Reading the "Manifesto" of the Christchurch mass murderer, the first thing that strikes the reader is just how rational he is about what he expects will await him after his ghastly deed.  He hoped to survive, serve a life sentence, and be released after 27 years, all the while using his time in jail to "spread his ideals by media coverage."  Not unreasonably, he might have also said he would write a bestseller and become rich while in jail.  All of this thanks to the fact that the death penalty in New Zealand (and all of Europe) is considered cruel and unusual punishment even for scum like this.

More to the point, the entire mainstream media in both America and Europe promptly declared him a white right-wing terrorist, evidently without bothering to read his manifesto's pontifications first.  Terrorist and white he demonstrably is.  Whether he is right- or left-wing is a lot less certain.  A lot of the ideas he discusses in his "manifesto" are crackpot, to put it mildly.  But they are crackpot in a distinctly green, leftist way a lot more often than in a right-wing, let alone a conservative way.  He admires British Nazi Oswald Mosley, but apart from immigrants, he also hates capitalists and says he has plans to deal with both of these evils.  Another plan he has is to deal with overpopulation by killing "and by doing so save the environment."  The shooter's preferred social system is "green national socialism, which is anti-imperialist," and he sees China as a model to praise.

If there is one thing to be seriously concerned about in the shooter's murderous ravings, it is not his crackpot ideas, but the fact that his views on immigration are shared by a majority of Europeans — and not only in Eastern Europe, which refuses to take any immigrants.  It is true that immigration is necessitated by the unnatural reluctance of European women to have children, but that does not make it any less of a serious problem.  And it is a problem vastly exacerbated by the clueless policies of Angela Merkel and the Brussels mandarins in opening Europe's borders in 2015 and continuing to depend on the anti-Western Islamist zealot ErdoДџan to control the migrant flows.  

As a result, according to Brussels, 20% more immigrants came to Greece from Turkey last year, with 90% of them using criminal smuggling gangs to make it.  Merkel's agreement with ErdoДџan, for which the E.U. paid billions of euros, was thus little more than a job guarantee for the criminals.  In the meantime, Germany continues to find various excuses to allow the mostly Muslim migrants to stay, while incidents of anti-Semitism explode from 311 in 2017 to 541 in 2018.  Italy has now joined Eastern Europe in refusing to take immigrants, and France itself, according to Macron, would have voted to leave the E.U. if given a chance.

All of this because there is no one in Europe with enough backbone to put an end to immigration.  It is clear why migrants keep coming and why they go to countries like Germany and Sweden rather than Bulgaria and Romania.  It is the welfare benefits that lure them even if there aren't any E.U. politicians with the guts to say this.  More than three years after the borders were open, two thirds of the migrants in Germany are still not working, and this is unlikely to change.  Why would they if the generous welfare payments guarantee a nice life anyway?  The only thing that would stop that is a law prohibiting welfare payments to migrants the first five years after arriving.  That is unlikely to happen, which is why the deranged shooter may find an audience for his future ravings.

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies (cbbss.org).  He can be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.