It’s been another busy week in the wackosphere. We’re also reminded that the racism and fear that lies behind our tendency to demonize people who are not like us can kill. A lot is coming in from Norway still, but it seems clear that the guy who went on a rampage is speaking the language of the conspiracist. This is why this is important. More about Oslo below, but trust me, I’d rather be making snarky remarks about people who think Amy Winehouse is still alive or was murdered or has been dead for months….

OSLO

My take on the Oslo massacre? The suspect’s rant, “2803: A European Declaration of Independence” (warning: huge pdf) is long. Like 1,500 pages long, and I’ve only been able to get a sense of the sweep of the conspiracy theory overall. Honestly, right now I’m working on another project and can’t quite dig too deeply into the conspiracy. But the tropes of national infiltration and media/government complicity are common in just about every perceived global conspiracy. The one thing that stuck out to me was his fear of “cultural Marxism,” is not foreign to American conspiracy theories. When you google that term, whatever it is supposed to mean (usually, “being more liberal than me”), you get Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily (home of the birth certificate conspiracy). You get Brannon Howse from Worldview Weekend. And these conspiracy theories get people killed. The most dismaying thing is the number of people who just don’t get it, even when they are horrified by such a massacre, people who say, “What a nightmare, but you do have to worry about the cultural Marxists.” And this is why we will certainly see this type of slaughter again.

Certain conspiracists think that the comparisons of Breivik to Timothy McVeigh are part of the government’s plan to sculpt a narrative. They are, based on my reading of sections of Breivik’s manifesto, extremely apt comparisons. Take, for instance, the sections detailing how someone should go about hiding weapons and carrying out guerilla warfare against the state. There was a section on preparing and burying weapons for later use that could have been lifted from The Turner Diaries, a book (really, violent porn for racists) that was apparently in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested, and which has a scene in which a government building (in the Turner Diaries, it is the FBI HQ) is destroyed by a truck bomb. Oh, and there is that whole truck bomb element in Oslo. This is not a random attack, but one which is (within limits) predictable and which you can anticipate by immersing yourself in…the type of stuff that I have had to read lately.

My copy of The Turner Diaries, by the way, has a blurb by Tim McVeigh on it. How’s that for a ripe little slice of publishing hell? And you wonder why I’m grumpy all the time.

So, let’s get dirty.

That’s all I can stomach this week. No conspiracy theory of the week. It’s just not that type of week.

RJB

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