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I'm curious about the potential for social contagion emanating from the recent wave of lone wolf terror attacks in Europe, especially Germany. I specifically don't mean male muslim asylum seekers/immigrants observing a terror attack and deciding to emulate it - they already have extremely powerful religious and ethnocultural dispositions towards such behaviour (and the deterrents are extremely weak - if you grew up in rural Syria or Afghanistan, German prison is comparatively nice, just commit your attack, then turn yourself in to police and you'll be rewarded with 10+ years of free room and board). I'm referring to otherwise non-jihad minded individuals, often people with psychiatric issues, shifting towards previously unheard of forms of randomized violence that conspicuously copy the exact methods pioneered by lone wolf jihadis.
Take the doctor who drove into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in Magdeburg - the right-wing in Germany was quick to point out he was an asylum claimant from a Middle Eastern country. But his extensive social media presence and past activist work point to an ex-muslim who fled Saudi Arabia on grounds of religious persecution, became a doctor in Germany and focused his political efforts on limiting Islamist power in Germany, going as far as expressing sympathy for the AfD. When this background information emerged, it was the German left-wing's turn to gloat and call him a far-right terrorist, which definitely matches his ideological profile better than jihadist. But why the fuck would an ex-muslim right-winger, obsessively terrified of an Islamised Europe, choose to drive a truck into a crowd of white Germans visiting a Christmas market, an obvious symbol of European christian heritage? If it was some kind of 4-d chess move to turn German opinion against refugees, it seems like a ludicrous goal for someone who has a record of constantly begging the German state to accept more secular Arab refugees persecuted by their home countries. If it was just a case of severe mental illness, why did his madness know to perfectly emulate a jihadi attack, right down to the method and target (cherished symbols of Western Christian culture and life)?
Equally perplexing is the recent car attack in Mannheim - the perpetrator is an ethnic German. Details are emerging that he was present at some far-right demonstrations in 2018, which for the political left in Germany makes this an open-and-shut case of right-wing terrorism. The police, however, is calling an ideological motive unlikely and highlight the attacker's psychiatric issues as the probable cause. Again, the same situation : why is a far-right terrorist (if he indeed is one) driving a car into a crowd of random Germans? There's virtually hundreds of more obvious targets he could choose that would conform to his ideology. And if he did it because of his severe mental health issues - why is this happening now? We now have centuries of documented experience of clinically insane people's behaviour and the risks thereof, and driving cars into crowds seems completely unheard of in the larger scale of things. Generally, randomised sprees of violence in which the victim's profile is irrelevant to the perpetrator are a historically extremely rare phenomenon - the recent stabbing spree in Villach in the Austrian region of Carinthia was apparently the first time EVER that such an attack took place in the entire region's history - not the first time in 50 years, not the first time since WW2, the first time ever. In a region that keeps documented chronicles of events since the Middle Ages. (This attack was committed by the usual suspect though, so it's less relevant to my argument.)
Does anyone have any ideas on what's going on here? Are we experiencing a jihadification of psychiatric issues and radical politics at large? Is there a growing sense among the extreme fringes of politics that lone wolf jihadism as a modus operandi has the highest ROI for influencing public life and political discourse, so one might as well emulate the methods and see where it goes? If you can't beat them, join them? Are mentally ill people who already harbour delusions of paranoia and grandeur enraptured by the vast amount of national attention and infamy these attacks receive, turning it into the method of choice for a kind of extreme attention-seeking/lashing out? Is social media somehow to blame?
I'm reminded of something Zizek stated about a decade ago in a discussion about lone wolf terror attacks - he said he could envision a future in which these events are sufficiently normalised to the point where they will happen without clear origin or purpose, almost as a new form of reactive behaviour your brain will simply intuitively tend towards due to it becoming a habitual social phenomenon rather than the progressive result of a precise form of Islamist theories around militant action. This seems increasingly possible - and absolutely terrifying.
There is always and forever a pool of disaffected young men who want to make a splash in the world and don't mind getting attention the negative way.
How this tendency is expressed depends a lot on the sociopolitical situation, carrots and sticks etc. A hundred years ago, they'd have been Anarchists, fifty years ago they'd have been lefty terrorists, some are now school shooters, far right or muslim terrorists, trans AI doomers etc. etc.
The particular expressions are memetic, mass shootings, car attacks, arson, assassination, bombings etc.
The population is the same.
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Relevant ACX:
I think a lot of it is related to the media coverage. People running amok with knives or driving cars into crowds are over-represented compared to the number of people they kill in the media, and this in turn plants these ideas into the minds of people who are either clinically insane or plain evil.
For something which is much less reported on, look at wrong way driving on the Autobahn. If done in an attempt to kill yourself and possibly others, it is just as evil. But as it is much harder to establish intent after the fact, most of these deaths are just traffic accidents. Sure, the vultures of Bild will report on it, especially if they get juicy pictures of half-burned corpses, but it will not give them the kind of hard-on they get from a psychotic migrant stabbing some people.
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Terrorism is a meme - a true social contagion. Shooting into a random crowd is a popular meme in the US. Driving into one is popular in Germany [1]. Talking about a meme in the context of concern and apprehension is the vector. I think in the US, putting “assault rifles” in the news in perpetuity chiefly serves to remind individuals that the meme exists - it’s within the realm of possibilities for stuff to do and it’s easy/doable (quotidian). I acknowledge it’s somewhat ridiculous, but very clearly people couldn’t shoot masses without first considering it. I can enumerate any number of ridiculous things that no one is doing, benign or terrible. Naming and discussing them births them into the world.
Not naming the shooter is just the opposite. Not discussing the shooting is even better; no notoriety, no acknowledgment, no fame, no infamy, no victims, no crying mothers, no nothing. The extent to which Democrats rail against public shootings is the extent to which we will continue to have more. They communicate: “I’m so upset when you do this thing” which is received as a nine year old would: “do this to upset me”. The incentive is wrong for the media as defecting is directly rewarded with money/praise/concern! This is the lifecycle of the meme without which it would not exist.
Sometimes memes go out of style. Domestic bombings were all the rage in 1973 in the US (although those were not distributed in nature). In that case, they stopped when the perpetrators sorta blew themselves up, sorta got arrested, the news sorta stopped reporting it, and they sorta decided bombing police stations wasn’t changing the world, so they became Ivy League professors instead! So good luck to you. Planting bollards everywhere is a strong reminder that driving your car into people is a thing that you can do this weekend and telling people not to talk about it is worse!
1.https://old.reddit.com/r/2westerneurope4u/comments/1j2je9e/your_average_german_afternoon/
Most of the "hate crime" stuff follows this through line: treat every poorly-drawn swastika as a hate crime, and you will continue to get more poorly drawn swastikas.
More cynically, hate crimes and/or terrorism are political currency, so there's a supply and a demand. The demand vastly exceeds its supply; that's why the media (and the types of people who find themselves working for the media) would like to create more of them.
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I think that one in Germany was some kind of failed false flag. There were explosive devices in his car that were supposed to render his body unidentifiable, after which any number of identities, ethnicities and motives could have been ascribed to him. But the devices failed, allowing civilian authorities to quickly identify his body and his real Twitter account, and the media and government had to run with whatever awkward non-motive that could be found in his posts.
Where are you reading this? Skimming German newspapers gives me nothing on explosives. Also the idea that his body would be unidentifiable to the point where no one could conclusively claim his identity is ridicoulous, and not how forensics nor modern surveillance technology operates. And the biggest question - who committed this false flag? State powers? The AfD? Right AFTER an election when it will have minimal impact? I'm not buying it.
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You know there’s a pre-existing example of what you’re talking about? It’s mass shootings. Mass shootings started as copycats of the columbine attack, continued to iterate slowly. Most of them have some kind of motivation, but not the kind that makes sense to psychologically healthy people. Some claim to be whites supremacists, some claim to be black supremacists, some claim to be incels, some claim to be bullied, recently a few of them followed an esoteric TERF schizo account on Twitter, some of them claim to be motivated for trans issues. All sorts of motivations- most not the same as the columbine people. The main reason no ‘mass shooters’ have had Islam as a motivation is that we call them terrorists instead.
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Killing a bunch of random people is not really a good way to achieve any goal, unless your goal is just that: to hurt and kill others. The reason to want to do that is typically anger and resentment.
The reason for the anger and resentment of the Magdeburg attacker is fairly clear. He was in contact with numerous people from his region of origin and felt that they were, in some specific cases, not treated fairly by German society. In the case of Alexander S., I'm not sure what to think. He appears to have simply been a loser.
As far as the nature of the attacks, there is clearly a copycat element. As I said, this is not really purposeful, goal-directed behavior. It's likely the perpetrators simply copy whatever they see on the news. Using a car is also, to some extent, a rational method in a society where firearms are harder to obtain.
Apart from that, modern Germany is, like the rest of the West, a fairly atomized and unideological society. In the past, people who simply wanted to hurt and kill others could join a group like the Revolutionäre Zellen. Nowadays, that seems to be harder. There's little real appetite for groups like that, so resentful and mentally ill people act out on their own instead.
What does that mean he was simply a loser? That seems enormously disrespectful to the victims - imagine how much of a worthless failure you would have to be to be killed by a guy whose only notable feature is his inability to do anything right? And is 'fucks up a terrorist attack' on the list of typical loser behaviours? 1. Bad at sports 2. No friends 3. Never kissed a girl 4. Can't even slaughter a crowd effectively?
If you don't know his motive, just say that. Or at least go with mental illness, that doesn't throw the victims under the bus.
I think a loser who manages to kill a few people just graduates to extra pathetic loser through his murders. I have sympathy for losers, but not for killer losers. Humans are squishy and easily killed if you don't care about social consequences. Real life is not some MMORPG where A killing B proves anything relevant about the relative merits of A and B: the guys who shot celebrities such as Dutschke, MLK, Lennon might have had an impact on world history, but that does not mean that they the respectability of their victims should somehow be transferred to them. World history should not care for these murderers more than it should care to name the lightning strikes which kill a person.
If I am ever killed by some fuckwit, please don't elevate him to some level of respectability out of respect for me. I am totally with Brecht when he asks us to destroy any respect for killers and their acts of killing. Don't mention my killer by name, instead invent some demeaning nickname for him. Killing people (absent a very good reason) should get more ridicule than most other ridiculous behaviors. By all means, let late night TV speculate about the killer's penis size instead of turning my murder into a grimdark real crime drama with gloomy music.
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I believe his motive was anger and resentment, because, as I said, there is really no other reason to carry out a random killing of this sort. And the most common reason for anger and resentment is simply being a loser; i.e., not having achieved the status you want or feel entitled to within your particular social circle. You could call that "mental illness" if you like. Of course, maybe he had some other reason. The news articles I read didn't give much useful information.
To the rest of your comment, I find it bizarre to suggest that being killed randomly by a mentally ill loser makes you a "worthless failure". Sometimes good people die for stupid reasons. Here is a story about someone who was killed by a bed falling on her. Does that make her a "worthless failure"? Obviously not. Things like this happen every day.
You can be randomly crushed by a bed, a murder is targeted. Maybe not directly targeted, but targeted nonetheless. And what kind of person gets targeted by a loser and loses the altercation? A bigger loser by definition.
Beyond that I object because by painting the second guy as a simple loser you seem to be implying the other guy was either justified or not a loser.
No what I call mental illness is whatever compelled him to kill random people. Losers, as I have known them, are generally far too passive and cowardly to kill anyone. If simply being a loser was enough to cause people to go on murder sprees they'd happen constantly.
If that's how you define losers then I'd expect your loser hierarchy to get circular quick (and paint most people as losers) since most people would lose if targeted in a situation where mortal danger is not expected and there is little time to react, such as getting rammed with a car at a fair or getting shot in the back in school. Made of Iron Georg, who got knocked out, then stabbed by a katana and still managed to shoot down a few of his Zizian assailants upon waking up (and then lived), is an outlier.
Out of curiosity, why do you refer to him that way? His name was Curtis Lind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
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While it is the case that terrorism is ineffective, the modal European government response of utilizing the threat of terrorism to create the appearance of acquiescing to political positions they wanted to take anyway on e.g. Blasphemy can easily create the wrong impression. Their terrorism is effective because they're on the right side, not because it's terrorism.
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I will never understand this thought process - he wanted the German state to expedite refugee claims for secular Saudi Arabians and to take a more anti-Saudi stance geopolitically, which would never happen due to the balance of power in the Middle East and energy/economic interests - so his solution is to select a Christmas market and kill random people shopping there? Why not stab someone walking out the Saudi embassy, attack a Wahhabist, Saudi-funded mosque or, heck, even travel to Saudi Arabia and attempt to do maximum damage there since it's the supposed main focus of his ire? Even attacking organs of the German state makes marginally more sense. Instead, he selected for a group of people that probably largely agreed with him and his cause.
It all seems somewhat convenient that after doing the deed, he allowed himself to be arrested without a struggle (maybe I'm wrong but I can't find a german-language article saying the opposite), will now face a fair trial in which he can argue for insanity and will most certainly be able to finish whatever sentence he gets before he dies of old age - and without fear of being targeted by muslims within the prison system, as might have been the case had he chosen Islam as his target. Maybe murdering Europeans has just become the most low-risk of political extremism with the least relative consequences?
Why do people get angry at some people and at not at others? I don't know, I'm not a psychologist. Anger is a natural and universal human emotion. I believe it has some adaptive purpose, like all other emotions. The logic is presumably that the threat of anger induces others to treat you better. Accordingly, it makes little sense to get angry at others when you cannot possibly influence their behavior. I think this fits the pattern of how people actually behave. Few people get angry at wild animals or natural disasters.
Obviously, that doesn't mean that his anger was, in this case, actually useful or sensible. He was simply executing an adaption.
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I don't think there has to be a reasonable and coherent thought process. It's tempting to think something like "Islam bad and crazy, so anti-Islam ought to be good and sane", but the reality seems to be that being a sufficiently dedicated dissident against a well-entrenched ethno-religious memeplex is rather positively correlated with psychological issues. The n=3 most actively anti-CCP overseas Chinese I knew were so obviously schizophrenic that in one case even the generic soy-enjoying progressive mutual friend warned me about this before introducing them, and in the ideologically more integrated 1970s West one of the main streams of dissidents were people who took the Illuminatus! trilogy seriously.
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I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find. What it has is a thought that this will get attention and thus the grievances will be known and get attention. This seems to point to twin solutions of making targets harder to hit (schools are no longer the easy targets they were in the 1990s) by limiting access and slowing movement, and limiting the reach and saturation of the story; not giving the shooter notarity, not speculating on the motive, avoiding sensationalized reports of the carnage, focusing on the victims and their stories.
It’s always seemed to me that when a person reaches a point of dispair and rage at the society he believes is the cause, he tends to use the methods that the current system talks about the most. In the USA, it’s guns and sometimes vehicles. In Europe, it seems to be knives, bombs, and vehicles. You don’t see random bombings in the USA, even though they’d probably work to some effect. You don’t see guns in Europe.
"Every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice."
Now this...this is the kind of content that keeps me here.
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Doesn't that inevitably engender talking about the carnage, the shooters, and their motive?
It feels like wishful thinking to believe you can control a story so meticulously that the most titillating, sensational and puzzling parts of a story - i.e. the components most people want to know more about - could be left out in favour of someone talking about how hard it is to lose their son or friend in such a violent manner (the one component of the entire story that we can already imagine and know intuitively without needing it reported to us)?
Also, I feel like school shootings (in the media sense of the term, not the usual gang related shootouts that make up the vast majority of cases) have been somewhat decreasing compared to the past decade - maybe we have become a bit numb to it through over-saturation and that's dissuaded potential school shooters? 30 years ago shooting up a school could make your name and face legendary, you could become a kind of patron saint for outcasts and losers overnight. Today it's a crowded space, much more difficult to become part of the school shooter Pantheon like those Columbine kids.
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This has failed since Herostratus, and isn't likely to start working any time soon.
Notably, while we know herostratus’s name, nobody else seems to have copied him for a good long while.
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The random jihadi style attacks are less ideological than people assume.
Islam liberalized a lot of social policies, but also froze them. One of the problematic rules was that low level officials had unlimited tax power over their regions. These could be enforced on a small level.
One of the things that travellers between Christiandom and Islamdom often commented on was that in the Christian lands peasants often had carts. Under Islam they did not.
A cart was too much of a visible investment and could be sized by the local lord (not sure about the correct title) at any time.
How does a family protect it's wealth under those circumstances? One strategy it to convince everyone your family is too dangerous to mess with. The local lord or his relatives are frequently vulnerable to a mob of people with knives, they can't be hyper aware and guarded all the time.
However committing suicide makes you, and thus your family look weak. And therefore vulnerable to exploitation.
So you have things like "Running amok" where a brooding person suddenly lashes out in random violence.
So the attacks are often closer to "death by cop" than some deep ideological motivation.
You could probably eliminate a lot of it if there was some way for men who feel they've failed at life to die gloriously. But that's a big step for society to take.
Perhaps we could just start off by sending them on "the Hock".
This is a good point, and I agree that jihadism is often more ethnocultural than people assume. What I have trouble with is the idea that Syrian/Afghan asylum claimants in Western Europe feel like they've "failed at life" - they literally experienced the single greatest upward mobility of their families' entire history in terms of living standards, security and access to healthcare and housing by moving from rural poverty to countries like Sweden or Germany. Their apartment is paid for by the state (and even the shabby social housing here is better than living without running water or electricity in a village with no public transit connecting it to urban centres), food and clothing are provided reliably by both government agencies and charity groups/NGOs, they get to live in centres of cultural activity many of which are completely free of charge to enjoy, they even receive a monthly stipend to spend as they wish (granted, not much, but it's literally unconditional free money), AND they have the very real possibility of having their family getting residency permits in the same Western country if one member been living there long enough - how is this "failing at life"? It sounds like unimaginable luxury and comfort for someone living in quasi-medieval standards in some hut in Afghanistan.
And all the benefits I've mentioned are unconditional! That's not even getting into the possibilities if you take language courses (also offered for free by the government) and then seek employment (aided by governmental institutions and NGOs that exist specifically to help refugees find jobs, also free of charge), at which point you're on track for eventual citizenship, which is a lifetime, intergenerational guarantee that your needs will be met.
If one is given all of this, and the reaction is a so severe feeling of failure that you must take revenge on the country that gave you these amenities by wantonly slaughtering its children, I have to assume that the base expectation of life in Europe as a refugee was so outrageously high and inordinate (big house, nice car, pricey status brands of clothing, probably a state-mandated white sex slave, AND not having to work nor even learn the local language to acquire this) that one can barely consider these people adults or even mentally able.
No don't you see it man? When the state gives you everything it takes away the only thing that matters - purpose. You have 'failed at life' because you were just given all that, you didn't achieve it through hard work, and it is therefore worth less to you. This is felt especially innately by men coming from a culture that values the masculine provider, like the middle east - no matter what rationalisations our Muslim freeloader hears, deep in his heart he knows his father thinks less of him and his father's father wouldn't even spit on him. And it's not like he's too busy at work to brood and plan.
"Provider masculinity" isn't really a middle eastern thing, it's a western thing.
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I know plenty of pothead layabouts here in Vienna that are chronically unemployed and while they aren't super happy with themselves, they definitely enjoy the subsidised social housing and the welfare checks that allow them to live like perpetual college students without having to work. I really don't see Middle Eastern culture as having a "provider masculinity" at all - its a culture infamous for creating failsons, momma's boys and general worthless biomass that just lingers and mills about aimlessly in public squares. The idea that an Afghan asylum seeker only values what he "achieved through hard work" is an insane projection of your post-Protestant American work ethic on a culture that largely runs on family clan handouts and being the right person's nephew. How one can see an ingrained value for hard work in some of the most nepotistic and unproductive societies on Earth confuses me - why do you think they came to Europe in the first place, if for not free shit?
Lmao did I offend you somehow? That was not my intention, but this is a terser response than I expected.
No I am not 'insanely' projecting my post-protestant American work ethic on a culture that blah blah blah. I am describing the mindset of a particular type of person, the kind of person who gets given everything by the government but still works - as a doctor no less - and still also finds time to lobby the government, but still thinks he failed at life. That is the kind of guy who sees handouts as stripping him of purpose - if he didn't he'd be like your pot smoking buddies, languishing in ennui.
You're right, I overreacted - not offended, just kinda stunned. My bad.
I'm now also a bit confused since you're talking about the doctor who committed the Magdeburg attack, when that doesn't at all match the category I was describing - he was from a middle class Saudi Arabian background and definitely not receiving welfare. On the surface he's literally a model migrant - proudly secular, professionally educated and employed, clean record, etc. He also arrived in Germany by legal means long before the 2015 refugee crisis. What I was referring to are the vast bulk of uneducated, often rural refugees who enter illegally and then claim asylum in order to be allowed indefinite stay and financial assistance.
Fruck is partially correct, but more so incorrect. I will be speaking on a personal level, because I come from MENA. Fruck is correct, in the sense that some of the lashing out stems from a sense of inferiority or ennui; however, Fruck attributes this to a fundamentally incorrect cause.
First of all, it is trivially true that Arab culture in general do not value hard work or being a provider. Is being a provider expected? Yes, especially in the upper classes. But in the lower classes, all manners of mediocrity, laziness, corruption and sloth are generally accepted; hard-work is not an arab virtue. It would be incorrect to say that these men feel insulted because they are being denied the opportunity to provide for themselves.
They are, however, insulted by their perceived inferiority. Arabs, and arab men especially, are driven by a need to have "face". They need to appear rich, and powerful. Women need to love them, men need to obey and respect them. It's also important to note that many arabs believe that they are culturally and genetically superior to everyone else. So, when an arab refugee ends up in Europe, the cognitive dissonance between how he perceives himself (strong, virile, powerful), and what he actually is, which is a ward of the state, produces these incoherent and violent actions. In fact, their presence in Europe might actually strengthen this tension. In the Middle East, arabs can at least be ignorant of their station, but once exposed to European standards, in an ironic twist, it might drive them to further extremes of supremacy.
Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the inferiority psycho-sexual complex arabs have towards whites. Can be seen in these reddit threads: here, here, and here. For reference, /r/muslimcorner is a place where young muslims talk and discuss islam. Notice the weird comparisons towards white people? Notice the subtexual resentment?
It's very funny that the first one is from a Pakistani because I've heard them and other non-Arab Muslims be accused of the exact same thing except toward Arabs.
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I agree with this, and it matches my experience with Arab immigrants - especially the younger refugees - very well, having lived in Paris and now in Vienna. Especially in France, there was a constant sense of indignation among them and the word "disrespect" was used liberally whenever any entitlement didn't materialise. (By far the most outrageous recurrent example of this was them rudely approaching girls to hit on, and when told there was no interest, claiming they were disrespectful - a hilarious inversion of what was going on).
This begs the question - why would they even come here if they are so supremely sensitive and accept nothing but total slavish obsequiousness from the side of the state and population? I have trouble forming a theory of mind for these people, there seems to be a total lack of reflection around the most basic elements of social organisation : why would someone who doesn't work and lives off of foreign countries' welfare systems be respected? How can one perceive oneself as "strong, virile, powerful" after leaving behind one's homeland and sheepishly fabricating stories of persecution (i.e., being a weak victim) in order to gain asylum? Is it all just downstream from an extreme mix of chauvinism and anti-intellectualism?
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It is not entirely new development. Many acts of 19th and 20th century "propaganda of the deed" were perpetrated by not the most stable individuals and attention-seekers who sought validation by notoriety or hate, rarely motivated by calculated political strategy or a plot. Random anarchists and other terrorists generally did not achieve their goals. After and including Edward Oxford, several people tried to shoot Queen Victoria, and I believe none of them had any coherent plan they wanted to achieve. When someone achieved something according to a nominal plan, it is dubious the consequences were to their expectation.
As far as I know, the anarchist attacks of the late 19th Century were not randomised at all, but targeted precise members of the existing power structures - royals, police chiefs, ministers, etc. They might have had a psychotic/romantic component to them, but they had a vaguely coherent moral system of who deserved to be the target of violence - can you name an anarchist attack in which someone stabbed a random child that just happened to be there? I think throwing a hand grenade at the Tsar's carriage and stabbing a group of kindergarteners is not comparable in the slightest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_violence#Notable_actions
Here's a pretty good survey of anarchist violence, you'll notice that the choice of targets is precise and systematic.
Interesting to note that even when anarchist violence was more "randomised", it still focused on bourgeois institutions and symbols like the Opera and established coffeehouses with wealthy patrons. I really think the comparison to these recent sprees doesn't hold up well.
There is a difference, but I see I did not argue why I felt there is a similarity.
Anarchists / left-wing radicals came up with shared narrative justifying their attacks and selection of targets. However, most of time the attacks did not achieve the goals the narrative purported to they should have achieved. I think they were often motivated by the hate of bourgeois symbols, and embraced a narrative which claimed that killing bourgeois symbols would achieve something and provided validation for what they wanted to do. ETA: But the narrative failed to materialize. Their "systematic" thinking was not reality-based, so was it systematic at all?
I believe car attackers (or school shooters, or other lone wolfs) also have an internal narrative what they are doing makes sense to them, hating the people they kill if for nothing else when planning it and then doing it. The difference is that the "shared" aspect of the "shared narrative" is becoming increasingly lacking, that I acknowledge as the new development.
I was particularly thinking of Edward Oxford, who had no clearly defined political ideology at all. He decided to buy guns, practice shooting and take a shot at Queen Victoria because ... uh, he had become unemployed and felt like inventing a romantic revolutionary terrorist organization consisting solely of himself? How far personality-wise he was from Gavrilo Princip, a school dropout rejected from army whose assassination plot almost failed but set in motion of events that resulted in creation of Yugoslavia ... which he nominally wanted, but I doubt WW1 was the path he was envisioning.
I think Princip's motivations and actions were totally coherent and well-directed (he might not have imagined WW1, but the step-by-step consequences of his attack were exactly what he and the rest of the Black Hand had hoped for) and don't really fit our descriptor - I do agree about the "internal narrative" and I think that's an important component, that these sprees somehow make sense to the people committing them, no matter how wanton they seem from the outside.
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I think the biggest example, and one that you don’t mention, is China, where there were apparently 19 of these random murderous attacks in 2024, as per this end-of-year review by the BBC. As in Europe, I am given to understand that the earliest mass casualty attacks this century were by Islamists, often Uyghurs, but they’re now predominantly Han and unrelated to any grand ideological movement.
I think also of school shootings done for no discernible motive, which have increased rapidly since the 1980s even though kids in previous generations could just have easily have committed them.
Yes, I thought of the stabbing sprees in China, but I know very little about it and am always cautious about Western reporting of these kind of events, so I didn't mention it. A similar process, as you hint at, might apply there, too: what started out as a precise method of autonomist/islamist terror became a modus operandi for expressing dissatisfaction no matter your politics or chosen targets.
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It's probably comparable to school shooting in the copycat attack pattern way. News about school shootings make murderous loons think "Holy shit, I could shoot up my school!" News about cars being driven to crowds with fatal effects make murderous loons go "Holy shit, I could do so much damage just be driving my car into the crowd at a high speed!"
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