In a dastardly attack, multiple people have been killed and injured in two New Zealand mosques as 2 terrorists opened fire. The terrorists have reportedly killed up to 40 people and all mosques in New Zealand have been closed down. The mass shootings have taken place one at the Al Noor Mosque next to Hagley Park, and another at the Linwood Mosque in the suburb of Linwood, Radio New Zealand reports.
New Zealand Herald reported that one of the terrorists identified himself as “Brenton Tarrant” – a white, 28-year-old Australian-born man and live-streamed the shooting for 17 minutes by the terrorist. New Zealand police said it was working to have the footage removed from social media.
While several ghastly videos have emerged of the terrorist live-streaming the mass shooting, news has also emerged that the terrorist had published a lengthy over 70-page manifesto online where he detailed his ideology and views. The manifesto was created on January 21st and was updated yesterday before the shooting took place.
Metadata in manifesto uploaded before Christchurch, New Zealand mass shooting showed document was created by “Brenton Tarrant” on January 21, 2019. It was last edited yesterday, Word metadata shows. pic.twitter.com/hk5PIfgO9h
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) March 15, 2019
The manifesto was uploaded on document sharing website Scribd by Matthew Keys, an independent journalist based in San Francisco, but the document was later removed.
The journalist confirmed that the document was not removed by him.
Someone abused @Scribd‘s copyright notice feature to have the content removed (which is a federal crime). A counter-notification has been submitted but likely won’t be resolved for some time.
A mirror version of the manifesto is available to view here: https://t.co/YvLLbSYLem
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) March 15, 2019
The Manifesto is called “The Great Replacement – Towards a new society”. In the manifesto, which is in the question/answer format, the terrorist talks about his ideology and why he carried out these dastardly attacks.
First and foremost, the terrorist admits that what he is doing is terrorism, and he says that he is doing it to fight ‘invaders’ who have higher fertility rate and who aim to overrun Europe.
The terrorist repeatedly refers to immigrants, primarily the Muslim immigrants as invaders and makes references to the “Knights Templar” and ‘Crusades”. The Knights Templars were also called ‘Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’ (or Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici in Latin). The Knights Templar took a vow to defend their fellow Christians from ‘foreign’ intrusions, especially in the Outremer (the conglomeration of Crusader States in the Levant). In the Manifesto, the terrorist argued that Australia and New Zealand to be culturally part of Europe.
However, the terrorist says that he is not a conservative since conservatism is corporatism in disguise. To the questions of whether he is a ‘left-wing’ or a ‘right-wing’, the terrorist has no answer in particular and to both, he says it depends on the definition that people attach to it.
He says that depending on the definition attached to Socialism, he could certainly be one. He says if the definition means workers’ ownership of the means of production, then it would depend on who those workers are and what their intent is and who currently ‘owns the state’.
To the question about whether he was a fascist, he says “The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the People’s Republic of China”.
In the manifesto that has purportedly been authored by the terrorist, he talks about how his ideology evolved.
He says that when he was young, he was a communist, then an anarchist and finally, a libertarian before coming to be an ‘eco-fascist’. The shooter also seems to hold a deep disdain for corporatism. In fact, even partly blames the corporates for immigration of communities with a higher fertility rate.
