Jonathan Kay on Anders Breivik and The Turner Diaries: How a 2011 Norwegian massacre echoes a 1978 American novel
Jonathan Kay:
Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who slaughtered at least 92 people, is not only a terrorist and a murderer, but also a plagiarist: Sections from his 1,500-page manifesto were copied directly from that of the “Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski. And even the material he wrote himself is derivative: From the parts of the rambling and disjointed manifesto that I have been able to read thus far, his bigoted and paranoid worldview seems to have originated — either directly or indirectly — with The Turner Diaries, a hack science fiction novel written 33 years ago by an American white supremacist named William Luther Pierce. The Turner Diaries feature prominently on a Swedish Nazi Internet forum called Nordisk, of which Breivick was a member.
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But as with Hitler himself, Pierce’s white supremacy has very little to do with any sort of Christian “fundamentalism” — and the same is true of Breivik. While leftist commentators jumped on the initial description of Breivik as a Christian “fundamentalist,” his manifesto declares: “I guess I’m not an excessively religious man. I am first and foremost a man of logic.”
Breivik also promises that in his future utopia, “Embracing Christendom will be voluntary … People who choose to be atheists will enjoy the same rights” (though he also seeks a return to the religious policies of the mid-20th centuries, when Christian faiths had the status of official state creeds in many Western countries). This almost precisely follows the pattern of McVeigh, a lapsed Catholic-turned-agnostic who declared “science is my religion.”
The same is was true of the fictional Turner, who is described as someone who “has never been religious.” Though, like Breivik, Turner is made to occasionally throw around vague references to God and the divine order, he never cites Bible verses or Christian theories of holy war to justify his terrorism. In fact, his attitude toward Christianity is negative: “The Christians are a mixed bag. Some of them are among our most devoted and courageous members … But all the ones who are still affiliated with major churches are against us.” (In 1978, the same year he wrote The Turner Diaries, Pierce abandoned Christianity for a self-created pantheistic religion called “Cosmotheism” based on the principle of eugenics, white racism and National Socialism.)
The idea that right-wing extremists such as Pierce, McVeigh and Breivik are simply the Christian version of Osama bin Laden is entirely wrong, in other words. Islamist terrorists take (misguided) inspiration from their religious texts in the act of slaughter — explicitly linking their motivation to religion. Mass murdering terrorists with a Christian background (and this includes the IRA, incidentally) typically do no such thing, even if the religious-inspired themes of martyrdom and purification tend to animate their doctrines. Not that this makes mass murder any less hideous or destructive — but it does show it to be a different kind of animal.
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Leading UK Journalist Melanie Phillips Spells it Out
WALID SHOEBAT:
Melanie Phillips is a minority voice in The UK and she explains the issues on Islam and irrational thinking of the left and conservative appeasers of Islam She is not an ex terrorist but I am sure CNN and CAIR can find some false dirt to try and destroy her credibility.
Can the Left Resist the Temptation to Exploit the Norway Attacks?
Mike McNally:
First the mea culpa. As news began to emerge of yesterday’s bombing and mass shooting in Norway, like many people I assumed there was an al-Qaeda or other Islamist connection. From London to Mumbai, simultaneous attacks have been a hallmark of Islamists, and there were several reasons why they might have wanted to target Norway.
I wrote a post for The Tatler on how the BBC listed those potential Islamist motives — the Satanic Verses link; the deployment of Norwegian troops to Afghanistan, although the country wasn’t named; and “cartoons of the prophet” — without mentioning Muslims, Islam or Mohammed. It was ridiculous yesterday and it’s still ridiculous today. The BBC clearly also thought an Islamist connection was likely — they just couldn’t bring themselves to say it.
But I got so caught up in mocking the BBC’s reporting that I failed to consider that it might have been anyone other than Islamists; I could have left open that possibility while still making my point, and not doing so was a mistake.
However, in one sense yesterday’s attacks are the exception that proves the “BBC rule.” If the gunman (who is also thought to be responsible for the bombing) had been of Middle Eastern appearance, and had shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he mowed down his victims, today many in the media would still be speculating about a possible motive, and the authorities would be urging us not to jump to conclusions, as was the case with Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. But Norwegian police and media were reporting the “right-wing” connection within hours of the attacks, and by first thing this morning officials were describing the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, as “a right-wing fundamentalist Christian.”
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Rep. Allen West Says ‘Marxist,’ Now Who Else Will Tell the Truth?
by Arlen Williams:
Lost in the blow-up between Representatives West and Wasserman Schultz is that only two days earlier, Allen West said something much more significant and more massively belligerent — about Barack Obama — something the left would prefer drowned out.
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By last weekend, he even went as far as using a word with which most readers in Big Government are already familiar in the identification of Barack Obama: Marxist.
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Israel’s War of the Words
By Andrew Pessin:
Almost everyone agrees about Israel’s military superiority over its adversaries. After all, it has won all the conventional wars, as well as the non-conventional ones — Hamas’s fantastic victory declarations in 2009, amidst the ruins of Gaza City, notwithstanding. But there is another war, an ongoing war, in which Israel suffers nothing but defeat after defeat. And in the long term this war might be even more important than the military wars, the economic wars, and the political wars.
That is the War of the Words.
The war over the very words which people use to talk, and therefore think, about the conflict.
There are too many examples.
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Pandora’s Box in Norway
James Lewis:
If you destroy civilization, the monsters that fly out will surely destroy you. That is the lesson of the barbarian who killed almost one hundred innocents in Norway last week.
The Left will manage to blame the usual scapegoats, the way it always does. In fact, it is the Left itself that has opened Pandora’s Box by systematically destroying the pillars of Western civilization, even bringing in Muslim terror preachers to speed up the destruction of civilized life. Saul Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer. Nothing better captures the destructive mind of the cultural Left, and we can see the results all around us.
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Murderer’s manifesto imagined cautious alliance with Jihadists: “We both share one common goal”
by Pamela Geller:
The parsing of the writings and conversations of the Norway shooter begins. He is a murderer, a mass murderer. Period. He’s not anything else. He is sick, sick to death and he has aided the enemy in so many ways it defies comprehension. Anyone who would kill children is insane. And if he’s a right winger who hates Muslims, how does that translate into killing a bunch of political youth party Workers’ Youth League. He could easily have found Muslim children to kill if that had been his intention.
I despise savagery and inhumanity in any all instances. Period. This abject loser lowered himself to sub-human status. And he has done this wholly on his own. Nowhere does Christianity or the counter jihad movement call for violence of any kind. Whatever he says doesn’t square. He’s a bloody murderer. Period. He is responsible for his actions. He and only he. There was no “ideology” here. No mandate for murder, and all the leftists, Islamic apologists and Islamic supremacists and media hounds won’t make it so. Watching CNN and BBC coverage about Norway, I found very disturbing to hear the number of times they use the word “Christian.” They would never dare refer to religion when it is jihad, and this attack had nothing to do with Christianity. It is outrageous.
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