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.
Indeed. And I’d suggest this is particularly true of rabble-rousing troublemakers who are deemed to have served their purpose after they’ve propagandised the dictatorship into power – they become more trouble than they’re worth.
Or, alternatively, the useful idiot has stopped being useful.
@ wetherby
Yeah, Ernst Röhm and the rest of the SA could probably give the modern idiots some advice about that; had they all not been shot once Hitler had no further use for them.
Everyone in the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Off Party thinks they’re leopards.
Incidentally, I think I displayed some white privilege there, unthinkingly. While the US may not currently have domestic death squads in the conventional sense, uniformed agents of the state are killing mostly PoC on the regular, and getting away with it.
The best advertisement against MGTOWs is quoting them.
Ugh I commented on the wrong tab and then the comment got eaten and now it can’t be edited plz mods help me save face! D=
@Kevin Your google fu was much better than mine. þu was the only word I was able to translate (so I pretended Alan typed ‘you effing asshole’ :D). I like the actual translation better. 🙂
@Lumipuna LOL!
@Gijoel No, never!
Incidentally, I hope all of our American mammotheers are ready for the kick off of the civil war tomorrow? I don’t know who leaked that to Alex Jones, but oh well. Best of luck!
@Moggie
And then, in one case, goes on to shoot his ex, her boyfriend, and then himself. A whole lot of WTF in this case. 🙁
https://www.ajc.com/news/crime–law/cop-who-killed-caroline-small-shoots-self-after-killing-wife-man/R4pDsnaw9JpPB1pTtpqJGP/
@Alan: you remind me of the time I ordered a chocolatine in Paris.
It took a while (less than a minute, granted) for the server and I to work out that I was referring to pain au chocolat.
Reminds me of that case in New Jersey a few years ago. A cop took his wife hostage and eventually shot her in front of their young daughter. His cop buddies watched this whole thing go down, did nothing to stop. Then after he shot and killed his wife, the other cops all went over to comfort him.
And people wonder why anti-police sentiment is so strong.
In fact domestic violence is 2-4 times higher in police households than the general population
http://womenandpolicing.com/violenceFS.asp#notes
Gee, it’s hard to figure out why women who are the victims of rape or abuse don’t “just report” right away.
No, you can’t. No, they won’t.
Fishy Goat: cops who are violent on the beat are violent at home, news at 11!
In Montreal we had Stephanie Trudeau, who was known for pepper-spraying people on the terrace of a pub while a small march was going down the street. Department said this was good and normal. Later she was violently arresting someone who had a beer in hand when he opened the door to let a friend in — and got the whole interaction recorded, including her call for backup afterwards. That convinced the department maybe they should look into things. Apparently she arrested a cyclist for no good reason and gave him a rough ride before dropping him off in the middle of nowhere (I only just saw that one, despite it happening five years ago). Then she got arrested for beating up her girlfriend, which at long last got her fired.
And just in case the alt-light enablers of these extremists are feeling a little too smug in their denials that they have anything to do with these people, keep one thing firmly in mind: these people hate all the same people you hate. The press, racial minorities, the LGBT community, feminists… anybody who could be considered an “SJW” is to be opposed, and that shibboleth is shared between the most milquetoast of Dave Rubin devotees and the Andrew Anglins of the world.
Furthermore, you can’t just build up “SJWs” as some kind of threat to “Western civilization” (looking your way Jordan Peterson) and your only action item is “subscribe to my Patreon.” No, if the threat is really that dire, then logically it requires a proportionate response of equal urgency. So no wonder you see violence being perpetrated against both the media and the most vulnerable members of society. You’ve cast them as the villains in your narrative tale where all civilization is at stake!
On the topic of police awfulness, The Toronto Star obtained an internal report from the Toronto Police Service (TPS) indicating that there are significant problems with intercultural knowledge within the police department:
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/07/03/secret-report-sheds-light-on-toronto-police-culture.html
The article links to the executive summary and the full report, but the article itself provides an excellent outline of the recommendations and findings.
Spoiler alert: they’re not good.
One tidbit this article has that I missed was Peter Sloly’s role in reform of the department. When Chief Bill Blair (who I thought was setting the department on the right track) retired, it basically came down to a handful of names, including Deputy Chiefs Peter Sloly and Mark Saunders. Saunders ultimately got the top job, but at the time I had no idea what that meant. Apparently there was resistance to Sloly, who was perceived as being “too committed” to the black community, at least according to former TPS Board Chair Alok Mukherjee:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/alok-mukherjee-book-police-chief-mark-saunders-1.4602920
Mukherjee also indicates that Blair was in favour of carding (which is like stop-and-frisk but without the frisk), a clearly racist practice that has recently been discontinued. That was news to me and certainly costs me some respect for him.
There’s also budgetary reforms needed in the TPS and Sloly would have been considered a herald of that reform. The choice of Saunders was indication that the Board was averse to taking a confrontational stance with the force regarding its budget and its structural practices:
https://torontolife.com/city/crime/toronto-police-service-vs-everybody/
Long read, but outlines the players involved in the police drama of our city and why there’s an element of mistrust between the force and various communities.
I gotta give a big shoutout to the Star for its dogged reporting on the Toronto Police and Toronto Life for running down the situation. If not for them, I wouldn’t know anything about what goes on at the higher echelons of the force. Your local media matters, folks.
I can’t wait until this bastard Anglin is FINALLY hauled into a courtroom to account for his misdeeds. Under oath. Under cross-examination.
@Bananananana dakry – This reminds me of an essay by Theodor Adorno. He wrote that Naziism would destroy itself, because if it kept going as it was, the purity requirements would get more and more stringent, and it’d collapse. I can’t find the name of it now, though.
@Alan Robertshaw, @numerobis –
Regarding geographical language differences: In Montreal, an “all-dressed pizza” means one with both pepperoni and veggies (usually green peppers and mushrooms, perhaps olives) but when I asked for this in St. Catharines, Ontario, no one understood me.
Me: “What do you call a pizza with meat and vegetables, then?”
Other person: “Er… nothing. You just list the toppings you want.”
Me: (thinks this is inefficient, but then realizes there are so many things without specific words)
Too hot. Can’t we postpone until fall?
Good night, US mammotheers. Remember to be civil in your war against Christianity, family values, unborn children, white race, Western civilization and America’s greatness. I hear civility is everything these days.
At least #secondcivilwarletters is fun to read….
I get the jokes but war is a source of immense terror. With trump’s dick waving and the social strife he’s creating, it’s hard to feel at ease at all.
Fishy Goat:
I scanned that, but a bunch of the tweets were right-wingers trying to join in, and their attempts at humour were painful, even by my low standards.
@Moggie True. More than one was “Libtards have no guns, be home tonight.” Hohum….
I wondered if the same thing when Milo’s latest idiocy broke. He certainly used to.
Then again, I remember when the big leak on his Nazi ties came up out of and one of his passwords included “nightoflongknives”. I’m still not sure if that was surprisingly self-aware or incredibly not.
Katamount: what I remember of Blair is that he headed up the G20 response. Kettling, firing tear gas and plastic slugs at protesters, baton charges, agents provocateurs, the works.
He’s the enemy.