[mattparlane]

Great read, thanks for posting.

To me, one thing that's not being discussed much is that Europeans only settled in New Zealand around 200 years ago, pretty short in the history of humanity. You could ask the Maori people how they feel about Europeans showing up and taking their land and destroying their culture, yet they are not gunning us down in cold blood.

[pjc50]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Wars

NZ is somewhat unusual in that the colonizers neither won overwhelmingly (as in Australia and North America), nor eventually receeded (most of Africa), but struck a peace treaty and then stuck to it, building a mostly-peaceful society on that basis.

[vowelless]

I’m torn. On one hand I think we should think about the “motives” of these monsters and try to explain why they are wrong m, like you just did.

On the other side, I don’t want to legitimize even a semblance of rationality exhibited by this guy. Even if Europeans had been in NZ for a thousand years, this is not the right response.

[0815test]

As I've written already ITT, the last thing I would want is for the attacker to receive even a shred of legitimacy - but I nonetheless think parent commenter raises a very good point! Because see, that individual would sure like us to think that Europeans are in some way the "rightful" inhabitants of New Zealand, the place where he carried out his hateful attack. Even a cursory knowledge of history would quickly evince to us just how nonsensical this notion is - yet he happily makes that argument anyway! And we are to believe that this attack was not in fact driven by the most heinous sort of murderous and destructive intent, with "politics" and "ideology" (even of the most radical sort one could possibly imagine) being merely the flimsiest of post-hoc rationalizations?