The February 4 school shooting in Örebro was the deadliest such attack in Swedish history. The killer didn’t leave a manifesto, and officials are reluctant to call this a “terrorist” attack. But this shooting was not apolitical.
This piece was first published in Flamman.
The two heavily armed brothers were dressed like a masked tactical unit. They broke into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at noon on January 7, 2015, and opened fire at the editorial staff meeting. As they fled, the Salafist brothers also shot at the police who arrived at the scene. Among the twelve dead were five cartoonists and two police officers.
Ten years ago, we were “all Charlie.” And we didn’t hesitate to call it terrorism.
Terror is a carefully staged act of brutal violence designed to create maximum fear and shock. It is the weapon of the weak against an overwhelming enemy, as author Yuval Noah Harari noted in the Guardian after that massacre.
But what happens when a violent act comes without a manifesto? When the murderer has not explicitly stated their thoughts and motives? After the mass shooting at Campus Risbergska in the Swedish town Örebro, both politicians and police urged caution in speculating on the motive behind the massacre.
Authorities had already been prepared for Sweden to experience a school shooting. It wasn’t a question of if — only when. After the 2017 terrorist attack on the busy shopping street Drottninggatan in central Stockholm, police, emergency services, and health care professionals began conducting joint drills on how to respond to “ongoing deadly violence.” Schools practiced evacuation and lockdown drills — barricading themselves in classrooms.
A few minutes after the shooter Rickard Andersson stepped out of a school restroom, dressed in military gear and armed, and began shooting at students and teachers at the municipal adult education center (Komvux) in Risbergska, the rehearsed emergency response machine kicked in — police interventions, crisis teams, press conferences, identification procedures, and trauma support. Everything was communicated strictly according to protocol: avoid speculation about ideological motives, provide necessary information, let the investigation run its course.
Yet, among all these technicalities, a deliberate choice was made — not to call it an act of terrorism.
Even though the mass shooting was premeditated, a carefully orchestrated smoke-filled inferno. Even though it was carried out by a white Swedish man in military clothing — a loner who had severed his ties with society and ensured he left no personal traces online.
Witnesses reported that victims were selectively chosen. But in terms of gender, age, and occupation, the dead and injured were a mixed group. What united the names that have been released so far was that eight of the ten deceased were born abroad, mostly in majority-Muslim countries.
Terrorized
Despite the absence of a manifesto, the terror spoke. It sent a targeted message of fear to a large segment of the population with foreign backgrounds. Several witnesses told the newspaper Arbetsvärlden how abandoned they felt after the attack.
“Hate propaganda and anti-immigrant rhetoric have made us feel unsafe for years. But I never thought I would witness something so horrific. The government has left us unprotected and vulnerable to this horror,” said a female student.
The contrast was striking compared to reactions to the wave of gang-related bombings in Stockholm this January. Just days before the school attack, Johan Pehrson — leader of the Liberal Party that is part of the country’s right-wing government — had called for the criminal network Foxtrot to be classified as a terrorist organization. When Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson appeared on the morning news on TV4 to discuss the bombings, he attributed them largely to immigration. In that case, it was acceptable to generalize, to assign blame, and to stretch the definition of terrorism.
Sweden’s Total Defense Research Institute (FOI) has introduced the term stochastic terrorism in its reports to understand how terror is communicated, and how communication can lead to acts of terror.
Stochastic terrorism describes “how public figures and opinion leaders’ defamation and demonization of certain individuals or groups can lead to ideologically motivated violent acts carried out by lone perpetrators.”
Put simply: when groups or individuals are scapegoated on major media platforms, the threat against them increases, and the likelihood of violent attacks rises. If immigration is portrayed as the cause of gang crime, the risk of attacks against immigrants grows. Who says it, how widely it spreads, and on what platform it is said all influence the level of threat and terrorism risk.
“The lone wolf is an entrepreneurial barbarian, a one-man-pogromist, who wants to be copied,” writes British Marxist Richard Seymour in his latest book Disaster Nationalism. He argues that the wave of school and mass shootings is stochastic terrorism — each act of violence is meant to inspire another. Each massacre becomes a meme to be spread and sometimes even livestreamed through online forums.
Mass shooters are “consciously memetic,” Seymour explains. They study and copy one another. Swedish school shooters have referenced each other and, in some cases, have even exchanged ideas on the same forums. Even though Andersson’s massacre lacked a written message, Sweden’s deadliest mass shooting will likely be incorporated into future manifestos.
After the Örebro school massacre, many had trouble accessing the Flashback forum due to overload. In the wake of the horrific act, users of Flashback were forced to confront the forum’s own darkness. Were there users with the same ambitions as Andersson? Would copycats emerge?
Old posts resurfaced.
“I want to commit a school shooting,” one user wrote in January last year.
Administrators had to clarify that these old posts were not made by Andersson. But they still illustrate the dark subculture that has grown around school shootings.
Suicide Note “Manifesto”
“The lone wolf fascist, almost to a man, wants to be done with life: his ‘manifesto’ is a suicide note,” writes Seymour. Marxist philosopher Franco Berardi emphasizes this in his book Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. Massacres are outwardly directed suicides, he claims, even if many perpetrators survive.
Berardi analyzes a range of school-shooter manifestos and concludes that, regardless of motive, they share a common thread: perpetrators see their attacks as revenge against a society that has caused them suffering. They choose targets based on what will create the greatest shock effect. As Victor Malm writes in Expressen, where he is culture editor: “The murderers may be lone-acting madmen, but they want something.”
For Ida Ölmedal, culture editor at conservative Svenska Dagbladet, this is not reason enough. She argues that school shootings and terrorist attacks should be distinguished because the choice of location in the former has a biographical connection — something sociologist Jack Katz calls an “intimate massacre.” She writes: “While terrorists choose a stage that will create as much fear as possible and harm society, school shooters typically target a place that gives meaning to their own revenge and downfall.”
But this argument ignores the memetic nature of school and mass shootings. In online forums that spread manifestos and video edits, no such distinction is made. Footage from Anders Breivik’s massacre of young social democrats is mixed with knife attacks in Trollhättan and excerpts from the Christchurch mosque shooter’s manifesto. The deeds communicate with and inspire one another.
In the fifty-one-page manifesto from the school shooting in Nashville on January 22 this year, the perpetrator claims to have drawn inspiration from the “new generation of attacks,” from accelerationist groups such as No Lives Matter to the nihilist violence of 764. The Nashville shooter, in turn, inspired the fourteen-year-old who stabbed pensioners in Hässelby last fall, according to the Swedish public service channel SVT. The boundary between acts of terrorism and school shootings is thus fuzzy.
Attacking schoolchildren, synagogues, mosques, gay clubs, women’s yoga classes, or pensioners on evening walks creates maximum fear throughout society. Striking downward means striking at everyone. Not even immigrants who defy all prejudices, make an effort to learn Swedish at the Swedish for Immigrants program (SFI), or train for caregiving professions at the municipal adult education — as is the case of Örebro — should feel safe.
Therefore, it is impossible to separate mass shootings from politics. Even without written manifestos, the acts do manifest something. They become sources of inspiration and are copied. They exist in an interplay with public discourse, which singles out target groups through stigmatizing rhetoric, and causes fear that politics is forced to address.
Horrific acts that cause shock in entire communities. And things can hardly get more political than that.