Oblivion for Tarrant but his toxic creed will live online

New Zealand seeks to close a dreadful chapter in its history.

A survivor of the Christchurch mosque attacks, Taj Mohammed Kamra, centre, leaves congregational Friday prayers, two days ahead of the first anniversary of the Christchurch mosque shootings, at Horncastle Arena in Christchurch Picture: AFP

On June 2, Brenton Tarrant will stand trial in the High Court in Christchurch to answer for one of the worst acts of right-wing violence­ in recent history — the targeted slaughter of 51 Muslims as they knelt in prayer at one of two Christchurch mosques.

The result is a foregone conclusion. In every legal sense, ­Tarrant’s trial is a formality. A necessary formality, a painful formal­ity, a formality essential for the healing of the victims, but a formality nevertheless.

Tarrant’s guilt is not in doubt. He live-streamed himself in the act of murder. He wrote a 74-page manifesto confessing to the crime. Notoriety was the point of Tarrant’s terrorism, guilt is its corollary.

The verdict, when it comes, can only go one way.

For a country still grappling with the scale of Tarrant’s violence ahead of Sunday’s anniversary of the attack — the dead, the wounded, the shattered lives around them — the trial is an opportuni­ty for New Zealanders to close the book on one of the ­darkest chapters in the nation’s history.

New Zealanders have made it clear from the beginning that they wish to banish Tarrant from the national consciousness.

Jacinda Ardern vowed never to speak his name and 12 months on the Prime Minister has been as good as her word. In addition to the strict rules that govern any criminal trial, the New Zealand media have agreed to a loose set of protocols aimed at curbing Tarrant’s outbursts.

“We shall, to the extent that is compatible with the principles of open justice, limit any coverage of statements that actively champion­ white supremacist or terrorist ideology,’’ the media’s representatives wrote last year.

A picture of Tarrant that ran in the New Zealand Herald in June was accompanied by an edit­orial justifying the decision.

“We have an obligation to faithfully report to the public what is taking place,’’ the editors explained to their readers. “It’s an obligation we agree to with the utmost seriousness.’’

But for Tarrant the trial is an irresistible opportunity for theatre, the last chance he will have to tub-thump his poisonous views before he is swallowed forever­ into the New Zealand justice­ system.

New Zealand is not America. Jailed felons don’t do exclusive TV interviews here. Once the legal system has disposed of the Australian-born Tarrant, the public will never see his face again. Sitting in his cell in Auckland’s maximum-security prison, where he is being held 24 hours a day in solitary confinement, Tarran­t knows this.

He has been charged with 51 counts of murder, 40 counts of attempte­d murder and a single charge under New Zealand’s terroris­m suppression act. The trial is expected to run for six weeks. Tarrant has entered not guilty pleas across the board.

Rumours are rife about what Tarrant will do next: that he will sack his lawyers and go rogue, that he will change his plea and spare his victims a trial. That he will plead insanity. That he is a broken man on the edge of ­suicide.

But all the indications so far are that Tarrant will do precisely what he said he would.

In his manifesto, The Great Replacement, Tarrant said if he survived the attack he would plead not guilty and argue he was a soldier fighting an occupying force.

“Survival was a better alter­native to death in order to spread my ideals by media coverage and deplete the resources from the state by my own imprisonment,’’ he wrote.

In his first court appearance, Tarrant flashed the okay signal with his thumb and forefinger, a gesture appropriated by the ­extreme right to symbolise white power. In October, he cupped his hand and shouted into the microphone, which had already been dimmed, rendering his word inaudible­. Hardly the actions of a broken man.

“The one thing we can observe with terrorist trials is that they see them as an opportunity to continu­e the propaganda,’’ Charles Sturt University terrorism expert Kristy Campion tells Inquirer. “The standout example­ of this was the trial of the Red Army Faction but since then we’ve also seen Anders Breivik. Obviously there are concerns that will happen here.’’

NZ Herald editor Murray Kirkness says Tarrant’s grandstanding presented challenges for the courts and the media. Ardern’s edict not to name Tarran­t created the notion no one else would either, leaving a potentially thorny ethical problem­ for journalists.

“We firmly believe we’re the eyes and the ears of the public,’’ Kirkness tells Inquirer. “I’d like to think it’s the judge who’ll decide what’s defence and what’s propaganda, and suppress the latter.’’

In Australia, the risk is that Tarrant’s trial will fan a form of extremist ideology the director-general of ASIO warns us is once more on the march. Australia has always had a far right. But the drunken skinheads and sad nobodie­s who’d spend their weekends saluting homemade Nazi flags or training pointlessly in the bush have been replaced by a more extreme, more violent generation of race warriors.

These new extremists are more organised, more secretive and more doctrinaire. They lionise right-wing killers such as Breivik and Tarrant, and devour the pseudo-intellectual creeds they used to justify their hate.

“In the last 12 months they have started to produce increasingly cogent ideological content,’’ Campion says of the Australian far right. “Before that, the way they communicated their ideology was not very sophisticated.

“The ideology was contradictory, fragmented and largely communicated either through online posts or provocative performa­nces and displays, such as rallies or marches.”

These new creeds go by grand names. Identitariansim, the great replacement theory, “accelerationism” — the notion that society­ is doomed by its own corruptio­n and must be destroyed before it can be purified.

In online chat forums, adherents argue endlessly over the finer points of difference. But they all share the same insecurity: that the culture they claim is innatel­y superior to all others is too feeble to withstand contact with outsiders.

Tarrant is the modern face of this ancient delusion. In online forums and among far-right extremist­s he is already a hero, up there with Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, and Dylann Roof, the white suprem­acist who killed nine black parish­ioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

By July, come what may, he will be gone. But others are already­ moving to take his place.