YouTube Copycat High School Shootings - the New Social Statement?

by Christina 123 | September 23, 2008 at 03:18 pm | 427 views | 5 comments | 15 recommendations

MATTI Juhani Saari has one thing in common with Pekka Eric Auvinen, Jokela High School shooter, and the Virginia Tech murderer: they were all ardent admirers of the Columbine shooters, misfits Klebold and Harris, who jeered and pulled faces in to a youtube video before shooting dead 12 of their classmates in the Colorado college.

Virgina Tech killer Cho went to great lengths to deliver his artform videos to a tv broadcasters to coinicide with the shootings, Auvinen churned out sophisticated Nietzchean posturings, which several more unsuccessful would-be high school killers tried to emulate, for example a 15 year-old suspect in Norway presented a YouTube video featuring a 'Working Class Hero' soundtrack, whilst ominously threatening a Norwegian junior highschool that the attendees would die on a certain date. L:uckily, it was intercepted and the police put up metal detector barricades at the school door. on the predicted date.

What is chilling about Saari's video is that it is virtually identical to that of Cho's and Auvinen's, with a hand gun pointed directly at the camera with existential rhetoric.

"You will die next," sneers Saari as he pumps four bullets towards the lens; quite similar to Auvinen's efforts in November last year.

Revelations in the TIMES suggest that the Jokela gunman had been in contact with American teenager, Dillon Cossey, aged 14, who was arrested the previous month for planning a massacre at his school in Philidelphia, and thus, that the Jokela High School massacre was a copy cat one of Columbine and Virgina Tech. Both teenagers appear to have been admirers of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed 12 schoolmates at Columbine in 1999, as was Cho Seung-Hui, the Virgina Tech killer.

I heard on the news that Cho Seung-Hui may have timed his massacre precisely to coincide with the Columbine shooting. Together with Cho's literature, the 'arty' video and ranting poetry, not dissimilar to Ginsberg's "Howl", it appears that - mental ill-health aside - this was meant to be a statement of style, of "School-Shootings-As-Art" form. Cho uses drama techniques at the end of his NBC tape by pulling up his hood, lowering his voice and slowing the pace of his diction to give an overwhelmingly sad and touching effect to his word. Suddenly he seems like a young child.

Cho Seung-Hui does not seem to rail against his government nor even mentions politics, in fact he sounds pro-communist with his rant against kids not happy with their "mercs" or gold chains, again like Pekka-Eric Auvinen, he appeals to philosophcial, moral, ethical and political principles. Auvinen's reference to Social Darwinism equals Eugenics = Natural Selection = Final Solution, a quasi-superior stance, links with the Timothy McVeighs of the world and cult-like ultra-violent film industry and media is exposed.

We live in a society that glorifies violence, i.e., people can get their 15 minutes of fame by "topping" themselves in the prime of their youth and by taking as many people as possible with them. The latest, Matti Juhani Saari appeals to a German industrial metal band Wumpcuts pounding out quasi "life is pain life is a war" - type lyrics in the track that Saari adopts as his own philosophy. Wearing a ski mask and all in black loaded up to the eyeballs with explosives or fire-accelerants, Saari made his exit from the world by taking ten of his college friends with him, turning their bodies into a funeral pyre. Armed with Molotov cocktails, a uniquely Finnish "invention", Saari makes another ironic statement. The original Finns who used the Molotov cocktail against the Russians were heroes. This was different from Columbine, Virginia Tech or Jokela.

Cho Seung Hui refers to John Mark Karrs & Debra LaFaves in the manifesto Cho sent NBC news, just before he carried out his atrocity at Virgina Tech. It seems that Karrs claims he is the child killer of Jon Benet and LaFaves is a teacher convicted of having sex with a pupil. Given Cho's obsession with the paedophile issue, as witnessed in his graphic coursework plays, one dealing with a teacher stalking a pupil and another, about a stepfather who kills his 13-year old son who accuses him of paedophilia, we must wonder whether Cho Seung Hui is a victim of child sex abuse himself.

Pekka-Eric Auvinen is presented as a lonely, alienated and bullied "outcast" (his own word). What a powerful message this sends to teenagers across the globe, when fictional characters such as Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road became cult Anti-Heroes for the youth of the day. In the fifties, these iconoclastic figures were in the shape of Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones" or James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause". The romantic notion of riding off into the sunset on a Harley Davis bike wearing a black leather jacket was a satisfying ending.

Not any more.

We now have a generation of youth growing up to venerate real High School Massacres and the Teenage Gunman. The Youtube videos and Manifestos are pored over by society after the event in an attempt to understand,"Why?". A Facebook Group that calls itself "sympathizers" of the Jokela killer - and now the Kauhajoki killer - (Corrupt Org) explain they are trying to present a "neutral" philosophical framework that resists the notion that we should just brush off the phenomemon as "some crazy lunatic",' but instead ask ourselves, what has made these young people adopt their nihilist stance?

The group has twice been removed by Facebook, understandably, in the face of the grief of the bereaved relatives of the Tuusula victims. But were Kebold, Harris, Cho and Auvinen *"suicided by society"*, as French philosopher, Antonin Artaud might have put it? Perceiving themselves as being "rejected" by their peers caused them deep and damaging hurt, with grim repercussions on those around them

"Truth is a power. But one can see that only in rare instances, because it is suffering and must be defeated as long as it is truth. When it has become victorious others will join it. Why? Because it is truth? No, if it had been for that reason they would have joined it when it was suffering. Therefore they do not join it because it has power. They join if after it has become a power because others had joined it." ~ Kierkegaard

Finland's interior minister, Anne Holmlund, said the gunman was detained for questioning yesterday about the YouTube postings in which he is seen firing a handgun.
In one of the clips the man wearing a leather jacket fires several shots in rapid succession with a handgun at what appears to be a shooting range.
The posting was made five days before today's atrocity and the location was given as Kauhajoki.
The posting included a message saying: “Whole life is war and whole life is pain.
"And you will fight alone in your personal war.”
Ms Holmlund said police released the man because they had no legal reason to detain him.
School janitor Jukka Forsberg said of the shooting: “Within a short space of time I heard several dozen rounds of shots, in other words it was an automatic pistol.
“I saw some female students who were wailing and moaning, and one managed to escape out of the back door.”
The Finnish news agency STT reported that the school building was on fire and the gunman had explosives on him.
Vesa Nyrhinen, detective superintendent from the local police, said of the gunman: “He was wounded by his own bullets.”
College rector Timo Varmola said there were 150 students in the school at the time.
The 22-year-old identified himself on the video sharing website as Mr Saari.
He had posted three other clips of himself firing a handgun in the past three weeks.

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Clips from the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado were listed among his favourite videos.
The shootings happened almost a year after another gunman killed eight people and himself at a school in southern Finland.
Pekka-Eric Auvinen, described by police as a bullied 18-year-old outcast, opened fire at his high school, on November 7.
He killed six students, a school nurse and the principal before ending his own life with a gunshot to the head.