Ignorance + Internet = Tragedy: 10 ironies, contradictions and absurdities from the Killer’s Manifesto
Introduction
On 15 March 2019, a terrorist attacked two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people and injuring another 50, while they were at morning prayers.
The tragedy in Christchurch is monumental on so many levels. The great loss of life, and the shock to New Zealand that reverberated around the world. After reading the killer’s manifesto, I’ve also come to the conclusion that it is a tragedy of monumental ignorance.
In his manifesto, the killer, an Australian, went to great pains to justify his actions. He didn’t want to be seen as a maniac. In fact he repeatedly refers to himself as an “average”, “working class”, “white” person, a seeming call to see him as normal. And thus in his normality to be seen as someone who took a principled stand against an injustice, as any “normal” person should.
Reading through his manifesto, however, does not reveal normality, but actually reveals a profound ignorance of some of the basic facts and science of our world. Whether via YouTube, the echochamber of Facebook, or 8chan forums, his ideas were the shaky and extremist scaffold used to justify and to launch a vicious terrorist attack and to take the life of 50 innocent people and to injure the same number. But as the French social theorist Bruno Latour argues, discourses and theories about the world do not necessarily explain the world as much as they explain the actions and strategies of the people who hold these theories and ideas in their minds.
The killer believed in his ideas as if they were true. So much so that he was willing to throw away his freedom and take the life of many others. But, of his ideas, it is more acurate to say that they do not explain the world, but rather only help to explain the killers actions and strategies in the world. It is for this reason that the core of his ideas need to be fundamentally challenged. They should not be allowed to seem “normal”. They need to be revealed to the light of day and seen to be what they are, ideas that have little basis in fact or science. But also, taking from Latour that ideas guide action, they also need to be seen as not just factually and scientifically bankrupt, but also dangerous. In this way, they may have a diminished ability to guide the actions of others, who through their own ignorance may also unwittingly follow.
(Note that linking to the killers manifesto is controversial and objectional to many, so I have not added links to it here).
1 — The idea that his people are being invaded
He makes multiple references to his “white” people being invaded as if it has reality. But really, there is a real eradication under his nose. In Australia, his so-called white ancestors practically wiped out a whole culture through multiple waves — frontier wars, genetic assimilation policies, the stolen generation. There is a real genocide, it is still happening. Over the past 200 years his so-called white culture has taken over a whole continent, roughly the size of China, full of resources, and with a population a fraction of the size. He was able to travel across it with freedom and privilege and free from discrimination, very much unlike the aboriginals that so called whites displaced. His taxes, his health care, his education, all are subsidised by the theft of aboriginal land. And yet he talks of being invaded. It is the height of delusional, self indulgent self pity and paranoia.
2 — The idea that people have natural “homelands”
One of the strangest parts of the manifesto is him describing how well people treated him in various countries from all over the world in his years of travel, in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, wherever he went. One would think that after being treated so well, he would come to a humanistic appreciation for the peoples of the world. But he carried the belief that there is some “natural order” where Japanese belong in Japan, Mexicans belong in Mexico, etc etc, and they should all remain there. By this logic aboriginals’ natural homeland is Australian and everyone else should leave. But in fact people, ethnic groups, have been moving from place to place for well over 100,000+ years. People move for many reasons, opportunity, or they were sent there (e.g. as convicts), or they were forced out under threat of violence. The reasons are endless. Of the 50 people he killed, many were refugees and asylum seekers, who had to leave their homelands for their or their children’s safety. The killer was privileged, he was able to trot the globe, gather together his crazy ideas about “invasions”, “civilisations”, “white people”, and come back to a home that he knew. These others he killed didn’t have his fortune. Many left their homelands, against their will and could not return.
3 — The idea that he is making a stand against capitalism
In his manifesto he rails against capitalism, in particular the idea that capitalism undermines the natural order of people staying in their homelands. In his act of madness he was not responding to capitalism, that was just his crazy fantasy. What actually happened was he was led down the rabbit hole of algorythmic click bait — in video after video he was recommended ever more radical content. It’s good for Google to keep him watching, reading, even while he becomes radicalized. YouTube wants to keep him watching. It’s good for Facebook to keep him insulated in his echo chamber. In fact capitalism has been creating social externalities for more than 4 centuries, from the silver mines of Potosi, Bolivia to US farmers dying of cancer from exposure to Monsanto pesticides and herbicides. He is just the latest externality. He’s been used. He’s no longer needed. They’ll take out the trash, wipe their hands clean of him and the victims he created. He held a naïve fantasy that he was battling the forces of capitalism, when if fact he was just another of its bye-products, its spent fodder.
In fact the same forces that radicalised him also radicalized ISIS recruits. He has too much in common with them. He resembles them in everything but geography. They too would start off in a forum, with one video, one fringe article, that then led to the next recommendation, the next link, until they were on a plane to Syria to fight in a holy war. So while Google shareholders get rich, youth like him get radicalized, lost in a self referential web of fictional facts, twisted opinions mascarading as truth, ending in tragedy.
4 — The idea of a typological Muslim
The killer believed he needed to scare Muslims from so called “white” countries. But in fact the whole idea of a unified, typological Muslim that cannot integrate into Western societies is a myth. As Zia Sardar argued after 9/11, the teaching of the Koran in many ways mirror Christian teachings in spirit — no killing. Those that commit acts of terror are indeed not in line with the Islamic faith. For half a century North Africans have been living peacefully in France. One of Frances most celebrated people is the footballer Zinedine Zidane, of Algerian descent, considered one of the greatest footballers of all time. In Australia Muslims include doctors, lawyers, educators, and many other professions. Muslims also vary country by country, as well as the style of religious affiliation and practice. There of course is the modern Islamic notion of jihad, and many Muslim youth have been radicalized. This certainly is a problem. But if we are to believe that there is just this one type of radical Muslim, it would be akin to saying that there is only one type of Westerner, a genocidal colonizer intent on stealing the wealth from people’s lands. We know neither is true.
5 — The idea that his actions were in defence of “white people”
He believed he was doing this to save ‘white people’. But there is no such thing as ‘white people’. For starters, I’ve never seen a white person. It’s generally a blinding color and I hope I never see someone who is actually white, it would be terrifying. Most people who identify as white are actually either pink or peach or spotted or freckled somewhere in between. The word white is more acutately a metaphor … it is used to construct a boundary around European-ness, people from Europe, but it has no basis in fact or science. In the US the idea of whiteness didn’t emerge until the 20th century. Before then the incumbent Anglo-Germanic residents of the USA didn’t consider Irish, Slavs (Poles, Czechs) or Southern Europeans (Italians, Greeks) ‘white’. Good fodder for the civil war, and for the booming factories of the north, but certainly not ‘one of us’. In Europe white generally doesn’t make any sense. Europeans consider themselves part of ethnic groups often associated with nations (French, German, etc) and they also accept that they belong to the shared Western civilizational heritage (e.g. Jesus, Socrates). But just 70 years ago the Nazi Germans were rampaging across Europe, slaughtering and pillaging under the pretenses that they were racially superior to all the other Europeans. They certainly didn’t consider Greeks part of the club, or Slavs, or least of all Russians. In fact Russians were never ‘white’. Russians, having been born of Empire (like the US), have incorporated many ethnicities and are one big mix. While some Russians came from the North on boats, in fact they are a mix of Eurasian, Asiatic, Central Asian and Middle Eastern peoples (Stalin was from Georgia). Hitler considered them “untermensch” — subhuman.
Any Russian who claims to be white is forgetting what they fought against in World War II, why millions died, and who the millions that fought actually were. The notion of whiteness has so many holes, so many contradictions, I personally refuse to even use the term. I just refer to ‘so-called’ white people, and with my so-called white friends I encourage them to identify with some kind of cultural heritage, English, Irish, German, LGBTQ, whatever works for them, and something real — anything but white.
I have many so-called white friends from the US and Australia and New Zealand and Canada, that I have met over the years, and again and again the same theme emerges, they came from somewhere, there was a cultures or a set of cultures there, and genetically they are mixes, some with this, others with that, a bit of German with native american, or Irish with a bit of aboriginal, or Maori, or Jewish, or Arab, or other.
So the killer was not white. But he killed in the name of this fictional category. It is the pinnacle of tragedy-as-ignorance.
6 — The idea that he was defending his race
In his manifesto he uses the idea of race as a justification for his actions. But going deeper, even the idea of racial difference has been thoroughly debunked by biological and genetic science. We all have a greater chance of being similar genetically to someone in some other part of world than to someone within our own proximate ethinic group. Think about this for a minute. This is not a contradiction, but rather it is a consequence of our mutual heritage as humans coming out of Africa. Modern genetic biologists have come to the conclusion that there are no races. There is just one species — human. Of course, in pre-history there were many species, Neanderthal, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and many others. If the killer was looking for some kind of racial “essence” he might have latched onto the idea that people in Europe have more Neanderthal, which is true according to evolutionary geneticists. But its only about 2–4% and it is statistically insignificant in terms of procreation. It does not stop humans from creating fertile offspring like it does when a horse and a donkey mate. We are just one species.
The killer wants the idea of race to be applied to social policy. The last time the pseudoscience of race was applied, it led to the murder of over 6 million Jews, the worst war in human memory, and a host of other crimes. The killer’s ideas of race are a re-iteration of the ignorance-begets-tragedy of the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II.
7 — The idea that he was killing in the name of defending the West
As well, he employed ideas of the West to justify his massacre of innocent people. He harks back to the holy wars, to the battles against the turks, etc. However, the way in which he uses Western civilization is factually wrong. A continuous and geo-graphically consistent West does not exist. People get stuck on geo-graphic boundaries as a way to delineate civilizations, but these are rare in the change-is-the-norm life (and death) of civilizations. Moderns may trace the history of ‘Western’ civilization to the Greek city states. But ancient Greeks (Athenian, Corinthian, Spartan, etc.) didn’t even have the notion of ‘Greece’ let alone the ‘West’. Fast forward to the Roman Empire, and too, no real notion of the West, except that what was North were barbarians, the German tribes, which in fact was not even a category until recently. The idea that the West’s origins are unique is also a myth. Christianity is one of three semitic religions (Jeudaism, Christianity and Islam). Science, medicine, mathematics and other arts were transferred wholesale from the Muslim world to Europe. While Europe was recovering from a dark ages, the Muslim world was experiencing a scientific, philosophical and commercial renaissance — who’s energies were transfered to Europe over a long period of time.
Ironically the killers mythic, narrow, constricted notion of the West is the very thing that may lead to its demise — if that is the road the ‘West’ takes. His is a Handmaidens Tale version of the West, a fortress imposing an un-natural order. His sclerotic notion of the West is built on ignorance, of grandiose notions of holy wars and mythic battles and triumphs that cannot see how the West does not exist without its context — how it is a relational phenomenon. But if we look at the historical facts, then the future of the West as a relational development is interesting. It will not die, it can evolve. It can absorb new influences, it can respond to the new planetary context we are in. It can dance with other peoples, cultures, civilizations in a creative interplay. The West, having presided over the most racist and genocidal period in human history… yes, it may still anchor itself in a scientific view of humanity as a species — a common family working together. This idea, the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind appears across all cultures, all religions, all civilzations. The West can be part of this idea — a thriving ecology of civilisations.
8 — The idea that our current ecological crisis is driven by the non-West
Finally one of the most absurd notions is the idea that the current ecological crisis is driven by the non-West, through population growth and its impact on the world. In fact, it was the West that brought modern industry into being, brought forth the modern population explosion, drove up carbon emissions through the use of fossil fuels, and exported the consumer capitalist model to every part of the globe. This is the West’s modern evangelical project-neoliberalism. And in fact, the most intense resistance to this has come from the Global South. The West practically invented the current ecological crisis. Now today almost every country is complicit in the crisis and equally shares responsibility in addressing this crisis.
Instead of blame, a more productive stance would be to ask, “how can we mutualize the creativity of all peoples everywhere to address our shared challenges?”
9 — Blame — the fault lies outside of us
The manifesto is fundamentally an act of projection. Many if not most of the issues and problems the killer singles out against others (invaders, non-white, non-West, ecological crisis) can be seen as shallow and facile ways to create a ‘straw man’ — some enemy, some threat, some problem on the outside. In fact, most of the threats and problems the killer rails against are either fictions or things on the inside: ecological crisis and the West’s role, the replacement of peoples / aboriginals, the social externalities of capitalism, the idea of race, homelands. His act of projection has so many contradictions they are almost uncountable.
10 — The arrogance of ignorance
The manifesto makes clear the killer had no education. That his ideas were derived from the internet. He seems to take pride in this and wrote that the internet is the only place to find the truth. This explains both his tone and it also explains the emptyness and shallowness of the ideas. It is most often the ignorant that proclaim their ideas with the most confidence. For example scientists base any claims on hypotheses and theories. Hypothesis are only propositions that still need to be tested. Theories are the current best explanation of something until a better theory comes along. Our most powerful way of establishing knowledge is fundamentally based on proposing, testing, questioning, re-thinking. It is not based on loose proclamations and confidence. A misplaced confidence on the other hand keeps us insulated from questioning ourselves, our ideas. It gives us a false sense of certainty. Alongside his childish pride in rejecting education, he grew a naïve confidence in these ideas gleaned from YouTube videos, Facebook echo chambers, 8chan forums, without really questioning them. His confidence in his ideas, no matter how factually wrong they were, sprouted into the actions that his ideas indicated were right to take. Ignorance + Internet = Tragedy.
Concluding remarks
For the killer his choices are made. He has committed the greatest act of terror in New Zealand’s history. He’ll spend the rest of his life in jail — contemplating, perhaps confidently justifying, what he did. But others like him have a choice. The low road is ignorance. This means blaming, projecting problems on others rather than genuinely inquiring into the facts, the science, the source of an issue. The high road is knowledge — of science, history, art, philosophy — deep understanding. The low road is prejudice, the high road is inquiry and curiosity. The low road is hate and the high road is love.
José Ramos holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from the University of California Irvine, a Masters of Science in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University of Technology, and a PhD in the sociology of globalization and its alternative futures from Queensland University of Technology.
