17 March 2025
By Tom
Peters
March 15 marked six years since the
fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant massacred 51 people and
injured dozens more in mass shootings at two mosques in
Christchurch.
The anniversary of New Zealand’s worst
mass shooting—which the United Nations designated in 2022
as an International Day to Combat Islamophobia—attracted
minimal media coverage. Successive governments have sought
to suppress public discussion of the atrocity, including how
Tarrant was able to carry out the attack, his links to
fascist organisations, and his admiration for US President
Trump and other far-right politicians.
New
Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivered a
hypocritical speech at a memorial meeting in Christchurch,
declaring that “Islamophobia, like all forms of hatred,
has absolutely no place in New Zealand, and it is our duty
to challenge it wherever it appears, whether it’s in
words, policies, or in the silence that allows prejudice to
fester.”
In Australia, Tarrant’s home
country, Labor Party Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in
a similar statement, “Australia stands firm against any
expression or act of hatred or hostility toward the Muslim
community.”
Who do these politicians think they are
fooling? Both governments and the entire political and media
establishment have spent the past two years supporting the
US-Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and
demonizing pro-Palestine protesters. Students, academics,
doctors, nurses, journalists, artists and others who have
expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people are being
smeared as “anti-semites” and, in some cases, forced out
of their jobs.
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Research by the Islamophobia Register
of Australia has found that instances of anti-Muslim abuse
more than doubled between January 2023 and November
2024—especially after Israel began its genocidal assault
on Gaza in October 2023. The report highlighted physical
attacks on people wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh and the
hijab, as well as an arson attack on a Palestinian
restaurant, and a bomb being planted on a car outside a
house displaying the Palestinian flag.
Rosemary Omar,
who lost her son Tariq during the massacre at Al Noor
Mosque, told Radio NZ she had “very little faith” that a
similar attack will not occur. She noted that Tarrant had
many admirers and pointed to the recent threat by a teenager
from Western Australia to carry out a “Christchurch 2.0”
attack against a mosque in Sydney.
New Zealand’s
right-wing coalition government launched a witch-hunt in
January against Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, which
has organised many protests against the genocide. Deputy
Prime Minister Winston Peters, from the right-wing
nationalist NZ First Party, made inflammatory statements,
falsely accusing the group of “fascism, racism, and
encouragement of violence and vigilantism.”
Peters,
who is also New Zealand’s foreign minister, is currently
visiting the United States, where he will grovel before the
fascistic President Donald Trump, who Tarrant hailed in his
manifesto as a “symbol of white renewal.” Peters will
reiterate New Zealand’s support for US-led wars in the
Middle East—where NZ personnel are assisting in the
bombing of Yemen—and the militarisation of the
Indo-Pacific region in preparation for war against
China.
The NZ government and opposition Labour Party
welcomed Trump’s election victory and inauguration, which
was marked by two Nazi salutes by billionaire Elon Musk.
They have made no criticism of the Trump administration’s
assault on democratic rights, including plans to deport
millions of immigrants and the arrest of pro-Palestine
protesters such as Mahmoud Khalil.
NZ First was also
part of the Labour Party-led government of Jacinda Ardern
when the 2019 terror attack happened. The international
media glorified Ardern for her performative acts of
“kindness,” while ignoring her alliance with NZ First
and Labour’s support for its anti-immigrant policies. NZ
First has a long record of racist agitation against Asian
and Middle Eastern migrants and Muslims.
In the days
following the Christchurch massacre, the World Socialist Web
Site opposed the propaganda that Tarrant was a lone actor
who could not have been stopped and whose actions had
nothing to do with the policies of the Ardern government.
The New Zealand and Australian ruling classes had for
decades fuelled anti-Muslim sentiment, including by joining
the criminal US-led “war on terror” and the invasions of
Iraq and Afghanistan.
The WSWS warned that the attack
was “the product of the deliberate cultivation, at the
highest levels of the capitalist state in country after
country, of the most extreme right-wing nationalism. As the
working class internationally comes forward in a mass
resurgence of class struggle against unprecedented levels of
social inequality and the danger of war, the ruling class is
once again, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s, seeking to use
fascist forces to divide, intimidate and suppress the
opposition to the bankruptcy of capitalism and the
nation-state system.
“Political parties and
individuals espousing views that are not far from those of
Brenton Tarrant can be found in the governments and
parliaments of every European country, in Canada, Australia
and New Zealand, and in the US Congress and White
House.”
This is even truer today than it was six
years ago.
While Trump has returned to power, the
neo-Nazi AfD is now the largest opposition party in Germany
and the government has adopted its anti-immigrant policies.
Italy’s government is now led by Mussolini admirer Giorgia
Meloni, and far-right parties in France, Austria and across
eastern Europe are all setting the agenda for the
militarisation of the continent and expelling migrants and
refugees.
In addition to fully backing the genocide in
Gaza and seeking to criminalize domestic opposition, the
European powers are escalating the proxy war against Russia
in Ukraine, where the Zelensky regime and its military are
infested with Nazi admirers.
Tarrant visited Ukraine
prior to carrying out his 2019 attack, and told his family
he liked it so much that he considered moving there. The
rucksack he carried during the massacre was emblazoned with
the sonnenrad (black sun) symbol used by the neo-Nazi Azov
movement, which has been integrated into Ukraine’s armed
forces.
Discussion about Tarrant’s links to fascist
groups internationally has been deliberately suppressed.
Ardern instructed the media not to report on Tarrant’s
views and declared that she would never speak his
name.
In an anti-democratic decision, the New Zealand
state made it a crime to possess his manifesto, which
expressed admiration for Trump and far-right parties in
Europe, indicated that he had contact with groups in Europe,
and made clear the similarity between his anti-immigrant
views and those of NZ First and other establishment
parties.
A royal commission of inquiry was held in
secret in 2020 and evidence presented by the police and the
intelligence agencies, as well as statements by Tarrant
himself, have not been released. It reached the
conclusion—unsupported by any evidence—that Tarrant had
acted entirely alone and could not have been
stopped.
Tarrant had well-known links to the neo-Nazi
Lads Society in Australia, whose leader Thomas Sewell tried
to recruit him. Sewell’s current organisation, the
National Socialist Network, continues to operate in
Australia with protection from the police and the judicial
system.
Questions remain about why Tarrant was not
arrested in Australia when he made death threats in 2016
against opponents of the United Patriots Front, the Lads
Society’s predecessor. Another opportunity to stop Tarrant
was missed when New Zealand police failed to investigate a
complaint about anti-Muslim threats made by members of the
Bruce Rifle Club, where Tarrant trained for his attack. The
royal commission accepted claims by police that they did not
receive any complaint about the club.
In response to
widespread anger from the victims’ families over the royal
commission’s whitewash of state agencies, a coronial
inquiry into the massacre was launched in 2022 and is
ongoing. Coroner Brigitte Windley restricted the scope of
the inquiry to focus on the events of March 15, 2019,
whether Tarrant’s online activity “contributed to his
radicalization,” and why Tarrant was able to obtain a
firearms licence. She made clear that she will not release
information gathered by the royal commission that remains
restricted for “national security” reasons.
The
main response by the state to the Christchurch massacre was
to give more money and power to the spy agencies and to
boost internet censorship which is aimed, not against the
far-right, but against left-wing and socialist groups.
Ardern set up the Christchurch Call to Action in
collaboration with the Macron government in France, which is
notorious for its anti-Muslim demagogy, to establish
protocols to remove so-called “terrorist and violent
extremist content” from online platforms.
The
Christchurch Call is supported by 55 governments—including
the US, Germany, Britain and others which have denounced
socialist and anti-war activism as “extremism”—and 19
tech and social media companies, including Google, Amazon,
Facebook, Microsoft and X (Twitter).
The billionaire
owners of these companies have embraced the Trump
administration and are promoting its agenda of militarism,
racism and extreme reaction. They are censoring the WSWS and
numerous anti-war websites and pro-Palestinian voices while
amplifying fascists.
The main lesson that must be
drawn from the Christchurch massacre and everything that has
happened in the past six years, is that the danger of
fascism cannot be halted by appeals to capitalist
governments. The imperialist powers are lurching to the
right and promoting the same extreme nationalist ideology
espoused by Tarrant as they defend unprecedented levels of
social inequality and prepare for war to redivide the
world.
There is mass opposition to fascism in every
country, but history—including the rise of fascism in
Germany in the 1930s—demonstrates that anger and
opposition is not enough. What is urgently required is the
building of a socialist party, capable of mobilising the
political power of the international working class to put an
end to the capitalist system, which is the root cause of
war, fascism and inequality. This is the program fought for
by the International Committee of the Fourth International,
and the Socialist Equality Group in New
Zealand.
