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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.
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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