The 14 Words

This is not the post I had planned to write today, the first day I have had to blog properly since January, but tragedy intervened in Christchurch, so I will save my meditations on the meaning of race and gender as status markers in egalitarian democracy for another day.

Today we are praying for the dead.

Forty-nine people were killed in New Zealand as they gathered together for Friday prayers, forty-one at Masjid Al Noor Mosque, seven at Linwood Masjid Mosque, and one who died later in hospital.

The dead include children.

The shooter—may his time in purgatory be excruciating—has provided the internet with a “manifesto” on his “reasoning” for the attack, which has prompted the usual—one might almost say—scripted responses we have come to expect.

Friends on Facebook—well, one friend in particular—have drawn attention to the manifesto’s use of the “14 words” typically cited as evidence that one is in the presence of Evil, a.k.a. “right wing extremism.”

Except that the “manifesto” never cites the “14 words” as used in the most famous articulation of the phrase (to judge from the references my friends send me [see UPDATES below]), only paraphrases thereof. Nor—and this is surely interesting—does the “manifesto” mention aligning itself with the Alt Right, as per the most famous articulation of the phrase (see above).

Quite the reverse.

The “manifesto” is even more ambiguous about the shooter’s purported religious beliefs.

On the one hand (as my Facebook friend pointed out to our fellow medievalists in another Facebook thread), the “manifesto” includes a quotation from Pope Urban II’s call for the defense of Christians in the Holy Land. “ASK YOURSELF,” the “manifesto” exhorts Christians in all caps, “WHAT WOULD POPE URBAN II DO?” The narrator (I hesitate to call him “author”) also claims to have contacted the “reborn Knights Templar”—whoever they might be, no link is given—and received their blessing.

On the other hand:

Complicated? Funny how hard it is for servants of Satan to declare themselves servants of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Eco-fascists and communists? Well, we all know whom they serve. And yet, we are meant to believe that the shooter is not only “extreme right,” but “Christian”?

My Facebook friends have various takes on this incoherence:

Either false flag or elaborate Aussie shitpost.

Three degrees of trolling to this, I think. 1. Trying to provoke the Muslim community into an attack. That’s one of the reasons he live-streamed it. 2. Obvs. trolling the media. This is on par with Sam Hyde or the 9000 penises on Oprah. These guys get the biggest kick out of the media scrambling to understand internet culture. 3. Shoutouts to his friends on the Chans. Everything about this guy is a walking meme—the “remove kebab” music, Pewdiepie, the Navy SEAL pasta. It’s a wink and a nod that identifies him with an online in-group. Shitposting has become real. Or at least, he wants it to be.

Occam’s razor would suggest “lunatic” over “false flag.”

Yes, yes, I am sure that Candace Owens put him up to it. ;) I'm surprised he didn’t claim that Ivanka Trump or The Donald Jr. wasn’t his muse.

It seems to be classic Helter Skelter.

Communist -->Anarchist-->Libertarian-->Eco-Fascist...!! Which of these has most Fantasy involved (which is what we’re really dealing with)...??

What a bunch of malarkey!

Something fishy. 

Indeed.

Blaming Candace Owens for his radicalization while at the same time claiming that the (unspecified) actions she calls for are “too extreme, even for my tastes”? Claiming to have been taught violence, extremism, and ethno-nationalism by Spyro the Dragon 3?

It is hard to know which is more grotesque: the death of forty-nine people at the hands of this monster—or the efforts to take anything said in the “manifesto” seriously as a clue to the shooter’s intentions.

This is Vox Day’s take on the “manifesto”:

If, that is, anyone has actually done so, as there are more than a few distinctly false notes throughout the entire manifesto, which makes me very reluctant to accept the scenario at face value. The entire document felt very cut-and-pasted, and as if it had multiple authors, at least one of whom was trolling the reader.

The one thing that I think we can be certain about is that the author is not a Christian. Neither is he a “right wing extremist”—as certain internet gurus would have us believe.

Somebody out there wants a race war. Somebody out there wants Christians to bear the brunt of the blame. Somebody out there is confident that an attack on the right innocents will spark the conflagration, if only the right trigger can be pulled.

Maybe that somebody is a person—or persons—with considerable economic and political power.

Maybe that somebody is a young man—or group of young men—who simply want to enjoy the spectacle of war.

But that anybody, even for an instant, took this “manifesto” seriously? That is far more worrying than any fourteen words.

UPDATE [4:00pm CST or thereabouts]: My Facebook friend tells me the 14 words were written on the shooter’s gun. If so, the “manifesto” gives an interesting qualification:

There was a longer version? Seriously? “Are you a...false flag...?” Which door are you going to choose, the lady or the tiger?

UPDATE [5:11pm CST]: Aha! Here is the reason that it didn’t seem to me like the “manifesto” was quoting the “14 words” accurately. From another of my Facebook friends, who follows this conversation more closely than I do:

You do realize that the exact phrase DOES show up in the manifesto, page 7, right? And that the “most famous” formulation is not VD, but the originator of the phrase, the late David Lane, whose words are quoted directly, not VD’s cosmetic variant?

Which should prove two things: I have no idea what actual white supremacists talk about—I don’t know any. And Vox isn’t one either, as he has repeatedly said. Which still does not make the “manifesto” a reliable indicator of anything the shooter may believe—again, as Vox has suggested.