On Not Reading the Christchurch Killer's Manifesto

27 February, 1933.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” runs the new and much-mocked motto of the Washington Post.

Mocked not because it isn’t true, but because the Washington Post itself allegedly does not honour it.

In swift reaction to the shootings in Christchurch, the government of New Zealand has banned either distributing or possessing the killer’s manifesto. Offenders found with a copy face up to ten years in prison.

In the meantime, we read and see everywhere that the murderer was a “white supremacist.”

The problem is, he wasn’t, and the suppression of his manifesto serves to sustain this fiction and suppress this truth. I have myself criminally wordsearched his manifesto online for the term “white,” to confirm this. Nowhere does he express or endorse the idea that “whites” are, or ought to be treated as, superior.

Nor is the killer, as also often asserted, “right-wing,” let alone “far right”—according to his own statements. I wordsearched that one too. He says he is neither left nor right.

This government action in New Zealand begins to look sinister.

Imagine deliberately suppressing public knowledge of the causes of some deadly disease. Wouldn’t that ensure that the disease spreads, grows, and kills more?

Worse, falsely tagging this on the “far right” and on “white supremacists” seems likely to foment the very sort of tribal conflict and scapegoating that leads to more such massacres. Albeit presumably against “whites” and conservatives rather than Muslims.

Why would a government do this? Who benefits?

One possible reason is that such incidents are a convenient excuse for expanding government powers.

Misrepresentations of Godwin’s Law to the contrary, there is an obvious historical example of how this works: Hitler’s Reichstag fire. In the crisis atmosphere it evoked, he was able to seize absolute power. Without necessarily accusing Kiwi bureaucrats of ambition quite so naked, one can yet see how it all works to their advantage. As Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel reputedly once said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

A second possible reason is that the killer’s argument has too much truth to it. This is almost necessarily the case when anyone tries censorship. Things that are obviously false are no threat. When you think you can win an argument, you positively want the argument to happen. You only want to suppress a view or opinion when you feel you cannot respond to it.

I have not actually read the murderer’s long manifesto. The main reason is that I read copies available on the web have now been booby-trapped by someone with viruses. Not worth the risk. Also probably not worth the horrifying moral quandary of possibly having to agree to at least some extent with a mass murderer.

But you have to wonder. This has not happened with other manifestos from other mass murderers, which are generally pretty available online. No government ban, no booby-trapping. I recently read the long rant left by the 2014 “incel” killer. Mein Kampf, for that matter, is freely available, as it should be. So is The Communist Manifesto. The fact that either incites violence against an identifiable group is obviously not a vital issue. After all, awkwardly enough, so does the Quran.

There has to be something special here. Something smells wrong here.