StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
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.
February 12, 1894 – Émile Henry, intending to avenge Auguste Vaillant, sets off a bomb in Café Terminus (a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare train station in Paris), killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, when asked why he wanted to harm so many innocent people, he declares, "There is no innocent bourgeois." This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda by deed targets only specific powerful individuals. Henry was convicted and executed by guillotine on May 21.[5]
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.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
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.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
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.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
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.
StJohnOfPatmos
11mo ago
Being poor in a Western European country is still a better deal than receiving a generous salary to fight in a bloody war. The standard of living is too high for that tradeoff.
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.
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