Anders Breivik

Not One of Us: Asne Seierstad’s book on Anders Breivik

/107 Comments/in , /by

one-us-story-anders-breivik-and-massacre-norwayA Brief Review of: Asne Seierstad, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, Translated by Sahar Death (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

I recently finished reading One of Us, a book on Anders Breivik by the well-known Norwegian journalist and author Asne Seierstad. The book was published in Norway in 2013. The English language edition was released this spring. July 22nd marks the fourth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks, and the subject is topical due, in part, to the June rampage by Dylann Roof. There are significant similarities and differences between Breivik and Roof.

Everyone recalls the news reports of the 2011 attacks, but this book details Breivik’s life, the events of July 22nd, and his trial the following year. Assuming that Seierstad’s account is accurate — and despite some left-wing bias, it appears to be, this can be said about Breivik:

He was not a National Socialist, nor even a racialist. He supported Israel. He was a cultural Christian. Although he did not have a strong religious faith and rarely went to church, Christianity was important to his identity. He was anti-Islam. He considered himself a revolutionary conservative and an intellectual, not a warrior.

Read more

White Ethnocentrism as Psychopathology: Anders Breivik and Emma West

/156 Comments/in , , , /by

A major theme of The Culture of Critique is that several Jewish-dominated intellectual movements developed theories in which ethnocentrism by Whites (and only Whites) was an indication of psychiatric disorder. This was true not only of the Frankfurt School, perhaps the main offender, but also Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of “status anxiety” for Whites concerned about their displacement and Erich Fromm’s analysis in terms of “sado-masochistic reaction formations” (see here, p. 195ff). All of these movements were facilitated by psychoanalysis, an infinitely plastic bit of anti-science that was able to get any desired result.

We are now seeing a trend for psychiatric diagnoses to be given to Whites who are angry about the massive invasion of non-Whites that are destroying the traditional cultures and threatening the status of the traditional populations of White countries. Anders Breivik was recently diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for his rampage, mainly against young activists and the children of the leftist Norwegian elite he viewed as responsible for the immigration assault on Norway. This despite the fact that his operation was well-planned and despite the fact that his manifesto shows that he is quite intelligent and has read widely on the ongoing disaster of the Muslim invasion of Europe. I described him as “a serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy (e.g., developing culturally conservative media, gaining control of NGOs. and developing youth organizations that will confront the Marxist street thugs).”

His writings are definitely not the ravings of a psychotic completely out of touch with reality. Indeed, there will be an investigation by the Norwegian parliament because at least some members are voicing concerns that the diagnosis is not consistent with the level of planning involved. Dr. Tarjei Rygnestad, the head of a panel that must approve the ruling before it becomes official, stated in July that “it was unlikely that a true schizophrenic would have been able to plan an attack as carefully and calmly as Mr Breivik had.” Read more

Stephen Walt on Anders Brevick, Immigration, and Western Culture

/77 Comments/in , , , /by

If there’s one characteristic that defines the European nationalist parties, it is that they have eschewed racialist rhetoric in favor of cultural arguments. Geert Wilders, Marine LePen, et al. have claimed that Islam is incompatible with Western culture—that Muslims refuse to assimilate and have values that are incompatible with Western modernity, particularly on women and sexuality.

Without doubt this tactic has made nationalist parties more acceptable to mainstream voters and more difficult to attack by the left. It is not possible to tar these parties with the ultimate post-WWII pejorative—”Nazi—which is sure to come up if one breathes a word about ethnic interests of Whites.

Now Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, attempts to undercut cultural conservative arguments that he associates with Breivik—“the idea that he is defending some fixed and sacred notion of the ‘Christian West,’ which is supposedly under siege by an aggressive alien culture” (“Breivik’s Warped Worldview“). (He’d doubtless disapprove even more of Breivik’s Nordicist proclivities.)

In my review of The Israel Lobby, I made the following point about Western elites:

Confronted with the moral critique of America emanating from elite universities and the media, the old Protestant intellectual establishment quickly yielded the high ground. Many of them became avid cheerleaders of the new multicultural zeitgeist that rejected the America and even the Americanism of their ancestors, to the point that the new zeitgeist has become a consensus among elites of all stripes. They accepted their own demographic decline, and they gave up their pretensions as cultural leaders and trend setters. And they implicitly paved the way for their eventual  loss of political power to other groups, some of which have historically conditioned grudges against them—a dangerous situation to say the least. In doing so, they became the pallbearers for their own people.

Sadly, this applies to Stephen Walt. In the current main TOO article, Charles Dodgson does an excellent job of refuting Walt’s moral indictments of the West. Right now I am reviewing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization—a book that I strongly recommend for intellectuals like Walt. Duchesne, a sociologist at the University of New Brunswik, is fond of showing how the critics of the West typically presuppose ideas whose origins are uniquely Western. Read more

Does the Norway Atrocity Make Nationalism Illegitimate? A Reply to Stephen Walt

/60 Comments/in , , , /by

My first thoughts on learning about the mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on 23rd July 2011 were mixed with emotions. That such atrocity could be committed in the name of something I also believe in–the defence of the West from Third World colonization–was sickening. Should I feel shame? Perhaps. I certainly felt fear. As a parent I could imagine how those youngsters’ parent felt and my own children being targeted for my beliefs.

Then shame or a sense of impending shame began to take over. Viewing Breivik’s video and skimming his book forced the realization that this was not an aimless rampage but an act carefully thought out to achieve a goal. Breivik may be a psychopath, but he is a psychopath with a purpose. And his purpose is also mine. I had a moral dilemma.

The dilemma was this: If defending Western identity inevitably leads to atrocity, to the killing of innocent people, how can I justify participating in identity politics? How can I be a White loyalist and live with myself? It is easy to make excuses and brush the issue under the proverbial carpet. Most nationalists are not killers. We have a just cause. The other side does bad things. Some immigrant communities are prone to violence. Etc. etc. Still, if our side descends to atrocity, that is something for which we must take responsibility. Read more

Political Violence, Part 2: Violence by the Right: The Media’s Timothy McVeigh Paradigm

/26 Comments/in , , /by

Breivik, Goldstein, Amir, and McVeigh

In a sense, Anders Breivik’s killings were a form of vigilantism, as are almost all killings conducted outside the apparatus of the State. To illustrate my point, we go back to Weather Underground member, David Gilbert, talking about his decision to turn to violence:

Our movement had come about thinking we could shake the moral conscience of America….But painful experience had taught us that there was an entrenched power structure which profited from and systematically enforced oppression. We could not make a dent in the overwhelming social violence of the status quo without coming up against that power structure. (In Dan Berger, Outlaws of America, p. 44)

One could easily envision Breivik making the same exact justification for his decision to turn to killing. Both Breivik and Gilbert killed outside the mechanism of the State, but one is looked at as a sort of hero of the left and intellectual circles, while those same members would view Breivik as a monster beyond compare. This is helped by the media’s attempt to brand Breivik negatively while branding those Good Terrorists with positive qualities. Read more

Political Violence, Part 1: Anti-White Violence by the Left as Precursor to Today’s Mainstream Anti-White Establishment

/27 Comments/in , , /by

Political violence has been used throughout history to send messages and influence public opinion and policy. Throughout the 1960’s up until the 1990’s, leftists groups consistently used bombings, shootings, and scare tactics to promote their goals. In the United States, the Weather Underground is probably the most notable terrorist group in the history of the United States. Yet, the group is held esteem by many intellectuals, academics and media figures, who feel the violence committed by the group was justified given the context of the times. Leftist groups such as the Weather Underground were promoting viewpoints that would eventually become accepted into the mainstream, such as opposition to the Vietnam War and the dissolution of white homogeneity in the United States. As a result, groups such as the Weather Underground can give us a unique perspective on the prism through which the media and the Left in the Western World perceive violence.

In 1970, Weather Underground members Terry Robbins, Theodore Gold and Diana Oughton, were all killed when a bomb they were making in a Greenwich brownstone detonated, leveling the brownstone. The goal was to attack an army ROTC dance for non-commissioned officers in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in retaliation for the U.S.’s war in Vietnam. The fact that it was a dance likely would have resulted in the death of many female civilians. In 1981, a number of Weather Underground members and the Black Liberation Army shot and killed two police officers and a guard while trying to rob a Brinks armored truck. Many more incident could be listed, but the point is that these leftist groups were very violent. Read more

The effect of Breivik’s actions on Geert Wilders and the PVV

/19 Comments/in , /by

The killings of Anders Breivik, although shocking by their sheer scale, are nothing new for Dutchmen: Holland is used to political killings since the murders of anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Islam-critic Theo van Gogh in 2004. It has long since lost its innocence after a period of self-preceived tolerance. The meteoric rise of Wilders since 2004 is another dimension in which the discussion of Breivik’s killings is taking place, because Breivik has mentioned Wilders 30 times in his manifesto. What has been said in the mainstream Dutch media sheds an interesting light on the impact of Breivik’s actions.

The moment it was clear that the Oslo attacks were the work of Breivik, Wilders sent out a twitter-message: “That the fight against islam is abused by a psychopath is disgusting and a slap in the face of the global anti-Islamic movement. This fills me with disgust that the perpetrator refers to PVV and me in his manifesto.” The self-proclaimed intellectual newspaper NRC Handelsblad was quick to link the attacks with the right-wing intellectual discourse in their commentary on Monday July 25th: “Anders Behring Breivik is no fool, but an extremist. He knows his classics. The same philosophies that right-wing politicians craft their programs together.” The next day NRC and The Press stepped up their attack on Wilders by accussing him of ‘war-rhetoric’. Wilders replied by a new statement proclaiming: “We struggle in a democratric and non-violent way against further Islamization of our society and will continue to do that. The preservation of our freedom and security is our only goal.” Read more