GUEST BLOG: Dean Parker – MARCH 15, 2019

March 15 2019: fifty people are shot dead at two mosques in Christchurch. First reports were one gunman was active at one mosque, two gunmen at another. 

On TV3 a frenzied political scientist appeared saying this was clearly planned by a white supremacist group in Christchurch, where such groups are known to flourish. 

“Possibly their weapons have been provided by people with connections to the armed services,” he speculated, eyes ablaze, widening his conspiracy and then adding, startlingly, that a street assault on the leader of the Greens in Wellington a couple of days before “may have been connected.” 

He explained that white supremacist groups had been growing in confidence and told us the group in Christchurch would have, “a tight inner circle of four or five members—a cell—while outside would be a wider layer of support.” 

I have an American friend in Washington who claims to be the only person in the world who’s both a registered Republican and a member of the NZ Labour Party. I’d once roomed with him in a drunken university hostel in Wellington where he’d hung around with David Shand and Michael Hirschfeld and that Labour crowd before returning to the States and serving in the George W Bush administration and triumphantly entering Baghdad atop an armoured car like Lawrence of Arabia into Aqaba on a camel. 

He’d emailed me and asked what was going on and I’d repeated these comments to him. 

Then I heard on TV one of the killers was transmitting a live feed of his killings, filmed with a helmet-camera. I went to my computer and found it immediately.

It was appalling. One of the most appalling aspects was its familiarity. It was just like those gunman video games that I’ll never be able to look at again. The barrel points ahead of you, you move into various rooms, shooting everyone you see. In a corridor a figure suddenly appears and dodges to one side before you can get a shot in.

Bullets were fired in streams of four or five. They didn’t make a popping noise. More like suppressed explosions. Thomp-thomp-thomp-thomp. Thomp-thomp-thomp-thomp-thomp. 

People tried to flee and fell. Bodies ended piled together in corners. The gunman kept firing into them and there’d be no movement. Like firing into sacks of grain. 

He’d then go out, get another weapon from his car and, as though doing some domestic delivery, return, firing once more into the bodies. 

The worst killing I saw was the last. 

The gunman walks outside toward his car. He sees a woman starting to run away along the footpath. He fires and a red explosion comes from her head and she drops and falls into the road. 

The killer then gets into his car. The woman’s body is lying in front of the car. The killer drives off. We hear the wheels thump and the image judders. He has casually run over the body as though it were some empty cardboard box lying in the road. 

The live footage either ended here or I turned it off. At the time the news reports on my computer were saying six dead. I told my companion Isabel, who was still watching the Breaking News reports on TV3, that clearly there were dozens dead and told her what I’d seen on my computer and then said I wished I hadn’t.

On TV3 news there was an update caption saying the attack on the second mosque had occurred ten minutes after the attack on the first. I emailed my friend in Washington and wrote, “There might just be the one gunman,” and decided to keep a detailed record of that day and what followed.

 

                                                                                2.

Turned out, as I’d begun to suspect, there was just the one gunman. He was an Australian who’d been living in Dunedin, not Christchurch, and had travelled about overseas and had been planning some sort of terrorist attack for two years. 

He had intended an overseas attack, but came to the conclusion that New Zealand would do just as well. 

He did the shootings at one mosque, then drove to another and shot more there. 

At this second mosque his weapon was grabbed off him by a brave soul who tried to use it to shoot back but the rifle was empty. 

Hence the confused reports of more than one gunman—of three of them, one at the first mosque, two at the second. 

That was Friday. On Saturday the political scientist had re-worked his conspiracy theory and was now explaining to us how the gunman would have been radicalised here, by other white supremacists. 

In fact the gunman, in an Anders Breivik-styled manifesto posted on-line, had asked, “Where do I get my information? The internet, of course.” 

New Zealand’s only involvement in the mass killing was in providing the venue. It was an act done for a global stage. The killer lived in Dunedin but the internet was his home. 

Admittedly, the killer seemed to have fed his imagination at a Dunedin gun club. There, a former member of the armed forces who had been called in a couple of times to give advice ended up going to the police and laying a formal complaint. 

He said the club consisted of inadequates making up for their inadequacies with semi-automatic weapons and talking about mass killings. He said there was a strong anti-immigrant sentiment. I read an interview with the President of the club in which he said the killer “seemed like a normal sort of person.”

Our gun laws came under scrutiny. After the Tasmanian mass shooting in 1996, Australia legislated semi-automatics illegal and did a successful buy-back of weapons. At the time, New Zealand held an enquiry which recommended the same. Nothing came of it. For $25 you could continue to get a gun licence here and begin acquiring semi-automatics and practice with them at gun clubs. That is what happened.

 

                                                                              3.

The English papers were very good in their coverage of the political background. Good piece in The Independent—

“The suspected  Christchurch mosque shooter claimed he was just one of “millions” of people holding the beliefs that inspired the massacre of 49 people.

“Brenton Tarrant said only Anders Breivik’s Knights Templar group knew of his plan but said he had ‘donated to many nationalist groups and interacted with many more’.

“He claimed he decided to carry out an attack two years ago, while on holiday travelling in western Europe in early 2017.

“Security sources have told The Independent Tarrant may have met extreme right-wing organisations during his visit, which coincided with increased tensions over Isis-inspired terror attacks and the French presidential election.

“His ‘manifesto’ was posted to messaging board 8chan with a plea for anonymous users to spread his message around the world, and they did.

“But nothing in the 16,000-word document is new – the ideas, ideologies and memes used have long been spread by far-right groups and figures across the US, UK, Australia and Europe…

“Tarrant has also expressed his belief in the white genocide conspiracy theory, which states that white people are being ‘replaced’ by non-whites in western nations.”

 

                                                                               4.

The shock for New Zealand was, first, the immediate horror that someone could ruthlessly set about ending the lives of others—and, in this case, as they gathered for prayer. We’d seen it overseas, but overseas was overseas. Now it was happening here. And that was the second shock— catching up that we lived in a globalised world. 

All that interconnectedness that the modern world’s internet brought us also brought us the modern world’s casual copycat terrorism—done with a live feed. We were not distanced from world events. We were just as much a stage as London, New York, Moscow, Sudan. 

All that distance represented by “OE” had contracted and the expression had forever lost its potency. You don’t need to leave New Zealand for your Overseas Experience. It’s just up the road. The everyday terrorism we see on our TV screens could break out on the streets where we walk. Overseas is no more.

The ironies were apparent. Refugees and immigrants had come here looking upon New Zealand as a safe harbour from the woes of the world. Nowhere was safe these days. 

And how smug we’d all been, shaking our heads at American gun laws, tut tut tutting at the ease with which semi-automatics could be acquired and used. 

And the reaction here to demands for changing the gun laws saw gun clubs saying, “Now is not the right time to discuss this rationally,” and “Changing the law won’t stop this sort of thing happening.” Hadn’t we heard that before and scoffed at the hayseeds in Mississippi?

In fact America’s NRA immediately started giving advice to gun clubs and retailers here. Once more we heard the only way to stop a bad man with a gun was a good man with a gun.

 

                                                                             5

The street where I live is the holiest in Auckland. There’s a church, a seminary, a home for old priests, a nunnery—and a mosque. Lots and lots of flowers were left at the mosque, which was really good—reassuring for Muslims here, and at the same time reinforcing locals’ commitment to welcoming immigrants. 

There was a huge rally in Auckland’s Aotea Square. It was the first political gathering I’d been to in New Zealand where safety instructions were issued at the start—how to take cover, how to disperse rapidly, how to call for help. 

Marama Davidson from the Greens gave an excellent speech, very appreciated: how the victims were under surveillance when they should have been under protection.

Everyone was asking of the SIS: we all know it monitors Muslim and left-wing networks; does it do the same with the extreme right? The gunman was known to be an active participant on right-wing blogsites. 

I’d read how some years ago a British Home Secretary, whose government had taken part in the invasion of Iraq, was reported to have given a roomful of parents some tips on parenting. “Look for the tell-tale signs now, and talk to them before their hatred grows and you risk losing them forever.” He was of course addressing Muslims.   

My companion Isabel pointed out how quickly the media sought out the psychological reason the killer went wrong—the parents’ divorce, the father’s suicide, etc—and that this sort of explanation is never sought for Islamic bombers.

 

                                                                             6.

There were two contradictory things declared about the terrorist atrocity in Christchurch: that the shootings were a product of New Zealand society, and that New Zealand was a peaceful society. Neither was true. 

The shootings were committed solely by an Australian who had roamed the world and made a temporary home in Dunedin where he planned his attack. 

Australian commentators have certainly pointed out that the killer grew up in a period when racism, xenophobia and hostility to easily-spotted Muslims was quickly racheted up in popular Australian culture. But the killer’s real home was the internet where he relished the company of white extremists and posted his rantings. 

Initially he intended his attack for Australia or the US. He found Christchurch more convenient. New Zealand’s connection was the ease with which he could obtain automatic weapons and the setting at Christchurch. Possibly the shooting fantasies of his fellow gun club members in Dunedin helped fuel him. But that was all. 

As for New Zealand being a peaceful society, it never stood a chance. It was a tribal land of utu  and conquest followed by a settlers’ land of war and land seizure. Our major commercial activity was the slaughter of beasts. When it came to the slaughter of our own species around the world, we were always to the fore, volunteering to march from the sticking pens, blades in hand, to any conflict going. We would have invaded Iraq but we were busy being pals with China over a Free Trade Deal. We took part in the invasion of Afghanistan this century fulfilling a pledge we’d made to imperial powers way back in the nineteenth century. Attacks on women, teenage suicide, the beating and killing of children… New Zealand is right up there with the worst. If I were a young woman backpacker, or Chinese or Japanese, I’d steer clear of New Zealand. 

I so remember going into the public bar at the old Gluepot in Ponsonby and feeling the air thumping like a drum, like a nightmare, the violence that thick you could cut it with a knife—which someone was doubtless preparing to. 

“Psychotically tanked,” is muso Shayne Carter’s phrase. And he seems to have seen it all (and caused a certain amount). I’ve just been reading his Dead People I Have Known in which he says he was never happy about being born in Christchurch. “All that violence. The bleeding Polynesian kids in the Square at midnight, the prostitutes raped, murdered and thrown in the Avon river. The taxi driver saying, ‘This is Avonhead, but we call it Asianhead’, like I’m supposed to laugh. Ten-year-old, five-foot-tall Bic Runga abused by passing Nazis…” And Dunedin? “A deep-set propensity for violence… Kiwis play rough while keeping it shy and modest.” Exactly. For every disarming Flight of the Conchords and Rose Matafeo, there are a score or more maniacs seething with grudges. 

I was in Syria in 2003 and it felt a lot safer than late-night downtown Auckland. 

I’m sure a good part of the Springbok Tour protests of 1981 involved women taking the opportunity to march against the violent masculinity of New Zealand society. 

Poet James K Baxter believed New Zealanders harboured an innate anxiety but he mused battily this was because the land and the surrounding sea were so intimidating. In fact it’s because any minute someone’s likely to give you the fucking bash. 

On top of the bubbling violence lies an uneasy country where politics offers no hope, where belief in political solutions collapsed in the 1980s. I had an old mate from the Mangere Labour Party tell me his local Party branch rooms have photos on a wall showing known nutters to be wary of—all pathetic Pakeha. Whereas at the local Pak’N’Save the security camera photos of shoplifters are 100% Polynesian. For the mass, it’s forget about parliamentary change—loot now, while stocks last. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. 

 

                                                                               7.

People said nothing would be the same again after March 15. Certainly, all that distance represented by “OE” contracted and the expression lost its potency. 

But—nothing would be the same again? 

On Kim Hill’s radio show barely a week after the shootings a Christchurch woman said she’d put on a solidarity hijab then hadn’t got more than 200 yards down the road from her home before someone called her a fucking cunt.

My partner pointed out that by Sunday the TV news was still solely about the Friday killings—but the jaunty sports bulletin was back. 

And then, at a solidarity gathering outside the mosque up the road, a friend said to me that at least the banning of semi-automatic rifles was one good thing that had come out of the massacre and I said to him the Aussies did it twenty-three years ago and he replied, “But they did it in ten days! We did it in six!” 

It’s always the same again.

Dean Parker is an Auckland writer