Last loneliest loveliest lacerated

I have been mourning that my beautiful, laid-back homeland should be so violated. We expect physical earthquakes, like the one that knocked down Christchurch back in 2011 and killed 185 people. We don’t expect to be shaken to pieces by terrorism. The last terrorist attack was back in 1985, when a couple of French agents blew up the Rainbow Warrior, with one casualty. 

The country is trusting and easy-going and feels itself immune from invasion and terrorism, which is why the perp chose it. If he could strike New Zealand the massacre would get world coverage, as it did, and no country feel itself to be safe.

There is a redneck tendency in Christchurch but I am uncertain if it takes an organised form, and it is not known if he had helpers. It is also not yet known what kind of failure there was of surveillance and policing of a political movement that meets on-line instead of in cellars. He seems to have acted like Anders Breivik, as a lone show-off pretending to be a warrior for western civilisation. Why don't these guys listen to Mozart or visit cathedralsto celebrate this western civilisation?

I’ve read the statement by the alleged perpetrator. It’s standard fascism - ethnic cleansing with a whiff of master race, the re-creating of family life to bring up the birth rate, despising our society’s soft liberalism and hedonism, and love, over-powering love for violence and warriordom. There’s also a touch of eco-fascism. Mosely is cited, as is Breivik.

It’s hellishly cheeky for an Australian in New Zealand to complain of cultural and population take overs, which were inflicted on the indigenous populations of both countries, and where that colonisation is still a live issue.

David Toube of Quilliam, and once of this site, has an excellent piece of analysis on Radio Scotland.

He outlines the following:-

1. The influence of Camus’ Great Replacement (see here for more detail) a theory that the European capitalists are conspiring to replace the white population. This is similar to the motivation behind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where Jews were blamed for bringing in non-white people.
2. The vision of the perp as a soldier in the 1000 year battle against Muslim invaders (he aspires for Istanbul to be restored to Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia to be turned back into a church though he has no belief in Christianity.) This battle runs up to the Bosnian conflict, with Serbian nationalists co-opted as allies.
3. The far right symbolism which shows he is an ethno-nationalist rather than a cultural nationalist. He uses the black sun symbol as per Himmler as well as Odin’s cross and other neo-Nazi slogans. Do these people actually believe in Valhalla as ISIS believe in martyrs and 72 virgins?
4. Like ISIS this kind of ideology works as inspiration for self-motivated atrocities rather than organisations of cells and members. This makes it difficult for would-be perpetrators to be tracked down.
5. He uses the language of the meme outrage LULZ culture, and its revolting look-at-me, how-far-will-I go nihilism. There are in-jokes for the 8chan audience (Bellingcat analysis here and article by Ben Sixsmith here).

Jason Burke has a piece on the similarity between the far right and Islamist extremists:-

Though there are substantial differences, rightwing and Islamist extremism, and extremists, share a great deal. The basic mechanics of the process of radicalisation – by peers, through the internet or otherwise – are very similar. As is the way both forms of violent activism are on the fringe of a much broader movement, much of which has bled into the mainstream in different parts of the world. There are no “lone wolves”, at least not in the sense of a solitary actor without links, whether virtual or real, to others.

“This is not New Zealand,” said the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who has acquitted herself well in an unprecedented situation for New Zealand leaders. It is now. Sadly, our modest kiwi exceptionalism has died. 

(An Australian Facebook friend pointed out that like Breivik the perp chose a country that wouldn't torture him to death.  Despising liberal civilised countries for being soft, he chooses one that will be soft on him.)

Update:-

I have just had an email from a family member who lives in Wellington. She says:-

“A big state of shock, with vigils being held all around the country including one in Wellington last night which had to be moved from the Civic Centre as so many people turned up - over 11,000 people at the Basin Reserve. There is another gathering in Wellington on Thursday and many of the smaller communities are holding vigils or remembrance events as well. I think the thing that we all echo is “this is not New Zealand”. It has had a colossal effect on everyone and there is a real sense of deep sadness, but also an outpouring of support for our Muslim community, the families, and the people of Christchurch. I haven’t spoken to anyone yet who didn’t have tears when they saw or heard what had unfolded.”

The perp’s intention was to cause a civil war between Muslim immigrants and refugees, and the native population. He hasn’t succeeded so far in New Zealand.

Comments

[Robin Carmody]

"Why don't these guys listen to Mozart or visit cathedrals to celebrate this western civilisation?"

This is the thing: most of what these people like would not have been considered part of "western civilisation" only a relatively short time ago. It would, itself, have been seen as an alien threat. Breivik called himself Andrew Berwick, like a thousand non-Anglosphere pop and rock musicians, and was drawn to England because he knew that droning on about "bloody foreigners" while living a life completely dominated by American media and mass culture, as he did, would not be seen as hypocritical here as it would in most of Europe.

I like some of that stuff as well, but I don't construct the clash-of-civilisations rhetoric (from either side).

[Robin Carmody]

Indeed, I would say that the obsessive anti-Muslim stance of modern "conservatism" has only come about *precisely because* Rightists have embraced elements of pop culture which they once would have regarded as beneath them. This is something that some Leftists who are both pro-Islam and pro-pop - arguably a contradiction in terms - cannot face.

Those few Rightists who maintain the traditional conservative view of pop culture - Peter Hitchens, Peter Oborne, Edward Leigh I think (or whoever it was who wrote the "Muslims are right about Britain" piece) - are Islamophile if anything. But they are so marginal now that Leftists have been trapped into supporting an ideology that really goes against their own, just as they were with Roman Catholicism at the time of my birth.

[Robin Carmody]

See also Libby Purves in the Times just after the 2005 London bombings: "Much of the society that Muslims long for looks uncannily like the Britain we threw away". It is just that Murdoch was as central in that throwing-away as any soixante-huitard academic ...

[Robin Carmody]

I might also add that, in 2000, George W. Bush's misleading "compassionate conservatism" image enabled him to win the majority of the American Muslim vote - they responded to his emphasis on small-c conservative social values. Obviously, this was the year before the political era began when it would become effectively impossible for the more Right-leaning of the largest parties to win the majority of the Muslim vote in pretty much any majority-white country, but it shows what *could* have been achieved had the modern Right taken a different path.

[Robin Carmody]

I know I keep saying the same thing, but it simply seems to me that the two "sides" in the West have taken the wrong side, or rather the one has taken the wrong side and trapped the other into doing the same for fear of how it might come over otherwise - the Right has taken an anti-Muslim stance when, if it were truly conservative rather than populist, market-led and pop-culture-driven, it would be Islamophile if anything, and as a consequence the Left has been trapped into supporting people who really stand for everything it says it doesn't.

But this is the central problem: those who drone on about "bloody foreigners coming over here telling us what to do" have a culture which, in Britain at least (NZ isn't quite the same thing because it is a created society), is every bit as foreign as the culture of Left-liberals, if not more so. Here in Dorset, the people who'd take the greatest pride about not living among Muslims have elevated "Hotel California" to the level of "Linden Lea", which latter they've never heard of. Those who *do* know what "Linden Lea" is are far less anti-Muslim (and more Remain-voting) for the most part.

[RosieBell]

The kind of Christian conservative culture that did know Linden Lea and rejected jazz as a foreign contamination would of course have rejected large scale Muslim immigration, as it rejected Jewish immigration.

However that kind of culture is very small, and as you say, it's more of a liberal thing, putting value into the past. Cf the Church of England's church protecting and general liberalism.

When the National Trust was being formed it was backed by that kind of old-fashioned Tory while the progressive wing embraced knocking down old buildings and putting up something in concrete.

It's like how the Daily Telegraph has stopped being the paper for socially conservative yet parish councillor nature loved retired colonel types and has become the paper of money-grubbing consumerist spivs.

[Robin Carmody]

I know that culture - or what little remains of it; its remnants, shall we say - doesn't really like living next door to Muslims, but its echoes and ghost today it can show a good deal of sympathy out of shared social conservatism, c.f. Peter Hitchens' response to the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham. A variant of this is David Lindsay's idea that what we call "the West", defined largely by pop culture, is in fact "the pseudo-West" and Russia is a dominant force in "the Biblical/Classical True West".

But these views are on the fringe of the fringe, and the dominant "foreigners out" lot in Dorset, and everywhere like it, will continue to think Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney came from Piddletrenthide ...

[Robin Carmody]

I think that culture would, as you say, be hardline anti-Islam had it somehow survived and remained a dominant majority culture. Its Islamophile leanings might partially come out of a determination to distinguish itself, to be different - but also I do think there is a genuine crossover in terms of devotion and way of life, certainly much more so than there is with the - in their own lives - overwhelmingly secular and morally relaxed white Corbynites.