‘The Great Replacement’: Decoding the Christchurch Terrorist Manifesto

• ‘Bühnensucht’ is a German expression denoting an irrational longing to take the stage or as Jenkins put it already in 1974, “terrorism is theater” (Jenkins 1974:7). In the age of online communication and social media, the stage is the same as the Internet and the audience that interactive mix of producers and consumers, the so-called ‘prosumers’ of online ‘user generated content’, where it is difficult to determine the borders between production and consumption of what Bauman has called ‘autotelic violence’ (2017:30). The far-right terrorist attack of Christchurch was staged ‘in real life’ (IRL) with the purpose to create maximum impact through dissemination online. Facebook is said to have removed no less than 1,5m videos of the terror attack during the first 24 hours, which demonstrates the magnitude of terrorism as an act of strategic communication (Falkheimer, 2013:44-55) or as Marsh and Mullholland argue: “the attack seemed orchestrated for the social media age” (CNN 2019/1). Tarrant thus has much in common with ISIS who painstakingly staged their executions as emblematic hybrid media narratives with the purpose of a maximum of impact (Krona 2019).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Terrorism

extremism

radikalisering

online-radikalisering

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