Yesterday morning, a man wearing a military helmet and a Darth Vader mask entered a school in Trollhattan, Sweden, carrying a sword. After posing for a picture with two students who thought his outfit was a Halloween costume, he stabbed a teacher with his sword and began attacking other students. He killed two and seriously injured several others before being shot by police.
Those looking for a conventional answer as to why he did it don’t have to look too far: The killer, identified in the media as 21-year-old Anton Lundin-Pettersson, seems pretty clearly to have been motivated by racist and religious hatred towards Muslim immigrants. The school he picked for his violent rampage is overwhelmingly populated by immigrants; surveillance footage of his rampage reportedly shows that he deliberately targeted people of color.
A suicide note he left behind reportedly railed against immigrants. He was apparently also a supporter of a proposed anti-immigrant referendum, and a YouTube account identified as his followed several YouTubers known for railing against Muslims, including Howard Bloom, an eccentric author whose latest book, the self-published “The Mohammed Code,” purports to show how Mohammed sought to use violence to take over “the entire world.”
But Lundin-Pettersson’s rampage, while clearly driven by hate, was hardly a conventional hate crime. There is his bizarre outfit: in addition to wearing a Darth Vader mask (and a Nazi-era German army helmet) he reportedly shouted out Vader’s famous line “I am your father” as he launched his attack. And he apparently provided his own soundtrack for the rampage, playing what one witness described as “terrifying” Halloween music as he stalked the halls of the school, as if he were re-enacting a favorite scene from a movie or a hack-and-slash video game.
He may also have announced his planned rampage on 4chan the day before, in the creepy tradition of the Umpqua Community College less than a month ago. According to a screenshot now circulating on the internet — I haven’t been able to confirm it — he warned the denizens of 4chan’s r9k forum, in a post deliberately echoing the words of the earlier killer, to skip “school tomorrow if you live in Sweden,” adding a Trollface graphic along with his note and telling his readers that “my image will be of relevance.”
If the 4chan screenshot is real, it suggests that the Trollhattan killer was deeply enmeshed in “troll culture” online, a world in which violence and even mass murder can be reduced to an assortment of memes, where someone like mass murderer Elliot Rodger can be hailed, only partly ironically, as the “supreme gentleman” he famously declared himself to be.
Invariably, when people on 4chan or YouTube — or some other cesspit of the internet — start making jokes about mass killers, or even hailing them as heroes of sorts, we’re told that none of their comments really count; they’re just trolls, doing what trolls do.
But scratch a troll posting racist memes, and you will almost certainly find a real racist; scratch a troll posting misogynistic attacks on Anita Sarkeesian, and you will find a real misogynist. When trolls send rape and death threats to those they genuinely hate, their recipients need to take them as seriously as more obviously “serious” threats.
The world of the trolls is a nasty, hateful world, and those who soak in it too long may end up lashing out at the world in violent ways.
Indeed, it’s telling that the Trollhattan killer’s favorite YouTuber (if the account attributed to him is really his) was the noxious rager who calls himself TheAmazingAtheist. Lundin-Pettersson subscribed not only to TAA’s main channel but to his personal channel as well, and he favorited dozens if not hundreds of TAA’s videos (I stopped counting). Unlike some atheist activists, TAA doesn’t devote much time to trashing Islam; he’s far more interested in bashing Anita Sarkeesian and other supposed SJWs.
But TAA affects a hyperbolic “mad as hell” persona that, despite its obvious theatricality, seems to be rooted in a good deal of real anger. I can barely make it through a single video of his, and can only imagine the corrosive effect that watching dozens of his rage-filled videos would have on someone’s soul.
Naturally, YouTube comments being the cesspool that they are, the Trollhattan killer is receiving a good deal of posthumous support from racists, trolls, and racist trolls. An assortment:
There are critics, of course. And a few commenters who feel that he hadn’t killed enough people to deserve all this adulation.
A reminder: these are from YouTube, not 4chan; I honestly don’t have the stomach to wade into the assorted 4chan threads devoted to the killer.
At this point, I think it’s become clear that websites that permit the posting of this sort of unregulated hate speech — from 4chan to Reddit to YouTube — are enabling the hateful troll culture that seems to have turned Lundin-Pettersson into the monstrous “troll” murderer who took two lives yesterday.
I’m glad to hear someone else say this. I don’t have any data to back it up, but I do feel like a lot of this troll-y chan-culture far-right nihilism is, in some ways, a response to a world that seems to keep growing more and more competitive. Like, these /r9k guys might think that they’ll never have what it takes to live a decent life in this society; the hierarchies around sexual attractiveness that seem to have become MRA orthodoxy – alphas, betas, top dogs, etc. – are like a kind of shorthand for a more-pervasive sense of societal and economic stratification. I’m not saying that it in any way excuses any of this bullshit, but I do have at least a sense of the frustration that some of these guys must feel.
I go on Yahoo comment a lot, and the comments there are as bad – literally ‘kill em all’ type comments – people who claim to not give a shit that refugees suffer extraordinary abuse etc, you have to wonder how they treat people in every day life.
Amazing Atheist is such a piece of shit. I watched some vids for the atheism, very soon realised that he really hates women – always called feminists of course, even though Amanda Todd was certainly not a feminist (at least in any public sphere), and hadn’t even made it to womanhood.
It is a heartbreaking story, and anyone who blames AT for her problems really is such a sack of shit.
@ altofronto
It’s a fascinating topic and one that probably will be brought up more as these events become even more common, if we’re to do something about them.
I’m not sure about the wealth inequality thing. in how many of these cases were the victims materially better off than the perpetrators? I doubt if that’s ever been the case.
Usually the victims are of the same ‘class/status” as in s school shooting. In racist attacks I suspect the perpetrators are normally much better off. I know there’s lots of right wing rhetoric about immigrants stealing jobs from the white man etc and lording it up on benefits paid for by the hard working white guy, but that certainly doesn’t reflect the reality.
These cases nearly always boil down to hate and/or false sense of betrayed entitlement. How do we address that? I’m not sure. Education? I think that might be difficult. There’s a dichotomy in that we tell people that everyone is entitled to respect (not saying that’s a bad thing!) but that can lead to people feeling they’re entitled generally. Perhaps we’re creating a generation of narcissists who think the world should revolve around them and don’t allow for other people to not put them at the centre too? Who knows? Lots to think about.
Sickening.
I called it twice before now: This will not be the final MRA ideology-fueled killing. There will be more, likely within the span of a month or two. I’ve not been wrong so far. I wish I were.
Fuck MRAs. They’re literally no better than fascists.
Alan: I might sound crazy to any other leftists on here, but I don’t think class is an issue, directly speaking. I think your observation that they focused on people of their own economic class is correct (and very interesting). Similar to rape and other violent crime, people tend to stay within their circles.
If class is an issue I think it’s secondary at most. MRAs do not often seem to (mis)use class to galvanize their morons, unlike fascists. If they were smarter they would, but we’re lucky in that regard. In all honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if these kids were all at least from relatively well off families. The entitled leech class rarely values human life like the rest of us do. Their children are usually raised in environments that devalue human life for that reason. I think if they really are all somewhat well off, it’s likely their drive to feel important in the face of their blatant mediocrity that provides the tinder. The spark is, of course, whatever hatred du jour they’ve been served by the various youtube hatemongers, e.g. Amazing Atheist.
This is why we need hate speech laws. If the fasc and their hateful counterparts can proselytize, there will be blood, and a lot of it.
tedthefed: “If I meet someone I hate, it’s likely Trey Parker and Matt Stone are a big part of the reason why I hate them.”
Same. South Park is a disgusting amalgam of “common sense” (ie unlettered stupidity predicated on already-existing ideology), bigotry, and self-righteous ignorance all bundled up in one gigantic golden mean fallacy. The truth, for them, is always some socially centrist economically libertarian horseshit. The fact that it informs the politics of so many disgusting manbabies is horrifying. It’s political illiterates leading the politically illiterate. They’re the kind of people who whine about identity politics because, shocker, they don’t have to deal with people politicizing who they are. For those of us whose identities are apparently politics in-themselves, it’s not really an option to ignore this shit and treat it like some kind of game like Trey and Matt can.
This is one reason I keep reporting “white genocide” groups on Facebook (not that it does much good). They mention Sweden a lot.
I don’t think that’s really the issue.
Really, more the issue is that many of the people who are second lowest on the social ladder seem to desperately need to have someone lower than them to step on to reassure themselves that they still have control over something. “At least we’re better than them.” This means that any attempt to actually help the people worse off than them and possibly make them equal is a threat, because they will no longer have someone they can be superior to.
The end result is poor people voting against anything to help poor people because it might help someone else poor as well.
Irene: Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc. are all pretty comfortable with neonazis. I report them too, but it does nothing. Allowing fascists a platform is allowing them to galvanize violent assholes all around the world. These sites are complicit in these mass murders. The administrators who refuse to take down the fascist calls to violence are complicit. They are no better than the fascists themselves.
Until liberals realize that providing a platform to the far right is like playing with napalm nothing can be done to stop it.
@ Alan – of course the victims were not wealthier than the killer – they were children!
I’m just saying that wealth inequality + scapegoating and anti-immigrant rhetoric go hand in hand. It allows resentments to fester, when there are 10 biscuits on the table, the rich man takes 9, and then says “watch out, that immigrant wants your biscuit”.
The killers are cowards, and two-faced shitheads at that, because they always see themselves as heroes up against some Goliath, or some nebulous concept of personal injustice, or The World, but they always target unarmed kids who don’t stand a chance against them, and who weren’t to blame for anything, anyway.
If they actually wanted social change, they would steer their energy into that, or maybe target politicians, but that’s hard to do and they are just in love with the idea of killing people, so they pick easy targets. Pre-schoolers, sometimes.
I don’t think we are a generation of narcissists, but we are an Individualistic society. That’s almost certainly a factor.
I think there are trends of a feeling of social exclusion / isolation, and relative powerlessness, and the notion of One Lone Individual Against The World that is prevalent in a lot of our favourite cultural narratives is appealing.
I need to sleep, but there are probably myriad factors that are likely preventable, which could help eradicate the disease of Toxic Masculinity Shootings – if we ever stopped dismissing them as “isolated incidents” and chose to see it as a public health issue.
I think one of the major preventable factors is wealth inequality – people who are relatively content and have jobs, access to education, and are able to plan a future don’t tend to worry as much about who has what, or get so nihilistic and murder-suicidal.
I mean, this is a change that’s going to have to fucking happen anyway, whether anyone agrees on this particular issue or not – we cannot keep feeding the 1% and let the rest starve, it’s just not feasible.
The other major factor is raising young men to be compassionate, upstanding citizens. Feminism’s getting that message out, gradually. I think.
And what would also be useful would be a will to crack down on hate groups like the KKK and treat them like the unpatriotic terrorist cells they are.
I dunno, that’s my vision for the future, but then again, when you have is a hammer and sickle, everything looks like a nail (and a sheaf of barley).
@ Jenora – Spot on. I concur.
@ Scribbles – I’m pretty sure MRAs do appeal to Class, I mean they’re obsessed with money – and then they often describe the struggles of the working class (dangerous jobs, working to sustain a nuclear family, etc) as a gender issue. (Feimainismists took urr jurrbs!)
I guess they see all relationships as transactional, and that they always lose out somehow by… having to put in any amount of effort. It’s mostly founded on male entitlement, but it’s always tied to the concept of a man who is the sole breadwinner and doesn’t have enough money to support another person financially.
On the subject of socio economic issues being relevant to the motivations of the far right murderers currently destroying lives in our world:
There are people who fear loss of resources and see any POC as a threat to those resources. Constant comments about welfare Queens, refugees being given housing and benefits, healthcare ‘tourists’, etc etc – the people who condemn these people tend to have knee jerk reactions to any story that appeals to their prejudices. They probably read news from the Daily Fail and Daily Express, or non UK equivalents.
I don’t think that they are especially poor. I think that they have higher than average fear and anxiety about being poor, but are probably not that near the bottom economically. I say this as someone who lives in a low income area, and is at the bottom myself.
@ altofronto
I should sleep too, but you raise some interesting points.
I’m still not convinced by the equal wealth distribution though. Even if you raised the perpetrators of these sorts of things to the highest standard of living unless you artificially kept the people they hate at a relatively deprived level, they’d still resent them.
It’s true of course that people who are comfortable tend not to commit mindless violence. One thing I notice a lot when I’m mingling with the wealthy (I sneak in) is how Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis etc might still disagree on things, but it’s with the same intensity that people may argue about which Mad Max film is best, passionate but non violent.
I think mass Shooters are an exception to this though. They are from backgrounds where they do have opportunities. Now there may be an issue as to whether they recognise that bit that’s a matter of perception not reality.
Let’s face it, how many of the grievances that killers put forward to justify their behaviour have *any* grounding in fact?
Changing the system won’t have any affect because these guys are already the main beneficiaries of the system.
I realise I haven’t described what makes someone likely to kill, just more the common or garden bigot. There has to be a lot more toxicity to actually create a murderer. It’s late.
I’ve been saying for a while that mass shootings in the USA (and really, mass killings in general) should be covered by the media in much the same way that suicide is covered now – there should be a lot of discretion involved. In particular, I’d rather see the focus on the victims of these people, rather than on the killers themselves. By giving the killers attention, we give them and the ideas which they use to justify themselves oxygen.
A lot of these actions aren’t really driven by any particular political position, but rather by personal fear and inadequacy. Mass killers tend to be in one of two age groups – there’s the ones who are in their early twenties, and the ones who are in their late forties through late fifties. They’re generally male. They’re predominantly white. The younger ones were marked as “promising students”, but basically bombed out once they got out of the high school environment and the rigid structures involved there (essentially, without the external restrictions on their choices, they get overwhelmed by the options available, and drift rather aimlessly). If they have jobs, the jobs they have are usually low-skilled ones, and while they’ll do the job, they’re not happy in it. The ones in their forties and fifties have been largely working low-income and blue-collar jobs which require a certain amount of physical ability, and often they’ll have had a medical problem which prevents them from doing their usual job, and a certain degree of resistance to re-training. The common factor: in our current culture, neither of these groups have that much to feel positive about, and they’re easily ambushed by the memeplex of toxic masculinity with its constant requirement to “prove your worth”. There’s also a degree of entitlement involved in their attitudes – they feel entitled to the trappings of success, and they feel angered because they can’t obtain them (the girlfriend, the good job, the family, the happy home) as easily as they feel they should. They will tend to project the reasons for their failure outward – if something goes wrong, it’s never their fault. If they do something bad, it’s still not their fault – they were pushed into it. If they can’t succeed, it’s because the world is stacked against them, personally.
When they kill, they’re doing so because they want to “go out in a blaze of glory”. They’ve justified killing others to themselves by making it a necessary pre-requisite for getting the ego-reinforcement they’ve been denied elsewhere. Their thinking is that if other people just gave them what they wanted/needed/felt entitled to, they wouldn’t have to do this – it’s a form of punishment for society. And each mass killing which gets documented in the media with much analysis of the killer shows another potential killer exactly what they need to do in order to get the attention and status they so desire.
Working to improve wealth distribution may slow these people down somewhat, but I doubt it would stop them. What needs to happen is the dismantling of the memeplex of toxic masculinity. That’s going to be difficult, because there’s a lot of people who are making a lot of money out of selling it to others (the entirety of Hollywood, for a start). But a good place to start would be by changing the focus of articles about these events to focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators. Leave the perpetrator’s names out of the coverage, leave the perpetrator’s motives out of the discussion. Eulogise the victims, celebrate their lives, their triumphs, their good fortune. Leave the killer where he (and as I said, it’s generally “he”) deserves to be – in obscurity. Don’t even cover any trials. Remove this particular “short-cut to glory” from the list of options.
@ megpie
That’s a brilliant analysis, I think you nailed it (and I even interpreted “memeplex” through context).
I think your solution is one of the most practical too. For these guys that notoriety and being immortalised in history (albeit in reality 15 minutes of fame) is the only way they can feel, posthumous, validation and worth.
Unfortunately I don’t think the press will ever come round to that way of thinking. The public, who pay for the papers, aren’t interested in the victims (unless there’s something particularly unusual about one). The fact that the victims are just everyday normal folks means there’s nothing to note. It’s the killer’s motivations etc that pique interest by the very fact that killers are deviant and therefore unusual.
Of course, as these events become more commonplace, even the killers will become uninteresting. Unfortunately I think the killers will recognise that. They’re competing for attention in an over supplied market. The grim future is that we’ll see such people try for bigger and better “spectaculars” in order to stand out. And that of course will be picked up by the media. It’s one big self sustaining positive feedback loop.
OK I do have to say, even though stuff like south park has a lot of fualts, it does have some good too their lorde episodes made me feel a lot more confteable about who I am. Anvd they do mock trolls quite alot on the show ( I have not watched the newest season)
About it being class issues, I think that is wrong. There are plenty of racist or minogmist who are upper class. I think it’s just that some people have alot of hate inside them, and they focus it all into one little outlit.
To say it is just class based seems to me like it ignores most the problems. I would say rather it is culturally based. And extends beyond class.
Robjec: Class is about more than just economics. It informs everything around it. Our mode of production plays a very large role in creating our institutions, our language, who we are individually, and our culture; quite a few prominent thinkers have claimed that it plays the predominant role.
South Park, like a broken clock, is right once in a long while. It’s still pretty horrible overall. It’s good you found something in that wreck to feel good about though.
I think the answer to all of this is that there is no answer. Violence is encoded too deeply in this country’s DNA. It’s central to who we are. I’d bet you anything future historians would define us by our mode of production and our bellicosity. That is, if there are any future historians.
That said, no-platformism is the correct tactic in this case. To allow hate movements to grow and spread their hatred is complicity in the atrocities they inevitably encourage. It allows these movements to galvanize dumb young balls of free-floating rage like the murderers we’ve seen over the past year.
I’m glad to see people finally getting it. Incitements to violence shouldn’t be protected speech. Technically they aren’t, but few people seem to understand that fascism and co. are, in themselves, an incitement to violence.
I will say as much of a scumbag as TAA is there are much MUCH worse people to be a figurehead for the atheism manosphere crossover. At least he did take a pretty strong stand against racism recently. Imagine if Aurini had has followers. Terrifying.
Ellesar | October 23, 2015 at 5:51 pm
I go on Yahoo comment a lot, and the comments there are as bad – literally ‘kill em all’ type comments – people who claim to not give a shit that refugees suffer extraordinary abuse etc, you have to wonder how they treat people in every day life.
Amazing Atheist is such a piece of shit. I watched some vids for the atheism, very soon realised that he really hates women – always called feminists of course, even though Amanda Todd was certainly not a feminist (at least in any public sphere), and hadn’t even made it to womanhood.
It is a heartbreaking story, and anyone who blames AT for her problems really is such a sack of shit.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Please don’t tell me that a-hole is harassing a young girl, or worse, a little kid? I swear before I got on the internet I really had no idea people were so mean spirited. When I was growing up we didn’t act like this toward others. Even if we were really mad at them for something. I think the the medium of the internet breeds and encourages cruelty.
“Imagine if Aurini had has followers. Terrifying.”
I only saw one very boring video of Aurini and couldn’t take more than 4 minutes or so. Who’s he racist against? He didn’t get to that part in 4 minutes.
NWS
Everything you wanted to know about Aurini: (VERY NSFW: ethnic slurs, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Lex Luthor looking fuccboi, etc)
NWS
I’m so sick of all these trolls and killers, I need some hope….