THE CULT OF THE VICTIM

On March 15, 2019 a gunman opened fire on worshipers at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, killing 50 and wounding around as many. Survivors of gunshot wounds often have traumatic injuries that require multiple surgeries and leave them severely disabled for life. Before embarking on his rampage, the alleged gunman broadcast over the internet a “manifesto” outlining the motive for his deed. In his manifesto, the alleged perpetrator claimed to have had “brief contact” with “Knight Justiciar” Anders Breivik, the convicted Norwegian mass murderer, and to have taken “true inspiration” from Breivik’s “2083” manifesto. Indeed, the Christchurch massacre would fit the definition of a copycat crime in terms of motive, manifesto and mass murder.

Breivik plagiarized approximately 15,000 words of his manifesto from a pamphlet on “Political Correctness” by William S. Lind. In turn, the alleged Christchurch killer “plagiarized” his deed from Breivik. On his March 17 traditional RIGHT webcast, Lind spent a little over 16 minutes talking about the Christchurch rampage. Not surprisingly, neither he nor his interlocutors mentioned the Oslo precedent.

So what did Lind say about the Christchurch terror attack?  Did Lind take moral responsibility for the consequences — even unintended — of his words?

Lind’s first observation was to caution that there was much that remained unknown about the attack. He then criticized “the establishment media rushing to judgment” by reporting that it was a right-wing hate crime. Then he launched into speculation — “I only say possible no idea at this point” — that the alleged attacker had been converted to Sunni Islam during his travels in Pakistan and that the attack on the mosques was “actually part of the Sunni-Shiite war” and that “it would make sense in many ways for him to try to blame this on the right because of course who’s leading the opposition to Islam in the Western countries?”

It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?

The “second thing that immediately jumped out” at Lind was “why in the Hell are there mosques in New Zealand to begin with?” This remark evoked appreciative laughter from his co-hosts, Brent and John. The real problem, according to Lind, was allowing Muslims to come to Western countries, or, if they are allowed to come, allowing them to build mosques.

Lind then expounded for three minutes on the unrelenting persecution of Christians in Islamic countries and the disregard of the establishment media toward “church bombings and mass murders — those get a paragraph or two in the same papers that splash this [Christchurch] across the headlines on the front page with the biggest type.” 

According to Lind, these atrocities are “happening all the time in Africa”:

We have had Christians worshiping on a Sunday morning suddenly the doors of their church are barred and it’s set on fire by Muslims. These don’t even make the New York Times. Remember the Times‘s real slogan is “all the news that fits we print.” So this [Christchurch shootings] fit their narrative of evil Christianity — evil white males, evil right-wing etc. The mass murder of Christians by Islamics doesn’t fit the narrative so, okay, doesn’t exist and this by the way is exactly what the President and his supporters means by fake news.

So the murder of 50 people by a gunman in New Zealand was “fake news” because it fit a supposed MSM “narrative.” After discounting media coverage of the Christchurch attack, conjecturing about an alternative scenario and objecting to Muslim presence in Western countries and lack of media coverage of atrocities committed against Christians, Lind turned his attention to the strategic disaster of the attack. 

For this analysis, he assumed the “current narrative” of a right-wing, anti-Islamic attack. From that perspective, Lind expressed sympathy for the killer’s alleged motivation, “from what we’re being told now were inspired by this guy’s reaction to seeing Islamics all over France — well, that’s an understandable reaction [laughter].” Let’s unpack that logic: according to Lind, it is an “understandable reaction” for someone to commit mass murder because he didn’t like seeing so many Muslims in France. 

Nevertheless, Lind was eager to advise “our colleagues on the right [that] it’s important to understand why actions like this actually work against us.” 

In other words, the “understandable reaction” of mass murder is, regrettably, a public relations mistake.

Lind’s analysis of the strategic inaptness of this particular kind of “leaderless resistance” action relies on his theory of “fourth generation warfare” and with the “cult of the victim” that he attributes to Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, “what we know as cultural Marxism or political correctness”:

All Marxism is loser worship. It’s if you’re successful, if you’re a builder, if you’re a producer, if you’re out there doing great things, you’re evil, you’re a capitalist, you’re a member of the bourgeoisie, you’re an exploiter, you’re a landlord etc., you deserve a firing squad or the gulag. If you’re a complete loser who produces nothing you know you’re only a taker, you’re, you’re always defeated, then you’re a moral hero and in the climate that we now live in where cultural Marxism sets the tone throughout much of the world the highest status you can achieve is victim.

Why “loser worship” makes this kind of “leaderless resistance” violence strategically disastrous for the right is left unspoken by Lind. My interpretation of what Lind is getting at here but not clearly articulating is that the attacks will evoke sympathy for the victims and thus elevate their status over that of the “real victims” — the perpetrators.

But the real victims here, according to Lind and his colleagues, are the young, white heterosexual Christian men (such as Breivik and the Christchurch terrorist) driven to violence by the pervasive cultural Marxist oppression :

…so many lost young men that feel like they have no future we’re not allowed to have our own spaces anymore as like white Christian European people without having to have without foreigners coming in here… 

…we can’t speak out against any of this without censorship or losing your job or something and it’s driving people mad… 

 …this feeling of oppression where you can’t say what you think about anything because because certain viewpoints have effectively been outlawed…

…more and more men young men particularly — and this by the way, Brent, is happening in many parts of the world — are finding themselves with no prospects if in this country they’re white Christian men, heterosexual. They are considered somehow evil. Again they’re the old equivalent of the capitalists and landlords under the old economic Marxism. They’re inherently evil and they can’t do anything without women but they can’t do anything with women because if they displeased a woman she could immediately claim sexual harassment and he’s guilty until proven innocent and the rage is just building and building and building and because of the way the internet fosters leaderless resistance I’m afraid you’re right, Brent, we are going to see more of this but on our side we need to understand it is strategically disastrous.

Does your head hurt trying to follow Lind’s “logic”? That is the point. It is not logic but a propaganda technique that relies on the listener/reader’s conditioning to assume that what they are hearing/reading and trying to follow is a logical argument. Jacques Ellul gave a concise description of the technique Lind employs:

Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions. There are two salient aspects of this fact. First of all, the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy. But the accusation is never made haphazardly or groundlessly.* The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed, he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit. He who wants to provoke a war not only proclaims his own peaceful intentions but also accuses the other party of provocation. He who uses concentration camps accuses his neighbor of doing so. He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship. The accusation aimed at the other’s intention clearly reveals the intention of the accuser.

*Because political problems are difficult and often confusing, and their import not obvious. the propagandist can easily present them in moral language — and here we leave the realm of fact, to enter that of passion. Facts, then, come to be discussed in the language of indignation, a tone which is always the mark of propaganda. 

Lind’s cult of the victim enlists young, white, heterosexual Christian men driven mad by having their future — their rightful prospects as successful builders, producers, capitalists, landlords and doers of great things — stolen from them by losers. They just can’t catch a break! Even when they go out and shoot a bunch of those losers, it is the losers who get elevated as high-status victims in today’s cultural Marxist climate instead of the real victims, those meritorious young, white, heterosexual Christian, dispossessed males who deserve to be successful but have been cheated out of their victory because the system has been rigged by those inferiors who deserve to lose.

“We’re all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They’re all victims. Every one of you.” — Trump