RARE PHOTOS: The desperate terrorist | Rare Historical Photos

We do so not to attribute blame but to ensure New Zealand properly reckons with how he was missed so we can prevent the next atrocity.

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Explaining why someone could commit such a crime might seem impossible or pointless. Such actions are surely so evil as to be incomprehensible – the deranged behaviour of an individual with irrational beliefs. There might seem to be little point in attempting to understand how an atrocity like this is connected to social or political movements, or to technological changes occurring at the time. One might think that the perpetrators of these crimes are such loners, so removed from society, that they are outliers: they are not representative of the politics of the time and their detection is therefore almost impossible.

Yet none of these claims is true. No matter how heinous their actions, these individuals emerge from and are connected to phenomena – personal, social, political, technological – that we can identify and understand, so long as we have the will to do so. Such claims are also dangerous. If we do not properly seek to understand why and how someone might commit such horrors, then we have no hope of preventing similar events from occurring in the future. There are few endeavours more worthwhile.

In the same way, it is possible to identify and explain how an individual could prepare and launch an attack of this devastating magnitude without being detected – but, again, only if we have the will to do so, and the will to learn from our mistakes. If we do not try, prevention can never become more effective, and similar events will remain difficult to stop. Until now, despite a Royal Commission of Inquiry into some aspects of the March 15 attack, we have not truly sought this understanding.

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Like many people, the terrorist suffered trauma, loss and abuse in his early life. His parents’ separation and divorce, the debilitating illness and subsequent suicide of his father, whose body he discovered, and the physical assault he experienced at the hands of his mother’s partner all helped create the conditions for possible future deviant behaviour. His early life likely left him with traits and attitudes that helped set him on his path to violence, including a sense of rejection, a lack of confidence in some areas of his life but astounding arrogance in others, and a desire for status and respect. He emerged from his youth with an anger and a hatred and an attraction to brutality, which he bottled up in interactions in person but let loose online.

Yet personal histories like his, and even those psychological traits, are so common that they alone cannot explain why someone would commit an atrocity of the kind he committed on March 15.

It is also inaccurate to think of the attack as irrational or incomprehensible. For the terrorist, what he did was rational. He knew that he would face considerable negative consequences – either life imprisonment or death by police gunfire, although he clearly intended to surrender rather than be killed. But there were also clear benefits that he believed he would enjoy as a result of his actions that day. In particular, he imagined that he would be seen as a hero within the white nationalist movement and be glorified by thousands of strangers on 4chan and other sites.

The best starting point for understanding his atrocity is not in his personal psychology or background but his social network, and the broad social and political movement of which that network was a part. Terrorism is a social phenomenon. The violence involved is intended to provoke, incite and intimidate as a way of achieving a political, social or ideological goal. Unsurprisingly, then, a terrorist’s decision to use force is not simply an expression of personal despair or psychological disturbance. It is also heavily influenced by a social movement of some kind, whether the person is an active member or merely a quiet observer.

For the man who attacked the Muslim community of Christchurch on March 15, that movement existed predominantly online. This was partly because of his personality; he preferred to be alone rather than in the physical company of others. It was partly because of the money he had at his disposal, and his unemployed status, which allowed him to travel and spend a great deal of time online. But it was also due to the technological nature of the time in which he reached adulthood, with its surge in new forms of anonymous, encrypted, extreme and transnational media.

For the terrorist, this online community was epitomised by 4chan, and particularly that site’s most extreme board, /pol/. It was on this board that racist, extremist language was so common as to be almost required, and that acts of mass-casualty violence were glorified and treated as inspirational, giving the perpetrators seemingly mythic or eternal status. It was here that the terrorist was introduced to new ideas of white superiority and the threat posed by immigration. Indeed, his view of the entire world was shaped by discussions on the site.

On 4chan and sites like it, extremist white nationalist ideology — the belief that the white race is simultaneously superior and under threat, and that this threat requires a violent response — spreads insidiously and easily. Through humour, memes, abuse and status signalling, young men are exposed to these ideas and repeat them with little effort or cost to themselves. Given the terrorist’s latent attraction to violence, until then expressed through non-political forms such as gaming, it was not difficult for him to begin seeing the use of violence through a nationalist and political lens; to begin seeing it as legitimate. This ideology not only provided an outlet for his sadism and hatred, but also gave him a way of attaining a sense of masculinity that had eluded him most of his life. In this environment, he could fantasise about himself as a protector of the white race.

White nationalist ideology was therefore crucial to his radicalisation towards violence. The terrorist was nativist, white nationalist and white supremacist. He believed that the white race was both superior and threatened by other races. He claimed to be opposed to the movement of non-white peoples into European-majority countries, but he also despised those peoples even when they remained in their own countries. Which of these ideological positions he emphasised depended on the audience he was addressing.

The terrorist closely followed and supported transnational far-right movements in many countries. In his eyes, these movements were on the brink of widespread political success. However, it was the one in his own country, Australia, that most energised him. He became active in the most prominent Australian far-right groups online, growing bolder, threatening violence and increasingly seeing himself as having a crucial role to play. In fact, his close connection to the political context in Australia and elsewhere partly explains his long preparation time. He believed that his attack needed to occur at a time when the political will existed, when sufficient white nationalist momentum had been built. Only then could his own action play a part in a rapid chain of events leading to the taking of power by the far right. By 2018 he believed the time was right and set himself a date.

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Just as these online and offline influences worked together, the terrorist’s personal struggles and this political context converged to make violence more likely. His racism drew him to white nationalist ideology, which in turn gave him a justification for his hatred of other peoples. His online interactions on 4chan and the Facebook pages of far-right groups from Australia gave him the respect and attention he had so desperately craved but failed to find throughout his life. And where others in the movement perhaps sought to achieve white nationalist goals through political means, his attraction to death and brutality meant that he was more inclined to pursue an explicitly violent way of realising those goals. He could now openly celebrate past perpetrators of mass violence as warriors for the white race.

Between 2014 and 2019, we can see a marked change in the way the terrorist spoke about violence online. In 2014, he posted mostly in banal terms about travel, women and non-political topics, with one significant exception: he spoke in almost genocidal ways about Indigenous Australians. From mid-2015, coinciding with Dylann Roof’s attack in Charleston, his language became extremely violent and militant. He celebrated Roof’s attack, implored others to ‘read his manifesto’, and advocated for more violence against innocent civilians in places of significance.

The more he stated that the violence of others was legitimate and necessary, the more he felt the need to say that he would do something himself. The more he blustered about his (initially) imaginary intentions, the more likely it became that he would begin to take steps towards making a real plan. And so, over the following years, he increasingly portrayed himself as someone who would take action; a foot soldier who would make a sacrifice for the white race. In part, this transition from boasting about imaginary violence to planning his own was his attempt to gain attention and status within his online community and the offline Australian far-right movement.

As pathetic and galling as this conclusion is, the terrorist planned his attack partly in an effort to impress a network of strangers he never knew.

A mildly abbreviated extract taken with kind permission from the newly published He Told Us: How an Australian committed far-right terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand by Chris Wilson and Michal Dziwulski (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), available in bookstores nationwide.