Apologies to music fans for this political ranting. There will be a review of High Voltage along shortly, a superb weekend, but for me the whole thing took place under the shadow of the terrible events in Norway on Friday.
While on the surface this seems a random and inexplicable event, it’s something many have warned was coming for a long time. The only surprise for me is that it happened in Europe rather than in North America.
Some commentators are still insisting that Anders Brevik was some kind of lone nut who wasn’t part of any wider political movement. They seem to ignore the fact that his rambling “manifesto” isn’t his own words, but is almost entirely cut-and-pasted from a slew of right-wing writers ranging from a number of notorious far-right bloggers to The Daily Mail’s racist columnist Melanie Phillips. This post on the once-infamous Little Green Footballs gives a lot background, and makes it clear why so many people thought Anders Brevik and the anonymous white supremacist blogger “Fjordman” were the same person. Charles Johnson of LGF used to run with that crowd until he realised where it was all heading – so he knows what he’s talking about here.
Since 9/11 we’ve seen a cross-Atlantic alliance of right-libertarians, extreme Christian fundamentalists and white nationalists with an ugly kind of Islamophobia as the ideological glue holding them together. They have become what looks an awful lot like an exact mirror image of Al-Queda, the same abhorrence of the mixing of cultures, and the same violent intolerance to anybody who isn’t exactly like them. And now they have perpetrated something of a 9/11 of their own.
Brevik may be “mad” or “evil”, but his madness has been marinaded for years in a toxic stew of far-right ideas, and at least some of the people whose writings have inspired him now have blood on their hands. Freedom of speech is an essential principle, a cornerstone of a functioning democracy. But those who use their freedom of speech to spread hatred and incite violence need to take responsibility for the consequences when others take their words at face value.
People talk about tolerance, but it has to a two-way street. The vast majority of sects and subcultures are benign and harmless, and deserve tolerance. A small minority are not, and any right to tolerance should instantly stop the moment the bodies start to pile up.
Edit: I had thought of titling this post “The 9/11 of the right”, but thought it too provocative. But I see Charlie Stross has done precisely that:
I’m just horrified by the scale of the event.
This is in Norway, a country of 5 million souls.
92 dead in Norway is … well, multiply by 60 for the equivalent proportion of Americans and you get over 5000 dead. Playing the numbers game with such a horror is distasteful, but it suggests to me that the political impact on Scandinavian and European anti-terror politics in general is going to be non-trivial to say the least.
This is the neo-Nazi 9/11. Breivik had links to the English Defense League and other racist right-wing groups. The folks who police and intel groups all over the west have been treating with kid gloves, compared to the islamicists, due to the explosive and barely-acknowledged fact that there’s wide-scale support for anti-immigrant views all over the west, especially anti-muslim views, and semi-respectable politicians playing these prejudices for personal careerist gain.
It’s a poisoned chalice. And I have no idea what this bodes for the future, other than: nothing good.
And I really can’t disagree with any of that.
I hesitate to comment on any political matters as words can be so easily misconstrued, so I really won’t mind if you don’t publish this comment!
Huge care is needed in writing about this issue. I’m no fan of Melanie Phillips etc, but I’m sure she’s never suggested the use of violence against anyone. It’s therefore a huge leap to say that the fact that parts of her commentary have ended up in this loon’s ‘manifesto’ causes her and her fellow right-wing commentators to have ‘blood on their hands’ or to have ‘perperatrated’ this appalling event. I do worry that left-wing commentators are making the same sort of mistake that right-wingers do when, for example, right-wing commentators conflate peaceful Muslims (who may simply have a different world-view) with terrorist Islamists.
One other thing: is Phillips actually a ‘racist’? Unless you can prove that she is, that comment could be perceived as defamatory. I would hate you to get contacted by Daily Mail lawyers.
Put “Melanie Phillips Racist” into Google, and you get not far short of two and a half million hits. I think the Daily Mail’s lawyers have a lot of names on their list before they get as far as me. If she doesn’t like being called a racist, she should stop blowing the racist dog whistle all the time.
I hope chose my words carefully when it comes to exactly who does and doesn’t have “Blood on their hands” (which is quoting Charles Johnson, who does name names).
I’m not going ask you to start into the abyss and read any of Fjordman’s screens. But take my word for it, he is truly vile.
You may well be safe from the Mail’s solicitors then!
I’ll take your word for it on Fjordman’s articles, from what you say it’s best to steer well clear . Out of interest, Phillips’ take on the use of her words by Brevik is below:
‘there are only two references to me or my work in its 1500 pages. Those references are to two articles by me published in the Daily Mail, a mainstream British paper — one on mass fatherlessness in Britain, and the other on the revelation by a former civil servant of a covert Labour government policy of mass immigration into Britain. There is no reference whatever to my writing on Islamisation.
Not only that, Breivik name-checks a vast number of mainstream writers and thinkers, including Bernard Lewis, Roger Scruton, Ibn Warraq, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Hannan, Diana West, Lars Hedegaard, Frank Field, Nicolas Soames, Keith Windschuttle, Edmund Burke, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Hayek, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Ghandi, George Orwell and many others; indeed, it’s a roll call of western thinking and beyond, past and present.’
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Editor’s note. While I welcome well-reasoned discussion on this subject, I reserve the right to delete or remove comments which are threatening, abusive or clearly racist. Never forget that by posting here you are a guest on private property, and I’m under no obligation to provide a soapbox for the far right.
I just don’t know why people feel that a discussion is even relevent for something like this. 500 people won’t even change this…. it will take each and everone of us to change! Teach your own children about hatred!