Why did Brenton Tarrant commit terrorism against innocent worshiers?
There is a lot we don’t yet know about what motivated the 28-year-old man charged with murder in a shooting that killed 49 people and injured at least 48 others in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But his writings suggest that the white nationalist ideas behind violence and attempted violence in the United States and elsewhere influenced him deeply.
The shooter reportedly left behind a 74-page manifesto. It’s the kind of document instigators of mass violence often write to inspire copycat attackers (which is why I chose not to link to it).
Still, the document is worth understanding in context. There are throughlines in the manifesto that are similar to the ideas described by other shooters or those who have attempted shootings in recent cases in the United States and around the world.
In February, a “white nationalist” Coast Guard lieutenant in Maryland was accused of planning attacks on members of the media and left-leaning politicians. (The attacks may have been stymied because of his web searches related to drugs and violent extremist acts.) The Christchurch shooter and the Coast Guard lieutenant used similar language, made similar references, and most disturbingly, revered the same people for their use of horrific violence in the furtherance of white nationalism.
A word on terrorist manifestos
The reason it’s important to both understand the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto and refuse to spread its contents without context is that a manifesto is a published and public declaration of intent or belief — and the critical term to remember is “public.” The Christchurch shooter wrote his manifesto with the clear intention of it being shared widely after he committed an act of mass murder.
That means that historically, terrorist manifestos have never been accurate documentation of either their belief system or the planning that went into their attacks. The main intention of terrorist manifestos is not to help everyday people understand how they became terrorists — it is to create new terrorists.
In this particular manifesto, the author is not attempting to provide a fully factual history of himself or his reasoning behind his actions. Much of the first 10 pages of the manifesto are the shooter responding to questions he’s posing to himself about who he is (“just an ordinary White man” and why he decided to kill (“to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands”). The manifesto intersperses details about why the shooter targeted New Zealand with self-aggrandizing rhetoric about the shooter’s own personal bravery.