs. He approvingly cites the deterrent effect of killing their children.
Tarrant writes that his breaking point came while traveling through France. There, he was overwhelmed by the number of “invaders,” whose black and brown faces he encountered in every city and town. Judging from his words, he didn’t pause to consider that most of these people were in fact not foreigners but the children of people who have lived for several generations in France. They are people who know no home but that country. Tarrant describes being overtaken by emotion when seeing a wartime cemetery, which he views as the resting place of a previous French generation that fought “invaders.” It apparently never occurred to him that the majority of the World War II-era Free French Army, which liberated France from the Nazis, consisted mostly of black and North African colonial soldiers. It is the descendants of these people whose presence caused Tarrant, an Australian tourist, such heartache that he, according to his manifesto, “broke into tears, sobbing alone in the car.”
In his writings, Tarrant makes clear that he has no problems with Muslims who live in their own homelands, nor with Jews, as long as they live in Israel. He simply wants them out of the West. “How they are removed is irrelevant, peacefully, forcefully, happily, violently or diplomatically. They must be removed,” he writes. It is unlikely, of course, that these people will leave their homes voluntarily. The United States and Europe are where they raise their families, pay taxes, attend schools, and contribute their labor to society. To insist that they to “go back” to an imaginary homeland on a distant continent, therefore, is to insist on genocide and ethnic cleansing.
