Radicalization & Degeneration
16th March 2019
Rod Dreher looks at the New Zealand atrocity.
One of the biggest lies we hear whenever there is a mass terror attack, such as the one against New Zealand’s Muslims, is that the killing was “senseless.” It’s not without reason when ISIS does it, and it’s not without reason when people like Brenton Tarrant, the alleged NZ shooter, do it. The acts are evil, but not senseless; there is a rationale for what they do. To be clear: do NOT read me as saying Tarrant’s acts “made sense” in the general sense of the term; I’m speaking narrowly here, to mean that causation is at work. We need to know this so we can better combat things like this.
I suspect that calling it ‘senseless’ absolves the snowflakes of any obligation to understand the perp’s point of view. It converts a deliberate act on the part of an individual into something random like a tornado or a flood: We can’t understand it, so we hold a candlelight vigil and place some flowers and move on.
- Tarrant identifies himself as an “ethno-nationalist eco-fascist.” He says he was first a communist, then an anarchist, then a libertarian, and finally an eco-fascist. He’s 28. This is not a stable person.
And the communist phase came first. How many ‘unstable persons’ consider themselves communists right now?
- He says his aim is to accelerate history by frightening people and creating conflict. In particular, he wants to cause the US to move to take away people’s guns, and the Second Amendment supporters to respond to this violently.
- He said he chose the firearms for his attack specifically to incite an argument within the US, leading to the left attempting to confiscate guns, thereby starting a civil war.
This is certainly working in New Zealand — the first thing the NZ government did was proclaim its intent to put further restrictions on gun ownership. (The question no one is asking; How many people would have been saved if one of the people in that mosque had been armed?)
- This was a brutal slap: “Above all, don’t be stale, placid, and boring. No one is inspired by Jeb Bush.”
Can’t argue with him there.
Here’s the chilling part: Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true. You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really is happening. So are all the rest.