Terrorist attacks in Norway

Thanks for that Felix. When I checked on Saturday, the whole site was inaccessible.

bbc liveblog

Never mind Kaczynski, cribbing Melanie Phillips, how low can you go?

Looks like I'm well behind the curve on the Melanie Phillips connection. From the Breivik thread on Blood & Treasure. (n.b. whole thread is worth a read)

Very appropriate imo. Not to mention the contributions of those denouncers of multiculturalism and muslim failure to "assimilate" such as Sarko, Merkel and Cameron. But no, no, let's not talk about that, clearly just a lone madman, like Boris Johnson says:

Just a "narcissist and an egomaniac"? Takes one to know one, ey Boris?

Or even, the Telegraph, going for the classic Anders Behring Breivik was a 'mummy's boy'
. Ah yes, if all else fails, let's get oedipal...

Anything rather than talk about the right-wing, islamophobic agenda that Breivik was far from alone in promoting.

http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/anders-breivik-a-suitable-case-for-wilhelm-reich/

Apparently Breivik has claimed there are two more cells 'in [his] organisation'. This is according to the statement released by the judge in today's hearing.

I agree. But that's also what puzzles me, this guy's views are given so much airtime, why does he feel the need to go and commit mass murder himself? Aren't the civilian deaths in Iraq and Aghanistan not enough for his bloodlust?
I spent some time going through that deranged manifesto, but I couldn't really find a rationale for the terrorist attacks.

I don't think anyone is taking this too seriously. If you actually were part of an organisation hoping to achieve further strikes in the near future, you wouldn't exactly start blabbing about it now, would you?

It seems more likely he's just come up with this out of an attention-seeking desire to compensate for the disappointment of not being able to hold forth in a public hearing in front of the world's media dressed in his little fetish uniform. Also his imaginary friends (sorry, comrade Knights) probably help him feel less alone at this stage.

Pics of him today with a 'MARXIST HUNTER' patch on his weird wetsuit thing posing with a rifle.

I NEVER NOTICED THE MARXIST HUNTER BADGE!

The curious thing about this kind of right-wing thinking is its paranoid, anti-establishment self-image. So you get daily incitement against muslims in mainstream papers, world leaders condemning multiculturalism (from the right), and indeed a decade of wars quite consciously styled by their perpetrators as a clash of civilisations, and yet the claim is that the mainstream is PC Marxism banning Christmas and opening the Borders to all comers. So, what is the embattered true patriot to do in the face of these imaginary Islamic hordes over-running Western civilisation if not take to the streets (EDL) or take up arms (Breivik)? To be honest the surprising thing is how little this actually happens, suggesting of the millions of people who read Mel Phillips and her ilk only a handful really take it seriously. Because if many readers really believed the existential threats they peddle there'd be a lot more of this kind of thing.

Yes, that's the thing I'm trying to work out too. But maybe it's not that unusual - I imagine pre-WW2 would have been very similar, with rampant anti-Semitism among the European ruling class, yet still there was this powerful paranoid feeling of betrayal eg. with the Dolchstoßlegende.

The weird thing is that he didn't go and execute a group of Muslims like Baruch Goldstein did, he shot children whose only 'crime' was to be at a social democratic youth camp.

Arbeiten has already pointed out how close this guy's thinking is to Nazism. Breivik is not a Nazi (though it seems that his main reason for rejecting the Nazis is that they lost WW2 thereby causing the current domination of 'cultural Marxist'), but his thinking really is very similar to Nazism. One idea that Nazis and similar thinkers have been obsessed with is purification through violence - maybe that's what the mass murder of social-democratic children is meant to be .

Zizek's argument is that the right recognises fundamental social antagonism, but rather than identifying the enemy as the ruling class, sees it as the 'liberal elite' who deny social antagonism all together ('cultural Marxism' seems to be a variant of this). So in that sense right-wing populism is closer to a class analysis than liberalism. The paranoia element is explained via that; life is shit, someone must be responsible, who is stealing our enjoyment? Name your scapegoat. And yet the government aren't doing anything against the 'threat', so it's up to us etc...

But isn't 'liberal elite' usually a codeword for 'Zionist conspiracy'? Even 'cultural Marxism' is identified with mainly Jewish writers...

when Breivik is speaking of Cultural Marxism he means the Frankfurt School right? I'm sure he would have a field day with culture studies under the tutelage of Stuart Hall et al.

It is interesting you say that Slothjabber, though I don't think it is what Zizek is getting at (he is really good on anti-semitism), I have noticed how much 9/11 conspiracy theorists and its related movements have in common with the stuff Frost posted from the far right. I am getting the impression that this has a lot to do with the effect the internet has had. You know the proverb 'giving x so much rope they hung themselves', it's sort of like that with the plethora of 'information' and conspiracy narrative there is on the net.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/24/norway-massacre-anders-breivik-s-deadly-attack-fueled-by-hatred-of-women.html?om_rid=DNs6uI&om_mid=_BOLWxyB8cfeuXp

Well Zizek was talking about the US 'culture wars' where the right are mostly Christian Zionists, so I don't think it's an anti-Semitic codeword in that context. But it's relatively simple to switch in Muslims for Jews while the structure of the ideological constellation remains basically unchanged.

Self-pity is a normal trope for the right, particularly the extreme right. Justification through victimhood is the norm, in that context all violence is defensible as self-defence. That's not to say that the left doesn't use the self-defence justification as well, but there is a basic asymmetry there (contrary to what liberal critics critics say about left and right "extremists" being essentially the same). That is the absence of a systemic critique amongst the right, means the only explanation for the wickedness of the world is "bad people done it".

Especially problematic for the essentialists and racists is how to explain how the world's most superior race - the european/white race - is progressively being taken over by inferior races?(sustitute "cultures" for races for added 21st century new right fash points) Simple, it must be a conspiracy of Bad People amongst us, the "enemy within".

The de-racialisation of this "conspiracy of evil-doers" discourse in favour of a "cultural" version, allows the replacement of the scapegoats of yesteryear (Jews) with those of today ("cultural" Marxists) and allows on the one hand, reactionary zionist islamophobes like Phillips to join the party, and on the other, neo-nazis smart enough to twig that the holocaust got bad PR, to recycle themselves as defenders of Western liberalism (I kid you not) against the muslamic hordes.

Thanks for that. This makes me think the guy should not be regarded as a right-wing terrorist but a psychotic, maybe he's got something like delusional disorder, and is just using Melanie Phillips et al to rationalise his delusions. Terrorists have some rational strategic expectation of the consequences of their violence, like they expect that it will inspire the masses to rise up, or that there will be harsh generalised state repression, or that violence will simply terrorise sections of the population into submission etc. How could the murder of 68 children help him achieve the aim of killing off half a million 'cultural Marxists'? Even if his acts were to inspire others, there can be no expectation of that.

Melanie Phillips is feeling persecuted by the cultural Marxists:
http://twitter.com/#!/MelanieLatest/status/95488220686585856

P.S. I notice she hasn't explicitly condemned the attack on her twitter feed - we should demand she does! After all she blogged about the islamification of Britain just a day before the attack ("Is Londonistan turning into Lemmingland?").

Glen Beck has commented on the Utøya shooting. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

I have Al jazeera on Facebook and every article that has been posted about this Norwegian atrocity has been victim of a right-wing tea party racist shit storm.

Yeah, unlike those Tea Party and Young Republican summer camps.

There is nothing essentially Nazi about "purification through violence," i.e. the use of terror.

I concur, look at Franz Fanon's Wretched of The Earth

Glenn Beck and his Nazi tourettes. I'm just waiting for him to drop any pretence and show us his Dr. Strangelove impersonation.

No1:

None of us would be reading and discussing this manifesto if there had'nt been this mass murder. And, among the ones reading and discussing it, may be the Breiviks of tomorrow. That also is part of it. He would not have had such publicity for his horror ideology without the horror attacks. Therein lies his rationale.