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.