Oslo and Utoya: further readings II
[ by Charles Cameron — various angles on Breivik, continuing ]
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“There’s always a mystery.”
Dr. Dalrymple is holding forth on what we can — and can’t — know about the mind of a mass murderer like the Oslo shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. “I don’t think we’ll ever understand” what makes a person capable of this kind of premeditated murder, Dr. Dalrymple tells me over lunch. What’s more, he says, “we don’t even know what it is to understand. At what point do you say, ‘Aha! Now I understand!'” he asks.
That’s a [pseudonymous] British prison psychiatrist, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.
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A few things have happened since my previous batch of posts on Oslo and Utoya: some other reading – I’m betting one of them is that a lot of people have arrived that their “Aha! Now I understand!” moment on Breivik, and aren’t particularly interested in alternate views. Their eyes may still be caught by a sensational headline, perhaps, they may still be fascinated by police procedural accounts of the investigation and trial – but they’ve arrived at closure on “who he is and why he did it” and that’s it, case closed.
Dr. Dalrymple’s suggests there is “always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there’s always a mystery, and I think that’s going to remain.”
In this post, I’ll begin to list some of the more remarkable and/or worthwhile reading I’ve come across since my previous post. Let’s begin with Thomas Hegghammer:
When Thomas Hegghammer writes about Breivik, which he has finally done, we get the chance to read one of the world’s finest Al Qaeda scholars writing about one of his fellow Norwegians. I mentioned his tweets as passed along by Will McCants in my first “some other reading” post. Hegghammer’s NYT op-ed, The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists, claims that Brevik’s 2083 manifesto “reveals a new doctrine of civilizational war that represents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of Al Qaeda”. If anyone should, Hegghammer should know.
So that would be my number one pick.
And then…
An American Apology to Norway . . . sorry about that, from MilPub. Written by Seydlitz, a friend of — and recent guest poster on — this blog. Personal and touching.
Moving farther afield, this one caught my eye:
Joan Acocella, Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right, on the New Yorker’s Book Bench: “The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway — and, by extension, in Scandinavia and the West as a whole — to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence.” Acocella closes with the words, “Larsson died before those developments, but he’s up there somewhere saying, ‘I told you so.'”
Of all the people on that Scandinavian right, Breivik quoted the blogger known as Fjordman most frequently – so this interview with Fjordman (under his own name, Peder Jensen) is key. Most telling quote, strangely enough: “After the terrorist attack and his blog being cited as an influence, Jensen says he will never use the alias «Fjordman» again.”
I wasn’t intending to use this post to do much in the way of propagating my own ideas, bur many of the items that follow have to do with who influenced or inspired Breivik, and thus with the issues of free speech, inspiration, incitement, and slippery slopes. Earlier today I responded to a ZP comment with an aphorism playing off the phrase “correlation is not causation” – so that phrase was already prepped and ready in my head, and what nudged its way into consciousness as I was tapping out this quick write-up for Fjordman was another:
Quotation is not causation.
I think that’s important in a way that parallels the importance of “innocent until proven guilty”.
Back to my list.
Oslo anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Anders Behring Breivik: Tunnel vision in an online world, in The Guardian, comments on Norway’s “subculture of resentment”:
Breivik must willingly have allowed himself to be brainwashed by Islamophobic and extreme rightwing websites. However, had he instead been forced to receive his information through a broadsheet newspaper, where not all the stories dealt with Europe’s loss of confidence and the rise of militant Islam, it is conceivable that his world would have looked slightly different. Perhaps one lesson from this weekend of shock and disbelief may be that cultural pluralism is not necessarily a threat to national cohesion, but that the tunnel vision resulting from selective perusal of the internet is.
Okay, Stormfront next. I won’t link there, but I visited, and they had a thread titled Please post ALL items about the “Oslo killer” in this thread! which already ran to 51 pages shortly after the event. Conspiracy is stranger than fiction – consider this intriguing suggestion from the first page:
White Brothers from Norway, let us know the truth. It sounds like a Mossad operation to me. Another, 9/11, Mumbai, 7/7, Spain, Shoe Bomber or Ball bomber. This has the tell tale signs of a Mossad operation.
Pastebin / Anonymous. Worth quoting in full:
Operation UnManifest:
As Anders Behring Breivik wants to use the cruel action of killing over 90 young people to promote his 1516-page manifesto, also with the help of the internet, Anonymous suggests following action:
1. Find the Manifest of Anders Behring Breivik : 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence
2. Change it, add stupid stuff, remove parts, shoop his picture, do what you like to…..
3. Republish it everywhere and up vote releases from other peoples, declare that the faked ones are original
4. Let Anders become a joke, such that nobody will take him serious anymore
5. Spread this message around the internet and real life, translate it
6. Have a moment for the victims of his cruel attacksWe all are anonymous,
We all are Legion,
We all do not forgive murder,
We all do not forget the victims.
Time for a quick detour on Anonymous? — in the words of NYU’s Garbriella Coleman, in the most detailed account I’ve seen (h/t Shannon Trosper) of that curious entity, Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action:
Anonymous functions as what Marco Deseriis defines as an improper name: “The adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors.”
And while we’re on the subject of names — “We are Legion” is likely an echo of the response a biblical demon gave to Jesus when commanded to leave a crazed man: “My name is Legion; for we are many” (Mark 5.7).
Back to our Breivik materials…
Anders Sandberg is someone I respect and have been reading for years – currently at a futuristic tank at Oxford I believe, an old-time gamer, well acquainted with heremetic and kabbalistic traditions, and pretty clear-headed in not always expected ways. His piece here — Blaming victims, individuals or social structures? — is worth reading in full, but the sting is in its tail:
It is worth considering that the number of victims of terrorism and individual hate-crime over the past century (perhaps of the order of hundreds of thousands) is minuscule compared to the number of victims of institutionalized democide and war (of the order of hundreds of millions victims). While terrorism is horrific and personal, it is when mistrust or hatred of out-groups become institutionalized they become truly dangerous. In this regard any political ideology or institution that does not try to reduce its out-group bias ought to be viewed as far more potentially dangerous than any individual, no matter how hate-filled or destructive.
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Okay, I clearly need more than one post to do justice to my materials, so I’ll leave it at that for now, and be back soon.
