Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

by Nick Walsh These violent video games are murder simulators. They're not just murder simulators--they are mass-murder simulators, because the child drills, and drills, and drills, and drills, to kill every living creature in front of him, until he runs out of targets, or he runs out of bullets.

--Lt. Col. David Grossman, interviewed by EIR, April 27, 2007¹

As Lyndon and Helga Zepp-LaRouche have made the point, the violent video-game industry, spearheaded by individuals like Bill Gates, but directed by higher-level Anglo-American circles connected to the Revolution in Military Affairs, is aggressively recruiting potentially millions of teenage suicide bombers in the United States and Western Europe. The facts are irrefutable. These teenage suicide bombers are being cultivated to have the same psychological motive, to "fight and die for my cause," as radical Islamic terrorists of the Middle East. But, in many cases, their lethal ability, because of the video games, is greater than even the most well-trained assassins. Therefore, the leading threat to our national security today, is not terrorism in Asia, but rather, the mass movement of American and European school-age terrorists being orchestrated to murder their schoolmates, and themselves, by agencies directing today's computer game industry.² Those in high-level positions of government today, who deny the obvious cause of this new violence, or, even worse, defend the violent video-game industry's "rights" in the "free market," are themselves "working with the terrorists." Those who defend violent video games are the enemy of the United States. The facts permeate every case so far, in which a school massacre has occurred. Important cases, to prove the point, follow:

The Case of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18 years old Tuusula, Finland, Nov. 7, 2007 "I am prepared to fight and die for my cause." Pekka-Eric Auvinen entered Jokela High School, shouting, "Revolution! Smash Everything!" and then shot and killed seven students and a principal of the school, before shooting himself. Posted on his "YouTube" self-profile just hours before the killing, were video clips of himself playing violent video games. One of these featured him, as a British SAS Special Forces Agent, in Dice Games' "Battlefield 2: Special Forces." The killer's game stats, posted shortly after the massacre by the company, revealed that Auvinen, known as "NaturalSelector89," "has played 189 hours since March, which averages 50 minutes per day. At 10:47 AM yesterday [Nov. 7], immediately before the massacre took place, he played his last round of BF2 [emphasis added)]. Among those murdered, there is a member of the multi-gaming clan eyeGaming...."³ Auvinen, on his YouTube page, wrote, "Don't blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read." He said, of his motive for the massacre, "the truth is that I am just an animal." As all deployed terrorists will defend their masters, look more to what Auvinen defends: his entertainment!

The following are as listed by the killer himself on YouTube:

Hobbies: BDSM [bondage/sadomasochism], Existentialism, Shooting, Guns, Computer Games.

Favorite Books: 1984, by George Orwell; Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; and all of Nietzsche.

Music: Nine Inch Nails [a favorite of previous school killers], Impaled Nazarene, Hatebreed, Godsmack, Alice Cooper.

Movies: "Natural Born Killers," "Reservoir Dogs," "Dr. Butcher MD," "Lord of War," "Saw," "Apocalypse Now."

Now, these video games are simulators. There are flight simulators, that teach you how to fly. And there are murder simulators, whose only redeeming social value is that they teach you how to commit the act of murder. If these things were rape simulators, we would not tolerate letting our children play them. And yet, we sit and watch our children play endless hours, practicing blowing people's heads off. --David Grossman, interviewed by EIR, April 27, 2007

The Case, and Cover-Up, of Seung Hui Cho,⁴ 23 years old Blacksburg, Va., April 16, 2007 On that morning, the deadliest mass shooting by a lone individual in U.S. history occurred, when Seung Hui Cho entered Norris Hall at Virginia Tech University, shot and killed 32 people and injured 17, before shooting and killing himself. Nearly all of the killing was done in 10 minutes. Cho had no history of weapons training. He had purchased the two guns used in the massacre two months earlier, and practiced with those weapons for a total of one hour, on a shooting range. Police asked, upon surveying the massacre scene, "How could one person do all this damage?"

Although it's obvious, from study of the facts, that Cho was addicted to and driven, by violent games, this element of the story has been the subject of a major cover-up, reaching as high as the former head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. The following evidence reveals the truth.

On April 18, 2007 the Washington Post website, under the headline "Centreville Student Was Virginia Tech Shooter," wrote, "Several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung Hui from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike...." Hours later, the article disappeared from the site, and was never published.

On April 22, N.R. Kleinfeld, in a New York Times article, wrote, after talking with relations of Cho, "When Mr. Cho entered Virginia Tech, which is crouched in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, his parents drove him to school with guarded expectations. Perhaps he would no longer retreat to video games and playing basketball alone the way he did at home."

Cho's roommates, in interviews, said they never saw him playing video games, though the same roommates admitted, they had nearly no interaction with him. They reported, that he spent all his time in his room, on his computer. The police reported that when they found Cho's computer, he had removed the hard drive, and it has never been found. One investigator said, "I would like to get my hands on that computer."

In a videotape Cho made before the massacre, he called out the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Columbine killers, who had trained tirelessly on "Doom." Cho said to others, he "planned to repeat Columbine." Training on "Counterstrike," as his heroes had on "Doom," was essential preparation for that plan.

Although the Virginia Tech Panel Report of August 2007 shamelessly ignored all evidence of Cho's "Counterstrike" training, it indirectly proved the role of the games, through its description of the massacre. Keep in mind, as you read the following, that Cho, as with many of these killers, had no previous training with any firearms.

The Virginia Tech Report described how in Norris Hall, the main scene of killing, Cho shot and killed a total of 33 people, including himself, and injured 17 others for a total of 48 people. The report said, the time Cho took in Norris Hall was "about 10-12 minutes in total." During those 10-12 minutes, he walked around, and surveyed five classrooms, and returned to the classrooms "more than once." At two of the classrooms, Cho was prevented from entering, because students and a teacher held the door closed. At one classroom, "Cho returned and beat on the door, opened it an inch and fired about five shots around the door handle, then gave up trying to re-enter and left." Cho also tried to enter another classroom, but was held off by a teacher at the door. From the report's descriptions, it can be estimated that Cho spent between 50-75% of his time, that is, five to seven minutes, actually shooting. At other times he was either trying to gain access to the classrooms, or reloading his weapons. Most of the killing occurred in one classroom. During those five to seven minutes, he would have shot and killed, or injured, one person, on average, every six to eight seconds. Cho is reported not to have uttered a word during the entire time. The panel report wrote that he went about his killing "methodically."

According to Grossman, "'Counterstrike' is a game which has a complex set of rules that rewards head shots. If you shoot at the enemy, and you hit them in the torso, you might get 15, 20, 30% probability of a kill, but if you shoot at the head, you get a 90% probability of a kill. And so, while you are shooting, you are trained in the game to do double taps to the head, poom-poom, poom-poom, two, three, four, five shots to the head, which is what's happened in the actual phenomenon.... It's a very realistic game, in which heads explode, and bodies fall, and people twitch and they die" (EIR, May 24, 2002).

The fact that Cho was so driven to kill people he had no personal relation to, and that he spent only a few seconds shooting at each of his targets in such a methodical way, is evidence that he thought he was simply playing just another video game. The people he killed were targets on a computer screen. The game ended with a bullet to his own head.

In a video made just before the killing, Cho, sounding like a deranged terrorist from the Middle East, said, "You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today, but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours, now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

Q: There was a case in 1996, in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in Australia, where some combat shooter killed 35 people, wounding 22. And the point was made that the killed-to-injured ratio, was 1.6:1, which is exceptionally good. Now, in the case of the Erfurt boy, he killed 16, and wounded, I think, 6, or 9. You have a killed-to-injured ratio of 2.5:1, approximately. Now, can you really acquire that kind of skill, which puts you in a special forces kind of level? Can you get that from computer games alone?

A: 'Absolutely.

--David Grossman, interviewed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, EIR, May 24, 2002

The Case of Robert Steinhauser, 19 years old Erfurt, Germany, April 26, 2002 Robert Steinha@auuser entered the Johann Gutenberg school in Erfurt, and announced, "I won't be writing today," then stormed through the school firing rapid and fatal head shots. The following news account, as with the account of Virginia Tech, provides sufficient evidence of the cause.

"By all accounts, he stalked through the school searching out teachers and killing them with point-blank shots from the Glock to their heads. 'There were dead bodies lying everywhere in the corridors,' said Thomas Rethfeldt, 18. In all, the lethal teenager shot 40 rounds and killed almost a quarter of the school's teaching staff. 'I thought it was fireworks. Then the door opened, and a masked man came through the door. The teacher was standing there, and he shot her through the head, through her glasses,' said student Dominik Ulbricht.

"Dubbed the 'Erfurt Terminator,' Steinha@auuser killed pretty much everyone he aimed at. 'Many of the victims were killed with headshots; he clearly was a trained marksman,' said Bernhard Vogel, premier of the state of Thuringia, where Erfurt is located. Only one person was wounded on the leg from a gunshot. The other three wounded were hospitalized from shock."⁵

Although Steinha@auuser was a member of a gun club for a year before the massacre, no gun club provides this type of "skill and will to kill." Computer games, like "Counterstrike," do. Upon investigating Steinha@auuser's computer, police found he had spent countless hours playing violent games "Ninja," "Doom," and "Counterstrike." One officer said, "He had clearly become obsessed by these games and by the use of guns." The teen trained for a year on the games, with intent to carry out the massacre. During the crime, he wore the black clothing and mask of the ninja player from the game.⁶

At the Bill Gates-inspired Columbine High School massacre, which is something worshipped by many of the later killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris chose Hitler's birthday (April 20) to carry out their premeditated killing spree. Not coincidentally, Steinhauser chose the birthday of, apparently, his favorite Nazi, Rudolph Hess.⁷

Now basically, the children who've never played the violent video game before, when they have to kill somebody, they're thinking about it. It's a conscious, thinking effort. But, the children who've played the games a lot, and are very good at the games--there is no conscious thought; there is nothing but brain stem activity; it completely bypasses their conscious brain. The video game turns killing into a conditioned reflex.

--David Grossman, interviewed by EIR, May 24, 2002

The Case of Michael Carneal, 14 years old West Paducah, Ky., Dec. 1, 1997 At Heath High School in Paducah, shortly after morning prayers had ended, 14-year-old Michael Carneal raised a .22 caliber pistol in the midst of a crowd of students, fired eight times, and hit eight of them. He reportedly stopped shooting when he saw the bullet holes in the wall, and his close friend lying dead, covered in blood. When the school principal grabbed him, three teens were dead, and five wounded, one paralyzed for life. Carneal had no previous training with firearms, although, he'd logged countless hours killing, on Microsoft's "Doom" and "Quake." His skill, and will to kill, therefore, were strong, as evidenced by the difficult theft of the gun out of a locked box in a neighbor's garage.

Grossman said, "It's a 14-year-old boy, that's never fired a pistol before stealing that gun! Now, where did he get that incredible, unprecedented skill? Well, when he committed that crime, he planted his feet--and, according to all witness statements, he never moved his feet throughout the crime. He held the gun up at a two-handed stance. He never fired far to the left; he never fired far to the right. He just put one bullet in every target that popped up on his screen." Carneal's sister, present at the scene, reported to police that she did not recognize her brother's face as he committed the act.

"A stunning case," said Grossman. "You know, I train the FBI, I train our Green Berets, and nobody in history can find an equivalent achievement of marksmanship skills. He fired eight shots, got eight hits on eight different kids, five of them were head shots; the other three, upper torso. Three of those children, with just one 22 caliber bullet--a 22 caliber bullet is a very small, anemic round--he put one 22 caliber bullet in every child. Three of them were killed, and one of them is paralyzed for life.

"Now, this is the kind of supernatural shooting skills we're seeing. Part of it is visualization. Understand that a flight simulator can't teach a kid to fly. A flight simulator doesn't teach you to fly; it makes the learning curve much, much, faster. So, if you spend endless hours in a flight simulator, when you get in a real plane, you learn much faster. The kid in Paducah had spent countless thousands of hours playing the murder simulator, the point-and-shoot video games. He stole a pistol from a neighbor's house, and he fired two clips of ammunition--now that was his flight training--he fired two clips of ammo from a real pistol. Prior to that he'd never fired an actual pistol, but he transitioned very, very quickly from the simulator to the reality, because of all of his thousands of rounds.

"Afterwards, the police asked him, 'Okay. You shot the person you were mad at. Why did you shoot all these others? Some of 'em were your friends!"' (EIR, March 17, 2000). But Michael Carneal didn't know.⁸

Microsoft is running these types of operations. They are not merely profiting monetarily, but they're involved in orchestrating these actions.

--Lyndon LaRouche, Nov. 12, 2007

The Case of Wired Magazine Writer Clive Thompson, 38 years old Worcestershire, U.K., Nov. 5, 2007 On Nov. 5, 2007, degenerate writer Clive Thompson supplied clinical evidence to support the charge by Lyndon LaRouche that, the intended end-game of computer games is to drive the player to suicide. In addition, he provided clinical evidence that it is an obvious intention of certain institutions to popularize this cult of death, in the United States and Western Europe. In his enraged screed, titled, "Suicide Makes Sick Sense After Playing Halo 3," Thompson wrote, "I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mindset of a terrorist. That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting--with great success--terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing." The infantile Thompson whines that he "sucks" at Halo 3, played on Bill Gates's Xbox live, because he has a wife, and kid, and therefore only gets "maybe an hour with Halo on a good day." But, Thompson proclaims, therefore, he has learned to kill superior opponents by charging them, while being shot, and throwing a grenade at them at the last moment, to kill, "from beyond the grave." "It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber--or a kamikaze pilot. It's not just that I'm willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It's that I'm exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

"For me," the disgruntled family man continued, "dying will not penalize me in the way it penalizes them, because I have almost no chance of improving my state. I might as well take people down with me. Or to put it another way: The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes--haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away--just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves. Since the game instantly resurrects me, I have no real dread of death in Halo 3." On the subject of suicide, Thompson concludes, that "something about playing the game gave me an 'aha' moment that I'd never had before: an ability to feel, in whatever tiny fashion, the strategic logic and emotional calculus behind the act."

In another Wired magazine article, by the same Thompson, titled "I, Columbine Killer," he revels in the game "Columbine Massacre RPG," a game created to simulate the Columbine massacre! He writes, "I barrel into the Columbine High School cafeteria, pull down the fire alarm, and the kids erupt into chaos. Then I pull out my Savage-Springfield 12-gauge pump-action, which I've sawed off to 26 inches for maximum lethality. A jock stumbles across my path: With one blast, he lies dead on the floor. 'This is what we've always wanted to do!' hollers my fellow killer, Dylan Klebold. 'This is awesome!"'

This game, as can be observed, places the player in the shoes of satanic gamers' "folk heroes" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. What's the end of the game? Thompson can't wait to tell you: "As the school shootings wind up, your avatar commits suicide in the library alongside Harris.

The game cuts to real-life photographs of the killers' dead bodies, taken from security cameras in the schools."⁹

Conclusion And then there is the future. Coming soon to American youth is the new game "Persona 3," produced by Atlus Company for Sony's "PlayStation 2" console. In this game, your avatar is a high school student, going through the motions of high school life, until each day when "The Dark Hour" occurs and your school becomes "Tartarus," a monster-infested labyrinthine tower where students join together to battle "the enemy," called "the shadows." How does your avatar summon his "persona" in order to fight "the shadows?" By committing suicide! Yes, indeed, each time the student desires more power, he or she must pull a pistol up to their head, called an "evoker," and shoot themselves.

In the Middle East, radical terrorist recruits are gained through perversions of the Islamic religion.¹⁰ In the United States and Western Europe, the perverted religion of the terrorist, is the video game. The level of production, promotion, and mass distribution of these games, by people like Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire Bill Gates, Rupert "I, by dingo, like it bloody" Murdoch, Sony Company, Wired magazine, and others, in the face of the obvious effects of such games, proves clearly that the satanic effect is the intent. What is the end of game-playing today? To shoot yourself? To shoot your friend? Or, to shoot your classmates, and then, yourself? Is that why you play? If the people of the United States, led by the 16-to-25-year-old age bracket, do not destroy MySpace, Facebook, and these computer games, the United States cannot survive.

Only a zombified terrorist could be excited about that.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------