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The most obnoxious passage in the adversity-laden "manifesto" the killer of Halle left online before he went to kill is the one with the Achievements. Achievements are bonus goals that can be achieved in many video games today, but then there are virtual trophies, you can decorate your video player profile with it.
Even in real video games, the goals of "Achievements" often sound cynical - "kill so many opponents with a headshot", "kill so many enemies with a particular weapon". Transposed into the real murder plan of a true murderer, written in a pseudo-ironic style that is now recognizable as characteristic, they are disgusting, inhumane, deeply repugnant. If one believes his "Achievements" list, the perpetrator of Halle had, among other things, to kill at least one child as well.
Here the AfD, there the international anti-globalists
As characteristic as the mixture of pseudo-irony and hate is the mélange of white supremacy, right-wing conspiracy theories, racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, blended with video games, manga and cinema references, which is to identify the author as an initiate among initiates. Look, international brothers in spirit, this is what this text - written in English - say: I'm just as serene, ironic, broken and inhumane as you. We belong Together. The murderer wanted to be a role model - or at least belong to it.
Undoubtedly, there is a close ideological connection between the AfD, German Nazi networks and what was probably going on in the mind of the murderer of Halle. But he sought his audience out there in the vast world of the Internet. He considered himself part of a subculture "that is global, even though the globalists are actually totally detested," Christian Schiffer, video game journalist and co-author of a book on conspiracy theorists, said this week. The perpetrator of Halle evidently believed in the theory of the Jewish world conspiracy. On the representatives of the AfD refer again and again, only quite convoluted, but recognizable for initiates.
Supplies for the terrorist influencers
There is no simple causal link between video game culture and radical right-wing mass murder. But there is a history of radicalization within a small section of those who consider video games as part of their own identity. If you talk about it with people who identify themselves as gamers, but harvested until today often angry defense reflexes. That needs to change.
The misogynist hustlers of the so-called gamergate movement are still there, they still consider themselves a bulwark against "political correctness" and "social justice warriors", they celebrate Donald Trump and can always muster an online mob together. Most of this group will probably never violent. But they are part of an international scene from which the next imitators of today's terrorist influencers are recruiting. Maybe one or the other is slowly starting to think differently.
The failure of the services
The fact that the murderer of Halle apparently once again announced his actions online at relevant, if unnamed, location is an indictment of the security authorities.
8chan, for example, the ugliest and most offensive part of the Chan culture that began in the West with 4Chan, has been the scene of such announcements several times. Even the culprit of Halle seems to have been traveling there. There are pertinent messenger channels and other online rallying points of far-right internationals.
That this virtual right-wing terrorist underground exists, composed of white men who want to be somehow important, is no longer a secret. At 8Chan, the killers of El Paso and Christchurch and others have announced their actions. How can it be that an international intelligence community, which is supposed to be preoccupied with the fight against terror, does not notice this?
Long before the killings in Halle, 8Chan's original, meanwhile remorseful founder, Fredrick Brennan, told a Wired reporter that he hoped that 8chan would soon be closed down. "The only ones who really would suffer are the mass murderers to post on 8chan because they know that people will archive their stuff there. "
We live in a world in which NSA and Co. have tapped tens of thousands of computers, occupied central nodes of the network. A world where encryption has cracked, phones hacked, and even commercially distributed professional routers outfitted with rear doors. Email, messenger, web traffic are monitored and skimmed. Everything, supposedly, in the service of the "fight against terror". Why it was not possible to spend a few of the billions of dollars being invested to warn local police authorities about the mass murder, including photos of the murderous weapons, remains completely incomprehensible.
What needs to change, right now
Perhaps it is true that the intelligence services of the West are subject to the same perceptual distortion as the former head of the German domestic intelligence service: They continue to see terrorism primarily as their area of responsibility if it emanates from Islamists. In fact, there are certain parallels between the "self-activated" Islamist terrorists who have been murdering in Europe in recent years and today's "self-activated" right-wing terrorists. As a threat, however, the murdering Nazis do not seem to be on the anti-terror agenda. That must change on the spot, also in this country. At least the Attorney General seems to have recognized the problem.
There has been a lot of talk in recent years about online radicalization among Islamist terrorists, but little about the similar process that today's right-wing terrorists are undergoing. More surveillance will not be able to prevent such acts. But it is high time that the informal networks from which the self-activators come are finally thoroughly screened. And also to clarify the question of what role the recommendation systems of the major online platforms play in this.
And if only to achieve what it must ultimately be, and that is not a task for intelligence agencies: to understand how men get on this path of inhuman, murderous madness. So that we as a society can finally develop strategies to counter this. The terror only ends when nobody wants to be a terrorist anymore.
