Inside the mind of the amok-killer

In Winnenden, near Stuttgart, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer went on a shooting spree at a school and then a car showroom, killing 15. He had said before the atrocity:

I’m fed up. I’ve had enough of this meaningless life, which is always the same. Everyone ignores me, no one recognises my potential.

Dalrymple comments:

This reeks of resentful, narcissistic grandiosity, the result of an imperative to be an individual at a time when individuation is more difficult than ever.

Fuck off

These words, writes Dalrymple, are

the chief motto of British service industries.

They are also chosen, he points out, by

a surprisingly large number of auto-tattooists for the exercise of their dermatographical art.

He recalls a patient who

had the two words tattooed in mirror writing upon his forehead, no doubt that he might read them in the bathroom mirror every morning and be reminded of the vanity of earthly concerns.

Suitable applicant for a post in the British service industries

The seemingly minor social phænomenon of tattooing affords us, says Dalrymple,

a little glimpse into the Hobbesian moral world inhabited by a section of the population with whom we normally have little contact: they actually want to be considered psychopathic.

Moreover, we must not discriminate against someone who has Fuck off tattooed on his forehead. Dalrymple notes that

prudence is a virtue and used to be considered one of the cardinal virtues. No longer.

We have become so individualistic that

we claim the right to behave any way we like without any consequences for ourselves. A man may tattoo Fuck off on his forehead and then claim to have been discriminated against when he is refused a job serving the public.

The many hang-ups of Moslems in the West

Some observers, Dalrymple notes, see Islamisation

as the most fundamental threat to the continuation of Europe as a civilisation.

These people assume that Europe

does nothing to change the Moslems themselves, and that their religious affiliation is of such overwhelming importance to them that nothing else goes into forming and maintaining their identity.

Dalrymple believes this is too crude a view. Rather, he says,

it seems to me likely that Islamism in Europe is a reaction to cultural dislocation caused by the very power of the dislocating attractions (many of which seem to me to be, in truth, sub specie æternitatis, not very attractive) that Moslem youth experience merely by living in Europe.

The factors the West faces, and which it declines to tackle in any meaningful way, are listed by Dalrymple as follows:

• a highly secularised Moslem population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism

Fertile ground for Muslim ‘martyrs’

The outlook in France and the rest of the West is grim, says Dalrymple. He identifies the factors which, he writes,

ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come.

These are:

• a highly secularised Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism