"An ordinary white man". How should we best place the actions of Brenton Tarrant, the attacker on the Christchurch mosques, in their wider context? For while the actions of Tarrant may be exceptional in their violence, the rhetoric underpinning them is most definitely not. It draws upon much broader and long-germinating narratives of a white-European West faced with an existential, if not directly biological, threat to its very survival.
It is crucial to understand the pervasiveness of such narratives in order to fully appreciate the portent of Tarrant’s words and deeds. As upsetting as it may seem, we need to take seriously his claims to be the ‘soldier’ and ‘vanguard’ of a wider movement for reclaiming ‘European civilization’ (also in its farthest, Antipodean reaches).
In the hours and days following the attacks, commentators pointed (quite rightly) to the role of social media in helping to create figures like Tarrant by providing networked platforms for the spreading of hateful ideologies: how, otherwise, would a gym employee from an Australian provincial town have woven together the “shreds of history, para-ideological ruminations and paranoid declarations” that make up the 74 pages of his ‘manifesto’, as medievalist (one of the most eminent scholars of the Crusades) Franco Cardini defined the rantings of Tarrant.[1]
