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.
Off topic, but I just made THE best food ever. Success!
Vaguebooking at its finest.
Congrats, though.
Lol, so true. I just don’t have any real life friends to yell at. :p
@Mockingbird
Education has always been controlled primarily by people far removed from the day to day activities of educating children – from offices and closed door sessions, matters like approving the curriculum, how to meet standards set by the US dept of education and so forth…next in the ‘chain of command’ are counties, then school districts, then school administrators, with teachers basically only in control of daily lesson plans. For a brief time in the mid-1990s there were a few pilot programs working at helping kids to prepare for the transition out of ESL (English Second Language) in the newly mandated time period, or to ‘catch up’ enough to move out of remedial level classes in English/language arts and mathematics, but those programs were eventually abandoned after their pilot had concluded along with the funding for it, while charter and magnet schools began to gain more interest from parents, students, and administrators. Standardized tests, performance evaluations, all of the various things that are documented and then used to assess whether or not a school, or a teacher, is meeting the required student academic standards for public schools aren’t producing better students and all of these things aren’t raising the low performing schools more into line with the middle and as far from the top achieving as ever.
Teachers have gotten creative in ways to deal with budget cuts time and time again, but now that many are coming up to retirement people should worry about how they’re going to find new teachers to replace those who are leaving the profession, those less than stellar results from common core testing should have to wait before being addressed. Everyone who feels like teachers are doing a bad job are welcome to get a degree, obtain their teaching credential, and give it a shot themselves.
@dhag85
What did you make?
@kupo
I thought nobody would ask!! 🙂 I made fried “rice” (ground up cauliflower) and veggies, with soy sauce and sesame oil. So happy right now, but I’m fighting off the scavenger cats.
I’m OBSESSED with sesame oil atm. I’m putting it in everything; roast chicken, veggie soups, carrot cake (!!), stirred through mash… Damnit, now I’m hungry.
Fuck yeah, sesame oil is the best. Can you drink sesame oil straight from the bottle or is that lethal?
is the ground up -ness of cauliflower, slicing up the florets or do you have to do anything else to prepare it? my two sprogs would go for “cauliflower rice” and beansprout stirfry in a big way. One won’t eat green, the other won’t eat carrots
“I thought nobody would ask!! 🙂 I made fried “rice” (ground up cauliflower) and veggies, with soy sauce and sesame oil.”
Are you a raw foodist?
Dunno about sesame oil, but I found that drinking excessive olive oil was bad for my digestion and I assume the same would apply here.
@autosoma
I break it up into florets and run it through a food processor and then fry it in sesame oil with the other veggies (garlic, spring onions, ginger, green peas, carrots and bean sprouts + soy sauce, rice vinegar, salt/pepper).
@VOoT
No.
“Teachers have gotten creative in ways to deal with budget cuts time and time again, but now that many are coming up to retirement people should worry about how they’re going to find new teachers to replace those who are leaving the profession, those less than stellar results from common core testing should have to wait before being addressed. Everyone who feels like teachers are doing a bad job are welcome to get a degree, obtain their teaching credential, and give it a shot themselves.”
This! All over the Manosphere are people dissing “the public school system” including that armchair “economist” Aron Clary who doesn’t even have kids! He’s middle aged so presumably he’s happy with the education he got way back in the day but somehow now he knows its all “gone to hell” because he……. is having PTA meetings and dealing directly with teachers on the regular because of all those kids he doesn’t have?
What experience do these people have to say teachers are shit?
@Orion
Haha. It’s also 135 kcal / tbsp. And I already had a pound of chocolate today.
All this food talk is depressing me. I just had two teeth extracted on Friday and the whole left side of my mouth is swollen. I can only eat really soft foods. I did manage to eat some pad Thai without the peanuts last night, but the swelling is a bit worse again today. I can’t wait to get back to normal!
@wwth
Aww, I’m sorry. :/ Hope you feel better soon. That sounds awful.
I realize my comment didn’t pass moderation. I know why now, should have read the Comments Policy first. Sorry, I’m generally new here, been lurking for a week, and just decided to comment.
Anyhow, I’ll repost it. Sweden, in general, seems to be falling apart. In August two Eritreans decapitated two native Swedes, and now the far right wingers are setting refugee camps on fire, and of course now this guy with a sword comes along. I don’t think even a tragedy like this will put brakes on the far right, since from what I hear they are the only ones who offer tighter immigration control – something Sweden, with its housing problems and rising crime rates, desperately needs. It would be bad if Sweden became a police state like the US, that would kind of defeat the purpose of being a liberal welfare state.
Someone mentioned Hungary earlier, and since I’m Hungarian I decided to chime in. Basically our far right party, Jobbik, actually came out badly of the current crisis. That is because Jobbik basically was willing to jump in bed with Islam – their philosophy is that anything that’s anti-west is good. In an effort to appeal to the Turkish religious right, Vona, the leader of Jobbik, called Islam “the last hope of humanity” a couple of years earlier. Of course now Vona wants to shoot the refugees on sight, claiming they are all ISIS, but the ruling party Fidesz easily shuts them down by reminding everyone of what he said. And since the left wing political parties all wanted to let them in and are in favor of quotas, Orbán’s stay in power is guaranteed. The popular opinion here is that no one wants immigration to Hungary, the economy is already bad enough, and most people seem to think they are all terrorists. The fact that even from left wing news sites we hear that rape is out of control in German refugee camps doesn’t help in changing the popular opinion.
@Breid
Huh? Are you talking about the case where one (not two) Eritrean citizen stabbed (not decapitated) two people in an Ikea store?
Virtually out if touch:
Guffaw. Do I spy with my little eye a rape culture apologist in our midst?
Breld:
What is it that you are saying? Because right now it sounds a little like something we would typically grill the manosphere for.
@Breid
Also, everything else you said about Sweden is wrong as well..
*sends WWTH virtual ice cream* feel better!
I heard that initially there were two suspect, but one was let off because they couldn’t prove anything against him. But from what I’ve understood he was in on it too. The decapitate part I’m not sure about, when I first heard about this it was called a beheading and someone even posted a photo through the window of the IKEA store in question which showed a person lying on the ground with their head cut off.
So, it isn’t true that refugee camps are being vandalised and that crime is at an all time high? That’s what I read on nearly every second news outlet (both left and right), but I don’t live there, so I have no idea. People nowadays have this doomsday attitude concerning Sweden because of all these things happening there, and I guess the fact that it’s generally considered a peaceful country makes the situation look worse than it actually is to an outsider.
@ Orion
Funnily enough though drinking olive oil is recommended if you’re a bit, er, bunged up if you know what I mean
@dhag,
I know, that’s why I was drinking it.
@Alan,
Indeed. Based on my experience, I suspect that would work pretty well.
Alan — or mineral oil. So probably any oil really — mineral oil just being the thing doctors don’t feel silly recommending for a small child I guess? Man, if my mother had known she could just give my brother olive oil we’d’ve all been happier, cuz that’s a thing we always have boatloads of (Italian, it’s basically a dietary staple!)