By David Futrelle
“Stochastic terrorism,” as many of you know, is a way to terrify your enemies without getting your hands dirty, or even bothering to learn how to make a bomb or fire a gun.
It’s when someone says or publishes something nasty about someone they hate (or a group of such someones), knowing full well that there is a very good chance that their words will incite some unbalanced fanatic to physically assault or even kill the intended target.
Sometimes stochastic terrorists mention violence explicitly; other times it’s implicit. But the whole point of stochastic terrorism is to bring violence down on an enemy without having to do this violence oneself. It is, as one anonymous blogger has noted, a sort of “remote-control murder by lone wolf.”
Those who engage in stochastic terrorism generally do it with a wink and a nod, sometimes pretending it’s all a big joke, sometimes using dogwhistle language that gives them a certain degree of deniability when the gun or the bomb goes off for real.
For an unusually transparent example of stochastic terrorism, consider a rather alarming post that went up on The Daily Stormer yesterday. In the post, an anonymous Daily Stormer contributor who writes in a style strikingly similar to the site’s publisher Andrew Anglin offers some thoughts on the murder of five journalists at the Annapolis, Maryland Capital Gazette, rather theatrically urging his followers NOT to murder journalists themselves, all the while making abundantly clear that he would be pleased as punch if somehow a whole bunch of journalists were in fact murdered.
The writer who may be Anglin starts by describing the Capital Gazette as the “inevitable” result of media wickedness.
So someone finally shot up a newsroom. I’m surprised it has taken so long. … The media is an immensely powerful institution that is now explicitly geared toward bullying and destroying the lives of individuals. … The shooter at the Capital Gazette this week was not even alt-lite. He was just an ordinary person that got his life destroyed by a malicious journalist.
They cannot stop this from happening. As the media continues to abuse its position to hurt more and more little people, they’re going to find themselves in the crosshairs of an angry victim more often. This is Newton’s Third Law at work.
This is arguably stochastic terrorism right here, albeit of a particularly indirect sort — suggesting plainly that the journalists at the Capital Gazette (and journalists in general) deserve whatever “inevitable” violence comes their way.
But then Possibly Anglin gets more explicit. He starts with some not-altogether-convincing pleas to his followers to remain non-violent towards the media.
I would never endorse violence. None of you should go out and kill any journalists. None of you should encourage anyone to do it either.
He follows this by encouraging these same people to loudly and publicly endorse the murder of journalists if, you know, someone else were to do it.
What you do need to do, however, is push for the emotional normalization of violence against the media. When this kind of thing happens you need to go to everyone you know and say, “you know, I’d never kill any journalists myself, but I’d enthusiastically vote for any guy that says he’ll use state security services to do so.”
He then offers some tips so his readers can make their calls for murder sound more palatable to non-Nazis.
There are a number of dog whistles for Jews that you can express contempt bordering on the homicidal in public and still find normies on the street agreeing with you.
In Possibly Anglin’s mind, as you may have gathered, pretty much everyone he hates is either a Jew or a puppet of Jews.
You can say you feel that the media is contemptible and deserves vigorous extermination. You can say that you’d like to see lawyers and their families rounded up and put into camps, to a chorus of cheers of anyone that has ever interacted with the legal system. You can say that you value Internet freedom, and that when the YouTube censors found someone at their doorstep firing bullets at them, it set your soul aloft. You can say these things in public with a smile, often, and people will laugh and say, “if only.”
And then you can pull back the imaginary curtain to reveal that all these evil people who should be murdered (but not by you!) are all pawns of the, well, I think you know who he’s talking about.
After they absorb the message and the fire’s lit, you can tell them who Internet censors, journalists, and lawyers really are.
Not exactly subtle. But the Daily Stormer rarely is.
This is hardly the first time the writers at or readers of The Daily Stormer have made clear that their souls are indeed “set aloft” by the murder of their enemies.
After the murder of antifascist activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year, Anglin and his readers competed to see who could post the most appaling meme mocking Heyer; in a post on the site, Anglin denounced the murdered woman as a “fat … slut” and a “drain on society.”
Earlier this year, when a disgruntled videomaker shot up YouTube headquarters before killing herself, the Daily Stormer declared that she was ” too good for this world” and encouraged readers to “Keep Meming the Free Speech Jihadist” to keep her memory alive.
This is stochastic terrorism at its crudest. And if it doesn’t lead directly to someone being murdered, it will certainly nudge many of Anglin’s readers closer to violence.
Well I’ve told you Anglin, any fucking time mate.
þu magan áfandest
So much for their “no violent rhetoric” rule.
Wow who could have seen this coming? /sarcasm
While contributors to The Daily Stormer are not noted for their mental acuity or sense of reason they might consider, just for the hell of it, actually looking at the facts surrounding the alleged injustices foisted on this so-called “ordinary person” (also known as 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos).
In 2009 Ramos contacted a woman named Lori and asked to friend her on Facebook because she had supposedly been the only person in high school who treated him nicely. Although she didn’t specifically remember him she agreed and soon regretted it. Ramos became increasingly belligerent and abusive, swearing at her, suggesting that she commit suicide and constantly calling her at work in an attempt to get her fired.
Eventually, she filed suit against him and he plead guilty to one count of criminal harassment. He got 18-months supervised probation.
Ramos then sued the Capitol Gazette, claiming they had defamed him and ruined his reputation. The legal definition of libel: Libel is the written or broadcast form of defamation, distinguished from slander, which is oral defamation. It is a tort (civil wrong) making the person or entity (like a newspaper, magazine or political organization) open to a lawsuit for damages by the person who can prove the statement about him/her was a lie.
When the trial judge could get a word in edgewise (Ramos frequently interrupted the proceedings) she explained that the paper only reported the facts of the case using “publicly available records.” The appellate court upheld the lower court ruling.
Unsurprisingly, Ramos, described in one article as a “collector of injustices, real or imagined,” eventually took his revenge on five innocent people, none of whom were involved with the articles pertaining to his court appearance or conviction.
This sounds like flat out incitement to violence.
Who exactly is censoring them if they continue to wail on about all this? Evidently they have enough platforms to push their “message”.
I would imagine even if every person of Jewish heritage left the Earth the Anglins of the world would still promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “Don’t be fooled, they just want you to think they’re gone! But they still control everything!”
@tim gueguen
They’d probably actually turn their guns on their next bugaboo for ex blacks, Muslims, so on, riiiight down the line. And so on and so on, until finally they turn on each other for failing their own arbitrary little purity tests. Because sadly in this case haters quite literally gotta hate.
Off topic but related, trump has refused a request to set the flag at half staff in remembrance of the Capital Gazette shooting, enormous shithead that he is.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/anne-arundel/annapolis/bs-ac-cn-flag-request-denied-20180702-story,amp.html
@tim gueguen and Bananananana dakry: You are both so right. Their entire movement is built on hatred, and without someone to blame all their problems on it would fall apart.
“You shouldn’t encourage people to murder journalists! You should only rally to instate people in power who WILL murder journalists!”
…What kind of fucking definition of ‘encourage’ is this shitstain operating off of? Because it’s certainly not any definition that’s in the dictionary.
@Banananana Dakry:
See also Babylon 5 S1E4 “Infection”.
@Surplus:
Great minds and all that, I wanted to post that as well.
This is, in my opinion, one of the best episodes of the show.
Sometimes, although I suspect not very often, this happens. But I can’t see the tiniest scintilla of evidence that this is what happened in this case. Ramos might as well have turned his ire on the court, since as far as I can see nothing was reported that wasn’t already a matter of checkable public record.
And if you don’t want stuff like this reported, there’s an incredibly easy remedy: don’t do things like aggressively stalking innocent women if you don’t want the facts of the matter to be made public after you get caught.
I’m not supporting police arresting nazis and throwing them in jail, whilst lawyers strip every asset they own and give it to the people they’ve harassed. But I wouldn’t condemn anyone who did.
So, this happened:
https://medium.com/@Amy_Siskind/week-85-experts-in-authoritarianism-advise-to-keep-a-list-of-things-subtly-changing-around-you-so-d581acd7874e
http://poll2018.trust.org/
@ Alan Robertshaw
‘thu magan afandest’ (sorry, I don’t have the skills to access an Old English font.)
I think you called him ‘you strong ravager’ presumably sarcastically.
Interestingly, I’ve read that in the latter stages of WWII committed Nazis were some of the most likely to yield intelligence quickly if they were even no more than in fear of mistreatment.
Your sarcasm looks well placed.
@ Kevin
It’s Norse. The wonderful Scildfreja worked it out for me. The literal translation is something akin to “You may test yourself”. But the vibe we were going for was “Feel free to try!”. (I’m so classy) 🙂
Google claims it’s Icelandic and translates it as “your stomach prickly”.
“Then they came for the lawyers, and I did not speak up, for I was already hiding from cops, and the lawyers had stated that while they could speak up for me, it would be costly and not very helpful in my case”
This is by no means an unpopular sentiment; I would point out though that in the play, Dick the Butcher is the bad guy, and he suggests this as a necessary preliminary step in imposing a tyranny.
The original Nazis of course we’re quite keen on the veneer of legality. The majority of attendees at the notorious Wanasee Conference were lawyers.
After the War there were the little known ‘Subsequent Nuremberg Trials’. These weren’t an international affair like the more famous tribunal; they were brought solely by the US under their occupation powers. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently. Especially in regard to unrepresented three year olds.
The question for the tribunal in the “Judges’ Trial” was whether they’re could be any liability for judges and lawyers for merely taking part in legal proceedings that were by definition, ‘lawful’, no matter how unfair in practice.
The tribunal found that, generally, there wasn’t. I find this quote from the judgment quite apposite though. History repeating and all that.
I have to ask, aren’t the writers at The Daily Stormer ostensibly “journalists”? Does Anglin not see how this could easily backfire on him?
People who eagerly anticipate the introduction of government death squads never think they will be in any danger. But once a government decides that it can straight up murder citizens within its own borders without due process, nobody is safe.
With Scandinavian languages on a mutual intelligibility spectrum that includes Old English, we’ll get similar meanings, but interesting misunderstandings too, I suppose, with American English and British English as an analogy.
The “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” attitude is the only argument these fools seem to understand.
@ Kevin
Even well after the Danelaw there were communication problems between folks from Northern England (where there was still a huge Norse influence) and Southern England.
As Caxton wrote in the fourteenth century:
That crops up even today. People sometimes ask what’s the difference between “unlawful” and “illegal”. Absolutely nothing as a matter of law; just one’s from the Norse and the other from Norman French.
He’s also not keen on anyone who reads books and understands Latin, as I recall.
In fact, that whole section of Henry VI Part 2 seems quite startlingly prescient – although of course Shakespeare wasn’t saying anything new.