Manifestos of White Nationalist Ethno-Soldiers

The 2010s was a decade during which self-acclaimed “ethno-soldiers”murdered what they consider as enemies of whiteness and the West in a spectacular mediatized and gamified fashion. Three attacks carried out against Jewish and Muslim places of worship are of particular interest here. October 9, 2019, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the twenty-seven-year-old German citizen Stephan Balliet was setting in motion the plan he had been preparing for a long time. According to a manifesto published by Balliet (2019, 9) himself, the time had come to “[k]ill as many anti-Whites as possible, Jews preferred.” Balliet’s attack was to take place at the local synagogue in the German city of Halle. However, the plan did not play out as stipulated in his manifesto published online. Instead of entering the synagogue to slaughter members of the congregation, as the synagogue’s newly reinforced security prevented him, Balliet turned to by-passers, killing two and injuring several (Holmes 2019). Balliet broadcasted his actions on Twitch.tv, Amazon.com Inc’s gaming platform. On April 27th, John Timothy Earnest attacked the Chabad of Poway in California, killing one person and injuring three. Before the attack, Earnest (2019 1) posted a manifesto on the image-board site 8chan proclaiming, among other things, that “[e]very Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.”He also called upon “White men” around the world, “the greatest race that our God has created,” to “kill all” Jews (3). March 15, Brenton Tarrant attacked the Masjid Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center during Friday prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand. Killing 51 people in a shooting spree, Tarrant (2019, 73) broadcasted his attack live on Facebook.com with the aim of encouraging other white ethno-soldiers to “thrive” and “march ever forward to our place among the stars” to “reach the destiny our people deserve.” Although these shooters acted on different continents, they share the same symbolical universe. In written manifestos, they declare that they are the avant-gardist defenders of the West currently under both external and internal threats. Several scholars, security experts, and journalists have set out to map these shooters’ motivational and ideological underpinnings. For example, Graham Macklin notes that while both Earnest and Tarrant were identically preoccupied with the conspiracy theory of White Genocide, Earnest’s (2019, 25) focus was “saturated with conspirational