Manifestos of White Nationalist Ethno-Soldiers

Introduction

The 2010s was a decade during which self-acclaimed “ethno-soldiers” murdered what they consider as enemies of whiteness and the West in a spectacular mediatized and gamified fashion. Three attacks carried out against Jewish and Muslim places of worship are of particular interest here. October 9, 2019, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the twenty-seven-year-old German citizen Stephan Balliet was setting in motion the plan he had been preparing for a long time. According to a manifesto published by Balliet (2019, 9) himself, the time had come to “[k]ill as many anti-Whites as possible, Jews preferred.” Balliet’s attack was to take place at the local synagogue in the German city of Halle. However, the plan did not play out as stipulated in his manifesto published online. Instead of entering the synagogue to slaughter members of the congregation, as the synagogue’s newly reinforced security prevented him, Balliet turned to by-passers, killing two and injuring several (Holmes 2019). Balliet broadcasted his actions on Twitch.tv, Amazon.com Inc’s gaming platform. On April 27th, John Timothy Earnest attacked the Chabad of Poway in California, killing one person and injuring three. Before the attack, Earnest (2019 1) posted a manifesto on the image-board site 8chan proclaiming, among other things, that “[e]very Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” He also called upon “White men” around the world, “the greatest race that our God has created,” to “kill all” Jews (3). March 15, Brenton Tarrant attacked the Masjid Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center during Friday prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand. Killing 51 people in a shooting spree, Tarrant (2019, 73) broadcasted his attack live on Facebook.com with the aim of encouraging other white ethno-soldiers to “thrive” and “march ever forward to our place among the stars” to “reach the destiny our people deserve.” ¹

Although these shooters acted on different continents, they share the same symbolical universe. In written manifestos, they declare that they are the avant-gardist defenders of the West currently under both external and internal threats. Several scholars, security experts, and journalists have set out to map these shooters’ motivational and ideological underpinnings. For example, Graham Macklin notes that while both Earnest and Tarrant were identically preoccupied with the conspiracy theory of White Genocide, Earnest’s (2019, 25) focus was “saturated with conspirational anti-Semitism rather than anti-Muslim reference points [as with Tarrant].” Commenting on the attack, Dirk Moses (2019, 206) concludes that Tarrant, unlike other perpetrators of contemporary “fascism and right-wing terrorism … does not subscribe to antisemitic conspiracy theories.” However, as I argue in this article, these three shooters are not examples of either anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim discourse. Rather, in Balliet’s, Earnest’s, and Tarrant’s manifestos, there are indications of a discursive convergence by which anti-Jewish conspirational discourse of Jewish global domination is merging with an anti-Muslim conspirational discourse that the West is currently being colonized by Islamic forces acting like puppets to Jewish puppet-masters. Research on the convergence of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim discourses has been discussed in previous literature, but is scarce (Nilsson 2019; Zia-Ebrahimi 2018). A few studies identify intertextual and interdiscursive dimensions of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim conspirational discourse (Bergmann 2018; Botsch et al. 2012; Renton and Giley 2017), but in-depth analysis of recent articulations merging anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim conspirational discourses into one conspirational and racialized horizon is unexplored.

In this article, I inquire further into this symbolical universe to make an attempt to comprehend the underlying discursive logics that are expressed in these shooters’ manifestos and broadcasts. I make a case for seeing this universe through two analytical lenses: conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism (explained in detail later). These two discursive logics are amendable, appropriable, and lend themselves to a wide variety of local articulations but share a genocidal imperative which makes them particularly dangerous. I argue that the conspirational and racialized logic seen in their manifestos draws eclectically on two familiar conspirational theories: the Jewish World Conspiracy Theory, with tropes from the theory of the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), and the Great Replacement Theory, with tropes from the Eurabia Theory, that becomes the basis for a refashioned theory of White Genocide.

Setting out from Kathleen Belew’s work on the importance of analyzing the discursive, ideological, and motivational interrelations of shooters discussed in this article (Belew 2018), my intention here is not to condemn or moralize but, in a Spinozian fashion (Klever 1995) and in the light of what Roger Griffin (2008) calls “methodological empathy,” to understand. Informed by an anti-essentialist ontology and an anti-foundationalist epistemology, I employ discourse theoretical tools to analyze how political subjectivities are construed in these manifestos and the type of political maxim that inform these identifications (Howarth and Stavrakakis 2000). This has been done through a systematic reading of the manifestos and related publications, with a focus on statements, symbols, and iconography that relate intertextually and interdiscursively between the manifestos and to the theories in question (Fairclough 2003). Moreover, while I am referring to these conspirational theories as theories, this does not imply that they are logically coherent frameworks based on sound empirical analysis. Rather, they are ideal-typical interpretative frames of reality, informed in relation to contingent synchronic and diachronic social and political relations.

The data of the analysis are primarily these shooters’ manifestos published via social media before or at the time of the attacks. The data are analyzed through the lenses of conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism, two analytical categories that are explained below. This analysis is not holistic and other aspects can, and indeed should, be highlighted in these and similar manifestos to get a better understanding of their contexts, logics, production, circulation, and the discursive fields that make out the raw-material for them.

Digital multiplatform ecologies and white ethno-soldier manifestos

Balliet, Earnest, and Tarrant were in no sense avant-gardists in publishing their manifestos online. The last decade has seen a great number of manifestos by self-acclaimed fascists, ethno-soldiers, and defenders of the white race, from Anders Behring Breivik (Norway 2011), Anton Lundin Pettersson (Sweden 2015), Dylan Roof (US 2015), Robert Gregory Bowers (US 2018), and Patrick Wood Crusius (US 2019). ² Before them, Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto Industrial Society and its Future (1995), which was copied to some extent by Breivik, is an earlier example of a manifesto providing an ideological explanation for a heinous act. However, the transnational multi-platform (radical nationalist) media ecology that has emerged in the last decade or so (Albrecht, Fielitz, and Thurston 2019; Ebner 2019), provides any consumer with an endless source of information ready to be twisted, reframed, and repackaged to become sensational digital commodities in the form of ironic and satirical memes on a global market (Nagle 2017; Tuters 2019). It thrives on the economy of scale, whereby technology for high-quality production of sound, image, and video is readily available at a low cost where anyone with a basic understanding of digital media can become a producer (Fuller 2005).

Of particular relevance for this article is the gamification of broadcasted violence. With body-cameras mounted on either the head or the chest, any individual can become the protagonist in his or her own shoot ‘em up game. Before attempting his assault at the synagogue in Halle, Balliet posted a link to a Twitch live-stream where one could follow him, and Tarrant’s mass shooting spree was broadcast live on Facebook. These forms of broadcasting and livestreaming terror, not least mastered by ISIS, have the potential to break through the constant flow of attention-seeking digital material circulating to go viral (Macklin 2019; Nance 2016). Balliet, for example, planted a cliff-hanger in his manifesto. In the weapons-section he mentions “a secret weapon” (2), followed by “[v]iew the live stream to find out more” (Balliet 2019, 7).

The manifestos of Balliet, Earnest, and Tarrant are not solemn narratives of a passage à l’acte, they are products of this digital media ecology in which a myriad of communication genres is in constant flux and development. In the case of these three manifestos, they all appear to be inspired in various ways by Britvic’s copy-paste manifesto from 2011. Earnest’s “An open letter” and Tarrant’s “The Great Replacement: Towards a New Society. We March Ever Forwards” both have a similar structure, containing a short autobiography, an ideological motivation for the planned attacks, an encouragement for others to follow suit, an homage to people who have influenced them, and a post-act Q&A-section answering imagined questions posed after the deed. Balliet’s four-page manifesto “Techno-Barbarism: A Spiritual Guide for Discontented White Men in the Current Year +4” is accompanied by an eleven-page “Pre-Action Report” describing weapons in detail, has a shorter ideological motivation, and is coated with anime references, and the last page with the headline “Achievements” has a clear allusion to shoot ‘em up video games, naming various types of kills. While gun fetishist tendencies are not as prevalent in Tarrant’s manifesto, on Twitter he posted a number of images of his weapons covered with esoteric symbols and names of people he was out to revenge, which indicate a strong emotional relation to his weapons.

The autobiographical statements have an overall similarity in that their authors identify with a form of victimized or oppressed whiteness (cf. Hage 2000, 19). While Balliet’s manifesto has very few mentions about himself, he identifies as a “suppressed white,” a “weeb” (i.e., a non-Japanese male obsessed with anime and manga) and as a “Techno Barbarian.” The latter is a reference to one of the bestselling table-top role-playing miniature wargames in the world, Warhammer 40,000. The game plays out in a grim apocalyptic and nightmarish future of the 41st millennia after humankind first ventured into space. It is heavily influenced by fantasy and horror fiction literature and, in particular, the fall of man as depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and comes with the slogan: “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” It would appear that Balliet, as a Techno Barbarian, can inspire other “whites” to stand up against the evils of the world (Koehler 2019).

Earnest (2019, 1) states that he is of “European ancestry” and that the “blood that runs in my veins is the same that ran through the English, Nordic, and Irish men of old.” According to Earnest, who identifies as a “goyim” (i.e., non-Jew) and states that he is a chosen Christian, “I am truly blessed by God for such a magnificent bloodline” (1). In the Q&A-section, Earnest answers the rhetorical question: “Are you a terrorist?” By further enforcing a positive identification with whiteness and an assumed impossibility for whites to commit terrorist acts, Earnest states, by evoking a stereotypical picture of a Muslim terrorist, that since he is not wearing “the sandnigger’s” equivalent of a durag,” since his “skin isn’t the color of shit,” as he cannot be “smelled from across the room,” since it is “socially unacceptable” for him “to marry” his cousins, and, since he does not shout “Durka durka mohammed jihad” (a reference to the American satirical series South Park), he concludes: “So no, I’m not a terrorist” (6). Earnest lists a number of figures that have inspired him, among others, Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, Brenton Tarrant, and Robert Bowers (responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018).

Tarrant’s manifesto is the most elaborate of the three. He declares he is “just a[n] ordinary White man” aged 28, of Scottish, Irish, and English working class “stock” who more recently has been working as a “kebab removalist” (Tarrant 2019, 5), referring to a song that was spread during the War of Yugoslavia to encourage ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims (Katz 2017). He also identifies as an “ethno-soldier” and “freedom fighter” (Tarrant 2019, 18) and in a Q&A-section he answers a rhetorical question of whether or not he is a racist: “Yes, by definition, as I believe racial differences exist between peoples” (15). Similarly, regarding fascism he answers: “Yes. For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist” while adding, “I am sure the journalists will love that” (18). Regarding influences, he mentions other “partisans/freedom fighters/ethno-soldiers” as well the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley (1896-1980) and American conservative politician Candace Owens as having influenced him “above all” (17). Finally, he states that the PS4 game Spyro the Dragon 3 “taught me ethno-nationalism” while the popular third-person shooter game Fortnite “trained me to be a killer” (17). While Fortnite is framed as a digital training zone for killing, Spyro the Dragon is a reference that circulates in the radical nationalist media ecology as a reference for ethno-nationalism. Tarrant’s manifesto and actions are also a call to action, an example for other whites to follow: “You wait for a signal, while your people wait for you” (51). While Balliet was waiting to rejoin his fictional love in Valhalla, Tarrant was waiting to rejoin his white brethren there (73).

Although these manifestos differ in how they are framed, Earnest drawing heavily on Christian references, Balliet conspicuously on anime and gaming, and Tarrant more explicitly on fascist and alt-right lingua, they are, I argue, part of the same genre and style, the genre being mass-shooter manifestos and the style being self-acclaimed ethno-soldiers on a mission to save the white race. Where these manifestos truly intersect is in their discursive logics of conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism.

Conspirational racialization

The analytical category of conspirational racialization derives from Zia-Ebrahimi’s (2018) work on conspirational discourse that constructs Jews and Muslims as essential and universal bodies of a mischievous alterity. I understand racialization as an identificatory logic by which subjects and objects are attributed an essential identity which is indistinguishable from their bodies (Meer 2013). This evokes the question of how to understand racialization in terms of alterity articulated with religious categories such as Jew and Muslim. Recent scholarship has revealed the many ways in which racism continues to haunt our societies under the guise of post-racial discourses (Titley 2016); that is, anti-Semitism is displaced and turned into a historical remnant or a Muslim problem, whereas conspicuous Islamophobia is a mere critique of religion, since a religion is not a race (Nilsson 2020).

An historical perspective on the matter reveals that even before the advent of biologically articulated racism, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim discourse, founded on a Christian theological logic, articulated the Jew and Muslim in terms of incommensurable somatic alterity focusing on bodily features, and not least on the idea of pure blood (Carr 2017). Biological categorization was not the first scientific, systematized classification of alterity and was seen in the philology of the 19th century, from where the classificatory categories “Aryan” and “Semite” derive (Masuzawa 2005, 149). Biological racism was coupled with imaginations and fantasies articulating bodies as vessels of certain cultural and theological essences (Bethencourt 2015). It was a matter of “race-thinking before racism,” to quote Hannah Arendt (1944). As stressed by Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), Nasar Meer (2013), Topolski (2018), and others, the joint historical categorization of Muslims and Jews as Semites was of a philological nature and not biological.

There are both continuities and discontinuities, similarities and discrepancies in how the Jews and the Muslims have been articulated as incommensurable others to Christian Europe and caution is called for so as not to conflate these entangled diachronic and synchronic relations into one anachronistic narrative. Focusing on logics of conspirational racialization has the analytical advantage of not confining the analysis to preconceived essentialized and static analytical categories (Rattansi 2005). Moreover, while racialization produces alterior bodies, it also creates sameness; thus, racialization produces both sameness (whiteness) and alterity (racial others) based on imagined universal and essential traits that are somatically articulated in relation to notions of nation, people, race, religion, and gender (Gillborn 2006).

Setting out from Michael Barkun’s (2003) work on conspirational thought, racialization and conspirational discourse appears highly alignable since one underlying logic of conspirational thought is that for a group of people working secretly towards achieving specific and evil goals, this supposed evil component is located “outside the true community” (3), Hence, I see conspirational racialization as an identificatory logic that constructs boundaries of in-group and out-group but, since it is a matter construing essentialized and a-historical universal identities, it is a foreclosed logic.

The Jewish world conspiracy

It is well documented that, during the last century in Europe, Jews have been conceived of as an ethnic or racial group whose supposed weight in politics, economics, and culture has been taken as constituting a threat (Cohn 2005, 29). Today, a broad range of anti-Jewish conspiracies are circulating in the radical nationalist media ecology. They are often framed through what Macklin (2014) calls “ideological bifurcation,” a form of political communication that is constructed from a play on exoteric and esoteric messages, the former being for public consumption and the latter for the discursively initiated, commonly coated in sarcasm and irony. Articulations of this sort often draw implicitly or explicitly on the myth of the Jewish world conspiracy that gained widespread traction in Europe with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 20th century and the conspiracy theory of the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), popularized in the US and later Europe through William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, published in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald (1999). The myths describe Jews as planning the construction (or the completion) of an international supra-Government by infiltrating national governmental institutions with the aid of Jewish capital, and controlling national and global media to shape the minds and the will of the people (Cohn 2005).

In Balliet’s (2019) manifesto, explicit references are made to “ZOG” (10). Jews are referred to as “rats,” “kikes,” and “kikelette.” Jews as “rats” and “parasotes” echoes the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew (in German Der ewige Jude) and portrayals of Jews as an uncontrollable plague of a race (Friedman and Koch 1989). “Kike” is a derogatory slur dating back to the beginning of the late 19th and early 20th century while “kikelette” refers to a Jewish child. In Earnest’s (2019) manifesto, Jews are being openly targeted. According to Earnest, Jews act “as a unit,” have “a genocidal instinct,” and “every Jew plays his part to enslave the other races around him—whether consciously or subconsciously” (1). Earnest states that Jews are a “squalid and parasitic race” that have committed an “endless” number of crimes, from “lying and deceiving the public through their exorbitant role in news media,” “using usury and banks to enslave nations in debt and control all finances for the purpose of funding evil.” He refers to “their role in cultural Marxism and communism,” “their role in feminism which has enslaved women in sin,” “promoting race mixing,” and “their role in the murder of the Son of Man—that is the Christ” (1). Earnest’s anti-Jewish rant articulates Jews both in terms of theology, race, and politics, thus creating a universally malevolent incarnated Jew: “every Jew young and old” has contributed to these alleged “crimes” (1).

Tarrant’s (2019) manifesto is the least explicitly anti-Jewish of the three. In the Q&A-section, Tarrrant even asks a rhetorical question on whether or not he is an “anti-semite,” to which he responds: “No. A jew [sic] living in Israel [sic] is no enemy of mine, so long as they do not seek to subvert or harm my people” (15). Regardless, the symbolism in his manifesto and on his weapons show clear indications that the manifesto is underpinned by an anti-Jewish conspirational logic (cf. Moses 2019). The above statement appears to appeal to Tarrant’s confessed puritan and racial take on ethno-nationalism; that is, that people sharing the same ethnic heritage in terms of race and culture are of the same nation (Bromley 2018). Jews apparently do not fit Tarrant’s ethno-national understanding of “white” and thus have no place in what Tarrant (2019) sees as the West. Jews living in Israel are considered as non-enemies “as long as they do not subvert or harm my people” (15). Subversion here is arguably a flirtation with Jewish influence over the minds of whites in the West, as are statements of a global “anti-white media machine [that] controls them” (21). Tarrant’s non-animosity toward Jews is thus conditioned. Moreover, Tarrant’s publications are filled with references to Nazi occultism. The first page of his manifesto is covered with a Black Sun, an ariosophical symbol also stitched to his backpack worn at the day of the assault (Goodrick-Clarke 2002). The Odal Rune and the number 14 were depicted on Tarrant’s automatic rifle. The former was a symbol used by Nazi soldiers during World War II and in fascist and national socialist movements ever since, while the latter refers to David Lane’s (1999) 14 word white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” (6).

Tarrant (2019) depicts globalism and globalists as a malevolent “force” seeking to undermine the white race through a “global and corporate run press,” “the education system,” and assumed corrupted state-apparatuses (21). If there is indeed a puppet master lurking behind the scenery, “why”, Tarrant asks, attack “immigrants when ‘x’ are the issue?” (21). Tarrant answers that “x” can be dealt with in time. This “x” is curious. While it could indeed be a deliberative deception, that is, shitposting, the “x” taken together with commonly used euphemisms for Jews such as “globalists,” it would be blatant not to take Tarrant’s anti-Jewish articulations seriously. Thus, while Tarrant conspicuously turns his focus toward Muslims, the underlying racial take on ethno-nationalism, the exclusive identification of whiteness as non-Jewish, and the national socialist and white supremacist iconography suggests that the manifesto is impregnated with anti-Jewish tropes.

The great replacement

The Great Replacement Theory, also known in French as le Grand Replacement, is a conspiracy theory popularized in radical nationalist circles by the writings of the French historian Renaud Camus (e.g., 2012; 2017). According to the theory, the French and European indigenous populations that have seemingly been homogenously rooted in their lands are being de-culturalized, de-ethicized, and de-nationalized through the course of a generation or two. An unrooted man is, according to Camus (2017, 27), a replaceable and removable man. The theory proposes that in 20 years or so white secular Christians will have been replaced, through a militarized colonization, by immigrants from the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular due to the Europeans’ assumed lack of virility and fertility and the immigrants’ breeding frenzy (93). The discursive trope of racial replacement has a long history in France, as elsewhere in the West. However, Camus spins a whole conspiracy suggesting that the alleged replacement is orchestrated by an ideological hodgepodge called “replacism,” mixing the political left’s alleged liberal anti-racist dogma (i.e., that there are no races) with the political right’s alleged capitalist ideals (Zuqète 2019, 148).

The Great Replacement Theory lends itself to various types of articulations. Central to this analysis is how it often draws on tropes from the Eurabia Theory and counter-jihadist activism (Asprem 2011; Carr 2006). The foundational piece of the Eurabia Theory was commonly attributed to Gisèle Littman’s writings (2005), under the pen name Bat Ye’Or (2005). According to Littman, alleged mass-migration to Europe from predominantly Arab and Muslim countries coupled with capital from Gulf is part of plan to Islamisize Europe and turn into one cultural and economic entity with the Arab world, that is, Eurabia. This Islamization is moreover supported European political elites who, through politics of multiculturalism, has launched a cultural end economic assault against the white Christian and secular population of Europe.

The theory takes on local articulations and various shapes in relation to each country’s specific history (e.g., the Nazi-/fascist past, regions of Muslim immigration, and colonial histories) and contemporary events (e.g., the Islamic veil affairs, halal-food, and Jihadi attacks). Regardless of its local articulations, Muslims are construed as a universal and monolithic mass, without any specific relations to time and space (Sayyid 2018). Historical events are commonly re-articulated and described as pivotal and emblematic moments where Europe was saved from Islamic occupation and colonization (e.g., the Battle of Poitiers in 732 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683) and symbols and figures are fetishized (e.g., the Knights Templars). All this emanates in the construction of a theory about an eternal Muslim conspiracy with the aim of colonizing the West (Lee 2017).

In Balliet’s (2019) manifesto, there are no explicit statements referring to the Great Replacement Theory, or the Eurabia theory. However, Balliet states that he originally planned to “storm a mosque” while implicitly referring to Muslims as “golems” (10). By using the epithet “golem,” Balliet evidently refers to Hebrew folklore and appears to suggest that Muslims are, if not created by Jews, at least under their control. As Balliet has it, “killing 100 golems won’t make a difference, when on a single day more than that are shipped to Europe” (10). Targeting Jews was, to Balliet, more sound since that was a step to “cut of the head of ZOG” (10). In the manifesto, Balliet also refers to the kebab-removal trope by naming the successful burning down of a mosque as an “achievement” called “Crusty Kebab” (11).

In Earnest’s (2019) manifesto, references are made to the Great Replacement Theory in stating that “mass immigration” is used to “displace the European race” (1). However, anti-Muslim conspiracy theories are secondary, just as in Balliet’s manifesto. That Robert Gregory Bowers, who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, is referred to as an inspiration is less surprising, given Earnest’s target, but that Tarrant is referred to throughout the manifesto as his greatest inspiration and a “catalyst” is significant, given the manifesto’s anti-Jewish coating (5). Earnest actually takes credit for attempted arson in trying to burn down a mosque in Escondido, California, in tribute to Tarrant: “I scorched a mosque in Escondido with gasoline a week after Brenton Tarrant’s sacrifice and they never found shit on me (I didn’t realize sandniggers [Muslims] were sleeping inside though—they woke up and put out the fire pretty much immediately after I drove away which was unfortunate. Also, they didn’t report the message I spray-painted on the parking lot. I wrote ‘For Brenton Tarrant -t./pol/’)” (4). ³ To Earnest, Muslims are second-hand enemies in relation to Jews. However, the alleged ongoing replacement of whites is clearly described as orchestrated by Jews, who supposedly not only use Muslims as “puppets” but also “[s]pics” and “niggers,” although, according to Earnest, they “aren’t intelligent enough to realize that the Jew is using them and they will be enslaved if Europeans are eliminated” (6).

Tarrant’s (2019) manifesto title is the “Great Replacement”; therefore, it is not surprising that of the three, his manifesto is the most elaborate on this issue. To Tarrant, the Great Replacement is about demography. The manifesto’s text-section starts with a threefold repetition of the statement: “It’s the birthrates” (3). According to Tarrant, the one thing to take away from the manifesto is “that the birthrates must change”; if not “the European people would still be spiraling into decay and eventual death” (3). According to him, “not a single white nation” meets the level of birthrate needed to regenerate the population, but nevertheless “the population in the West is increasing, and rapidly” (3). Tarrant states that the reason for this increase is “[m]ass immigration,” and “the higher fertility rates of the immigrants themselves” (3). In this logic, we are witnessing “an invasion on a level never seen before in history” with “[m]illions of people pouring across our borders” (3). This alleged invasion is organized by “state and corporate entities to replace the White people who have failed to reproduce, failed to create the cheap labor, new consumers and tax base that the corporations and states need to thrive” (3). This is framed as “an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people” (4).

In the manifesto, Tarrant includes plenty of references to the Eurabia Theory and counter-jihadist discourse that he connects to the Great Replacement Theory. First of all, he states that “Islamic nations in particular have high birth rates, regardless of race or ethnicity” (13). Islam will accordingly, “due to its high fertility rates … grow to replace other peoples and faiths” (15). Islam thus allegedly has a racial element to it in that it will replace “other peoples.” Islam is universally articulated as the oldest enemy of Europe and the West. Tarrant holds that for 1300 years Islam has brought “war and devastation” (13). Muslims are moreover portrayed as “Islamic [sic] invaders” that have enslaved “millions of Europeans taken from their lands” (5).

White genocide

The White Genocide Theory, as a meta-theoretical melting pot for the theory of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Great Replacement, is impregnated with the Eurabia Theory. Even though the theory genealogically precedes Camus’s Great Replacement, there are good reasons to approach it in this manner. The core feature of the theory is that it ties the former theories into a question of not only a conspiracy to replace Europeans and Westerners through a deliberate program of demographical, cultural, and ethnic exchange, but that this is an orchestrated attempt to eradicate the white race.

Commonly, the White Genocide Theory is attributed to the aforementioned American David Lane’s (1999) White Supremacist Manifesto and in particular fourteen paragraphs that describe an alleged ongoing white genocide (see Michael 2009). Paragraph seven, for example, states that “all Western nations are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the White race” and that the “life of a race is in the wombs of its women” (Lane 1999, 4). The manifesto ends with the fourteen word credo: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” (6). Lane’s theory and writings sprung of the American white power movement of the 1970s and onward but can, like the Great Replacement Theory, be seen to have many previous historical elements in racial biology, eugenics, national socialism, and post-fascism (Belew 2018).

Balliet, Earnest, and Tarrant all claimed to be revolting against an ongoing genocide of white people. Balliet (2019) is the least explicative of the three and explicit articulations of white genocide are missing. However, one of his main maxims are to “[k]ill as many anti-Whites as possible, Jews preferred” (10). Killing Jews is in his logic “to cut the head of ZOG, which are the kikes” (10).This suggests that the future of whiteness depends on the eradication of ZOG, which suggests that Balliet follows the logic of the White Genocide Theory. Earnest (2019) talks interchangeably about “white people,” “white nations,” and “the European race” (2-3). He explicitly states that “European people are genocided [sic]” (3) and, accordingly, that “[e]very Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race” (1). When it comes to Tarrant (2019), genocide is explicitly mentioned throughout the manifesto in terms of an “attempted” (34) and “ethnic and cultural genocide” (18). In this logic, the alleged “ethnic,” “cultural,” and “racial replacement” adds up to a “WHITE GENOCIDE” (4).

As earlier stated, these are not logically coherent and unchangeable theories. They are contingently articulated and differ somewhat between each manifesto as well as how they relate to, what in this analysis is presented as, the original publication. For example, while both Earnest and Tarrant use Christian identity as something emblematically European and positively related to whiteness, Lane (1999) described Christianity as something that “brought torture, murder, war, inquisitions, insanity, misery, slavery, superstition, ignorance ,and the Dark Ages” and favored Germanic and Norse mythology, arguing that Wotan (aka Odin) is “the true God of the Aryan people” (326). However, the manifestos converge in a conspirational logic where Jews and Muslims are racialized as universal antagonists to whiteness. What emerges from this type of conspirational racialization is an identificatory logic of a universal “white/us” and “non-white/them,” kept apart through irreconcilable borders, locked in an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, where the rationale for coming to terms with evil is its annihilation; that is, a genocidal imperative following the logic of us or them instead of us versus them (Wojcik 1997, 141).

Anthropoemic populism

The analytical category of anthropoemic populism refers to the specific discursive logics that articulate the boundaries of “we” and “them.” Following Zygmunt Bauman (1997), one of the core ambitions of modern state building was to bring order to a chaotic natural world which has led to warfare against alterity. Accordingly, this war against alterity was driven either by the logic of anthropoemy or by anthropophagy. Anthropoemy (i.e., vomiting out) is a logic that is obsessed with homogeneity and purity and describes how modern societies or nations conceive of alterity as something essentially incommensurable. It is a strategy of exclusion, excluding the stranger from the national body with such strategies as segregation, confinement, or destruction. Anthropoemy stands in contrast to anthropophagic (i.e., ingesting) logics which focus on the consumption of alterity, rather than its destruction. In other words, while both logics are founded on notions of order and purity, anthropophagic logics are assimilatory and anthropoemic are exclusionary and potentially genocidal (Haveman 2005).

Populism is here understood as a contingent and anti-foundationalist identificatory logic. This means, as Ernesto Laclau (1994) states, that “the language of populist discourse—whether of Left or Right—is always going to be imprecise and fluctuating: not because of a cognitive failure, but because it tries to operate performatively within a social reality which is to a large extent heterogeneous and fluctuating” (118). It is by dividing the heterogeneous and fluctuating nature of social reality into two homogenous blocks, the people and the non-people, that populist discourse presents an imagined reality that is stable and orderly.

Contemporary anthropoemic populist articulations typically portray societal conflict along two racialized axes of inclusion and exclusion into the “we” (Brubaker 2017). Along the first axis, the horizontal, articulations are made of alleged universal distinctions between a culturally, religiously, and/or ethnically/racially homogenous and pure people, versus culturally, religiously, and/or ethnically/racially heterogeneous impure others, for example, the Jews and the Muslims. Along the second and vertical axis, a particular distinction is made in social and political terms between the true people and the traitors to the cause of the people, that is, the political elite, the news media, and feminism (Nilsson 2020). In the racialized and conspirational logic analyzed here, anthropoemic populism helps in understanding how enemies of radical nationalist actors such as “liberalism” and “the politically correct,” “feminism” and “femo-Nazism,” “socialism” and “cultural-Marxism,” “the media” and the “thought police,” and so on are articulated as collaborators with the alleged racial enemies of whiteness. This is why Breivik attacked the Norwegian social democratic youth organization since they were, in this logic, a future generation of race-traitors that would continue the alleged undermining of the European, white people (Hemmingby and Bjørgo 2016).

In Balliet’s, Earnest’s, and Tarrant’s manifestos, the logic of conspirational racialization merges with the logic of anthropoemic populism to expand the enmity toward the white people to include anti-white traitors, typically puppets to globalism or ZOG, and to create a genocidal maxim which is practiced through a form of self-acclaimed revolutionary, leaderless resistance, and accelerationism in line with the writings of white supremacist ideologues like Louis Beam and James Mason. Balliet (2019), for example, holds that Jews, together with politicians, are privileged groups that pat each other’s backs “in this sad excuse of a country” (10). Referring to Germany in this way suggests that the country is in a deplorable state in need of rectification. Earnest (2019) similarly connects Jews with the state apparatus and in particular how governmental law enforcement agents, “glow-niggers,” together with the “Jewed-media” are imposing a politically correct regime on white people (4). Earnest refers to the meme “the Day of the Rope” (8) which, since being mentioned in William Pierce’s (aka Andrew Macdonald) Turner Diaries, has become a reference for the day of retribution, “a grim and bloody day,” when race-traitors will hang (1978, ch. 23). Tarrant (2019) similarly argues that the West finds itself in a deplorable state where a “nihilistic, hedonistic, and individualistic insanity” has allegedly “taken control of Western thought” (3).

In the prevailing logics of conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism there is no other viable solution to the current state of the West than a form of leaderless resistance, infused with a sense of masculine chivalry and idealization of martyrdom that will encourage other white “ethno-soldiers” to retaliate (Crawford and Keen 2020). When Balliet (2019), for example, states that the “only way to win is to cut off the head of ZOG,” he adds, if “I fail and die but kill a single jew, it was worth it. After all, if every White Man kills just one, we win” (10). While Earnest (2019) sees a potential in more meta-political strategies and demographic change, he states that “[e]very single White man has everything to lose by doing nothing, and everything to gain by taking action” (5). To Earnest, the number of Jews killed in an attack is secondary: “I only wish to inspire others and be a soldier that has the honor and privilege of defending his race in its greatest hour of need” (2). In Tarrant et al.’s study, Earnest sees a momentum that “may very well be the last chance that the European man has to spark a revolution … [t]he Day of the Rope is here right now—that is if you have the gnads [balls] to keep the ball rolling” (8), and “KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING. IT’S FUCKING HAPPENING” (5). Being in the “early stages of a revolution,” Earnest states that “I do not care if I die,” (7) “we need martyrs” (4). A battle is supposedly awaiting and calling out to other white men, Earnest states: “More than anything I wish I could’ve seen your faces and fought alongside with you on the battlefield. Give them hell for me. Give. Them. Hell” (8).

Tarrant (2019) lays some blame on others for his blatant attitude toward an alleged western world in despair. In the manifesto he describes: alleged Jihadi attacks, and in particular the one in Stockholm in 2017 and the resulting death of eleven-year-old Ebba Åkerlund; the French presidential election in 2017 between Emmanuel Macron, “a globalist, capitalist, egalitarian, an ex-investment banker with no national beliefs other than the pursuit of profit”; and Marine Le Pen, “a milquetoast, feckless, civic nationalist”; and, finally, how the French countryside had become the birthing ground for non-white “invaders” (7-8). Tarrant relates how, during a trip to France, he broke down in tears and asked: “WHY WON’T SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING?” (9) He describes how, guilt-struck and filled with anger, he turned the question on himself: “WHY DON’T I DO SOMETHING?” (9). Reciting Lane’s 14 words, Tarrant says that he has reached the conclusion: “We must ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children” (7). To achieve this end, Tarrant outlines a non-democratic and genocidal revolutionary strategy: “Do not suffer under the delusion of a Democratic victory, prepare for war, prepare for violence and prepare for risk, loss and struggle, as it is the only path to Victory” (59). Tarrant sees hope in the rise of a “populist movement” (55) but stresses the urgency of the situation: “THE BEST TIME FOR ATTACK WAS YESTERDAY, THE SECOND BEST TIME IS NOW” (57). Besides attacking and killing “invaders,” Tarrant makes no exception for supposed anti-white “traitors” who “deserve a traitor’s death” (39). To “Antifa/Marxists/Communists” he says: “I want you in my sights. I want your neck under my boot. SEE YOU ON THE STREETS YOU ANTI-WHITE SCUM” (27). He moreover encourages others to follow his conclusion: “YOU WAIT FOR A SIGNAL, WHILE YOUR PEOPLE WAIT FOR YOU” (51). The manifesto in this regard is steeped in an affective call to martyrdom: “ACCEPT DEATH, EMBRACE INFAMY, ACHIEVE VICTORY” (56).

Once victory is achieved, Tarrant envisions how the newborn populist movement will attract more and more people “[t]hrough our own actions and speech” that will “show them a new path” (45). Painting a future based on his take on eco-fascism, which is illustrated in images of men roaming in the wild, and blonde women as mothers. These images all bear the emblem of the Black Sun. He especially focuses on the “environment, traditions, families, workers [sic] rights, and personal and racial responsibilities” (45). Tarrant sees a future world where ethno-nationalist separatist diversity is truly celebrated, where “diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted in unrestrained [sic] in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy” and “the peoples of the world remain true to their traditions and faiths and do not become watered down and corrupted by the influence of outsiders” (14). In Tarrant’s mind, “a rainbow is only beautiful [due to] its variety of colors, mix the colors together and you destroy them all and they are gone forever and the end result is far from anything beautiful” (14). The path to this new world appears to be long and for now, he says, “we appeal to the anger and black comedic nature of the present, but eventually we will need to show the warmth and genuine love we have for our people”: “SHOW THEM THE WAY FORWARD” (45).

Genocidal murmurings

While Balliet’s, Earnest’s, and Tarrant’s manifestos show both convergences and disparities, they point to a number of developments brought about by the radical nationalist media ecology. First, during the last decades, the intertextuality and interdiscursivity of conspirational thought made possible by the radical nationalist media ecology seem to have brought about a homogenization and convergence of discourse and discursive practices (Nilsson 2019).

Second, the radical nationalist media ecology is driven by a creative exchange in terms of the usage of discursive strategies to convey messages, mimic established modes of communication, and an overall meta-political strategy, but where English is the lingua franca. This does not imply that earlier fascist, post-fascist, and radical nationalist discourses were not articulated in a transnational setting (Whitman 2017), but that the escalated shared library of potential memes, tropes, and cultural references made possible through a globalized consumerist culture, creates new possibilities for the creation of conspirational and racializing discourses, loaded with affect and familiarity.

Third, in these manifestos a discursive field, or a narrative frame, emerges in which whiteness, masculinity, and the West, are under an acute threat. A universal and essentialized notion of the white people is articulated where perceived threats to an imagined natural political order are seen as threats to whiteness and the white people.

Fourth, this frame is molded on the logics of conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism resulting in a genocidal maxim to purge the West from national alterity; alterity here conceived of as a universal, essential, and somatic threat that merges race, ethnicity, religion, and culture. Now, if a cultural or religious identity is seen as an inextricable part of human bodies, the only logical way of purging a society from this identity is to get rid of the bodies carrying the identity in question.

Fifth, urgent action is called for in either a defensive or a pre-emptive manner, but always seen as a response to an imagined onslaught. As Moses (2019) points out, “[as] so often the case with genocide, a genocidal subjectivity develops in seeking to prevent genocide: perpetrators invariably think of themselves as acting in self-defence to avert imminent destruction” (204). This type of reasoning is very clear in Earnest’s (2019) rhetorical question, “[d]o you hate other races?” to which he answers, “I hate anyone who seeks the destruction of my race” (6). This suggests that these shooters could just as well have turned their aims toward either of the two groups.

Finally, the authors of the manifestos, through self-acclaimed chivalry, appear to envision a racially pure and homogenously white future; a fascist restoration of a lost order through the renaissance of Man (Griffin 2008).

Caution is called for in determining what actually motivates shootings and other types of attacks, that might indeed be classified as terrorism, which follow similar logics. However, while echoes of conspirational racialization and anthropoemic populism are heard throughout the radical nationalist media ecology, murmurs based on these logics appear to resonate far beyond the media ecology and into political arenas in Europe and the United States. By taking actors like Balliet, Earnest, and Tarrant seriously, and by not seeing them as pathological reminders of a past era of western history, they become important indicators of how low, frequent racializing murmurings of the nexus of religious, racial, and cultural alterity can burst out into acts of genocidal violence.