The Great Replacement as Political Myth: Significance, Identity, and Violent Mobilisation in Brenton Tarrant’s Manifesto

The power of far-right terrorist manifestos lies not just in their arguments but in their capacity to provide existential significance to collective anxieties. Drawing on Blumenberg’s concept of the “absolutism of reality” and Bottici’s philosophy of political myth, this paper argues that Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto works to provide the existential significance that radicalisation can draw on, transforming formless demographic anxiety into a certainty that licenses action. Analysing the manifesto through an interpretivist lens, the paper identifies four themes through which the Great Replacement myth operates: warfare, invasion and biological destiny; degeneration, betrayal and redemptive violence; enemies, extermination and hesitation resolution; and urgency, sacrifice and the promise of victory. The analysis shows how the cognitive, integrative, and mobilising functions of myth fuse inseparably in extremist contexts, forming a radicalisation mechanism that operates independently of empirical truth. These findings carry implications for understanding why political myths persist irrespective of their accuracy, and why counter-narratives that seek to rebut them may miss what gives them their force. Given that Tarrant’s manifesto has been cited as an influence by later attackers, understanding how it works is both analytically and practically urgent.