On Friday, March 15, an Australian gunman attacked the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Jumu'ah prayers. Fifty-one people were killed and dozens wounded. The youngest of the dead was three years old. He livestreamed it, because distribution was part of the plan.
Before he began, he posted a 74-page document to 8chan. This page will not quote it and will not name him. But it will print the title, because the title is the entire reason a New Zealand atrocity belongs in an American archive:
THE GREAT REPLACEMENT
-- TITLE OF THE DOCUMENT POSTED BEFORE THE ATTACK, MARCH 15, 2019
That is not a phrase a man makes up in a garage. It is the English rendering of le grand remplacement, coined by the French writer Renaud Camus in 2011 for the claim that native European populations are being deliberately swapped out by elites. And Camus did not invent the argument either, only the branding. The argument is American, published in New York in 1916 and written into American immigration law in 1924, a lineage this site keeps a standing dossier on.
I. WHY THIS IS AN AMERICAN STORY
The reasonable objection to filing this here writes itself. An Australian, in New Zealand, killing New Zealanders. What has that to do with the American right?
Three things, and they compound.
First, the theory he named is in wide American circulation right now, in politer wording. In 2017 a sitting congressman told the country "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." That August, marchers in Charlottesville chanted "you will not replace us" and the President found very fine people among them. Last October a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue having posted that a refugee agency "likes to bring invaders in that kill our people." The vocabulary is not imported. It is domestic, and it is broadcast.
Second, the document was written to be copied. It is addressed to readers, it flatters imitators, and it was posted to a board whose American users are the target audience. This was not a confession. It was a recruitment brochure with a body count attached as proof of concept.
Third, and worst: the theory has no borders because it has no specific enemy. Christchurch's dead were Muslim. Pittsburgh's were Jewish. The theory accommodates both because its actual claim is about who counts as native, and every country supplies its own answer. Whoever is nearest and least like the author will do.
II. WHAT NEW ZEALAND DID BY TUESDAY
One contrast belongs on the record while it is fresh, because Americans are about to be told that nothing can be done.
Within twenty-four hours, New Zealand's prime minister said the country's gun laws would change. Within seventy-two, her cabinet had agreed in principle to ban the category of weapon used. She refused to say the gunman's name in Parliament and asked the country to do the same, on the grounds that notoriety was the payment he had come for. She wore a headscarf to meet the families and did not treat it as a photo opportunity to be defended afterward.
Set beside the American pattern after Pittsburgh, and after everything before Pittsburgh, that is not a policy difference. It is a difference in whether the thing is understood to be a problem with a solution.
CLAIM: "You're blaming ordinary conservatives for a lunatic on the other side of the world. Nobody who worries about immigration wants anyone shot."
THE RECORD: Almost nobody does, and that is not the mechanism. Nobody here suggests that people concerned about immigration levels are latent killers, or that arguing about visa policy is violence. The claim is narrower and it is about supply. A theory that says a specific population is being imported on purpose to displace you does not stay an opinion, because it contains its own emergency. Give it to ten million people and almost all of them will do nothing at all; the handful who conclude that an emergency licenses anything are not a malfunction of the theory, they are the theory working. That is why the title of that document matters more than its contents, and why the people repeating the theory in cleaner language owe an answer today rather than a complaint about being asked.
Fifty-one people went to Friday prayers. This page expects to be citing that document again, in an American context, and hopes to be wrong.
SOURCES -- THIS PAGE
- The attacks, the toll and the document's title: the assembled record of the Christchurch mosque shootings; START, University of Maryland, on the document's narratives and tropes.
- The theory the title names, and its French coinage and American ancestry: Bridge Initiative, Georgetown University; this site's standing dossier.
- New Zealand's response, including the gun-law announcement and the refusal to name the gunman: contemporaneous reporting, March 16 to 21, 2019.
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