Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian who killed 49 people in the mosque massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, published a manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement,” that has been described as a shorter and “more sloppy” version of “the same themes” expressed in the 2011 manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.
In one section of his 74-page manifesto, Tarrant predicts that a racial civil war will erupt in the United States:
Civil war in the so called “Melting pot” that is the United States should be a major aim in overthrowing the global power structure and the Wests’ egalitarian, individualist, globalist dominant culture.
In the United States, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the cult of the individual has been practiced for the longest time and with the deepest devotion.
Luckily for us, the end results of this deracialized, irreligious and deculturized program show themselves.
The United States is in turmoil, more so that at any other time in history. States hate other states, the electoral college is under attack at every turn and the races are at each others throats. On top of this is a two party political system, split by racial, social, cultural, linguistic and class divides.
The end result is a nation in gridlock, unable to respond to any great change, unable to commit to any great projects. A political and social stalemate that makes any advancement impossible.
Meanwhile the 10000 ton boulder of demographic change rolls ever forward, gaining momentum and possibly destroying all in its path. Eventually, when the white population of the USA realizes the truth of the situation, war will erupt. Soon the replacement of the whites within Texas will hit its apogee and with the non-white political and social control of Texas; and with this control, the electoral college will be heavily stacked in favor of a democratic victory so that every electoral cycle will be a certainty.
After an election cycle or two with certain Democratic victory, those remaining, non democratic voting, non brainwashed whites will see the future clear before them, and with this knowledge realize the impossibility of a diplomatic or political victory.
Within a short time regular and widespread political, social and racial violence will commence. In this tempest of conflict is where will be strike, a strong, unified, ethnically and culturally focused pro-white, pro-european group will be everything the average white family need and long for. With these boosted numbers, and with our unified forces, complete control of the United states will be possible. Above all be ready for violence, and when the times comes, strike hard and fast.
Well, this is interesting, eh? Tarrant sees the American “cult of the individual” as giving rise to a “deracialized, irreligious and deculturized program” that he blames for the decline which his act of violent terrorism was intended to reverse. Elsewhere in his manifesto, Tarrant declares: “Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth.” So he was not a conservative; indeed, he denounces “modern conservatism” as part of the problem.
This is an argument I’ve heard before, and which I have argued against. When the Left attacks conservatives as “racist,” seeking to link conservatism to violent terrorist hate groups, this is a deliberate misrepresentation, as these extremists generally deride conservatism — a recruiting tactic. Telling the alienated white man that politics is futile, that he is doomed by “demographic change,” extremists seek to inspire such people to reject politics altogether. Indeed, the white racialist is often the same type of individual who joins Antifa. Have none of these young fools bothered to read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer?
What causes the alienated young man — whatever his race, whatever his ideology — to join an extremist movement? The fact is that mainstream politics does not appeal to his grandiose desire for personal significance, his short-sighted craving for action. Effective activism in the political sphere requires patient toil, and it may take decades to achieve real success. One must become a cog in the vast machinery of party politics, where even many of your allies may not share your particular vision, and where even the most talented and visionary leader might spend years in the wilderness before obtaining power. Winston Churchill, for example, spent the decade of the 1930s marginalized within British politics which was then dominated by advocates of appeasement. Ronald Reagan, whose debut in partisan politics was his 1964 “Time for Choosing” speech on behalf of the doomed Goldwater campaign, required another 16 years to win the presidency. If such world-historic figures had to struggle against powerful opposition, and await their chance for many years, what is the prospect that someone like Brenton Tarrant can “make a difference” in the regular work of politics? His resort to violent terrorism is an expression of his sense of hopelessness. And in this, it is the terrorist himself who represents “the cult of the individual.”
Whenever I encounter this sort of “white supremacist” mentality, what I want to say to these fools is, “If you are so damned superior, why not just go succeed in life, and demonstrate your superiority through personal achievement? If you are so concerned about demographic change, get yourself a wife and sire a dozen children!” But they can’t do these things, and it is their sense of failure that inspires their hopelessness.
Don’t bother quoting Nietzsche and Spengler at me. I’ve stared into the abyss, contemplated the prophecies of decline and rejected them. The future does not belong to those who lose hope. However foolish it may seem to keep plugging away — “three yards and a cloud of dust” — and however little share of glory may belong to the lineman in the trenches, the hero does not surrender to the siren song of despair. You may be trailing by two touchdowns at halftime, but you can’t quit.
Consider this: When Whittaker Chambers left the Communist Party in the late 1930s and became an anti-Communist, he feared that he was joining the losing side of the struggle. When he exposed Alger Hiss, he was vilified, smeared as a liar and worse. But there was a young California congressman who believed Chambers — Richard Nixon proved that Hiss was a liar. That early Cold War drama inspired other anti-Communists, including a Yale student named William F. Buckley Jr., and an actor named Ronald Reagan. From the time of the 1948 HUAC hearings, two decades elapsed before Nixon was elected president, another 12 years before Reagan became president and finally — in 1991, more than four decades after the Chambers-Hiss controversy — the Soviet Union collapsed into the “ash heap of history.”
None of that history was inevitable. Beginning with Chambers, who did the right thing even though he believed the Communists would ultimately destroy America, each man involved made his choice. What John F. Kennedy called “the long twilight struggle” against Communism could have turned out much differently, if not for the choices made by a handful of men. And the most important choice they made was to hope.
Hope requires a sense that your life has meaning and purpose, no matter how obscure your station in life or how great your hardships may be.
Brenton Tarrant is a loser. He had what was, in some ways, an enviable life. After high school, he worked a couple of years as a personal trainer, then began traveling the world. How many young men would like to spend their 20s jetting off to see the sights in Europe and Asia? Despite these advantages, Tarrant surrendered to despair and his manifesto was an argument for others to embrace hopelessness, to resort to violence — indeed, he dreamed of bloody racial warfare in the United States as preferable to “the cult of individualism.” What a stupid waste of life, not only in terms of the dozens of unarmed people he murdered, but also in how Tarrant threw away any hope for his own future for the sake of the sick “blaze of glory” fantasy that inspires mass murderers.
“My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future.
“The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.”
— Robert E. Lee, 1870
