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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