

RADICALISATION



We hear a lot about radicalisation these days. Three girls aged 15 and 16 went off by themselves from east London to Syria to join Isis a couple of weeks ago. Three days ago a 19 year old guy was given 22 years in prison for wishing to cut off the head of a British soldier (he was caught before he did it, unlike Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who did behead a British soldier on the streets of London on 22 May 2013). The word for all of these young people is jihadis.



One o



RADICALISATION



We hear a lot about radicalisation these days. Three girls aged 15 and 16 went off by themselves from east London to Syria to join Isis a couple of weeks ago. Three days ago a 19 year old guy was given 22 years in prison for wishing to cut off the head of a British soldier (he was caught before he did it, unlike Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who did behead a British soldier on the streets of London on 22 May 2013). The word for all of these young people is jihadis.



One of Us is an excellent book about the radicalisation of an anti-jihadi.



On 22 July 2011 he left a van with a bomb next to a government building in Oslo which exploded and killed 8 people. Then he drove a second van out of Oslo to a place called Utoya which was an island in a fjord. This was where a summer camp was going on. It was run by the youth wing of the left wing Labour Party. He got on a ferry and when he was on the island he walked round shooting the children who were there. He killed 69 of them and wounded many more. 57 of them were between the ages of 14 and 19. It was a small island. They had nowhere to run. Some of them jumped into the cold waters of the fjord and he shot them as they swum. When the police finally arrived he gave himself up without a struggle. He was not one of those you’ll-never-take-me-alive-copper guys. The shootings were only Part One. The trial was Part Two.



THE EUROPEAN TIMOTHY MCVEIGH



Anders Breivik was the European Timothy McVeigh. Both these guys were in their own minds at war against their own governments, which they saw as tyrannical and evil. McVeigh’s specific complaints against Washington seem diffuse, but Breivik was very specific: Multiculturalism and cultural Marxism.



We need to ask what he meant by this. And he was at pains to explain. In fact, if people had only listened, he might not have had to shoot all those children.



It’s the media who are most to blame for what has happened today because they didn’t publish my views. One therefore has to get the message out by other means.



My responsibility is to save Norway. I take full responsibility for everything out here and I’m proud of the operation. If you only knew what hard work it’s been. It was bloody awful. I’ve been dreading this day for two years.



What did he mean by hard work? Well, he did everything himself.

Here are some of the things he had to buy (where did the money come from? A dozen maxed out credit cards) :



1 farm, isolated

Respirator mask

Heavy duty rubber gloves

Protective apron

TV stand

Hotplate

Sulphuric acid (large amount, from used car dealers)

Powdered sulphur

Sodium nitrate

Ethanol

Acetone

Caustic soda

Lab equipment (flasks, bottles, funnels, thermometers)

Fuses

several kilos of aspirin (for acetylsalic acid)

protein powder

steroids

shooting lessons

liquid nicotine

electric drill

metal cutters

superglue

bayonet

plastic sheeting

3 toilet brushes

Magnetic stirrer

Spatula

Distilled water

Microballoons

1 set of dumbbells

6 tonnes of fertilizer

6 food blenders

1 dozen 50 kilo bags

1 Glock 17 pistol

1 semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle

A whole lot of ammo



HARD WORK



He trained rigorously for the big day :



First he gulped down a big protein shake, then he fixed a big rucksack filled with stones on his back, another on his front, and carried a five-litre container filled with water in each hand.



Then he would stagger about for twenty minutes. And the bomb making was really dangerous :



The barn was full of chemicals, the liquids were unstable and his working processes were experimental. He had scarcely any safety measures.



It was such a shame he didn’t blow himself up with his dangerous unstable chemicals, but I guess he was just…lucky.



BACK TO THE QUESTION : WHY SHOOT ALL THOSE CHILDREN?



Strangely, this was a very similar attack to the Peshawar school massacre, which you will remember happened in December 2014. The Taliban were executing the children of the army, their enemy, both to punish the Army and to remove a number of future enemies. Really it was the same thing on Utoya island. These children were the future Labour Party elite. Breivik explained in his address to the court:



If we can force them to change direction by executing seventy people, then that is a contribution to preventing the loss of our ethnic group, our Christianity, our culture. It will also help to preventing a civil war that could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians. It is better to commit minor barbarity than major barbarity.



His attitude to the massacre was strikingly similar to Himmler’s remarks about the mass killings of Jews – a truly unpleasant thing to have to do, but future generations will be grateful, of this we can be sure.



BREIVIK’S MAIN POINT



That ethnic white Norwegians would by 2048 be a minority in their own country unless steps were taken. That the great number of Muslim immigrants and their much larger families would be the majority. That this was a very bad thing – cultural suicide. And that this was happening with the connivance or the acquiescence of the liberal left, the “cultural Marxists” as he called them.



We can see that Breivik is a terminal point in the spectrum of populist/rightist anti-Islam anti-immigrant politics which are now so prominent in Europe. E.g. Marine le Pen’s National Front in France – check it out, in the Euro elections in 2009 they got 6.3% of the vote and were 6th, in the same elections in 2014 they got 25% and were 1st. Here in Britain we have the rise of Ukip, in the Netherlands they have the Freedom Party led by Geert (“I don’t hate Muslims, I hate Islam”) Wilders, and so on. So we see that Breivik’s views were extreme but were only the outer edge of what has now become part of the political mainstream.



A STRANGE COLLUSION OF NEED



Breivik saw his trial as the most important phase of his mission. Because he knew the world’s spotlight would be on him, and then he would have his chance to explain his political message. Everyone had ignored his internet rantings before, but now, now they wouldn’t. They’d be hanging on his every word.



However, there was a psychiatric report on him : paranoid schizophrenia. Insane! Not legally competent to stand trial!

He was outraged, offended, massively angry.



And so were all the families of the victims. They didn’t want him to be insane either. They wanted him to be judged responsible for his actions. (This strange conflict with the psychiatrists happens at many big trials, like that of Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.) A second report was commissioned. Result : dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. Meaning : he was sane! Much relief by both Breivik and the victims’ families. How strange. ( A personality disorder is the psychiatrists’ get out of jail free card. It means you are a person who commits extreme acts without remorse but you aren’t mentally ill. You’re just evil.)



BREIVIK IN PRISON



He got 21 years, which doesn’t seem like enough, but they can extend it indefinitely, apparently. He thought he would be able to live the life of a political theoretician in jail, with a pc and a printer and correspondents all over the world. Turned out not to be like that at all. He got a typewriter which was glued to the desk and no pc. His correspondence dwindled to nothing quite quickly. He wasn’t any kind of hero to anyone. He had a string of complaints about his treatment :



He was often given only enough butter for two, or, at a pinch, three slices of bread, even though they knew he ate four. “This creates unnecessary annoyance because I either have to eat dry bread or be made to feel guilty for asking for more.”



God forbid that Anders Breivik should ever be made to feel guilty, hmm?



THIS BOOK



Is excellent, a very gripping read, and opens up a whole morass of complex questions. I thought Asne Seierstad strayed into tastelessness in some passages recounting the details of how some of the children died (“The bullet had hit Elizabeth’s ear canal, seared through her cranium and gone right into her brain and out the other ear. Only when it got to the pink phone cover did it stop”) but overall this was a great effort.



Recommended.



