From the May-June 2019 issue of News & Letters

by Gerry Emmett

The Australian terrorist who massacred 50 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mar. 15, has been charged with 50 counts of murder and 39 of attempted murder.

His intention was to spark a genocidal war. His models were the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, and Breivik’s exemplars, the Serbs who committed genocide against Muslims in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Along with broadcasting his massacre on Facebook, the Christchurch terrorist also published an online manifesto. The manifesto is a depraved, pseudo-intellectual expression of everything that is lowest and most corrupt in human consciousness.

THE ULTIMATE LOGIC OF HATRED

It does hold two points of interest, however. First, unlike the rambling thousand-plus-page, cut -and-paste manifesto of Anders Breivik, this killer’s text is concise and written in his own voice. It is a measure of how this fascist consciousness has been mainstreamed—the genocidal hatred of the “Other” now has enough social and political presence that it can express itself easily in everyday speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fighting exactly against this tendency when he warned us that “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide.”

Second, the terrorist’s description of his move from the revolutionary Left to the fascist right, which has been almost universally ignored, is a significant measure of the ideological pollution of our time. His manifesto somehow declares support for workers’ rights and environmentalism along with its call for genocide.

The contradiction between these ideas in his head reflects the real world battle of ideas between those Leftists who supported the anti-fascist struggle in Bosnia, and the Syrian Revolution, against those “Leftists” who made excuses for Slobodan Milosevic’s and Bashar al-Assad’s genocide.

The sleep of historic Reason gives birth to monsters.