The Christchurch Murderer, the Ideology of Identity and the Great Replacement.

Brendon Tarrant’s ‘Manifesto’.

The word is still reeling at the Christchurch atrocities.

Solidarity is the first, and best, response.

Yet it is becoming clear that the killer was more than just a “extremist right-wing violent terrorist”.

Tarrant has an ideology.

In the manifesto he states that he was previously a “communist“, an “anarchist“, and a “libertarian“, but then turned to “racist” views and became an “eco-fascist” concerned with global warming. Though he rejected the label of Nazism, The American Conservative comments that his political ideology matches national socialism and that he despised capitalism while idolizing China. It comments he only sees Christianity’s value in uniting Europe. Tarrant also laments the moral breakdown of the West. The manifesto includes references to high-profile right-wing figures and Internet memes and encourages people online who agree with the shooting to spread his message and to create more memes. These elements, along with the live-streamed video—in which its viewers had cheered the attack on—gave the appearance that the attack was influenced by internet trolling. This is further supported by the perpetrator’s reasoning for his choice of weapon; he believed it would violently escalate the American gun control debate and cause civil war in the United States.^{[52][53][54][55]} He supports return of racial segregation in the United States. The manifesto ends with neo-Nazi symbols above two images.

Wikipedia. (More directly from the Manifesto below)

The text talks of “mass immigration” and “higher fertility rates” of immigrants.

The clearly indicates the most important strand in the Manifesto, beginning with the title, is the Great Replacement.

This is the ideology, developed by the French writer, Renaud Camus, that European white people are being “replaced” by others. His best known book is Le Grand Remplacement (2011).

The hysteria this idea has generated can be seen on this site,

The Great Replacement is very simple. You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people. Renaud Camus

The Great Replacement (French: Le grand remplacement) is a term originally coined by a French writer Renaud Camus who first used it to describe the demographic replacement happening in France due to its mass immigration policies and low birth rates among the native French.

The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad – from Germany, to England, to the United States, which all have below replacement birth rates and migration policies that pose an existential threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.

This is highlighted by the French media: La théorie du « grand remplacement », de l’écrivain Renaud Camus aux attentats en Nouvelle-Zélande (le Monde).

Camus claims that the term is an adaption from Brecht, “Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?” While his main influence is more diffuse, and wide ranging, he has had some political involvement. Camus was part of a micro-party  French political parties often have ‘allies’ which essentially exist to i) create the impression of a ‘broad front’ ii) be a way of getting extra spending through without running over limits) ” SIEL (Souveraineté, identité et libertés, was one, under the wing of the Front National, now Rassemblement Nationalin their broad front, Rassemblement bleu Marine.

SIEL is now, after an obscure row, largely centred on the virulence of some of their declarations, independent and linked to the Identitarian movement, anchored clearly on the extreme right. They *claimed* (dubiously) to be running a European List this year.  This month Camus won a case against somebody who had called him an anti-Semite. The judgement rested on the lack of detail in the charge, and he was awarded only 1000 Euros in damages. (13.3.19 La justice donne raison à Renaud Camus face à Yann Moix).

This hallucinatory picture of a declining Europe is reinforced by Tarrant’s hostility to Muslim people.

He talks of “foreign invaders”, and this (The Manifesto of Brenton Tarrant – a right-wing terrorist on a Crusade)

He is (as in the image above) ‘anti-imperialist’ as well, expressing an admiration for China.

But the heart of the work is hatred, from an angry man, and more hatred, for Immigration to the West.

 

Terrorist suspect traced his radicalization to a visit to France https://t.co/ohmGWdUByx via @WSJ

— Renaud Camus (@RenaudCamus) March 16, 2019

Le "grand remplacement", obsession du terroriste d'extrême droite de Christchurch https://t.co/YKSnzGwqnF via @LObs

— Renaud Camus (@RenaudCamus) March 16, 2019

Camus denies any responsibility:

French ‘Great Replacement’ writer denounces ‘appalling’ NZealand attack

As he tweeted today:

So let's summarize. There are two opposing groups. In one replacists and replacers, organizers and perpetuators of the genocide by substitution (85%?). In the other the replacees non-replacers, i.e. who formulate some shy objections to their own genocide by substitution (15%?) https://t.co/vAle0yeZY5

— Renaud Camus (@RenaudCamus) March 16, 2019

Camus denies any connection with the atrocity. France 24.

“I am totally non-violent,” the 72-year-old Camus told AFP, saying the arrested 28-year-old Australian suspect had committed “appalling, criminal, disastrous and idiotic terrorist acts”.

“If he wrote a pamphlet titled ‘The Great Replacement” it’s blatant plagiarism… of a phrase that doesn’t belong to him and he doesn’t understand,” said Camus.

The writer, who is also a gay rights activist, lives in a 14th-century chateau in southwest France.

Yet, he has just drawn attention to the ” crime against humanity” that is immigrant presence and the “genocide” that is the great replacement.

C’est fou la haine qu‘ils mettent à lutter contre ce qu’ils nomment la haine c’est-à-dire la résistance au génocide par substitution. Qu’un peuple & une civilisation refusent de mourir tranquillement les met hors d’eux. Ils auraient traité de salopard un juif qui sortait du rang.

— Renaud Camus (@RenaudCamus) March 16, 2019

L’attentat de Christ Church est d’abord atroce et criminel, c’est un monstrueux forfait. Très accessoirement, il est aussi imbécile, puisqu’il dessert gravement la cause que (peut-être) il prétend servir, la lutte contre le remplacisme global, crime contre l’humanité du XXIe s.

— Renaud Camus (@RenaudCamus) March 16, 2019

Both the BBC and Channel Four have underlined the link between the ideology of the Manifesto, Camus’ Great Replacement, and Identitarian politics.

The latter, which is movement across Europe, with some US links, stands for white European cultural (and racial) Identity. The French wing, Les Identitaires which puts their ideas forward more clearly than the English language Wikipedia version does, their ideas join together (itnrseciotnallty as it were)

Disgust with materialism, consumerism, and the exploitation of workers by big international capital, hostility to the non-representative character of the French electoral system, and the take over of democracy by oligarchies, hostility to American hegemony and Islamic imperialism, opposition to mass race mixing and the charge of permanent guilt to Europeans, a rejection of Paris run Jacobin centralisation , a refusal to bow to ready-made thinking enforced by intellectual terrorism.

• dégoût du matérialisme, du consumérisme et de l’« exploitation des travailleurs par le grand actionnariat international »
• dénonciation de la non-représentativité du système électoral français et de la confiscation de la démocratie par les oligarchies (technocratique, syndicale, médiatique et financière) ;
• hostilité à l’hégémonie américaine et à l’impérialisme islamique³⁰ ;
• opposition au métissage ethnique de masse et à la « culpabilisation permanente » des peuples européens ;
• rejet du jacobinisme centralisateur parisien ;
• refus du prêt-à-penser et du « terrorisme intellectuel ».

It goes without saying, though apparently not noticed by BBC’s Newsnight, that this movement (mouvance, in the sense of its broad current)  is linked to acts of violence.

 Racisme, violence, salut nazi… Un journaliste a infiltré Génération identitaire et le bar La citadelle à Lille. (3 months ago).

 

Harry’s  Place  comments,

We have watched as politics of “Identity” has taken over our academic institutions, our media, our civic structures and non-governmental organisations, mostly co-opted, colonised or cajoled by the far-Left. This poured fuel on the last burning embers of the far-Right and it now threatens to ignite a conflagration, from corners of Eastern Europe, to the streets of Paris, all the way to the most unlikely place on earth: New Zealand.

When progressive politics stresses above all else the primacy and priority of race, religion, gender, and so on, is it any wonder the far-Right – which has a century or more of practice in this despicable arena rises to the challenge? You can’t have relentless the prodding and sniping at ‘heterosexual white males” without expecting a countervailing extreme to emerge again, especially since the cloaks and mantles of previous far-Right movements are lying on the ground for a new breed of maniac to pick up. Such is the dynamics of reciprocal radicalisation.

The problem is that identitarian politics and the influence of Renaud Camus are more extensive than the list cited.

In The Strange Death of Europe. Immigration, Identity, Islam ( Bloomsbury. 2017) Douglas Murray says that Europe is committing suicide, its “civilisation” is committing suicide. There are two reasons, “the mass movement of peoples into Europe.” And “lost faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy.”(Pages 2 – 3) The continent has decided to become a “u-topia”, a no place.

Douglas, who refers to Camus, says “migration, “we are not after all such great melting pots that anything and anyone can be endlessly poured in with the results always coming out the same.”(Page 310) “We do not want our politicians, through weakness, self-hatred, malice, tiredness or abandonment to change our home into an utterly different place.”(Page 320)

This is Murray’s background:

Associate director of the Henry Jackson Society Former director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, Educated at Benedict’s school Eaton Collage, and Magdalen College Oxford..

Just as writers such as Gilles Kepel have, rightly, traced the links between some forms of political Salafism and Jihadist violence  (Terreur dans l’Hexagone: Genèse du djihad français. 2015, see Le jihadisme, passage à l’acte du salafisme) we are entitled to ask questions about those who have indulged Camus’ tirades. Identitarian and Great Replacement ideology are some of the conditions for the activist turn to the violent far right. The alternative account of jihadist violence, by Olivier Roy, as a “nihilist” spasm by desperate people, (Le Djihad et la Mort, 2016) looks an unfruitful angle from which to gain an insight into the atrocities in Christchurch.