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.
An once again I have to ask myself; why was I ever subscribed to that guy?
@ Orion and Argenti
My first aid kit is based around the theory that there’s no internal ailment that can’t be treated by either paraffin, activated charcoal, chalk or olive oil.
(For external ailments it’s iodine or tiger balm)
Any mention of the Amazing Atheist deserves mention he’s an admitted pedophile, or atleast, when he was a teenager. Because people can easily get over something as abhorrent as attraction to children.
Because you tried chalk and oil for the externals and it didn’t work?
“Kinda telling how many of those YouTuber posters had 4Chan meme avatars and anime avatars. A friend and I have noticed that people with anime avatars normally seem to white supremacists and/or bigots, somewhat ironically considering the origin of anime. It’s an odd contradiction but one that normally holds up when it comes to reality.”
In a basic sense, it’s because many of them are socially retarded nerds, and I’ve long found far right/left/extreme political ideologies are intractable with mental aberrance, so it’s not terribly surprising you’d see such people fawn over drawings of caricatured asian girls. People with far right/neo nazi beliefs I’ve also found tend to be fairly “diverse” in how they approach things, especially given how fringe their beliefs are. In addition to violent, frothing at the mouth white supremacists who would commit mass murder of anyone who isn’t white if they could get away with it, I’ve seen plenty of neo nazis who espouse seemingly humanitarian beliefs and that all races deserve their own lands and should be left in peace. It’s still really bizarre when you go on their twitter accounts and see them posting/reblogging anime porn or joking about such things. I looked up the last person with an anime avatar in those screens, and their avatar looks like a cropped picture of an anime girl’s face covered in semen. Nice.
It can also be quite elaborate for them. Many on the far right have asiaphilic tendencies or admiration for east asia (especially Japan), and I also imagine many of them think anime characters are meant to be white, and see anime as a way of those slant-eyed g**ks admiring aryan looks. This cretin, who’s popped up a lot in racist trolling on twitter in recent times, makes that belief clear in his profile description: https://twitter.com/awyattman88
@ Orion
I bust up my ankle a few years back on Dartmoor. Every now and then if I’m doing some long range trekking over rough ground my ankle can start to grind.
Sometimes it’s got so bad I’ve seriously fantasised about whether it’s safe to inject EP/90 lubricating oil in there.
I’m told injecting ball bearings works better.
A friend recommended boiling up prawn shells. Although now I think of it that might just have been a trick to get me to peel some prawns.
Apparently things like jelly babies help, as they coat the bone surface or something.
It’s funny, my vegan friends try to make some point about what goes into sweets, but for me the fact humans can take hooves and sugar and make them into those foamy banana things is an achievement up there with the Moon landings.
Regarding the idea that racism isn’t so much a “thing” in Europe — I once read someone commenting on another site about how horrified they were that Americans track people’s race so much. You’re asked to give your race or ethnicity at school, when applying for a job, when joining a club, etc etc. It seemed like this particular commenter thought that this was emblematic of racism.
But the thing is — gathering this kind of data helps us describe and quantify gaps in wealth, achievement, education, etc. by race. I tried to find some information on wealth by race in Europe, and it seems like the only country that had any information available at all was the UK (and yes, white people are doing a lot better in the UK than POC, just like in the US). I wonder if we had more data available would we find that race is, in fact, a “thing” in Europe.
My grandmother used to give my mom cod liver oil when she was a kid, just as a general “thing that’s good for you.” She couldn’t stand it.
Now she (my mom) has arthritis and she’s taking again it to help with her joints.
(The “good for you” thing I was given as a kid was Vitamin C – probably pretty useless, since Vitamin C is already in most fruits and vegetables. Having a bit more of it than you need is harmless too, though TOO much will also give you diarrhea.)
deniseeliza – I live in the UK and am often asked my ethnic origins on various forms, esp re healthcare. I don’t like it and usually don’t fill it in.
But I do agree with what you say – I live in central London, and it is perfectly obvious that the white middle class population have the best of everything.
Gah. My writing is all awkward today. I don’t know if it makes sense to share this here, but I’m worried right now because my dad has had pneumonia for over a week and doesn’t seem to be getting better. Just doing some chores yesterday wore him out. I guess it’s one of those sicknesses that tires you out generally, but he’s finished his antibiotics and is still exhausted and coughing.
On topic: well, this is all levels of awful. I’m not too sure of the correlation/causation thing between internet trolling and these kinds of killings, but I think one common factor in this case is racism. I’ve noticed that YouTube comments can be particularly shitty (read: racist).
Also, thanks @dhag85 for your perspective on Sweden’s politics. I know your comment was a few pages ago, but I found it very informative, thanks!
@Breid
Pretty sure someone pranked you with a fake photo.
It’s true that there have been a few attacks against housing for refugees recently, but that’s about the only thing you got remotely right. As for the crime rates, the number of crimes that are reported to police are is pretty much at an all time high, since this number has been steadily rising since the 1950s. This has nothing to do with recent immigration. If anything, the rise has been declining in the last few years. The number of actual crimes committed is not generally thought to be increasing. The general trend is that cases of fraud and theft are increasing, whereas violent crime rates seem stable.
@epitome of incomprehensibility
I’m glad someone read it! :p
“mineral oil just being the thing doctors don’t feel silly recommending for a small child I guess?”
– This should be the last thing they recommend, for anybody, what to spek of a small child.
“But the thing is — gathering this kind of data helps us describe and quantify gaps in wealth, achievement, education, etc. by race.”
– The data is sold to corporations so they can gauge how to best advertise to various race, class, gender and age demographics.
“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.”
– Beware photo shopping.
“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.”
Mixing sexually liberated cultures with sexually conservative, even sexually repressive cultures, does not work. There has to be re-education on this topic when you go from one to the other. I consider myself sexually moderate but in my travels to various countries I often go from one extreme end to the other and there’s always a learning curve for me each time. There are literally some cultures that think the term “free love” means you can just have sex anywhere with anyone you want, regardless of consent because everyone (in the “free love culture”) is “open” to have sex with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They literally think “free lovers” have no concept of rape because its “free love” for everyone, everywhere! I’m not kidding you.
@mrsexception – No arguments here re: teachers.
Yes, there are bad apples and some people who just don’t belong in the profession, but the vast majority seem to be caring people who are trying to do the best they can for their students within in the context of their systems and contraints.
It’s unfortunate that it seems like the data-driven analytics increasingly being employed have primarily served to devalue the job that they can do as present educators at the expense of their being [robotic voice] Teaching Unit #1234 disseminating Batch AB-C of Information to students 454-601 with results being measured at regular intervals. /robotic voice
@Virtually Out of Touch:
That’s… not why rape happens in camps.
@deniseeliza
“racism isn’t so much a thing in Europe”
I’m going to have to guess that you don’t reside in Europe.
it’s endemic, everywhere, every country, we’re rife with it. We may not have had slavery and segregation. we’ve had millennia more practice at it than the US, Europe (Britain, France and Spain) based their initial colonisation of the US on it. Britain first stab at slavery in the US were the Scottish and Irish, Spain’s was from their north and west African positions and I think France’s was from Nornandy, and French Basques.
We’re well versed in it, its so ingrained that is banaly commonplace.
@autosoma
I think maybe you misread that comment.
dhag yes sorry I didn’t pay full attention I spent several hours this morning challenging someone’s casual racism, trying to make them think a bit different only to get nowhere and be smugly smirked at, for not knowing what “they” are doing, what “they” are taking, what “they” are up to. So I probable took out my frustrations at my inabilities to effectively correct them here, if is inadvertantly caused offence I apologise
Further to our discussion on Euro politics, Poland has gone down the anti EU, more immigration control route.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/poland-lurches-to-right-with-election-of-law-and-justice-party
Further to our discussion on Euro politics, Poland has gone down the anti EU, more immigration control route.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/25/poland-lurches-to-right-with-election-of-law-and-justice-party
Evidently Theresa May has fans, even if they’re not in Britain.
It’s never bothered me, although I’m bemused by the distinction between “White” and “Irish”. I tick the former, even though my ancestry is almost entirely the latter, because I suspect I’m not the type of “Irish” they mean. (I’ve only spent about four days in total in the country.)