Confessions of a child of the century

Nine minutes before Brenton Tarrant killed fifty-one people in two mosques in Christchurch, a seventy-fourpage document titled “The Great Replacement” was sent to New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, and to seventy or so other addresses. One can’t help acknowledging that it was one of the most effective publishing launches to date. In just a few hours, “The Great Replacement” was quoted and commented on, online and in print, as well as on TV, in every part of the world. Somerset Maugham believed that a book’s launch was to be measured in inches. The launch of Tarrant’s little book could be measured in tens of thousands of inches a few hours after the book, which takes on the appearance of a manifesto, came out. But The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx was also a booklet compared to the ponderous Das Kapital. And Mao Zedong had relied on The Little Red Book to launch a cultural revolution. Two little books that went a long way. Of course, a little book demands stringent formulations, and skips detailed elaborations. Tarrant knew this. But Tarrant, too, had once been a conscientious author who wanted to hold forth. He, too, had his “complete works”: a manuscript numbering approximately 240 pages. Tarrant reports that in this work he “spoke on many issues and went into much depth, but in a moment of unbridled self-criticism I deleted the entire work and started again, two weeks before the attack itself.” The booklet we are reading now, in rushed and feverish form, is therefore what remains of a broader argument. Let’s start with the cover, as one would with any other book. At the center is a circle divided into eight wedges that converge into a smaller circle, ridged by crooked black lines reminiscent of Ordine Nuovo or of certain Nordic sects. Every wedge has a name. From the top, clockwise: anti-imperialism, environmentalism, responsible markets, addiction-free community, law and order, ethnic autonomy, protection of heritage and