The Norwegian killer is no Christian fundamentalist but a right-wing imitator of Marx and Lenin.
By Steve Sailer | August 1, 2011
It has long been anticipated—with foreboding on the right but with something approaching longing on the left—that mass immigration would lead to a ghastly backlash atrocity.
Thus, when in January a young white man in Arizona, the frontline state in the struggle over illegal immigration, attempted to assassinate his Democratic congresswoman, numerous voices of respectability, such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, blamed the massacre on the hate-filled bigotry of Arizona Republicans, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and anybody else they happened to loathe.
Almost immediately, copious evidence emerged that the killer was psychotic and had never paid attention to conservative commentators. When confronted with the facts, though, some of the press doubled down.
Now in Norway the long-expected enormity has finally happened. Yet the killer of 76, Anders Behring Breivik, turned out not to be a lowbrow soccer hooligan taking out his rage on immigrants. Instead, he is a cold-blooded, excessively rational highbrow who turned his guns not on immigrants but on the children of their sponsors, the white liberal elite.
Among terrorist monsters, Breivik is perhaps the most lucid since the Unabomber, whom he plagiarizes in the 1516 page “compendium” he posted online just before his crimes. So I undertook the unpleasant task of trying to understand what motivates him. Is he a Christian fundamentalist fanatic, as has been widely assumed by the U.S. press? Or is there something else going on here that won’t make sense from an American perspective?
Having thought about this rotten person longer than I’ve wanted, I have finally grasped that Breivik only makes sense when viewed on his own terms, which are those of the bloody history of continental European ideology. Breivik, I’ve come to realize, is a Marxist heretic.
Breivik’s hundreds of pages of planning 72 years of conflict in his manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence reflects a Marx-like confidence in his own science of history. His turn to terrorism to begin the recruitment of a revolutionary vanguard is reminiscent of the urge of the first major Marxist heretic, Lenin, to hurry history along with violence. Like the second world-historical Marxist heretic, Mussolini, who substituted for Marx’s emphasis on class his own emphasis on nation, Breivik wants to substitute “culture.” He argues that white leaders influenced the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism” import Muslims to deconstruct the indigenous conservative culture they hate. He will set off an (oxymoronic) “conservative revolution.”
Breivik, a smug egomaniac who boasts, “I have an extremely strong psyche (stronger than anyone I have ever known),” looks rather like a 1975 Chevy Chase signing off from Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” with the catchphrase, “I’m Chevy Chase … and you’re not.”
The only good news is that there probably aren’t many more like him. His odd combination of personal viciousness with self-sufficiency (Norwegian police have concluded he was a “lone wolf”) and the willpower to defer gratification during years of planning makes him rare among murderers. Hollywood has been churning out movies about bad guys just like him for decades—for instance, in 2011’s Jake Gyllenhaal thriller “Source Code,” an ultra-skilled domestic terrorist blows up commuter trains. Fortunately, Breivik is the first to actually have been conjured up.
In the decade since 9/11, we’ve started to notice that many would-be Muslim terrorists in the West, such as the Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, aren’t always Islam’s best and brightest. The recent British comedy film “Four Lions,” about a Sheffield jihad cell of Ali G-like morons, satirized this pattern.
Last Wednesday, for example, U.S. Army private Naser Abdo confessed in Killeen, Texas to planning his own personal jihad against Fort Hood, where another Muslim soldier, Major Nidal Hasan, murdered 13 people in 2009. Abdo was caught because he bought his weapons and bomb-making supplies at the same gun shop where Hasan had purchased his murder weapon. The once-burned store personnel, acting on (no doubt deplorable) stereotypes, called the cops.
In tragic contrast, Breivik’s crimes epitomized the Nordic propensity for careful planning. He first set off a bomb in Oslo’s central government building, which drew police downtown. That gave him 90 minutes on the outskirts of Oslo to hunt down and slaughter 68 people at the annual Labour youth camp for future leaders of Norway’s dominant left-of-center party.
His tactic of targeting the next generation of ruling elites for mass assassination is an appallingly horrible refinement of terrorist technique. While liberals gloated that the Norwegian mass-murderer will discredit the right the way that Timothy McVeigh helped launch Bill Clinton’s re-election drive in 1995, Breivik’s calculation is that one such massacre per decade would demoralize and disrupt elites.
The threat of personal assassination tends not to deter politicians because if they don’t show personal bravery, they’ll get replaced by more charismatic figures who do. For example, some of Geert Wilder’s rise in Dutch politics stems from the obvious risks he is taking with his life. Two earlier Dutch spokesmen against Islamic domination of their cities paid with their lives: Pym Fortuyn, killed in 2002 by a Dutch leftist, and Theo van Gogh in 2004 by a Muslim.
On the other hand, in an era of small families, people are more cautious about their children than themselves.
Marketing Murder
Not surprisingly, the analyses of Breivik offered by American pundits have mostly been obtuse.
For self-interested reasons, American liberals have clung to an initial description by a harried Norwegian policeman of Breivik as a “Christian fundamentalist.”
In reality, Breivik used “Christian” as an American might use “Judeo-Christian”—as a cultural identity moniker in the armed conflict he wanted to launch against Muslims and, more importantly to him, elite whites.
The most notable traits of Breivik’s character are a Nietzschean lack of Christian compassion and guilt, grandiose ambition, self-confidence, competitiveness, cynicism, and a lack of normal human emotions. The standard assumption is that he is an unstable individual driven to rage by reading anti-jihad websites such as Gates of Vienna. But I don’t sense a huge amount of anger in the hundreds of pages I endured. Instead, 2083 reads more like a marketing and strategic document—a business plan, as it were—for how to build an ideology and a movement that will win a struggle for control of Europe.
Liberals will be disappointed that Breivik repeatedly claims that his cause is anti-racist, anti-ethnocentric, and anti-anti-Semitic. But it’s difficult to know how much to believe the 1,516 page document he left behind because in it he revels in the need he perceives for insincerity: “In order for conservatives to succeed, they must copy the Marxist strategies. We must actively use deceit … As Muhammad once said: War is Deceit (al-Taqiyya). Many Muslims are masters of deceit, and it’s time we start adapting to these realities as well.”
Breivik is a devout marketer looking for a winning spiel:
“When an American nationalist discuss with a European he will immediately bring up race as this factor correlates with the US issues (Mexican immigration, African Americans etc). Using this form of rhetoric will cause a majority of Europeans to “run for the hills.” … Everyone should know this by now and should be more considerate when choosing their rhetorical approach, because the most essential thing at this point is to continue to build a broad and strong consolidation of conservatives. For Europe, this rhetorical approach will for the most part involve cultural defence relating to Islam(isation) as it is the only issue at the moment that has the potential and potency to unite enough conservatives.
He labels his cause an “Indigenous Rights Movement,” cynically explaining: “Rhetoric related to ‘indigenous rights’ is an untapped goldmine … playing the victim card is the most potent strategy of our times. … The most pragmatical way to move forward is to play the victim card in combination with cruel methods of armed resistance. We must literally focus all our efforts at creating an optimal environment for recruitment.”
Obviously, there’s a logical contradiction between his advice in favor of moderate rhetoric and his terrorism. Perhaps he assumes that his trial will give him a platform for his rhetoric?
Overall, I don’t sense that he’s fundamentally motivated by the reasons he gives. Instead, he seems extremely motivated by competition, by the urge to develop a winning strategy. This is a man who took a year off at age 25 to play World of Warcraft (the popular medievalist online role playing videogame) full time running a guild. His crimes and his vast plan to triumph in Europe over the next 72-years seem like a monstrous scaling-up to the real world of WoW strategizing.
Norway’s McVeigh?
Rote comparisons have been made to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, although there are others that shed more light.
Breivik’s weightlifting and narcissism—“I’m in the middle of another steroid cycle at the moment … I have a more or less perfect body”—call to mind Yukio Mishima, the bisexual militarist novelist and bodybuilder who attempted to overthrow Japanese democracy in 1970. Mishima then committed ritual seppuku, stabbing himself and having an acolyte behead him. (But notice the “more or less” in Breivik’s boast; Breivik is always tempted by the Norwegian urge to try to appear reasonable.)
The Norwegian killer’s assault is reminiscent of the 1997 shootout in North Hollywood, in which two steroid-using, body-armor-wearing bankrobbers fired 1,101 rounds of ammunition at the LAPD. At the time, they were assumed to be the first of an inevitable wave of unstoppable Terminator-like criminals. Fortunately, 14 years later, they remain the American high-water mark for criminals who could have appeared in a Michael Mann movie like “Heat.” Hopefully, Breivik will remain an outlier.
Breivik also bears some resemblances to Charles Manson, who believed John Lennon was sending him a message in the song “Helter-Skelter” to start a race war that would lead to him becoming king of a post-apocalyptic America. On the other hand, Breivik’s only reference to hearing voices is a quote from John Maynard Keynes on the power of intellectuals: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
And Breivik’s general plan of provoking a crackdown by the power structure, which will presumably arouse sleeping allies, is a similar to that of South American Marxist guerillas of the 1960s and 1970s. Their two-part strategy was to cause so much chaos that the military would overthrow the democratic government, leading to the long-awaited revolt of the proletariat. As terrorist Carlos Marighella wrote in his influential 1969 Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla: “It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed crisis by performing violent actions that will force those in power to transform the military situation into a political situation. That will alienate the masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
Of course, they only succeeded in Part I.
Breivik’s endless compendium is a sort of maximanual of what a researcher with a fast Internet connection can dredge up these days on explosives.
Perhaps the most relevant comparison, but one that has gone almost unmentioned over the last week, is Breivik’s left-wing mirror image in Europe’s immigration conflict: Volkert van der Graaf. A similarly cold-blooded Northern European, van der Graaf, a Dutch legal professional, is about halfway through his 18-year-term for the May 6, 2002 assassination of Pym Fortuyn, the gay Dutch sociologist turned politician. Fortuyn had caused a sensation among voters by arguing that no more immigrants should be allowed in who didn’t accept gay rights and other elements of the Dutch progressive consensus.
Fifteen days before van der Graaf gunned down Fortuyn, Jean-Marie Le Pen of France’s National Front unexpectedly finished second in the first round of the French presidential election, qualifying for the run-off on May 5, 2002. Le Pen’s success set off a two-week hate, a continent-wide orgy of demonization of all immigration restrictionists, even one as obviously different from Le Pen as Fortuyn.
The day after the French election, van der Graaf gunned down Fortuyn. The previous month, Fortuyn had said to the Dutch prime minister: “when I am killed or wounded, then you are responsible because you give me no protection and you make the atmosphere in this country so poisonous that people want to hurt me…”
After the shooting, numerous Euro politicians and editorialists responded by implying that Fortuyn had gotten what he deserved. A myth was spread by the prestige press that van der Graaf had killed Fortuyn for some crazy animal rights reason that had nothing to do with immigration. Yet when the killer was tried a year later, he cited as his primary reason protecting Muslims from a man whom mainstream politicians had compared to Mussolini.
Breivik is a former juvenile delinquent. He brags: “Since I was 12 years old I was into the hip-hop movement. For several years I was one of the most notable [‘hip-hoppers’] from Oslo’s West side… I was the most active tagger (grafitti artist) in Oslo.”
He had a friend in a Muslim gang, so he had a pass to run the streets at night. Over time, though, he came to resent that Muslim gangs could get away with violence against white teens. The only whites allowed to form youth gangs in Oslo, he complains, are the far left violent NGOs like Blitz, which are government-subsidized in the name of fighting racism and fascism.
I suspect that this is the key to his psychology: he wants to dominate at ground level.
Upside-Down Lenin
In contrast to liberals’ attempts to exploit the slaughter, conservatives, fearful of guilt by association, claimed Breivik was obviously deranged. Yet a comparison of his writings to those of Loughner, or of Bruce Ivins, the mad scientist who committed suicide in 2008 after the FBI targeted him as the leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, shows a disturbingly sane and fairly sophisticated mind at work.
This guy isn’t crazy; he’s evil.
As an example of his calculating nature, after acquiring a small farm to serve as cover while he purchased fertilizer for a bomb, he wrote that this “chemical acquirement phase” was “perhaps the most danger[ous] of all phases … I estimate it is a 30% chance of being reported to the system protectors at the national intelligence agency during this phase.”
And indeed, as we learned a few days after his atrocities, Breivik’s fertilizer purchases did trigger the Norwegian authorities’ interest. They tapped his phone and email for 24-hours, but then lost interest. So his 30 percent guesstimate appears to have been right.
The eeriest thing about Breivik’s 1,518-page “compendium” 2083 is his air of Norwegian reasonableness, as if an unfunny Garrison Keillor were cast as a movie supervillain. In reality, much of the more sensible sounding parts in the first half are plagiarized from conservative and neoconservative sites. He sometimes cites his sources, such as pseudonymous Norwegian blogger Fjordman, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Jamie Glazov, John McWhorter, and Daniel Pipes. Other times he simply steals wholesale without credit, probably to leave the impression that he’s an erudite scholar.
He entitled it 2083 because in the later, less-plagiarized, more vile part of his endless book he offers a detailed scenario for European civil war between the alliance of “cultural Marxist / multiculturalist” and Muslim versus the “cultural conservatives” extending out seven decades until the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Turks before the gates of Vienna in 1683. (His demographic model is how the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 was triggered by the surging Muslim population.)
The killer would be 104 in 2083. Granted, Norway doesn’t have the death penalty, and some of its prisons are notoriously posh, so he might be around, but still his combination of horrific violence now and patience in his world-historical musings is strange.
Generally speaking, prophets of the apocalypse don’t bother with such glacial changes. Usually, the big one is coming real soon now, like in the John Cusack movie “2012” or the neoconservative historian Bernard Lewis’s predicted Iranian Armageddon on August 22, 2006.
Another oddity is that although Breivik claims to be a constant reader of the “anti-jihad” school of blogs kicked off by Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs after 9/11—and including Gates of Vienna and Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugged—the overall tone of the analytical section of the first part of the mass murdering terrorist’s book is less strident than, say, Little Green Footballs was during the first half decade after 9/11.
Breivik endorses a platform that he dubs “the Vienna school of thought”:
The ideological platform advocates a strict anti-Jihad/Islamic stance which indirectly establishes a default friendly stance and support to Israel as an integral part of its fundament. The Vienna School of Thought is a right wing, Western European equivalent and reaction to the Marxist-Frankfurt school (ideological caricature). The purpose of the platform is to ensure a consolidation of anti-Marxist forces before Europe is overwhelmed demographically by Muslims.
He’s drawing from the Gates of Vienna blog, which, even though it concentrates on Europe and the Middle East, is run by a consultant in Virginia. Breivik summed up the Vienna School of Thought’s “less controversial” principles as:
- Pro-Nationalism
- Pro-pan-nationalism (pro-Europeanism)
- Pro-national or pan-European crusaderism
- Pro-Christian identity
- Pro-cultural conservatism
- Pro-monoculturalism (pro cultural unity)
- Pro-patriarchy
- Pro-Israel
Liberals wishing to tie Breivik to the Tea Party are out of luck. He’s an agnostic on economics:
Economy—the school of thought does not include a description of a clear economical platform. However, a majority of its supporters are generally against a communist/socialist economical model and at the same time against a laissez faire capitalist model. An economical model may contain socialist and capitalist principles (welfare policies included).
Breivik repeatedly claims to be anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-Nazi, and anti-anti-Semitic.
Let me sum up, however, that I see no reason to believe anything Mr. Breivik says. I’ve read far more of his prose than I care to, and I still don’t know if any of these planks he endorses actually motivated him to commit his terrible crimes. He makes clear that he views stances as mere marketing. His repeated endorsements of dissimulation do not add to my confidence.
In contrast, while I haven’t read enough of Gates of Vienna to comment upon it, I did subject myself to a fair amount of their role model, Little Green Footballs, back in 2001-2003. LGF proprietor Charles Johnson struck me as a disagreeable fool, but a sincere one. Whatever invade-the-world nonsense he was peddling at the time, he appeared to have fallen for hook, line, and sinker. Johnson always seemed to believe whatever storyline was being circulated by Dick Cheney or Ariel Sharon.
In contrast, Breivik seems too smart to fall for scare stories about Muslim capabilities. From his juvenile delinquent days, he understands how Muslims win at the street level in Europe, but he sees them at present mostly as a demographic weapon used by leftist whites.
Why does he hate the European left so much when he spends so much of his book explaining how to imitate the success they’ve achieved through deceit, control of culture, and intimidating violence?
Breivik is essentially a Marxist-Leninist heretic, in the sense that Marx was a Hegelian heretic. The revolutionary Marx kept much of the conservative Hegel’s framework, but reversed Hegel’s notion that ideas drive history. Instead, according to Marx, economic history drives ideas.
Breivik doesn’t quibble much with Marx’s notion of a science of history. And Breivik certainly doesn’t have a problem with Lenin’s revision of Marx’s economic determinism in which Lenin posited that a vanguard elite (such as, oh, say, himself) can hurry history along with acts of brutality. Like the Frankfurt School of postwar “cultural Marxists,” Breivik emphasizes the political importance of hegemony over culture. Like these cultural Marxists, he’s not very interested in Marx’s obsession with class.
Breivik despises Marxists—they are, to him, the enemy team against which he competes—but he accepts much of their intellectual framework.
Yet Breivik is strikingly lacking in any nostalgia or sympathy for his seeming ideological predecessors. To him, Mussolini, say, is a loser. His image is bad for the brand, so he’s largely ignored in 2083, while liberal Englishmen like Mill, Keynes, and Orwell are cited. Indeed, 2083 is written in English, an odd choice for a supposed Norwegian nationalist but a much better choice than his native language for a marketer of a new ideology. In Breivik’s book, history largely began in the second half of 1945, but the influence of earlier European ideologies on him is unmistakable, even if he wishes, for marketing purposes, to avoid all mention of them.
Breivik updates the timeworn Marxian system of analysis by introducing the new reality of the 21st century: the rapidly growing Muslim population within the main cities of Europe. Government-sponsored multiculturalism uses Muslims’ cultural communities to deconstruct indigenous European cultural communities. Nice European conservatives yield or retreat to the countryside in the face of stubborn urban Muslims backed by elite media and government power. In the long run, cultural Marxists are doomed by the rise of Islam in Europe, Breivik contends, but are blinded to the fate they are crafting for their descendants by their hatred of cultural conservatives today.
To Breivik, demographic change has revitalized Marx’s dream of a predictive science of history. Analysis of fertility rates and immigration allows predictions of the relative size of these cultural communities within Europe over the next several generations. Comparative analysis of conditions within countries with different-sized Muslim populations—e.g., Finland vs. Saudi Arabia—shows the stages European countries are likely to endure.
In particular, the chaotic histories of Lebanon and Kosovo, in which Muslims became dominant through immigration and higher fertility, show what Europe can expect in the middle of the 21st century. Lebanon was, by Middle Eastern standards, prosperous and sophisticated under a Christian majority, but the rise of a Muslim majority led to the awful civil war of 1975-1990.
In online discussions, Breivik advanced some of these ideas. But he maintained a passive public façade of quasi-Marxian historical determinism about the inevitability of these changes so that he wouldn’t be suspected of plotting violence. This served to hide his secret Leninist side, his determination to go down in history as the prophet and first mover of the armed resistance.
Did the Marxist-Leninist heresy he invented motivate his atrocities? Perhaps, but I suspect that he is less a true believer in his own rhetoric than a devious marketer looking to promote himself, even (or especially) if he had to do it in the worst way possible.
He appears to be a young man of some talents who failed to achieve lasting success in politics or business, plausibly because others around him could sense the rottenness of his character. He retreated to plot in solitude the enormities that would make him infamous or, at minimum, inflict pain on this enemies.
Steve Sailer’s blog is isteve.blogspot.com.
The American Conservative needs the support of readers. Please subscribe or make a contribution today.
Interesting screed, and I agree to dismiss or label Breivik as this or that is to ignore the big picture. I would argue he is neither Marxist immitator, nor “Christian fundamentalist.” He is a terrrorist (criminal), ergo this is a law enforcement issue and not a political issue. Labels can be tricky. They are more often than not the byproduct of the media or pundits who are merely “setting the line” or engaging in the proverbial “less filling vs. tastes great” debate if which I spoke last week. Think about this comment; “His turn to terrorism to begin the recruitment of a revolutionary vanguard is reminiscent of the urge of the first major Marxist heretic, Lenin, to hurry history along with violence.” Interesting, but did not the previous administration (2001-2009) attempt to “hurry history along with violence” in Iraq? Ditto; “The most notable traits of Breivik’s character are a Nietzschean lack of Christian compassion and guilt, grandiose ambition, self-confidence, competitiveness, cynicism, and a lack of normal human emotions.” While this may be true in Breivik’s case; does this not ask us to consider the “lack of Christian compassion and guilt, grandiose ambition…” of US foreign policy? Again, to suggest Breivik is anything more than a criminal is afford a disturbing significance or validity to his “cause”.
If Steve sees no real connection between Breivik’s brutal deed and his highly eclectic statement of belief, then why bother to devote so many lines to denouncing Breivik’s rightwing Leninism and Nietzschean lack of guilt? What I read in the bits and snatches of Breivik’s wordy cri de coeur is an enlightening indication of how shattered the European Right is. Breivik mixes serious insight and passages from Nietzsche that I find highly timely with neocon agitprop and tributes to social democrats Orwell and J.S. Mill. There is no consistency here because decades of “cultural Marxist” domination in Western Europe has utterly destroyed any traditional European Right and even traditional bourgeois liberal parties. Breivik if anything understates the cultural Marxist poison that has destroyed European civilization. Of course mudering people won’t bring it back.
Steven Sailor wrote, “Breivik also bears some resemblances to Charles Manson, who believed John Lennon was sending him a message in the song “Helter-Skelter” to start a race war.” My impression from the case is that Manson invented this mumbo jumbo to motivate his followers. I doubt he believed this himself. Manson is a rotten little jailbird con-artist who had just enough charisma to string along drug addled hippies.
Breivik it seems had little ability to lead other people. As you imply, he is probably insufferable in person. Scandinavians have a real taboo of placing one’s self too high or wanting too much personally.
I like your allusion to Mussolini in terms of his cynicism. It’s always amazed me that the head of Mussolini’s secret police was not even a member of the Fascist Party. Mussolini had a sense of humor and showed it in public. When asked what it was like being the leader of all the Italians, he said, “Its pointless.”
Breivik lied about being part of a larger movement and may well have lied about his own motives. Rather than look at what he may or may not have said, look at the political outcome of his mass murder and what it will do for Breivik himself.
My guess is that he saw that immigration was becoming a hot issue, that the restrictionists are begining to win the debate and that as they win the debate their opponents will be forced to demonize them as facists rather than allow a debate that they cannot win. Breivik places himself in the centre of this debate by his actions. Everyone who is for mass immigration and wishes to limit debate will use him as an example; everyone who wishes to limit immigration must explain his actions away. I think that Breivik killed 80 people to get into the history books.
The European right was doomed when it turned revolutionary in the aftermath of WWI – led by the national socialist Hitler and the former Marxist socialist Mussolini. Franco was the only successful political reactionary of the 20th Century, restoring the Spanish monarchy, but he decisively lost the culture war. The right now is simply another left as the left completely dominates in the realm of ideas.
“Breivik also bears some resemblances to Charles Manson…”
How is this? I suppose if one looks hard enough, one can find resemblances in just about anything. Sailer can often be pointed and sensible, but this one is all over the place. Better to stick with the minority mortgage meltdown.
It is very soon after the fact, and everyone needs to have an opinion (or two or three or four). However, in cases where there is no real conspiracy indicating a deeper purpose, individual behavior can sometimes be distilled down to something simple, something often mundane. But if not, and in only such a short time, how can we now know for sure? By this time next year, we should be able to make more honest conclusions. In the meantime, Manson is as good an explanation as some others I’ve read. So we’ve got that going for us.
I see. Breivik it seems, is anything we need him to be. To the left he’s a crazy Christian. To the right, a closet Marxist. He’s plenty evil- we can all agree on that, sure.
His motivations are clear, and obvious. “You know the side I don’t agree with? Breivik’s a supporter of them.”
He’s a modern day Emmanuel Goldstein. Can’t wait for the day we find out Breivik liked child porn, hated puppies, and never recycled.
This reads like something from Human Events! What’s wrong with Sailer?
2 words: false flag.
I suspect that Breivik’s “anti-racism” and “pro-Israel” lines were just cover as they are for many on the European right. Read the latter part of his manifesto where he discusses in detail race differences, the disadvantages of race mixing, genotypes, Nordic genetic preservation, and other topics.
Author,
Your premise is flawed.
Additionally, the left wing has been focusing largely on Breivik’s politics; it’s the right wing that won’t stop fixating on how crazy he must have been, and how he’s secretly a leftist (though he said he loathed socialists).
So specious.
Gee Steve, I wonder why you left out Breivek’s comments that undoubtedly interested you the most. You know, the ones he made about VDARE, a blog that you personally run. They don’t embarrass you do they? You are a very bright guy Steve Sailor, I enjoy reading what you have to say, but maybe in the future you should consider not pandering to the haters out there. They might just go on a killing spree and then quote you.
This is exactly the kind of violence that Lenin, and Leninists, always hated and condemned. They called it “adventurism,” and they believed that it only helped the reactionaries.
All this talk of Lenin and Marx, and not one mention of Bakunin and the other anarchists who believed in “direct action”?
“Charles Manson, who believed John Lennon”
Did he think it was Lennon? Cause it was McCartney who wrote that one.
“In contrast, while I haven’t read enough of Gates of Vienna to comment upon it, I did subject myself to a fair amount of their role model, Little Green Footballs…”
You obviously haven’t read our blog if you think LGF was our role model. Try Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club.
Frankly, we began our blog because my husband wanted to help me re-focus on the larger world in the years following my daughter’s death. That was the motive. The mission was to stop the incursions of sharia into our legal system and to stand for Israel’s right to exist.
We’ve moved from being a mom-and-pop blog discussing a needed push back in the US (mainly re immigration and pc/mc strictures in our institutions) to being focused on the growing statism of the EU & the ways it could affect us down the line. We were concerned about borders, sovereignty, and the growing corruption in the elitist oligarchy in DC. However, US politics is too much a kabuki dance to take seriously anymore.
We’re conservative in the Russell Kirk sense of the word – i.e., preserving the culture. We could see it dissolving in the acids of the nanny state in Europe; what lay in store for us??
We were moved when Europeans responded so warmly to one or two essays about their situation. Those beginnings led to networking with members of the fragile right wing in northern Europe. Thanks to ABB’s assaults, that wing is about to be amputated and tossed on the trash heap. Norway couldn’t have asked for a better gift in aid of their increased repression and emasculation of their culture. Now they have a perfect cover to continue abetting Hamas.
The EU is busy cobbling together their continent-wide repressive measures to prevent another ABB. As if they could. It will involve criminalizing ppl who link to us & other ‘haters’.
Our interest was and remains networking with others. Read our list of essayists please, before you link us with someone you call “a disagreeable fool”. He’s a deluded City of One.
Your link is an insult to the years we’ve put into our work and to the dozens of people who have contributed to our effort. The anon Fjordman may not make it out of this in one piece. So your supercilious remarks about our work are about as helpful as ABB’s cut-and-paste job was.
I still find it incredible that he lined up so many obscure bloggers/ writers for his oeuvre. Rod Dreher?? Seriously??
And he mustered 1K recipients for his manifesto? I’m told he mentions us 84 times, but we weren’t on his mailing list because we’re simply not important. We’re a tool to open a treasure chest of European conservatives – or rather to slam the lid on them for good.
You’re usually so spot on. Now you appear lost in the forest this guy (and his operators?) created for you.
Cui bono?
Sorry Steve, this analysis is mostly rubbish. Breivik is a textbook Houellebecqian anti-hero. He is bitter at the hippie parents whose promiscuity and sexual openness wrecked his life (and his mother’s). Now he is taking revenge on other people’s children. The best comparison for Breivik is with other losers in the sexual free market like Seung-Hui Cho (the Virginia Tech shooter) or George Sodini.
I wonder if Breivik felt that it was even possible to have debate on immigration in Norway, and thus saw violence as the only way to advance his views. How often do liberal-left politicians listen to complaints about immigration without crying racism or xenophobia, which shuts down any debate?
Norwegians seem to be very politically correct: the rest of the world saw the Nobel Prize awarded to Obama as a joke while they seemed ridiculously unable to see Obama as anything less than a God. I would imagine Norway has a large share of strident, abstract politicians who see themselves on “right side of history.”
It might also be useful to remember that NATO bombs killed plenty of people in order to preserve a “multicultural” Yugoslavia. Breivik probably saw himself as using fire to fight fire.
Dave Chamberlin, if those comments about VDARE are so interesting that Steve should have put them in his article, couldn’t you have included them in your comment? I just searched Breivik’s whole PDF for “dare” and didn’t find them. I did find a section doing music reviews of the Swedish singer “Saga” — I kind of pity Steve for having to read all of that. And unlike Obama’s book, he won’t be able to keep coming back to that knowledge for more posts in the future.
Hang on, wasn’t the reasoning that Al Qaeada has given for its terrorist activities because of all the Westerners that are in their holy lands? That sounds like the same argument that Breivik was making…too many foreigners in his land. I’m not sure how this precludes it being a religious fight. It seems to me that certain people can only see terrorists in the Islamic world, and have no problem making a direct link to Islam. When a Christian terrorist rears his ugly head, suddenly there is no link to religion. Such hypocrisy is unworthy of this magazine. I expect more from the American Conservative.
Snore. Big sociobiology adherent Steve Sailer uses meaningless words like “evil” to describe the happenings of the homo sapiens sapiens form of life on the planet. Evil bears. Evil bacteria. Evil ants. Evil humans. Give me a break. No good. No evil. Just an eternal struggle between entities.
Way too many adjectives in this lame piece – we all get that Sailer doesn’t want to be associated with a guy that takes a lot of his message to heart and actually applies them, but god, the motivational name calling is so silly and transparent at this point. As for “terrorism”, well, the old definition comes into play:
Terrorism = The weak fighting against the strong.
The War Against Terrorism = The strong fighting against the weak.
Good luck in the next elections, Steve. Voting is going to turn this whole “disappearance of tribes” era around in no time.
Breivik is best described as a Nationalist terrorist. His fundamental motivations are nationalist, not religious.
As a terrorist revolutionary, his fundamental motive is “destablilize and radicalize”.
Steve, what happened to your “roid rage” theory? I thought it was more plausible, as well as more succinct, than all this raking over of Breivik’s stimulant-fueled plagiarized googlebait-quality manifesto.
Mencius Moldbug wrote the definitive Breivik piece.
I’ve been struck by how little attention has been paid to Mr Breivik’s apparent membership of the Freemasons (a photo appeared of him in Masonic regalia) Freemasons are anything but Christian fundamentalists – many would argue that they have always been in the vanguard of Liberal movements throughout the world. In Britain, the U.S. and other Protestant countries (such as Norway) they have a more conservative establishment image than in countries such as Spain and France, but this is largely because the state Protestant churches in non-Catholic countries tend to be quite Liberal anyway and attuned to the relativistic Masonic way of looking at the world. I certainly wouldn’t necessarily blame Freemasonry for the Norwegian massacre but the fact is Masonic ideals are the very reverse of Christian fundamentalism so either Breivik was not a Christian fundamentalist at all or he was very confused on religious and philosophical questions. Furthermore opposition to Islam is not necessarily a conservative position. Many hard-line leftists are militant anti-Islamists, e.g. Christopher Hitchens. Likewise many western Marxists supported the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that it would supposedly crush Islamic fundamentalism there. Unlike Mr Sailer, I wouldn’t write off the idea of Mr Breivik being mad at all. Christopher Hitchens’ conservative brother Peter has written very persuasively that most modern mass killers have been found to be regular drug users, whether it be cannabis, cocaine, anti-depressants or in Mr Breivik’s case, steroids.
Anders Behring Breivik is just a very ordinary human being, who fancies himself a very extraordinary human being. He hasn’t the brains or talent to accomplish anything truly great in this world, and he just can’t accept that. So he anoints himself the savior of a culture that he hasn’t the talent to contribute to in any meaningful way, and, coward that he is, sought to make himself infamous by attacking some of the most defenseless people in his society.
Guys like this never attack a well armed military installation, or a police headquarters —- they always “make their statement” by slaughtering those who are least likely to be able to fight back.
This is just another piece of animated excrement. Unfortunately, he won’t be the last.
Plutocrat and Gottfried,
Sailor’s informative and thought-provoking article does not deserve the peevishness of your response (“screed” and “so many lines”). Are you gentlemen annoyed that Sailor beat you to the punch in getting out the first relatively comprehensive analysis of the killer and his views?
horace,
Your point seems to be that Breivik thought along the lines that since the immigration restrictionists were going to be demonized anyway, might as well do something to the opposition that will really merit their opprobrium. I agree, and, to take Sailor’s description of him as calculating one step farther: he may have thought in terms of getting in the first strike, while the elites still had their guard down. But if one looks at the nastiness that the Blitz gang was allowed to get away with, really rubbing conservative urban whites’ noses in their insults and their immunity from the authorities, one can also see how a pure desire to dominate at street level, as Sailor says, could be Breivik’s prime mover.
As for restrictionists now needing to explain Breivik away; I don’t think that matters as much as the point, again touched on by Sailor, that the damage has now been done: “Breivik’s calculation is that one such massacre per decade would demoralize and disrupt elites.” Only time will tell if this evil calculation is correct, but if the likes of the denizens of the Blitz house decide to counterattack, we could indeed see much more bloodshed.
EyeOnMadisonStreet,
Breivik seems to me to have been intelligent enough to realize that his massacre would damage the anti-immigration cause and tried to increase this damage by claiming that he was part of a larger movement and releasing a lengthy statement and description of his actions. His actions will strengthen rather than disrupt elites and weaken the anti immigration movement. Objectively an anti immigration policy is in the best interests of the native Norwegians left wingers that he massacred; a low immigration country will be more tolerant of gays, feminists, environmentalists etc. Good luck making that arguement now though.
I don’t see him as being on one side or the other. He is smart enough to understand the question of immigration and amoral enough to only care about being the centre of attention. Think of the Leopold and Loeb murderers and you have his personality.
Could you provide a link to info on the Blitz gang ?
EyeOnMadisonStreet, I suggest you grab the nearest dictionary and look up both screed and peevish. My first sentence avers my “interest” in the missive (is this a better word?), as my final sentence offers my opinion of such a detailed socio-theo-cultural analysis of what I find to be a criminal. As far as your use of the word “informative” I might offer that sometimes “less is more”. I am sure you are aware of the text-speak acronym TMI. Does TAC pay by the word? if not, no need to write a manifesto in order to disect a manifesto. And finally, I am neither annoyed, nor in a a race with the author (“beat you to the punch”). We’re all grown-ups here, no need for you to be so peevish. Again, read the final sentence of my first post, err… screed
“”The Norwegian killer is no Christian fundamentalist but a right-wing imitator of Marx and Lenin”"
Had anyone said the same about Bin Laden or any of his Al Qaeda associates, he would be called an apologetic.
Ironically, this analogy has more truth to it in the case of Al Qaeda, but who wants to be an “apologetic”
It took me two years to realize there are two conservative leaning writers with the same-sounding name: John Seiler and Steve Sailer. Here’s hoping the embarrassment of my post above will tutor me in the proper spelling of Mr. Sailer’s name much quicker than that.
Joe the Plutocrat,
You’re right, in so far as I didn’t notice the word “interesting”, which preceded “screed”. But then, in point of fact, “interesting screed” is an oxymoron, since screed means a long, tedious piece of writing, i.e., something that could not be interesting.
I don’t text, and so had no idea what TMI meant til I looked it up. And no, I don’t think Sailer’s piece included too much information; on the contrary, what I can’t fathom is how one would want to simply sweep Breivik under the rug of the label “criminal” and leave it at that, as you seem to suggest. Jack the Ripper was a criminal, too, but the books on him fill a shelf; and in fact, all the research, including some “socio-theo-cultural analysis”, have likely contributed to our understanding of human behavior – along the way, of course, providing income for many writers. Whether this understanding has improved anyone’s behavior may be open to question, but I think we have to allow that as a possibility, and give due credit to the good faith and legitimate aims of at least some of the researchers.
The comments thread seems to confirm that Breivik will be used as a vessel to contain whatever ideas political shills want discredited via guilt by association. Cherry picking his incoherent manifesto will be a convenient rhetorical bludgeon used in attempts to stifle or limit the parameters of acceptable debate about the root issue at hand.
Whats interesting is that there’s a self consciousness about all this, wherein everyone admits aloud that defining Breivik is a perception game, but then speak about it as if others don’t also recognize this. There is now a contest to define and frame the narrative of what Breivik means; the emerging consensus acknowledges there is vast room for interpretation, (his “true” motives being opaque due to ideological inconsistencies, scatter-shot inspirations and psychological mysteries). As a result the actual political impact and implications of his deeds may be overestimated.
I think his incomprehensibility will dilute whatever potency he has as political tool. People are reverse deconstructing his motives based on whoever they they think will ultimately benefit from what he did, unsurprisingly arriving at wildly divergent conclusions colored by pre-existing biases. His manifesto even at face value is a muddle. Look at all the contradictory labels being thrown around by various analysts.
Whatever message Breivik wanted to send, it was already thoroughly convoluted by his own pretentiousness before he ever pulled a trigger.
And lets not lose sight of the fact that this guy methodically murdered over 60 kids in cold blood. Assuming he’s not psychotic, if nothing else let it serve as an object lesson in the poison of the conceit: “The Ends Justify the Means”.
Steve I disagree fully with your analysis, which I think is overly obtuse and convoluted and relies too heavily on finding some kind of clue within the intricacies of arcane political theories, which there is no evidence that Breivik studied or strived to emulate. Also, it kinds of seems like you are trying to establish a wall of ideological distance between Breivik, and “us” meaning people who are anti-immigration. I understand why (political correctness strikes yet again, in this least likely of places), but it is not helping anyone. Political correctness is what got all those kids shot. Let’s agree we have to reject PC everywhere, anywhere, anytime we find it. It is a poison of the mind. And with readers seeing you falling prey to its insidious influence – well let us just say it is only going to confuse people.
Let me just put this as plainly as I know how – that it is okay to agree with someone’s ideas, even if that person is a murderer or has committed violent crimes. You don’t have to agree with their methods or their actions – when all you share is an ideology or an accurate perception of reality. I am proud to stand up and be counted as an “anti-immigration, anti-multi-culturalism advocate”. And usually, in the past, you have been too. Don’t be shamed or scared now, when we need to be strong. This is a time to own our ideas, not disown them. Ok, I am done dressing you down on this for now.
But please, don’t waste your time (or ours) trying to figure out who is or is not a Marxist unless you limit the criteria for inclusion to the fundamental and irrefutable concept that what Marx “wanted” was a stateless and classless society. A one world government of elite bureaucrats presiding over a top down command and control structure with the proletariat (still) at the bottom.
Breivik is no Marxist. He isn’t even a socialist, which was a bit of a surprise because he’s Norwegian. Socialism in their welfare state has functioned fairly well in their small, mostly homogenous populations. It doesn’t work when you introduce immigrants who are the worst possible fit with the indigenous people that you could find even if you were to go out looking for them. Breivik – if you had to define him politically and economically, is probably a National Capitalist. And there is nothing at all to be ashamed of with that.
This incident really was made possible only by an elite cabal of evil multi-culturalists who despite having no absolutely no rationale for their actions or beliefs, conspired to destabilize and balkanize Norwegian society, even though the evidence is abundantly clear that such immigration policies as they created are always, in every place they have been implemented, (like in much of Europe and the US) an inherently destructive act; culturally/socially, economically, politically destructive. Breivik’s outburst is basically revenge. Yes, its political. And he made the political personal, because that’s what all govt policies become in the real world – personal. And that is what multi-culturalism became for the Norwegian people. I defy you to explain the situation in other terms, for the 41 women raped by “non-Western immigrants” in Norway. Or to the many Americans killed, raped, robbed, or injured by the hordes of illegals that infest our country. Politics is always personal, to somebody.
So who is Breivik more like? Well, he is more like Tim McVeigh – a patriot-revolutionary who deeply resented the abuses of the federal govt and considered his bombing a retaliatory strike at the heart, (or more accurately, one of the many hearts) of the beast.
So please, I wish you would quit confusing the readers with the psycho-analysis/political forensics. If the facts were a ball of yarn, your explanation has not been the equivalent of knitting a sweater – its been like giving a cat the yarn and some catnip and letting him loose.
Let’s just sum up the facts; people are territorial. They are “group based” creatures who depend on group identity to create functional societies. Collectivism, while not exactly popular on the American right now due to the machinations of the anarchist movement (and its hijacking of the Libertarian platform), is the basis for groups of people of any size. This is natural behavior, and it is reality. It is possible, within a collective at the highest level (a geographical territory controlled by a nation-state) to achieve the highest possible level of individual liberty that still is generally bounded by group identity – a person who claims a cultural identity as a citizen of a nation state. But without exclusive restriction on the geography, you invite chaos in the form of the introduction of individuals who will not accept (or be accepted) to this group. They want their own (to be with “their people), and that includes wanting to form and maintain membership as a group of people that eats, lives, dresses, and thinks as they do. Well, that is totally incompatible with a strong national identity for the existing group. Nationalism can be “race based” or it can be geo-political. But it certainly can’t be based on open borders, or any policy that allows for the existence of ethnic enclaves or of statistically significant minority populations that identify themselves in terms of being an “other” from the previously majority “indigenous” population.
A word to the wise:
The AUF / Young Social Democrats of Norway, that Breivik murdered en masse, are against the EU, and have campaigned successfully not only against closer EU integration, but against their own political elites who want to foist it on the country.
About 60% of Norwegians are against the EU. American Conservatives and their sympathisers should be very wary of accepting this widespread nonsense that the young idealists were some sort of globalising “elites” that were slaughtered like lambs (as though that should be an excuse!).
EyeOnMadisonStreet, do disrespect, as our disagreement would appear to be more semantic than politcal. As a former purveyor of political commentary; I took the liberty of using the word screed in a complimentary manner (you know us writers and our irony). I speaking more to the nature of the missive (political piece) as opposed to my personal opinion of the writer’s ability to capture my attention. To that end, I do not fine it oxymoronic to find Sailer’s article to be “long”, but not “tiresome”. I do not text, either. TMI is text-speak for “too much information”. Again, Breviek is first and foremost a criminal, to attempt to define him as an inverted Marxist, or left-handed Christian fundamentalist, or freemason, or whatever; affords him a degree of “validity” or “stature” I am not willing to concede. It’s like Tim McVeigh; he was a coward and a failure who was capable of fabricating and detonating a car bomb; all the “Turner Diaries” nonsense and “militia” crap is, as I have noted ad nauseum; so much “less filling/tastes great” tripe.
J Sebastian, Tim McVeigh a “patriot-revolutionary”? Please. Tim McVeigh was, as noted, a coward and criminal. I realize there exists a plethora of Tim McVeigh narratives; but let’s not go adding his face to Mount Rushmore just yet. In fact, one of the stories I heard is that he was an underacheiving, bitter failure and wannabe “green beret” who flunked the Army Special Forces “Q” course. Again, people like Breveik and McVeigh, Hassan, Rudolph are delusional cowards, who “act out” or resort to violence because their lives didn’t turn out as expected (usually because of Jews, immigrants, infidels; or the fact that mommy and daddy got divorced). even more distubing is the fact that the impetus or motive for ‘action’ can be traced to some holy book, pulp fiction novel, or pathetic “causes” such as ethnic pride/nationalism. Here’s something to consider; multiculturalism is not a policy; it is a fact of life. Hitler sought a world devoid of any culture beyond the Aryan culture, call me a stooge, but I’ll take multiculturalism over nationalism, any day (as I am not, and never was a member of the ‘master race’).
Franklin writes:
“….meaningless words like “evil” to describe the happenings of the homo sapiens sapiens form of life on the planet. Evil bears. Evil bacteria. Evil ants. Evil humans. Give me a break. No good. No evil. Just an eternal struggle between entities.”
Sometimes it’s good to hear just how breathtakingly ignorant is the atheist position, taken to its extreme.
Humans are the same as bacteria, right! A creature with a brain capable of logic should not be expected to function and behave differently than an amoeba, nor held to any higher standard! The word evil is meaningless – and every thinker from Plato onwards has been engaged in meaningless debate, right? Well of course – they’re just elaborate ants…
@EyeOnMadisonStreet
“Sometimes it’s good to hear just how breathtakingly ignorant is the atheist position, taken to its extreme.”
LOL. Psst, here’s a secret, pallie. Along with texting terms, the difference between John Seiler and Steve Sailer, and the dictionary, there’s something else you might’ve missed over the years. It’s a funny science called evolution, which has nutty branches known as sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and psychiatry, etc…It also shares data and outlook with ecology, ethology, etc…The breathtakingly ignorant men and women at work in these thoroughly fields have not only brought us understanding of biology they’ve also – brace yourself – closed the coffin lid on magic sky gods.
“…every thinker from Plato onwards has been engaged in meaningless debate, right?”
Correct.
“Well of course – they’re just elaborate ants…”
Correct again.
Hope you get your breath back. The Romans had a word for it that you might recognize. Spiritus.
“…thoroughly disreputable fields…”
DOH.
This is probably as good as it gets in describing why Breivik committeed mass murder.
But the interesting, perplexing question is not why Breivik committed murder, but why the West is committing suicide.
Atheist,
Speaking of spirit, one can trace the degeneration of the spiritual condition of mankind inversely with the rise of the sciences, pseudo-sciences and cults you are so eager to defend.
The Romans had another word you should learn about – curare – it’s the parent of the word cure. You will notice that it descends from its original sense, as a verb meaning of “to take care of”, into a noun meaning a mere remedy – i.e. a Band-Aid – around the time of the rise of hard science. Hard, indeed – but then for believers in the religion of progress, as celebrated by the high priests of reason, otherwise known as scientists, no price is too high to pay for another few minutes of sensual pleasure.