Reykjavík Grapevine - 29.07.2011, Síða 8

8
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2011
Reactions | Norway tragedy
Words Have
Consequences
I do not believe Anders Beh-
ring Breivik is insane.
Certainly, his murderous
rampage was horrific and
cruel. His targets were young, innocent,
and defenceless. How their deaths will
further his avowed goal of removing
Muslims from Norway is beyond me.
Insanity, however, is characterised
by a lack of reason, a lack of cohesive-
ness in one’s view of the world. Breivik
acted in a rational manner, if you share
his worldview. In his eyes, the political
parties—especially those on the left—
represented a direct danger to the
indigenous Norwegian culture due to
their policies on immigration and civil
rights. His fight was not with the Mus-
lims, whom he regarded as less than
human, but with those within his nation
who were allowing the enemy into the
Homeland.
There would be no point in purg-
ing the country of the Islamic infection
without first cutting off the means by
which the infection was entering the
body. The internal traitors are, in his
eyes, the immediate enemy. Therefore,
they (and their children) must die.
It would be overly simplistic to place
all the blame on the right wing extrem-
ists in northern Europe and North
America. The values of traditional Islam
are, to some degree, incompatible with
the values of a liberal society. The treat-
ment of women in many Muslim coun-
tries is abominable. The pronounce-
ment of death sentences on those who
convert from Islam is barbaric.
Nonetheless, the bloggers and
politicians who inspired Breivik must
be held accountable for their creation
of an alternate universe in which his
actions are perfectly logical. As Hitler
taught us, words have consequences
and calls for purification of the nation
can lead to particularly gruesome con-
sequences.
Unfortunately, Breivik’s views cor-
respond exactly to the hatred and igno-
rance spewed 24/7 by media like Faux
News (they like to call themselves Fox
News) and then echoes endlessly via
smaller outposts—it’s become impos-
sible in some states of the US to find a
radio station that broadcasts anything
but delusional Christian fundamentalist
propaganda.
This extremism, which has become
the greatest threat to civilized societies,
is not about churches and congrega-
tions. It’s about a way of thinking, with
its own culture, celebrities, and fulltime
poison pens, like Ann Coulter: “We
should invade their countries, kill their
leaders, and convert them to Christian-
ity.”
The description of Breivik—extreme
right-wing anti-government, anti-im-
migrant Christian fundamentalist gun-
lover—could in fact fit the GOP’s new
Congress members. These gun- and
bible-bearing extremists hate Obama
and liberals and despise education and
knowledge: who needs that when you
have a direct line to the heavenly par-
ent.
Tea Party members show up armed
(and dangerous) at county and city
hall meetings. At the Republican Na-
tional Convention a fan of Sarah Palin
screamed about the President of the
United States, to the audience’s delight,
“Obama is a terrorist, kill him!”
The politicians themselves also sug-
gest homicidal encouragements. GOP
Senate candidate Sharron Angle said
in an interview, “people are really look-
ing toward those Second Amendment
remedies…what can we do to turn this
country around? …the first thing we
need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
“This rhetoric is not cost-free,” a
former C.I.A. officer and a consultant
on terrorism told the New York Times.
Before last year’s elections many had
asked Palin—who encouraged voters
to “reload and aim” at Democrats—to
tone down her violent rhetoric. One of
those was Congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords, who warned of its possible
“consequences.” She was to discover a
few months later just how horribly per-
sonal those consequences would be
when she was shot in the head during
a murderous rampage by another right-
wing extremist.
We should not kid ourselves into
believing that this could not happen in
Iceland. As much as any other society,
we divide the world into Us and Them.
We happily imported workers from Po-
land and the Baltic states when times
were good, but we were more than glad
to show them the door when things got
tough. Our politicians are as willing to
stoop to demagoguery as politicians
anywhere, and Icelandic poison pens,
who blog about raping and beating up
politicians they don’t like, are no differ-
ent than their foreign hatemongers.
It is ironic that in the decade since
9/11 the US might have changed from a
nation that considered itself the world’s
model of democracy and justice to its
foremost exporter of hatred and vio-
lence. But mass annihilation no longer
requires national military actions. As
Anders Behring Breivik has shown us,
and Timothy McVeigh before him, it
only takes one. “We have met the en-
emy, and he is us.” Bin Laden must be
laughing in Hell.

In a very short time the discourse
following last week's right-wing
terrorist attacks in Norway
reached both absurd and scary
heights, with one of the best examples
being American TV and radio host Glenn
Beck's attempt to justify the mass murderer
by comparing the Social Democratic youth
camp in Utøya with the Hitler Youth. In Ice-
land, it was the writings of Björn Bjarnason,
a right-wing conservative and Iceland's Min-
ister of Justice from 2003 to 2009.
Only a day after the attacks, Björn, who
systematically voiced what he called “the
need” for the establishment of an army-like
police force when he was Minister of Justice,
wrote on his website (www.bjorn.is)—one of
Iceland's oldest blog-sites, frequently quoted
by journalists—that the Norwegian state,
with its powerful secret police force, should
have all the necessary tools to fight the threat
of terrorism. According to Björn, this police
force keeps a strict eye on potential terror-
ist cells—groups that operate “in service of
political ideals” or “under the banner of en-
vironmentalism or nature conservation.”
Following this came a paragraph about
the current Minister of Interior Ögmundur
Jónasson who has talked about granting
the police proactive investigation permits
to fight against organised crime, political
activists and environmentalists presumably
excluded. But as the murderer in Oslo and
Utøya had a political agenda, Björn argues
that environmentalists are likely to act the
same. Therefore, he concludes that the en
masse slaughter of teenagers should teach
the Icelandic authorities a lesson and en-
courage them to establish a secret police to
fight environmentalists.
Anyone who reads through the Oslo-
Utøya-murderer manifesto knows that he
sees himself as a warrior in a fight for the
creation of a conservative, Christian, fascist,
masculine, homophobic, militaristic, na-
tionalistic West. Surely he takes a step fur-
ther than most fascists by using Dark Ages
imagery, explicit language and an extremely
violent strategy to market his ideas, but his
written manifest is only an extreme version
of the same ideas preached by the more so-
phisticated everyday right-wing conserva-
tives, the Icelandic ones not excluded. Thus
it makes sense, if wanting to prevent further
mass murders á la Anders Breivik, that one
should look deeply into the growing fascist
rhetoric in Western political discourse today.
Shooting an island full of teenagers has
never been the tactic of radical environ-
mentalists who usually take action without
threatening lives, but in the eyes of Björn
Bjarnason and his like-minded people, a
special secret police force should be formed
to step on them and their rights. While
some people might want to dismiss what
the former Minister of Justice writes, it
should in fact be taken extremely seriously
that he finds it reasonable to use the Nor-
wegian mass murder to re-examine his old
fight against environmentalists—a fight in
which he is far away from being alone. Now
it is our responsibility to stop him and his
comrades in arms—wherever they are stand
politically—from being able to capitalise on
last week's events and thereby realising their
fantasies.
Opinion | Snorri Páll Jónsson
Úlfhildarson
Shoot Teenagers and
Fight Environmentalists
“Nonetheless, the bloggers
and politicians who
inspired Breivik must be
held accountable for their
creation of an alternate
universe in which his
actions are perfectly
logical.”
ÍRIS ERLINGSDóTTIR
JIANG JIANG