After Magdeburg: reflections on the politics of mass killing

By Tad Tietze

As a psychiatrist who comments on politics a lot, I have a few things to say about the connection between politics and mental disturbance in horrific mass killings like the one in the German city of Magdeburg yesterday.

While I’m not a forensic psychiatrist, I did have an invited article on the topic published in a peer-reviewed psychiatry journal (see below for more).

So as not to “bury the Lede”, it seems to me likely that this attack was related to a mix of the perpetrator’s (political) belief system and some kind of moment of personal disturbance.

This mix of politics and mental disturbance has become an increasingly common feature of lone wolf mass killings — and it leads politicos to either blame killings on their opponents or to deny a “truly” political cause, depending on their own views.

My argument is that you can’t easily separate them.

We know very little directly about the recent mental state of the alleged killer, whose Twitter handle is @DrTalebJawad, a Saudi-born psychiatric medical practitioner living in Sachsen-Anhalt and recently practicing near Magdeburg.

I’m not going to speculate on his exact mental condition until we know more, but it’s possible he is disturbed in some way, even if not necessarily “psychotic” in the traditional diagnostic sense.

However, from his Twitter we do know that he holds a somewhat atypical mix of ideas for a refugee from the Middle East — hardline atheism, anti-Saudi regime, anti-Islamist, alongside support for Elon Musk and the German anti-immigration party the AfD.

It’s also clear he’s long been an activist and community campaigner in some way for many years (he arrived in Germany in 2006).

This has already scrambled right-wing attempts to paint him in the usual way that might confirm their preoccupations — e.g. like they could the failed Tunisian asylum-seeker considered a security risk who killed 13 people at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016.

You can read more on the Berlin terror attack and Angela Merkel’s mishandling of the aftermath here.

But left-wing attempts to simply write the Magdeburg killer off as far right Islamophobe also make little sense. After all, he has for many years campaigned for migrants’ rights against what he perceives to be a dysfunctional and unresponsive German state.

But we also know something more important about him: at some stage he appears to have become radicalised against German society as a whole.

Here is part of his pinned tweet-thread from August:

I draw on two main sources of expertise for my argument here.

The first expert is the forensic psychiatrist Professor Paul Mullen, who provided a categorisation of mass killers that is, I think, the most broad-ranging and clarifying.

He did it in an article on “The autogenic (self-generated) massacre”.

In the article Mullen distinguishes between two types of what he calls “massacres” (i.e. “relatively indiscriminate killings where just killing people is the prime aim and the victims are all, or nearly all, chosen by chance, albeit from some broad social grouping”).

The first type of massacre is socio-political: “Manifestations of social conflict where antagonism between different groups or classes of people erupts into violence, which could properly be called civil massacres”. He gives Yugoslavia and Rwanda as examples.

The second type is “autogenic”, or “self-generated”: “The result of the actions of an individual, or small group, driven by highly personal agendas arising from the perpetrator’s own specific social situation and psychopathologies”.

Autogenic mass killers become so radicalised they carry out a massacre against a social group or (as they see it) an entire society. Often there is a tenuous link between the victims and the apparent aims.

Think any number of public mass shootings in the US, from Columbine and Sandy Hook to the Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 people in 2017 for motives that are not entirely clear to this day.

Or even the Germanwings pilot who deliberately flew his plane into a mountain, killing 150.

In some cases, there is a clear record of mental health problems, in others the mass killing seems to come without past contact with the mental health system or other “warning signs”.

The problem with applying Mullen’s typology too rigidly is that in today’s world of increasingly socially detached politics and political activism, the line between the two has become more and more blurred.

Luigi Mangione’s recent murder of a health insurance CEO in NYC seems to have been driven by a highly idiosyncratic political worldview — as well as a more recent individual belief in the failure of peaceful means to achieve political or social ends.

Hence, he can be considered to have been nuts or be taken up as a political folk hero or be condemned as a political folk villain!

It’s been a similar story with Western Jihadism.

At their height as terrorist movements, Al-Qaeda and ISIS could recruit cells to operate in the West on their behalf — or to get them to travel to join the Jihad. Attacks like that on 9/11 took a lot of resources, coordination and planning, and couldn’t be the actions of totally isolated individuals or small groups.

They had some kind of social backing for their projects, even if a relatively narrow one.

Notably, though, many recruits were recent converts to Islam (including people with no Islamic background or connections, which I’ll return to).

Once ISIS started to go into decline and lost the ability to effectively organise recruitment and cells in the West, they called for individuals to act on their behalf, attracting a series of radicalised people who were often “troubled” in some way.

The resultant political debates on what or who was to blame were interminable!

Here we need to move onto who exactly might be susceptible to carrying out a massacre.

My second expert source is the French sociologist Olivier Roy, who has done what I consider the best empirical work on Western Jihadists. He concludes: “We must understand that terrorism does not arise from the radicalisation of Islam, but from the Islamisation of radicalism.”

Roy argues that the pattern is that these people mostly start by radicalising against the society in which they live and only afterwards take up an extreme Jihadist ideology, one that rejects not only the decadence of the West, but the traditional Islam brought by immigrants to the West.

This insight helps to explain why a disproportionately high number of Western Jihadists are recent converts to Islam. Particular forms of Salafist Sunni Islam provide a frame for their radicalisation.

In one infamous case, the ISIS-flag-brandishing man who individually took hostages and killed people in the Lindt Café in Sydney, Australia, was a known Shiite Muslim refugee rights activist who flipped to supporting a radical Sunni cause (one which was prone to vilifying and even killing Shiites as apostates!) very soon before his terrorist act.

Roy’s is a vital insight that helps explain more than just Jihadi terrorists.

The necessary first step is to become radicalised to the point of seriously considering violent acts against a particular social group (or the whole of society), and only afterwards is it given an (often idiosyncratically mixed) ideological frame.

From what we know so far, the Magdeburg mass killer certainly had a bunch of worked out views that drove his migration to Germany and subsequent campaigning efforts, but he was (as far as we know) a non-violent actor until quite recently. Hence, he was not on the radar of authorities (possibly despite warnings being made but not followed-up).

But you can see in his pinned tweets that at some point he radicalises against German society, saying he has come to new conclusions about the need for indiscriminate violence.

In this way he is like Luigi Mangione, who also (like most everyone!) had views and beliefs but then something happened to lead him to the radical conclusion that violent means were the only way forward.

Mangione, despite some on the left or right wanting to say he was the product of widely-held ideologies, looks much more to be someone whose particular individual grievances led him to radicalise towards the need for violent action.

As Roy would say, the attraction to death and killing is key to what drives these people: “the nihilist dimension is central. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself”.

Hence Roy compares Columbine to Western Jihadism. He sees the connections rather than trying to artificially separate ideological from non-ideological massacres.

Back in 2014, The @ranzcp journal Australasian Psychiatry invited and published my article on “The Breivik controversy: politics, terrorism and psychiatry”.

Breivik was a lone actor, not psychotic or suffering from schizophrenia but likely disturbed in some way, who developed a clearly laid out but idiosyncratic far right ideology — using a variety of sources — that he used to justify murdering a mix of bystanders in Oslo and left-wing activists on Utøya Island in 2011.

Breivik’s worldview was a scramble of the political and the idiosyncratic. He had connections to far right and fascist movements yet drew his own conclusions about how to address their decline and isolation.

His act of mass murder was supposed to be an inspiration for far-right revival, but it was also a way to act out his frustrations and grievances at his situation, which he attributed to an Islamisation of the West carried out by traitorous Western political classes.

In all these cases the violent act itself becomes to the killer a way to express in a very public way their grievances. Giving it a political form then guarantees it will get more public attention and be the centre of more political debates.

In some ways, ISIS’s call to the already radicalised is a sign of the times: you want people to really pay attention? Then throw some ideology in to get people thinking of your act as having social significance because of the causes you espouse!

This then raises the truly important question: what is it about modern liberal democratic society that leads a minority of people to radicalise so extremely against it? That is a deeper question about the nature of modern society that no politico wants to deal with honestly, because that would require deep social change and not political quick fixes.

Of course, some might argue that the moment of “radicalisation” for these people is simply a moment of mental breakdown and that we should treat them all as apolitical.

This would be a mistake.

Radicalisation in today’s world of socially-detached and socially-non-responsive politics — a world in which the social institutions that mainstream and more radical politics organised themselves around have hollowed out and in many cases disappeared — is by necessity increasingly idiosyncratic.

There are no longer great social institutions to express more general social and political discontent and alienation. And, therefore, no institutions to channel or restrain the most extreme radicalisation into more socially acceptable ends (e.g. joining a far-left or far-right political sect with grand plans for world domination through revolution that never quite take off!).

Overall, the degeneration of political terrorism into something that increasingly looks like an autogenic (self-generated) massacre parallels the decline of all politics into an increasingly fragmented and ideologically unstable scene.

Sadly, until large numbers of individuals in society start to move to fight for collective shared interests — i.e. true social movements (not just narrowly based and socially-detached political movements) that can start to overcome the social and political alienation at the heart of capitalist modernity — I expect more of these horrific acts to be perpetrated.

None of these mass murders is likely to achieve more than increasingly hollow and bizarre government attempts to stop the next attack, which themselves fail. But they do make the ideological mass killing more attractive to the already radicalised, because they give the act an apparent social relevance and weight it doesn’t really have.