by Christos Zabounis

At 12 PM on Thursday, April 24, Justin P. entered a classroom at the private school Notre-Dame de Toutes Aides, where he was a student, and stabbed 15-year-old Lorene 57 times. He then proceeded to an adjacent classroom and stabbed three more students. A member of the teaching staff managed to subdue him by striking him from behind, and within eight minutes the police arrested him. These are the facts according to the police report. The motives behind his heinous act had already been shared by Justin a few minutes earlier, through an ideological-political manifesto that he emailed to his classmates. In it, he denounced, among other things, globalized ecocide, the extinction of species, industrial exploitation, and chemical pollution. “Nature,” he wrote, “has become a warehouse of resources that we deliberately defile, a soulless object subjected to calculations, graphs, and profits.” Although the prosecutor in Nantes stressed that “no motive can be determined with certainty,” it seems the so-called Godwin’s Law prevailed — a principle formulated in 1990 stating that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” The Jerusalem Post headlined the story the following day: “Nazi-sympathizing French high school student stabs girl to death in Nantes,” while the Greek newspaper Documento adopted a similar approach, adding a question mark: “France: Was the student who killed a girl in a Nantes high school a Hitler admirer?” Upon carefully reading the 13-page manifesto, one excerpt particularly caught my attention: “Loneliness is no longer a temporary condition; it has become a structure. And within this structure, social alienation takes root.” Witnesses described Justin P. as a solitary individual. I would also add “anti-globalist,” given that he clearly emphasized: “Globalization has turned our system into a machine for the decomposition of humanity.” At one point, he even writes the word ‘Hybris’.