RICHARD FERNANDEZ: New Zealand Attack Shows Us That Tribal Score-Settling Has Infected the West. “The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now.”

Ethnic conflict in the Third World is a dog-bites-man story. What is new about the New Zealand attack is that the terrible plague of tribal score-settling and grievance mongering is now in the West. Not that the West is a stranger to ethnic conflict: the Holocaust, Generalplan Ost, Holodomor, and Polish and Armenian genocides are bywords in themselves. But it was widely assumed that WW2 had seen these off (until Bosnia) and the risks of multiculturalism and mass immigration could be mitigated by immunosuppressive strategies like political correctness and demographic replacement, of which the EU project is a textbook example.

Yet events since 2016 indicate that this strategy is failing despite the suppressants. Pressure from the root causes — whether European colonialism, Islamic slave trading, 9/11, the War on Terror, multiculturalism, populism — are burning through the medication. The old devils are on the loose and the problem is what to do now.

In Europe, this Everything Old Sucks Again wound opened back up in Bosnia almost 30 years ago, and elites there proved unable or unwilling to stop it without outside (ie, American) help. Our own elites haven’t done much better in the decades since.