DO NOT READ THIS (Mass murder manifesto)

You have been warned.

This is the sick and horrible MANIFESTO of a mass murderer.

YES, it is about the VIRGINIA SCHOOL SHOOTING.

Gun-laws

The United States Constitution » second amendment

A well regulated (arms are locked away in peace-time) militia, being necessary to the security of a free state (not neccessary today, security is not under threat), the
right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

In other words:

The right to bear arms is infringed (i.e. possessing arms is FORBIDDEN), because of the following requirements are not met (unless you want to be a rabulist).

• well regulated militia (i.e. not single persons)
• necessary for security of a free state (i.e. state, not neighborhood defense)

Q.E.D.

Intentional creation of a hostile society

In his very watchable film, The Trap, Adam Curtis rams our noses in the pathological plan that the corporations have enacted on our societies. In a nutshell, the Cold-War game theory was applied to keep us in negative freedom.

I have a dream: Imagine what a wonderful world of fun we would inhabit if the organising principle was Free Money instead of capitalist usury and debt slavery. Just imagine the explosion of the arts, the durable, beautiful architecture, the communal turkish bath houses and youth centers on every street corner, free public transport, electric cars and so on.

Back to reality:

HERE ARE THE GRUESOME PICTURES OF A PRODUCT OF HOLLYWOOD AND CORPORATIONS MAKING WAR RESPECTABLE.

"War is so reputable still, because of Hollywood that George Bush can say ‘I am a war president’. That’s like saying ‘I am a syphilis president’. Kurt Vonnegut

Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only you didn't f*ck the living sh*t out of me. You could have been great. I could have been great. Ask yourself what you did to me to have me clean the slate. All the sh*t you have given me, right back at you with hollow points (open kogels) Don't you wish you finished me off when you had the chance? Dont you just wish you killed me? Number of the Anti-Terrorist You wanna rape us John Mark Karrs? You wanna rape us Debra LaFaves? F*ck you. Are you happy now that you have destroyed my life? Now that you have stolen everything you could from me? Now that you have gone a 9/11 like f*cking Osama. Now that you have f*cked your own life, lick fucking Kim Jong- II. Now that you have gone on a human safari like f*cking Bush? Are you happy now? Let the revolution begin. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. "Like Moses, I split the sea and freed my people, the weak, the defenseless, the innocent children of all ages." Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can? You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything. ======== Here are some more quotes from him. "Like Moses, I split the sea and freed my people. The weak, the defenseless, the innocent children of all ages."- Cho Seung Hui "You just loved crucifying me."- Cho Seung-Hui "Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?"- Cho Seung-Hui "Thanks to you, I died, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."- Cho Seung-Hui (except that Jesus died not die. They did not break his legs! He survived the crucifiction and this was the cause celebre to found a religion on.) Because his parents are members of the Christian Church and because of his references to Jesus and how they are crucifying him(Cho), his beliefs were most likely of Christianity and the words "Ismail Ax" were probably taken from the Old Testament. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?

Ismail Ax and the North Korean President

SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES AND A NOTE

I. “Campus Shooting at Virginia Tech“
II. “Massacre at Virginia Tech: The Victims.“
III. (related) “Making sense of losses: Guest blog by Kathryn Casey.”

To be fair, blogger Pamela Geller Oshrey of Atlas Shrugs may have noticed the following strangeness first. She has yet to explore it further. I guess that’s up to obsessive insomniacs like me.

Virginia Tech spree killer Seung Hui Cho, age 23, was found with a peculiar name written on his arm: Ismail Ax.

As Cho may have worked very hard to erase a good deal of his identity, the web-searching frenzy sparked by that mysterious name and Cho’s other known writings has so far been fruitless.

Still, if you slog through all the hits from Google’s Blog Search on “Ismail Ax,” you eventually reach this result:

Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy 1971 12 Apr 2007 by war

… young boy went missing in 1971, the people searched for the boy by word of mouth; the Asian Intelligence Agency (AIA) put a stop on all media and threatened to kill anyone who continued to pursue the issue of the missing boy. ismail Ax.

The North Korean President - http://presidentryan.blogspot.com/index.html

The blog, presidentryan.blogspot.com, is no longer online, is not in the Wayback Machine, and I could find no hits in Google’s cache…

I decided to take my search to Technorati:

The North Korean President.

On the off-chance the information is one day deleted from Technorati, I also made a screen cap of the results. You can click on the thumbnail on the left to see the image.

Google’s blog search and Technorati captured results from this blog at different times. Here is the Technorati snippet from the entry first found in Google Blogsearch hits:

Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy 1982
The North Korean President · 5 days ago · No blogs link here yet

The Americans controlled everything in South Korea, and when a young boy went missing in 1982, the people searched for the boy by word of mouth; the Asian Intelligence Agency (AIA) put a stop on all media and threatened to kill anyone who continued to pursue the issue of the missing boy…

It appears that on April 12, “war” posted that Americans had kidnapped a South Korean boy in ‘71. War apparently ended the entry with the tantalizing non-sequitur of a name, Ismail Ax — a name that would not be known to the public until April 17, after it was connected to the worst shooting spree in American history. Then 5 days ago, according to Technorati (that would have been April 13), the entry was edited, 1971 changed to 1982, and the name “Ismail Ax” deleted.

The same day, “war” apparently posted a new entry, titled “The American Connection.” Here is the portion of that entry captured by Technorati:

It was generally assumed that Kim Il-Sung would die and Kim John-Il would succeed the President, and when the time came in 1994, the Americans had another plan to dispose of the Kim family and put a South Korean trained agent as the next North Korean President…

Seung Cho bought his first handgun on March 13. According to this ABC News online article, Cho bought his second weapon on or around April 13 — about 5 days ago.

So far, this is intriguing and a little chilling, but there are flies in the ointment. For one, Technorati indicated that the weblog was last updated 16 hours ago — a full day after Seung Cho died at the end of his rampage across the Virginia Tech campus. Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 17th would have been the time the blog was updated. Was that when it was deleted? If so, who deleted it?

Any doubt that the owner might have wanted to associate the weblog with Seung Cho was erased by this Technorati result:

Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent
The North Korean President 16 hours ago

But there is again that pesky timing element, and the question of how search engines determine the time stamps of results. Do some search algorithms rely on the stamp on the blog entry, which can be manipulated by the user? It appears that Google’s Web search does not, but it’s harder to tell with the blog search.

I did another search using blogsearch.google.com, this time of the URL for the blogspot blog.

Again the results were chilling, and slightly different from Technorati (click the thumbnail if you are reading this after the search results have either changed or vanished). The entry titled “Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent” contained text in Google’s result. A single sentence:

Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent
It’s election time.
The North Korean President

I guess at this point I am left with a couple of questions.

The “1971″ version of the “Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy” entry was stamped April 12. The spooky “AIA Agent” entry above appeared to have been made or at least altered somehow yesterday. So: did Seung Cho have a blog, and rig it to self-destruct or have an accomplice alter it for him? Or did another hoaxster decided to play around with an attempt at Internet Infamy, a la WaniusMaximus? Could a family member, appalled and ashamed of what transpired at Virginia Tech, have gotten into Cho’s accounts and deleted anything incriminating, or simply insane?

I wouldn’t have spent as much time as I have on this if it were not for the open question of how long this blog has existed, and whether or not it was edited prior to Seung Cho’s killing spree. The presence of the name Ismail Ax, the strong anti-American paranoia expressed, the delusion inherent in calling himself an AIA Agent — all might fit the emerging portrait of the man. But hoaxsters aren’t always idiots, either. Some of them are subtle enough strike the right notes in an effort to fool their intended audience.

Yet if this blog was created in the last two days as a hoax, why was it then deleted? What would be the point?

I don’t know. If the search engines essentially agreeing on the age of the 5 to 6 day old entries are not the result of a blogger trying to game results with a timestamp, then I’m very inclined to believe that presidentryan.blogspot.com was Seung-Hui Cho’s weblog, and that he attempted to get rid of it, just as he did many other aspects of is identity.

Do your own poking around. What do you think?

Updates will be posted below.

UPDATE 1, 4:29 a.m. ET

A Technorati result that steers me further towards thinking this is a hoax:

Technorati Search: Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy.

The “Ismail Ax” result is time-stamped 12 hours ago.

UPDATE 2, 2:05 p.m. ET

Mike Clyne, writing in Bangkokker, has the best, most logical explanation yet for the origin of the name “Ismail Ax” that I’ve seen. Rather than quote, I’ll let the reader check out Mike’s entry in its entirety and judge for themselves. I still wonder if Cho just thought “Ismail (or Ismale, or Ismael) Ax” sounded cool. He was a writer, after all, and many writer’s minds, be they sane or insane, tend to work that way — they just like the sounds of words, especially if they are able to find some resonance in the words later.

I do not think Seung Cho’s crime was remotely related to organized terrorism. In his mind, perhaps Cho was an agent of similar chaos, but the personality being revealed through numerous accounts in the media is not that of a man who would have joined any kind of group for long, much less a terrorist cell. Taking any muslim references from Cho too seriously is just part of an attempt to manipulate this hideous crime for political gain. I’m with the Governor of Virginia on that score — to somehow use the VA Tech massacre for political purposes is loathsome.

UPDATE 3, 3:51 p.m. ET

I am a bad crime historian. Damn. MSNBC has been mentioning on-air the Bath School disaster. I had read at length about this tragedy in the past, but it didn’t occur to me to write about it in the wake of the VT massacre.

The Bath School event was actually the worst mass murder on a campus in American history, and it happened on May 18, 1927. It wasn’t a shooting, though — a school board member named Andrew Kehoe dynamited the building. His grievance? A property tax levied by Bath Township (MI) drained Kehoe’s funds and was forcing his farm into foreclosure.

The bombing killed 45 and injured 58, according to Wikipedia. As it was a bombing, it might first seem more akin to an act of domestic terrorism similar to the bombing of the Murrah building by Tim McVeigh and others, but it seems to me that other than using explosives, Kehoe was similar in outlook to shooters. His grievance was personal, and based in anger, hatred, and perhaps paranoia.

The majority of victims killed in Bath Township that day in May were elementary school-aged children.

UPDATE 4, 4:27 p.m. ET

Keep an eye on any NBC news outlet. The network has become a part of the investigation, thanks to Seung Cho. Apparently NBC received a packet of images and rambling notes from the killer, which they turned over to the investigators. This from an announcement made on MSNBC at 4:25 p.m. ET.

UPDATE 5, 7:20 p.m. ET

One thing is becoming clear — the first victims of the massacre apparently didn’t know Cho. Early reports from the University filtered through the mainstream media made it appear as though Ryan Clark and Emily Hilscher may have known their attacker, and then a number of bloggers followed suit, even adding in finer details.

The following is from TimesCommunity.com, an article published on April 17, 2007:

Hilscher, a Woodville resident, was apparently the first victim of the shooting as the gunman opened fire in a dorm before continuing his rampage at an engineering classroom located on the Virginia Tech campus.

Rappahannock County Administrator John McCarthy said it appears that Hilscher was an innocent bystander. “From what I understand, she was standing in the hall when the shooter approached,” he said.

(…)

Currently there is no information that indicates Hilscher had a relationship with the shooter. One student from Rappahannock County High School stated that her current boyfriend was Karl Thornhill, also a graduate of RCHS and her prom date last year.

Although Thornhill reportedly was under investigation by law enforcement officials, the Virginia State Police has released a statement clearing any suggestion that Thornhill had any involvement in the shooting.

Why Cho chose to do any of what he did is beyond the grasp of rational people. What is clear now is that from the very beginning, the massacre was the ultimate “random act of violence.”

Committed by a completely delusional, narcissistic, insane young man. NBC Nightly News’s Brian Williams said it best when he termed Cho a “uniquely sick” person.

UPDATE 6, 4/19/07, 12:39 a.m. ET

Viewing MSNBC’s slideshow of pages 1, 2, 5, and 11 from the “Manifesto” NBC received from Seung Cho on Wednesday, April 19, I was particularly struck by page 2. Here is part of the text Cho wrote:

Are you happy now that you have destroyed my life? Now that you have stolen everything you could from me? Now that you have gone on a 9/11 on my life like [redacted] Osama. Now that you have [redacted] your own people like Kim Jong-Il…

In the original blog entry above I quoted text found on the blog that once existed at presidentryan.blogspot.com. The blogger, whose screen name was apparently “war,” had posted the following in an entry titled “The American Connection”:

It was generally assumed that Kim Il-Sung would die and Kim John-Il would succeed the President, and when the time came in 1994, the Americans had another plan to dispose of the Kim family and put a South Korean trained agent as the next North Korean President…

Coincidences in instances like this are certainly possible. I remain much more skeptical of the deleted “North Korean President” weblog than not (see the note in bold below), but the portions of the manifesto NBC has made available already have me wondering.

NOTE: For the moment, I am of the opinion that presidentryan.blogspot.com is a hoax. presidentax.blogspot.com (see comments on this entry) is most assuredly a hoax — it says so on the blog. I also strongly object to criticism for making note of The North Korean President (”president ryan”). Anyone who thinks I’ve focused unduly on the killer’s mind has not read the first two entries on this weblog about this atrocity. Additionally, while it was worth some exploration, the entry above was anything but uncritical or lacking in skepticism.

Comments

Dr. ISMAIL AK is a Professor of Psychiatry at a university in Turkey. His research interests include the following:

Personal Disorders, Agresivve behavior and self-mutilation, ECT, Substance-related disorders, Sexual Disorders, Forensic Psychiatry, Sleep Disorders

From the Turkish Association of Psychopharmacology website:

President-elect:
Professor Ismail AK, M.D. Head, Department of Psychiatry, KTU School of Medicine, Trabzon, Turkey
Ismail AK is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Head, Department of Psychiatry, KTU School of Medicine, Trabzon, Turkey
He is an experienced on clinical psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.

Dr. Ismail Ak is one of the authors of an article about patients with mental disorders, psychotic features, etc.:

As regards pharmacotherapies, 354 (50.2%) were given antidepressants. . . . Among antidepressants, Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were 72.8%. . . .

This is an abstract of an article co-written by Dr. ISMAIL AK:

Even though all psychiatric disorders do not have the same potential with regard to committing a crime, the number of individuals having psychiatric disorders is gradually going up depending on the increase of crimes and violent behaviors committed in a society. . . . The relation between existence of psychiatric disorder and crime behavior has been significantly emphasized in several earlier studies. In conclusion, it is notable that the rates of committing crime for the individuals with psychiatric disorders are on the rise.

Dr. Ismail Ak is apparently one of the world's leading experts on the psychiatry of antisocial and suicidal behavior, psychotic and bipolar disorders, psychopharmacological therapy, etc.

The young man had been noticed to be disturbed and had been referred to counseling. Dr. Ismail Ak is an expert and author in the particular field most directly related to the guy's disorder.