The New Zealand terrorist attack and the international danger of fascism
18 March 2019
The death toll from last Friday’s fascist terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was revised upward to 50 over the weekend. The youngest person killed was a three-year-old boy. Thirty-four people remained in hospital on Sunday, with 12 in a critical condition, including a severely injured four-year-old girl.
People throughout the world are horrified by the cold-blooded, racist massacre, which targeted defenceless Muslim men, women and children while they were praying. Tens of thousands of people joined vigils over the weekend in New Zealand and internationally to show solidarity with the victims and their families and to defend Muslims, immigrants and refugees.
New Zealand police are now saying that Australian-born, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant was the only gunman and had no assistance from others. He has appeared in court on murder charges. Authorities in both New Zealand and Australia claim that he at no time came to the attention of either the intelligence agencies or the police, and was therefore not under any form of monitoring
This attempt to portray Tarrant as a disturbed “lone wolf,” and especially the claim that he was “off the radar,” is simply not credible. The 74-page manifesto issued by Tarrant makes clear that he prepared and carried out the terrorist atrocity on behalf of an international network of fascists and white supremacists, with whom he had openly collaborated for several years.
Tarrant’s manifesto is a modern-day Mein Kampf. It combines calls for genocidal violence and civil war to force non-European “invaders” from Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand—including all people of Muslim, Jewish, African, Asian and Roma…