After the tears have dried and the cries of outrage fallen silent, we may begin to recognise that the cinematic qualities of the Utoya Massacre were drawn from trashy horror flicks. It is a recurring theme within the Friday the 13th Screams at Elm Street genre that a serial killer must stalk a peaceful summer camp and murder innocent youths. Friday the 22nd’s killer effectively brought the celluloid violence to life, further crystallizing the phenomenon of Man’s nightmares intruding onto reality. This trend towards violence began innocently enough with grim dime novels and gore spattered cinema, but it then began to deaden the minds of our children with “first-person shooter” video games of increasing realism. Nowadays those same children have grown into soldiers directing unmanned drone attacks upon far-away lands, and at least one of them has visited a nightmare upon this peaceful island summer camp.
Shooting people who can’t shoot back is a vile act, the mark of a mass murderer, a paid executioner, or a NATO soldier. For two hours the killer professionally, confidently, and coolly stalked the unarmed youths, executing them one by one in absolute safety; for one hundred days the killer’s ex-classmates, now in NATO Air Force, professionally, confidently, and coolly stalked unarmed Libyans from the absolute safety of distant compounds. Breivik hated Muslims, hated Socialists, no doubt he hated Ghadafi, a Muslim Socialist; but better than a thousand Ghadafi-dispatched terrorists his deed should remind the people of Europe that wars abroad will bring war home, too. There are too many licences to kill being produced.
Why did he do it? We can answer the question: the massacre was essentially a publicity stunt to attract worldwide attention to the killer’s magnum opus, a 1500-page compendium entitled “2083”. Breivik’s screed is no great work of the human spirit; it is rather a copy-paste hodgepodge of Neocon ravings against Islam and Communism. In any case it does merit a look, if only because so many people were killed in order to make us read it. If this Breivik was a Herostratus, let us see why he burned down the temples of so many lives. Moreover, we must pinpoint where he went wrong.
2083 reveals that a new, vicious strain of political virus has emerged from the genetic engineering labs within the think tanks of the Neocons. The Masters of Discourse have long referred to traditional conservatives as “Nazis” because they oppose unrestricted immigration. They have made much hay of the fact that Nazis once considered Jews to be corrupt, once opposed the weaknesses of homosexuality, and once admired the spirituality of Muslims. The bad guy was supposed to be racist, love Adolf Hitler, hate Jews and gays. He did not have to hate Commies because Communism was a similar totalitarian ideology according to Karl Popper and George Bush. The new strain passed through these filters.
The long labours of ideologists within the Neocon movement have borne fruit, and now it is the Jews who are considered to be above suspicion, the homosexuals who are considered strong, and conservative Muslims who are held to be alien to the new conservatism. Today we are witnessing the rapid spread of many well-financed political parties and activist groups that connect far-right ideas with sympathy to Jews, tolerance of gays, and a rabid hate of Islam. The writer of 2083, too, is pro-Jew (so long as they are free of “multicultural taint and pass his muster as right-wing Zionists), pro-gay, violently anti-Muslim and anti-Communist. His nearest analogue is Pim Fortuyn, the assassinated Dutch far-right Judeophile and gay politician. Breivik marched with the English Defence League (EDL), a British group set apart by its strongly pro-Jewish, anti-Muslim militancy.
Breivik’s 2083 is heavily influenced by far-right Neocon writing. As is often the case with copy-paste compilations, it is difficult to assign an accurate lineage to the conglomeration of words and those of compiled authors. However, if 2083 is ever published, the copyrights of David Horowitz and Bat Yeor, Daniel Pipes and Andrew Bostom should be given pride of place. These are the writers who inspired Breivik to commit mass murder.
Gilad Atzmon reports that just a few hours before the attack Joseph Klein published an article in Horowitz’s Frontpage entitled “The Quislings of Norway” with additional incitement to murder. Klein wrote: “The infamous Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who assisted Nazi Germany as it conquered his own country, must be applauding in his grave… Norway is effectively under the occupation of anti-Semitic leftists and radical Muslims, and appears willing to help enable the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.”
These are fighting words, and Breitvik heeded them as he loaded his guns. The content of 2083 reflects his admiration of his Neocon sources. Quotes from David Horowitz’s Frontpage articles contaminate hundreds of pages with his vitriol. Bernard Lewis has his own place of honour. The notorious Bat Yeor, an Egyptian Jewish woman living in Switzerland who coined the term “Eurabia” (an alleged conspiracy to subjugate Europe to Arabs) and did much to promote and grew rich off the fear of Islam, corresponded with the killer. She “kindly” advised him and sent him her unpublished texts. She is the only person named in his Declaration of European Independence, and her advice the newly independent Europeans should follow, according to Breivik. Bat Yeor provided “inestimable service” to his project, and is quoted extensively throughout.
Robert Spencer, a sidekick of Jihad Watch’s Horowitz, is another great love of the killer, and so is American Zionist Andrew Bostom, self-proclaimed expert on “Islamic anti-Semitism”. Daniel Pipes is presented with his thesis that “The Palestinian phenomenon was created with the intention to justify Jihad.” Serge Trifkovic, an anti-Muslim Serb, Melanie Phillips, the British far-right Zionist who is friendly with the BNP leader Griffiths, and Stephen Schwartz are all quoted, along with numerous other activists and scholars who earn their bread by demonizing Islam.
Politically, the killer’s sympathies lie squarely with the United States and Israel: “The creators of Eurabia have conducted a successful propaganda campaign against these two countries in the European media. This fabrication was made easier by pre-existing currents of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in parts of Europe.” Economically, he likes Milton Friedman and Hayek; he would get rid of taxes and the welfare state.
Breivik hates the Palestinian people, and rails against the “Palestinian terrorist jihad”. Like every good Zionist he brings up the Mufti and the Holocaust whenever possible: “Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Arab nationalist leader, a leading force behind the establishment of the Arab League and a spiritual father of the PLO, was a close collaborator with Nazi Germany and personally met with Adolf Hitler. In a radio broadcast from Berlin he called upon Muslims to kill Jews wherever they could find them… he had visited incognito the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” Among the first things the newly independent Europeans should do, Breivik declares, is to stop all support of the Palestinians. In 2083 he calls on his fellow Templars to “Assist Israel in deporting all Muslim Syrians (also referred to as ‘Palestinians’) from the Gaza strip, the West bank and Jerusalem. These territories will be included in Israel. However, Jerusalem will come under joint Christian-Jewish administration. Demolish the abomination known as the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple of Salomon – the Third Temple as described in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 40-42. The Third Temple will become a place of worship for both Jews and Christians. The Dome of the Rock is regarded as occupying the actual space where the Temple once stood.”
For Breivik, as for all his Jewish teachers, Adolf Hitler represents ultimate evil. For this reason, he recommends that his readers avoid historically ominous words like “race”. 2083 is largely an attempt to categorize the other reasons to hate Muslims besides “race”. In the end, he did demonstrate to the world that he is not racist: he killed with an even hand, blue-eyed Norwegians as easily as brown-eyed guests. Breivik even hates David Duke – for being anti-Jewish. His hatred of Islam is not limited to the borders of Norway, or even of Europe – like all proper Neocons he hates Muslims wherever they are to be found.
Breivik spends many pages describing the evils committed by Turkey, including the massacres of the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds. There is a long chapter on the modern history of Lebanon, and the wars are presented as a struggle between Christians and Muslims. His favourite historical hero is Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince better known as Count Dracula.
His logic is as primitive as it is faulty: “If all ethnical groups and all cultures are equal, why is it black Africans, Afro-Caribbean blacks, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans want to abandon their own lands en masse to live in the lands of the West?”
The most obvious explanation: “because the West has robbed them blind,” does not occur to Breivik.
He continues his fallacious dialog: “If we’re all truly equal, why does the rest of the world want to live the Western lifestyle, a lifestyle created in the main by white people? Just why exactly, do they want to be part of capitalism, run businesses, work for the white man’s industries, claim the white man’s welfare and buy and use goods created by the creativity and ingenuity of Western – white – people?”
The fallacies are opaque to Breivik. His Neocon informers have not equipped him to understand that the hated immigrants had once worked in their own successful industries in their own countries.
By no means can Breivik be characterised as a Christian fundamentalist; nor is he a Christian Zionist. His feelings towards Christianity are lukewarm at best, little more than a cultural solidarity. He hasn’t decided whether to call himself Christian. He is still “struggling with this myself. Some of the criticism of Christianity…is legitimate.” Like many Jewish activists, he approves of “the Second Vatican Council from the 1960s …for reaching out to Jews”, an interpretation that at one time was universally resisted by conservatives everywhere.
Breivik’s theological liberalism, however, evaporates when he considers Islam. Though his arguments could be applied to immigration policies around the world, he will only speak out against Muslim immigrants. He does not call upon his country to stop tormenting the Muslim states even though this is the main reason for Muslim immigration. He cannot even consider the connection.
In any case, today, a Norwegian does not have to shoot his fellow citizens in order to express disagreement with immigration: this has become the mainstream attitude.
Immigration into Norway has slowed to a trickle. In a wild swing away from its own liberal policies, the government of Norway – like many West European governments – has changed the rules to make immigration almost impossible. In a famous case, a young girl from the Caucasus lived for some ten years in Norway, completed her university studies, wrote a novel in Norwegian – and ended up being deported as an illegal alien.
The Friday 22 Massacre Part Two. Breivik Sees Red
Breivik hated Reds even more than Muslims. The Pakis should be deported, but the Commies. Shoot them as traitors, he wrote in his 2083. He fumed against communism like Hitler in Mein Kampf, but Hitler had better reasons. Hitler competed against the Communists for the hearts of German workers, and Hitler competed against the softies within the national-socialist movement in Germany, who (notably the brothers Strasser) were prepared to deal with communists.
A long time has passed since then. Communism won in the titanic struggle of 1945, but suffered a huge setback in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequently, anticommunism has lost its meaning since at least 1991, but probably even earlier. Today, it could possibly mobilise a few old-timers in Washington DC, but maybe not even them.
It is with great astonishment we witnesses of Communism’s defeat read in 2083 that Communism was victorious:
“The US but especially W. Europe lost the Cold War due to the fact that we didn’t persecute the Marxists after WW2. If we had executed each and every Marxist and banned Marxist doctrines (not only the economical aspects but the cultural as well – internationalism, extreme feminism, extreme egalitarianism, anti-elitism, anti-nationalism) we would not be in the current situation. Instead, our traitorous and weak minded post-WW2 leaders allowed the Marxists to gradually infiltrate many aspects of society after WW2, especially our universities and the media (see the beginning of book 1 for a complete overview of how this happened). The first ML pioneers (Marxist-Leninists) were allowed to indoctrinate the ’68 generation, those who run things today.”
Breivik arrives at the unexpected conclusion that both the EU and the US are, in our present age, “socialist” or even “communist” states, “EUSSR and USSR” organised in accordance with Marx’s teachings. I did not know that Karl Marx envisaged a society with hundreds of billionaires and millions of paupers. One would have to be mad to describe the contemporary US and EU as “communist dictatorships” – these societies are extremely inegalitarian — workers are on the bottom, while the super-wealthy have an ostentatious lifestyle unheard of even in the Medici’s Florence.
The reason for this unexpected conclusion is that Breivik intentionally confuses Marxism-Leninism as the ruling ideology of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with the neo-Marxist western ideology of Fromm and Adorno, Marcuse and Lukacs. With all due respect, the Cold War was NOT a war with them, but a war against the USSR and its allies, a war with its geopolitical as well as ideological components. Western neo-Marxists were rather the allies of the capitalist West in that war, and their contribution to the fall of the Eastern citadel of Communism was enormous, as they successfully undermined the Russian elites’ belief in their own ideology.
Though Breivik quarrels with the Western Marxists, he finds it convenient to connect them with the Gulag and with mass murders in the USSR. This is dishonest: the Western neo-Marxists were against Stalin, and they called their Eastern brethren “Stalinists”, at least since Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.
Nowadays President Medvedev is talking again about de-Stalinisation; probably this talk will prevent his re-election. The people of Russia have differing views about Stalin, but the majority were and are against de-Stalinisation, for to them it symbolises the breakdown of the national masculine heroic paradigm.
Breivik accuses the Communists of supporting “extreme feminism”. This is odd. Joseph Stalin was the ultimate symbol of masculinity: the great Yugoslav director Dushan Makkaveev depicted him in his Mysteries of the Organism in priapic form. De-Stalinisation can be viewed as an attempt to unman the Father-figure of the Communist world. Again, Breivik’s ridiculous claim can be explained by his desire to gather all the Reds into one big heap: from grim NKVD commissars to California sociologists to the Norwegian teenagers he shot. He learned this nasty trick from his Neocon teachers: they paint every nationalist by the same brush as Adolf Hitler.
But not every traditionalist and nationalist is a Breivik or a Hitler; the Communists take differing positions on tradition, with Eastern Stalinists being quite conservative, traditional and mildly nationalist, while Western neo-Marxists rejected the bourgeois nationalism which caused two world wars.
Breivik stresses the Communist origins of the Frankfurt school’s founders, of Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács – but the neocons, too, were red-diaper babies or even active Trots before switching sides. Gramsci indeed dreamed of cultural hegemony as the means of arriving at socialism. He thought that a new “Communist man” might be created before any political revolution. However, Gramsci was mistaken. This theory of Gramsci was used to preach a reformist, non-revolutionary way, avoiding a violent takeover of banks and factories. The idea was played up by the Euro-Communists and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, disappeared with the Euro-Communist parties.
Lenin was right, and Gramsci was wrong: you have to take away from the capitalists both their chequebooks and their factories, their weapons and their newspapers, their parliament and their government, otherwise they will turn every agenda of yours to their benefit. The Frankfurt school and other Western neo-Marxists stood by the West in the Cold War.
The Western neo-Marxists behaved like the proverbial man who searched for a lost coin under the lamppost. Though he knew he had lost the coin elsewhere, there was more light under the lamppost. They did not know how to interact with workers, and so preferred to work with minorities, students, feminists. It was easier, but led nowhere, as we now see. The workers of Spain and Greece rose up last month, but the neo-Marxists were nowhere to be found. They did not lead this real popular revolt, as they were only used to their toy revolutions in the field of semantics.
The neo-Marxists gave up on revolution, gave up on socialism, gave up on the workers, and instead preferred to work “so no future Holocaust would be possible”. Breivik just intones that what these men did IS communism. Actually, many texts in 2083 are old anti-Jewish screeds with find/replace Jews by Marxists.
Regretfully Breivik was wrong: the communists did not win. We did not move even one step closer to communism by promoting gay marriages and multiculturalism. Fighting against Christianity and family does not help, either. All these steps were appropriated and used by Capital and against workers.
The proof that Breivik speaks nonsense (even in his own terms) can be found in his 2083, where he rates European states according to their acceptance of what he calls “cultural Marxism”. Not surprisingly, Russia and other countries of the Communist block are the freest from this dogma, while Germany, Sweden and Norway are the most subservient. Indeed, destructive western neo-Marxist theories were never popular in the East, where capitalism was dismantled in the real sense and there was no need for a make-believe pseudo-communist ideology to paper over a capitalist economy.
As for the West, 1968 was not, as Breivik says, V-day for Marxism, but the beginning of a turn towards the Iron Heel. Our freedoms peaked just after the long-gone year of 1968. 1968 was a turning point in America. In 1968, the richest Americans contributed 90% per cent of their income to the state, while now they pay less than 30 per cent (never mind that they do not pay even that much by cleverly exploiting tax shelters, exempt funds and other tricks). It was in 1968 that the American worker’s minimum pay peaked in real terms. Looking back, 1968 was the moment in history when mankind was nearest to the stars.
As children of the defeated ’68 revolution, we were free to love, smoke, think and act. We could travel and fly without being stripped at the airport, and our booze was not confiscated. We could make love and smoke in cafés. Since then, it has been downhill all the way: smoking has been banned, free thought has been incarcerated by Political Correctness, and political action has been reduced to joining a Facebook group.
In the US, as Noam Chomsky has instructed me, the U-turn coincided with the 1968 teachers’ strike in New York which reminded the Jews that their narrow interests are not necessarily best served by progressive and revolutionary tactics.
Support of dubious gender politics and retreat from the class struggle changed the Left. While the Left had always pushed for equality between the sexes, this equality leaned rather towards the masculine pole: whether it was a worker building the barricade, sailors storming the Winter Palace, cigar-smoking barbudos of Castro, they were all manly symbols of the Left. During the epic confrontation of the first half of 20th century, the Red Guards were not more feminine than the Stormtroopers, and Ernst Thaelmann was not less masculine than Ernst Roehm.
The present misbalance of male/female factors in the developed world was caused by technological developments (man’s physical strength is less needed), by ideological shift and by capitalists’ desire to maximise profit by employing women. As a result, men are frustrated. Their old traditional role of providers is over; their jobs went away to China, fighting is done by drones. Breivik’s massacre bears the mark of a frustrated and marginalized Norwegian man.
Breivik felt his manhood threatened by “television, where nearly every major offering has a female ‘power figure’ and the plots and characters emphasize the inferiority of the male and superiority of the female… by government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use ‘sexual harassment’ charges to keep men in line, [by] colleges where women’s gender studies proliferate and ‘affirmative action’ is applied in admissions and employment.”
Yes, the killer is a psychotic man whose vision is hardly adequate, but his point should be considered. Even his hatred towards Muslim immigrants could be traced to the threat to his manhood presented by virile, unencumbered-by-fear-of-harassment-charges Southerners successfully competing for the charms of the Nordic girls. This massacre and its possible follow-ups might well have been averted if this European man did not feel his manhood threatened in so many ways.
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
He acknowledges the help of Paul Bennett.