Jeff Sparrow - Person X and the Fascists among Us

FASCISTS AMONG US

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Awardwinning writer, editor, and broadcaster. He writes a regular column for The Guardian , and contributes to many other Australian and international publications. Jeff is a former member of the 3RRR Breakfasters team , and is a past editor of the Australian literary journal Overland . He is the author of a number of books, including Money Shot: a journey into porn and censorship , No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson , and Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right .

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First published by Scribe in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand 2019
Published by Scribe in North America 2020

Copyright Jeff Sparrow 2019

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

Chapter Four draws on arguments originally made in Jeff Sparrow, When the Burning Moment Breaks: gun control and rage massacres, Overland Literary Journal , August 2012.

9781925849677 (Australian edition)
9781912854691 (UK edition)
9781950354092 (US edition)
9781925938036 (e-book)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library

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For Steph

Contents

Introduction:

1 : fascisms old and new

2 : the world after 9/11

3 : fascist memes

4 : the Christchurch strategy

5 : ecofascism and accelerationism

6 : Australia and the fascist milieu

Conclusion:

Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce

INTRODUCTION

THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND

On 14 March 2019, a new post appeared on the 8chan politics board /pol/. Well lads, it read, its time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post. I will carry out and [sic] attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook.

The post linked to the Facebook page of a 28-year-old Australian man and a 74-page manifesto entitled The Great Replacement.

[P]lease do your part by spreading my message, making memes and shitposting as you usually do, it continued.

At 1.40 pm the next day, a man arrived at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers.

A worshipper greeted him with, Hello, brother and the stranger opened fire.

He shot worshippers indiscriminately inside the building, returned to his car for more ammunition, and then came back and shot more people. After about six minutes, he drove to the Linwood Islamic Centre and killed people there. One of the men at prayer wrestled with him, and he fled.

At 2.20 pm, police rammed the gunmans car, pulled him from the vehicle, and placed him under arrest. Fifty people were dead and another died later from wounds.

In her widely praised response to the massacre, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pledged never to utter the name of the alleged shooter. The people killed that day and the scores more left physically or mentally scarred deserved remembrance, she said, and the man who opened fire on them did not.

In an ideal world, the conversation about the mosque shootings would have begun and ended with Ansi Alibava, who came to New Zealand with her husband to start a new life; with Husna Ahmed, who led women out of the building and then was killed when she returned to save her wheelchair-bound husband, Farid; with Haji-Daoud Nabi, who jumped into the firing line to cover friends; with Sayyad Milne, the 14-year-old slain before he could fulfil his dream of playing professional football; and with the many, many others murdered as they worshipped.

Unfortunately, the bullets that took their lives didnt come out of nowhere.

Recent statistics show right-wing violence on the rise. The Center for International and Strategic Studies reports that terror attacks from far-right perpetrators doubled between 2016 and 2017 in the United States, and grew by 43 per cent in Europe in that same period. Between 2009 and 2018, according to the Anti-Defamation League, extremists from the right caused 73 per cent of US domestic terror deaths, compared to 23 per cent of deaths attributed to Islamists and 3 per cent to left-wing terrorists.

The only reason rightists didnt have a monopoly over the fifty deaths from domestic terrorism in 2018 was that one attacker abandoned white supremacism for radical Islamism prior to committing murder.

The alleged perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre might have entered the mosques by himself but, politically, he was never alone. We know that, after growing up in the regional town of Grafton in New South Wales, the accused man used inherited money to travel through Europe and on those trips he interacted with far-right organisations in many different countries.

We also know that he was deeply invested in the Australian fascist movement. On a secret blog frequented by activists from the far right, Tom Sewell, a leading fascist activist, acknowledged that the alleged perpetrator had been around the so-called patriot movement since before 2016.

He was well known, Sewell explained to his co-thinkers, for those in the know. A future mass murderer was well known to other fascists and none of them did anything to stop him. While Sewell and other activists distanced themselves from the massacre, some posters on platforms such as 8chan and Gab openly applauded the violence and others called for more killings.

Thats why we must understand the alleged perpetrators ideas, however repellent they are.

Ive chosen to refer to the accused killer as Person X. In part, thats because early readers reacted so strongly to the use of his name, suggesting on the grounds that Jacinda Ardern articulated that it diminished his victims. Certainly, many will find a discussion about the hateful doctrines that inspired Person X difficult. It would be wrong to make that process more painful.

In any case, the euphemism serves another purpose, emphasising a key argument of this book. The Christchurch gunman emerged from a fascist subculture in which hed previously been a minor and anonymous figure. Before he stepped into the limelight to shoot innocent people, no one outside the milieu of the far right knew who he was.

The next killer will be the same.

The massacre at the Christchurch mosques was an act of terror, consciously designed, in ways many commentators havent understood, to inspire further acts of terror. It represented a particular strategic choice for the fascist movement, a decision not to build public organisations but to encourage violence by previously unknown individuals acting in isolation.

Already, Christchurch has inspired imitations in San Diego and El Paso. Almost certainly, there will be others. But we have no way of knowing who will carry them out.

Hence, Person X: the anonymous young man who emerges from the shadows, gun in hand, already committed to an evil ideology.