Some Christchurch commentary of note

At the Washington Post:   The Racist Theory that Underlies Terrorism in New Zealand and the Trump Presidency.

An extract:

Trump is not to blame for the tragedy in Christchurch. But, as an editorial in The Washington Post noted, there isn’t much daylight between the “garden-variety racism” of Tarrant’s manifesto and the far-right nativism at times espoused by Trump and his advisers.

My colleagues pointed to the particular emphasis Tarrant seemed to place on the “great replacement” theory, a belief popular among the West’s far right that white populations face “genocide” as a result of declining birthrates and mass immigration. In his manifesto, Tarrant pointed to the formative impact of a trip to France in 2017, where he was disturbed by the number of Muslims he saw in a midsize French town.

“As I sat there in the parking lot, in my rental car, I watched a stream of the invaders walk through the shopping centre’s front doors,” Tarrant wrote. “For every French man or woman there was double the number of invaders. I had seen enough, and in anger, drove out of the town, refusing to stay any longer in the cursed place and headed on to the next town.”

Though immigration levels have dropped significantly in Europe since 2015 — and though Muslims are a small minority in virtually every European country — this belief remains a virulent mobilizer of the European far right and has spread in various forms both across the Atlantic and to the Antipodes.

Renaud Camus, the polemicist whose thesis in his 2012 book “The Great Replacement” almost certainly influenced Tarrant, decried the gunman’s actions in an interview with The Washington Post. But he felt little concern over how his ideas were being interpreted by far-right politicians and proliferated in the online echo chambers where Tarrant stewed in his hatred.

“To the fact that people take notice of the ethnic substitution that is in progress in my country?” he ventured to my colleague James McAuley. “No. To the contrary.”

Camus is hardly an outlier. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon has invoked the writings of Jean Raspail, whose deeply racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” conjured an epochal influx of swarthy migrants subsuming France. In 2015, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen urged her supporters to read the book.

And this:

As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a lengthy essay on American nativism, white nationalist angst over migration — whether it’s Latino arrivals at the border or the Muslims next door — hinges on tacit mainstream acceptance of the “replacement” theory: “The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration — as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion,” Serwer wrote.

A central contention of the Trumpist view on immigration, Serwer added, contends “that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States.”

That is, in essence, white supremacy. Trump “ought to state unambiguously that the New Zealand suspect’s ‘replacement’ ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse,” declared The Post’s editorial.