By David Futrelle
On Wednesday night, a gunman opened fire on patrons at two separate hookah bars in Hanau, Germany, killing nine; he and his elderly mother were later found dead in his apartment.
Like many mass shooters today, he left behind a manifesto (link available on request), one that revealed him to be a genocidal racist and eugenicist who wanted the people in a wide swath of countries — from North Africa all the way to the Philippines — to be wiped off the face of the earth. His massacre — which seems to have been directed at Turkish immigrants, the main patrons of the bars he chose to target — was his way of getting attention to his genocidal ideas.
He also wove a strange and paranoid tale about his own life, claiming that he had been monitored since birth by a shadowy agency eager to hear and capitalize on his thoughts. He claims, among other things, that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were his idea, that Donald Trump stole his slogan “America First,” and that he came up with the basic premises of a number of Hollywood movies and TV shows, from “Look Who’s Talking,” “The Cell,” and “Prison Break.” He also believes that the “invisible people” monitoring him can read (and control) minds. This portion of his manifesto reads less like a political declaration than the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic.
The 43-year-old shooter also made a few remarks, almost in passing, suggesting that he had never had a girlfriend, and some have taken this to mean that he was an “incel” This non-factual “fact” has made it into several news stories so far, and even onto Wikipedia,with The Sun describing him in a headline as an “‘Incel’ terrorist” and offering up a potted history of the incel movement to explain his rage. Meanwhile, The Independent (which should know better) made the contradictory claim that he
identified as an “incel”, and wrote that he had not been in a relationship with a woman, out of choice, for the past 18 years.
You can see the problem immediately; this is a claim that rebuts itself. “Incel” stands for “involuntary celibate”; anyone who claims to be celibate by choice is by definition not an incel. The shooter claims that in his younger years, from his mid-teens through his early twenties, he simply could not find a girlfriend who lived up to his exacting standards. “[T]o take a less good looking woman,” he wrote, “was out of the question – I wanted the best or nothing.”
In the years since then, he claimed that he remained single because “I know that I’m being monitored.”
There is no trace of the incel ideology anywhere in the shooter’s manifesto — no incel lingo, no rants against too-picky “femoids”or too-handsome Chads, no disquisitions on some lost golden age when every good man was able to date and ultimately marry his “looksmatch.” Unlike incels, the shooter did not blame women for rejecting him, nor (as far as we can tell from the manifesto) did he blame society for encouraging these women to “ride the cock carousel” with everyone but him.
Incel ideology is all about cultivating a deep sense of grievance toward women and feminism; the shooter’s grievances were directed at immigrants and Muslims and people of color generally — mostly North Africans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians — and at the people he imagined were monitoring him. If the shooter was even aware of the incel movement, there’s no evidence of it in the manifesto itself.
Indeed, though one imagines the shooter was radicalized at least in part online, as every right-wing extremist seems to be these days, there’s little in his manifesto suggesting just where, online or off, he got any of his ideas. There are no references to other mass shooters, no mention of the “great replacement” theory or the alt-right vision of “white genocide”, no sly allusions to 4chan memes. And while he lists Israel as one of the countries whose people deserve to die en masse, his conspiracy theories make no mention of Jews at all. A brief video he made aimed at Americans referred to an underground network of satanic baby-abusers, but made no reference to Pizzagate or QAnon.
In short, he’s given those us trying to make sense of his motivations plenty to work with. But, while his genocidal racism is certainly clear and obvious, he remains in many ways a mystery — and will remain so unless and until we find more evidence of his beliefs.
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@SRLO: the person who raped me is a white man. I’m well aware that they commit atrocities.
Among some of the other nonsense in this thread, ghoul isn’t a “non-human” insult. In popular culture, ghouls are human. They’re reanimated corpses, yes, but they’re reanimated human corpses.
@Rhuu
the incident happened barely 250 km south of my present location..and it just underscores the points that I made a few days back…So I felt compelled to comment..Nothing is more disconcerting than the proliferation of such odious elderly uncles in society…Sad that this uncle never discovered about Buddhism inspite of remaining so many years single
Well agriculture and land ownership and large human settlements did oppress women no doubt..before 10,000 years human relationships were more equitable
There is a certain inherent violence in the copulative act itself, which is why it has been weaponized into rape
I do have the intellectual honesty and openness to learn about Human and the Universe
Tbh there is nothing quite like the stupidity and privilege of men that come into a feminist space randomly start throwing around rape facts and assertions then getting surprise when they get a emotional response from a group that probably has a fair amount of rape victims in it
The whole fucking rape is an act of violence! You can’t nonviolent rape someone!
@Naglfar: right, that’s what I mean – regular Americans don’t know about it because our government blocks that information and a lot people don’t think to look further than that.
@Lainy
I meant the sexual act
@Talonknife
Eh, there’s an argument to be made that monsters aren’t really considered human, even if they were originally human before the monsterfication. Zombies are very dehumanized in recent culture (and often used as a metaphor for the “brainless unwashed masses”), for example.
But we’re arguing semantics at that point.
@semen
No sex is not naturally violent. If you think that I’m glad you don’t have sex
@everyone
Can we please not jump straight to internet diagnosing this guy? And please also stop with correlating schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder with violence. It’s making me sick to think of how you’re just pushing away my loved ones with these conditions in an effort to categorize a disgusting, racist, violent man as an “other” so you can feel a little bit better about yourselves for not being like them. (Spoiler alert: you are capable of violence. All humans are.) People with these conditions often have to hide it because of these attitudes and so they don’t get the help they need when they’re at their most vulnerable.
@David Rose
Thank you.
@SRLO (or is it MRAL?)
I hope you wake up each morning with an eyelash in your eye and go to bed each night with foot cramps that refuse to go away.
@Lainy
I am also glad that I have for the moment sworn off any carnal congress.
I meant it is proto-violent in the sense that such acts violate the corporeal borders of a person even if that may be voluntary
@SRLO
Is this really the time to talk about how religion could have stopped it? Religious and nonreligious people alike are capable of doing horrible things.
Am I the only person who finds this line oddly reminiscent of Andrea Dworkin?
@Lainy
At this point I’m not even sure what his goal is, the goalposts have been moved so much and changed so many times.
@SRLO
If there is consent it is not violation. If there is not consent it is violation and rape.
@semen
And I’m telling you your wrong. Sex doesn’t hurt. It’s not violent. Most of the time its an intimate, pleasurable loving act. It’s not violent.
@SRLO –
I’ll believe that when I see you address all the inconsistencies in your statement, rather than bring up atrocities in an attempt to distract us.
Do you understand that you’re usage of ‘white’ to mean ‘historical ruling class’ doesn’t work?
Do you understand that some people can both participate in oppression, while also being oppressed themselves?
@kupo – well said.
@Lainy
Is it possible he thinks sex should be violent because of porn? There is a lot of violent porn in the world.
@Naglfar – I wouldn’t want to speculate, honestly.
But this idea is a weird 2nd wave thing, maybe that’s why he’s struggling so much with intersectionality?
ETA: OH NO, wrong ‘your’ used above, nooooo!
@kupo: thank you for saying something. You always do and I know it is emotionally taxing. Thank you for standing up for us.
I am not speaking as a person with schizophrenia. I have PTSD, and some people have refused to be around me after finding that out because they thought that would make me more likely to be violent. I’ve also had people randomly diagnose me as paranoid schizophrenic because I had the audacity to confront someone about issues they didn’t want to admit were happening. So, yeah, that sucks and I wish I’d said something!
@Naglfar
No I gave my reasons above why the act itself may be considered violent especially when encountering it for the first time..Like the very first time you go to a butcher, you see the killing of a lamb as a violent thing but donot think much of it after seeing the umpteenth time
I myself rarely , almost never saw porn movies ..Since I am autistic , a porn movie has too many things going on to concentrate…but I think only professional porn has a violent undercurrent to it, amateur home-made porn may be free of such inclinations..that said when I did engage in self pleasure (better to say self-pollution or more aptly self-rape) it was almost always still pictures in various states of undress
@Semen If you think that sex is inherently violent… YOU’RE DOING IT INHERENTLY WRONG!!!!!
NoFap is one of the iron filings of crank magnetism, though. I’ll bet a lot of SR adherents, if you ask them, are also into other forms of woo.
SR and Buddhism aren’t going to make hateful people start singing kumbayah. You yourself, my friend, aren’t exactly modeling enlightened compassion when you barge into a thread about nine tragic shooting victims to crow about how it vindicates you.
Are hugs violent? Back massages? Throat swabs? If not, why not?
It’s mainly men who use violent terms to describe sex and sex organs – bang, smash, slay, hit, gash, body count. Sex isn’t inherently violent. It’s the person’s language and mindset that makes it so. People who talk about sex in those terms are more likely to perform it that way, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
@SRLO
I haven’t heard that terminology much lately, it seems to have mostly been popular a century ago.
Masturbating oneself is not rape, and it’s hurtful to victims to conflate the two.
@Buttercup
I’m sure they are. It seems like it could easily be a gateway woo form to get people into deeper stuff. I also wonder how many are anti vaxxers.
@Yutolia
You’re welcome ❤
@BQS
Oh please don’t remind me of that nasty post that went around Twitter yesterday. 😂
At the risk of sounding a bit too darkly glib at such a tragic occurrence, I don’t think either Look Who’s Talking or The Cell are films anybody really wants to take credit for….
Well, except Tarsem I guess.
@Naglfar: I thought the same thing. I couldn’t think of what ideology or person the idea might be coming from though. The idea that sex itself is violence is… well, it seems like taking away women’s agency and rape apologism at the same time.
@SRLO
What the hell. Are you seriously equating masturbation with rape?
You can fuck right off, asshole.
@Yutolia
I’m not sure either. As I said earlier, it sounds a bit like Dworkin, but I highly doubt that that is where SRLO gets it from. Maybe he thinks he’ll get feminist brownie points or something from it?
@Catalpa
MB is regularly categorized as self-rape in most SR forums so that the adherents donot violate themselves…it is like a marker of kinship in a community where there cannot be any kinship of blood
@semen
So when my husband abd I are laying in a spoon position and he’s got one hand between my legs rubbing my clit gently and another hand on my breast rubbing and gently pulling on my nipples while kissing my neck and ears. Making comments on how wet I am, how soft my skin is and telling me how much he loves me and I’m a squirming moaning mess because it feels so good and I’m getting so close and I love him so much
… How exactly is that violent? Point me out the violence.
@SRLO
Cool, so you can be united in your minimization of the impacts of rape on victims. That’s lovely, I’m glad you can bond over rape apologetics.
Can’t imagine why SR would be such a male dominated community. It’s a mystery for the ages. /Sarcasm
@Naglfar: I think it’s also a part of evo psych… although I did see an argument that in countries where marital rape is legal, all sex within marriage should be considered rape since the person can’t really consent or not. Although I feel that’s kind of extreme, I can see where they’re coming from with those specific circumstances. However, this person was not arguing that all sex is violent. Because it isn’t.
@Lainy
Isn’t it best if I donot comment on the going ons between husband and wife? if it was a non-husband non-wife situation I would have had a response for that exact scenario
@Catalpa
women can be part of Sex energy retention even if not strictly semen retention group, and brings new insights for the wider humanity
@ Naglfar:
Nope, not just you.
This is like when people use “self-abuse” as a euphemism for masturbation – it’s always puzzled me because surely sex with oneself is about as certainly consensual as it gets. The act itself is not “violence” if consensual, any more than picking one’s nose is self-mutilation.
@ Katamount:
The Cell had gorgeous costumes but not enough Vincent d’Onofrio.
People claiming some famous book or movie was “stolen” from an idea of theirs is pretty common. Occasionally they’re demonstrably right, but often it’s more like “J. K. Rowling must have somehow glimpsed the manuscript for my wizard novel that was rejected by publishers in the 1980s.”
I can see someone with the delusion of their thoughts being read might extrapolate that to the belief that movies that resemble an image or concept they once had must have been directly taken from their mind, but as noted above, people who think this seldom progress to violent retaliation. This guy had hate as well, and that’s what drove him, not mental-health issues.
@naglfar
No I think this guy thinks sex is a perverted dirty thing bad thing and knows that rape is also a bad thing and since they both involve genitals and nudity they must be equal in this. I am no stranger to bdsm and domination fantasies but I don’t consider those act violent either since they don’t hurt me. The most it hurts me is a smacked bottom and even that feels good to me and I consent for it to be done so it’s not violent. I think this dude just has issues and he decided to spend his day making rape victims relive or think about one of the worst moments of their lives first thing in the morning. Idk about but it was 7 am when I first came on here right into this asshole bringing up rape on a thread not about rape, to use as a gotcha
@ semen
We’ve been fucking since our first date. Don’t be a coward and fucking tell me where the violence was. This specific time was two nights before our wedding
@Lainy
I agree that he’s just trying to cause trouble. I saw his first post as I was checking the site after getting out of bed, and shortly after that he started going off on ‘splaining rape.
@naglfar
And now apparently the sex i had with my husband when he was my boyfriend is different then the sex we have now as a married couple. Only difference now is I have to remind him to take his ring off.
Calling consensual piv sex a violation of the body is inherently misogynistic. It contributes to the bullshit idea that women are dirty, broken or used up if they have had sex.
What all this has to do with a racist mass murderer, I’m still not clear.
@kupo
D…dare I ask??
@SRLO
Seriously?! You’re offended by the word “ghoul”, but you don’t see how offensive it is to trivialize the word “rape” by equating it with a momentary weakness of will? I’m surprised you don’t call it “self-holocaust”.
If you and your SR buddies are trying to engage in aversion therapy to make wanking seem less attractive, maybe don’t throw women under the bus to do so. We see far too many incels go on and on about how repulsive women are.
@Lainy
And I’m expecting he’ll next dive into some purity crap that he only applies to women.
@WWTH
And it makes it worse that he differentiates between marital sex and premarital sex. Not only does he condone marital rape, but this also reinforces the idea that sex before marriage is wrong for women but not men.
@BQS
Warning, this is nasty, do not read at lunch: https://twitter.com/AITA_reddit/status/1230523375224836096?s=19
As I said earlier, for a guy who doesn’t masturbate SRLO is quite a consummate wanker.
So is your argument that the rape apologetic phrase of “self-rape” is acceptable within the SR community because women aren’t allowed in it?
There’s so many problems with that. For one, it’s clearly not confined to the SR community since you’re using it here.
For another, there are male rape survivors as well, who are also harmed by this
And for the last, even if the phrase was never used in the vicinity of rape survivors, the minimization of rape is still a fucking horrible thing to do.
@Buttercup
incels want female love,touch and adoration and are ready to crawl on broken glass to have that
SRs think there are better things to do for men than to chase behind women or vice versa or women than to chase behind men
The male sacred body geography figures heavily in SR (the male member being the eternal Mount Meru, at the centrepoint of all the world continents), women donot figure much
because the principles of SR remain the same even if the man happens to be homosexual, so there is no point in constructing a philosophy which a vast section of men won’t be able to relate to
SR considers semen as the holiest form of matter in the material plane…The Practice of Brahmacharya by Swami Sivananda (freely available online from his publisher) is considered the foundational text of SR..though there are others like the Coiled Serpent etc
SR means the wholesome celebration of the male body and male aesthetics….having a flat six pack is a huge deal in SR coomunity…that’s why most members have adopted the monkish one meal a day regime
@kupo
There is so much wrong with the board, I can’t even find where to start.
@SRLO
They clearly don’t, if they did they wouldn’t be like this. They just blame women for all that ails them.
And you don’t see that as at all misogynistic? You are literally saying men are sacred and women don’t matter.
If women don’t matter and it’s all about men, why is there so much discussion of women on semen retention sites?
I’m not sure if the last word is a Freudian slip, a typo, or a pun.
@Naglfar
Start by throwing the whole man out.
@Lainy
I will answer your question..but won’t comment on a sexual encounter between a present married couple..I will write something from my own past..this something is a sexual encounter…will that be acceptable explanation for you?
@semen
Are you going to tell me where the violence is in the sex i told you about or are you just going to ignore it because it doesn’t show your views
@ semen
No i want you to comment on how my sexual act with the man i love was violent. We had this same sex before marriage and engagment so either answer what i ask you or shut the fuck up
@Lainy
see my previous comment..if you are okay with a story from my own sexual history..then okay…cuz I am not going to comment on the going ons of a married couple being an outsider…it would be highly inappropriate
@SRLO
How the fuck is an anecdote of your own sexual experience going to prove that all sex is inherently violent?
Even if you had a violent sexual encounter (which wouldn’t suprise me at all), that doesn’t apply to all other sexual experiences.
An anecdote of a sexual encounter devoid of violence would disprove the hypothesis that all sex is inherently violent, but I doubt you will relate the story of one of those, since you’re the one trying to claim that all sex is inherently violent.