At one point during the video feed he streamed on Twitch, the gunman who killed two people outside a synagogue in Halle in Germany smirks to the camera, “nobody expects the internet SS”.

Increasingly, we should.

The Halle murders follow a familiar template of violence, one established by the massacre of 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand in March this year, and then repeatedly imitated by fascists since.

In April, a young man shot up a synagogue in Poway. Beforehand, he published a manifesto hailing the 8chan bulletin board and then tried to livestream his violence.

In August, another fascist murdered 22 people in a racist attack on a Walmart in Texas. He, too, posted a document on 8chan praising the NZ massacre and its perpetrator.

The latest killer begins his Twitch stream with the now customary shout out to the anonymity of chan culture.

“My name is Anon and I think the Holocaust never happened,” he says.

To understand the “internet SS” – these men mouthing online injokes as they commit murder – it’s important to grasp just what such killers seek to achieve.

They see individual terrorism as a method for channelling into action the remarkable support that fascists enjoy on the darker recesses of the internet.

The architects of this strategy know that the sullen, unhappy young men attracted to 8chan already obsessed over the ever more frequent school shootings and workplace massacres in America, imagining them as moments of transformation in which a sad loser becomes, even for a few instants, an avenging god, his diminished potency and status miraculously redeemed by the weapon with which he mows down his enemies.

For ideologically-committed fascists, it makes sense to harness the dark allure of gun massacres for political ends.

Genuine fascism distinguishes itself from rightwing populism not so much by ideas but by action – in particular, by a commitment to violence, intended both to eliminate enemies and to restore the mystical soul of the nation.

But, in the United States, the attempt to build a fascist movement collapsed after the murder of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right event in Charlottesville.

The Australian fascist grouplets fared little better.

So instead of trying to organise further rallies, another option was to follow the script established by apolitical rage killers: stockpiling weapons, writing a list of grievances and meticulously planning a final confrontation. But at every step, the apolitical complaints of the school shooter could be replaced with the rhetoric of classical fascism.

That meant choosing symbolic targets, adorning guns with slogans, and writing political manifestos. In particular, it meant ensuring fascists on 8chan and elsewhere knew they were being addressed directly, by the use of their favourite memes and through livestream video over which they could exult.

If racial murder were gamified murder, terrorism itself could become a meme, a concept that would replicate and spread online, so that fascist gun massacres became a constant temptation for the damaged young men already committed to far-right ideas.

The Halle events reveal something of how that might work.

Even in the very different conditions prevailing in Germany, the perpetrator followed the model established in English-speaking countries.

He, too, wrote a manifesto, in which he set himself game-like targets to achieve (“Kill a Muslim and a Jew”, “kill someone with a pipe bomb”). He, too, streamed the violence, in footage in which he, perhaps inadvertently, revealed the pathetic desperation underlying the chan milieu.

“I killed a couple, I tried,” he mutters at one point. “Then I die. As the loser that I am.”

As news of the murders broke, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sent his condolences, describing the attack carried out on Yom Kippur as “another expression of rising anti-Semitism in Europe”.

He’s right, of course.

But the murderer’s casual shift from attacking a synagogue to executing a crying man in a kebab shop shows, once again, how antisemitism and Islamophobia reinforce each other.

The contemporary Jew-baiter and the modern Islamophobe make almost identical assertions: the Jew/Muslim wears strange clothes, eats distinctive foods, fosters violence and transforms the culture. More importantly, when bigots warn against an Islamic plot to transform the continent into “Eurabia”, they popularise a conspiracism akin to the old libel about the Elders of Zion secretly running the world.

The methodology matters more than particular details.

If you think the Holocaust never happened, you might equally believe in a Muslim Brotherhood plan to introduce sharia by stealth, probably perpetuated with the assistance of Cultural Marxists.

An attack on mosques, we’ve now seen, can inspire murder in a synagogue – and, for that matter, the killing of Mexican immigrants in El Paso.

That’s surely one lesson from the Halle murders: the normalisation of racial populism must end. When politicians – and Netanyahu’s a particularly notorious example – embrace xenophobia and Islamophobia, they facilitate a hatred that will be vented on the bodies of all kinds of scapegoats.

If ever there was a time for Jews and Muslims to unite, it’s now.

But we also need to think about the “internet SS”.

For obvious historical reasons, fascism in Europe looks very different from the tiny grouplets active in Australia and the US.

The far right in Germany boasts electoral successes as yet unimaginable in the English-speaking world. Nonetheless, the creation of a mass fascist movement still depends on a normalisation of political violence, something that, as yet, hasn’t taken place.

The misfits embarking on racial murder sprees to the cheers of their online pals will not create a fascist revolution. They might, however, reinforce an association between far-right ideas and actual violence, opening up the fissures between racial populism and genuine fascism in a way that encourages a move from one to another.

That, at least, is what the killers hope.

On the sites on which fascists gather, the Halle murderer has not, so far, received the acclaim he sought. The anons have mocked his appearance and his ineptitude, with many – in the usual logic of conspiracists – dismissing his actions as a so-called “false flag”.

Even so, again and again, the discussions come back to the single question: how might he have done better?

The implications are obvious – and terrifying.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist