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"The elections of 1948 were faked; so were those of 1951. In such circumstances, the moderates had no effective role to play. The men of violence moved forward." Paul Johnson, Modern Times. (New York: Harper Perennial; p. 496.)
Breivik, according to me, found an opportunity in Norway, and took it. Whether one can rightly claim that Norway's electoral system is corrupt is questionable on its face. The nation has free and fair elections among a brain-washed and cowed population sated with consumerism and nihilist poligion. Norwegians are often enraged about "ideas" such as Israel's existence because too often Norwegians have no personal emotions to actually feel in the real world, requiring sentimentality and false rage to have any feelings at all. But the elections are, more or less, what we have to conclude as free. Soft totalitarianism works just fine for a nation of idiots drunk, on dope, and sated by food and sex. Toss them some meaningful political religion, and life is wonderful. The people vote for more of the same. No force required. Breivik wasn't buying it. He was not that kind of nihilist.
Breivik, as I understand him, was interested in a politics of confrontation. In Algeria, the French provided it to the locals by bombing villages and slaughtering civilians in a rage of their own. It's not just massacres that motivate, though. If the state starts banning those who discuss the same things Breivik discussed, and if the state follows the fascist Left and bans what we think of as free speech, there will be a reaction that is little to do with speech at all. If Breivik's incident causes the Left to repress opposition to its "hate speech" codes, there will be less jaw-jaw, as Churchill puts it.
At the Belmont Club, Wretchard writes in the commnents:
If the line cannot be held here and we go on to ban more “cartoons” and more types of speech the chances are not that more Breivik-like behavior will be prevented but that in the end you will have nothing left but Breivik-like behavior. If we get there then everything runs under those rules, discussions stops and everything reopens again under the management of the Last Man Standing. But if we don’t want to go there, then now’s the time not for suppression, but debate.
Richard Fernadez, Belmont Club. July 26, 2011.
http://pajamasmedia.com/
So far there is still some openness to discussion, though the Left fascists are seemingly happy to put a stop to as much as they can, if we look to the treatment Robert Spencer, for example, is receiving from them. The French in Algeria missed that intermediate step.
In May 1945 Arabs massacred 103 Europeans in Algeria. The French retaliated: "Dive-bombers blew forty villages to pieces...." (Johnson: p.496.)
The effect in the longer term was the radicalisation of the natives, fairly, in my opinion. But there were Breiviks among them who no doubt would have found some cause to join whether the French ruled Algeria by force or not. Johnson points out that the Algerian resistance wasn't concerned to defeat the French military; the point of the resistance was to divide the people between collaborators and resistance. "The aim was to destroy the concept of assimilation and multi-racialism by eliminating the moderates on both sides." (Ibid. p. 497.)
The effect of terror is to sharpen the divisions: Ben Bella writes, "Liquidate all personalities who want to play the role of interlocuteur valable." (Ibid. p.497.)
Breivik, and again I speculate, shot children to death because he knows that most Norwegian couples have roughly one child. Many of these couples will now be past the age of reproduction. They are finished. They will not be replicated by their diminishing lot of babies. But more, Breivik, I think, determined to demoralise the survivors as well. Who among the survivors, direct or not, will now flock to the neo-fascist flag after knowing the potential result of it? Many might well reconsider a career as a Norwegian government apparatchik. Some might even question the whole parental world view that lead a man to act against it so vividly. Breivik has taken the fun out of being a sanctimonious Norwegian fascist. For some, at least.
"But it was the Muslim men of peace the FLN [Algerian Communists] really hated. In the first two and a half years of war, they murdered only 1,035 Europeans but 6, 352 Arabs (authenticated cases; the real figure was nearer to 20,000.) by this point the moderates could only survive by becoming killers themselves or going into exile." (Ibid. p. 498.)
Breivik is said to have desired a co-operation between such as himself and jihadis. It's sensible in that light: that like the Algerians and the French there will be only two options: French or Algerians. If the Algerians could murder enough Algerians, Algerians would either opt for collaborating with the French or they'd try to save themselves by joining the Algerian resistance. One assumes that Breivik sees himself as the (Modernist) Algerian in struggle with the (Muslim) French. Make French retaliation against the people so severe, and cowardice so fatal, that the people will choose one kind of death over another and hope they might somehow survive. If Breivik could join with the jihadis, he would have his other half the the confrontational dialectic needed to play this game. You can't have a war if no one is willing to fight.
The point, which Breivik seems to have grasped, is to kill the moderates so the survivors will see open conflict as a viable option. Compromisers are dangerous. They have to be, in the understanding of Breivik, the first to die to stir up a war I am sure he sees not only as inevitable but as right and good. He's just one man, now in prison and incommunicado. We won't be finding out much more about his ideas from him for a number of years at best. The question now is whether the fascist Left will play his game and repress any opposition, thereby further radicalising the people against the fascists. Less jaw-jaw, more war-war. We'll have to see how stupid and self-satisfied the Left is. Will they stomp on the opposition? I suspect so. Breivik will have the last laugh.
15 comments:
Excellent analysis, Dag.
I weep for Norway.
Among countries in occupied Europe during WWII, Norway, despite Vidkun Quisling's name being used for collaborators in those days, had a generally good record on resistance to the Final Solution. Roughly Half of Norway's small Jewish community survived the war. The starchy, confessionalist Lutheran bishop Ole Hallesby was imprisoned for saying that Christians should not aid the Germans in killing off the Jews, in which he was joined by numerous other voices in the established church. The Nasjonal Samling did not have enough people to really make a functional government (in clear contrast to France), so the German occupation forces had to do a lot of the administrative work themselves.
Hence, I am deeply saddened to hear of major parties in Norway becoming all but neo-Nazi in their hatred of Israel.
As for Breivik:
Mannen er en kriminell, ren og enkel (the man was a criminal, pure and simple).
Thank you, CGW, for your comment (and link at Jihad Watch.)
Kepha, I don't know what to say about the change in Norway from a poverty-stricken back-water not so long ago to a now fully Modernist and yet nihilist hell-hole of outrageously expensive alcohol and moralistic rage. I know your answer will be that Norwegians have fallen from traditional Christianity to something-- I'll say Satanic.
I'm no Christian, and certainly not the scholar you are in this field, but I have some deep sympathy for Christianity in general, especially when contrasted with European neo-pagan Romanticism as a political religion. Better to be a boring and ordinary Christian like Sarah Palin than a gnostic lunatic who believes in his own Will as telos. Humility is a hard lesson to learn, and I think wealth, much of it rentier in Norway, has corrupted a basically peasant population to the point of destruction. The destruction is not near complete, hardly begun, and until Norwegians come to humility, they are doomed to produce Breiviks here and there in mirror image of their own gnosticism.
Again, thank you both for your comments.
It sure is a sick little bubble you wingnuts live in.
Now, that is a fascinating comment. It adds so much and enlivens the debate in ways only one such as you could do. I think, no! I am sure you are a leftist genius who should tell the rest of humanity what to think. Thanks for you deep thoughts.
I think the the European left will play right into Breivik's hands by suppressing counter-jihadi speech even more than before. While Breivik's illiberal dictatorship would suppress the multi-culturalists; the Labor Party will show themselves to be just as illiberal. It will be the false alternative again. In the 1930 it was fascism or communism, for most Europeans. History is about to repeat itself as farce. Breivik will be laughing in his comfortable cell while watching it on his flat screen. Or could Norway wake-up?
Back to Algeria. In the last 20 years over 200,000 have been killed by a civil war between Salafi forces and the military dictatorship. France has long been out of the picture. This is pure Algerian culture. Once again that false alternative. My guess is that Egypt will enter that phase next.
Jason, I think nothing about men has changed since the times of Knossis, that man is still man, and eternally so.
These utopian dreams of the perfect man, or even Homo Sovieticus, a good man, are terrible phantasies that cause death and destruction just the same as any other outburst of unrestrained man at his worst. Capitalism, so-called, is the only saving grace I can see in the world, and it doesn't work that well in Norway, all the good of Modernity begin turned to a political religion as evil as Nazism was 60 years ago. We have to deal with the actual nature of man and put aside the childish things of Norwegian haters and their moralistic evils that allow for a man like Breivik to emerge from them. Man is man. The leftist think not, think themselves demi-gods, think themselves geniuses in control. How foolish. How obviously evil. And they cannot learn the difference. Breivik must be howling in his cell, laughing at the madness he is exposing. There will be more. There is always more.
A large portion of my family is clearly of Norwegian descent, but I don't think I could find one person among the extended group who would think about that or believe it if it were proven by dna tests; rather they are Scottish to the bone and know only the local scene from the mists of time. We're what one might call "close-knit." Whole villages in some areas are so, shall I say, in-bred, that I look like all of them to a frightening degree. There was a Scottish diaspora after the Clearances and well beyond that, forcing my own to scatter around the New World, and all of my life I have found strangers determined that I must be the person they think I am, I simple "am" the person that claim I am because I look like me/the other person they know. Yes, sometimes I see myself too, and he sees me, and it is discomfiting. Further, we share culture we mostly don't understand, folkways that we inherit from parents and near family, that are unchanged from the ways of the Old Country, and things so uncritically assumed that we pass them on without thinking. When I lived in Scotland I hated it: it was just like home.
As you point out, though, people do change, and fundamentally in some ways, when they learn and gain experience in the world. Some of my most rewarding experiences in life have been during times teaching adults returning to school to learn the things they couldn't learn as children. I teach, sometimes, Adult Basic Literacy. I find men and women coming to school to find out what they missed and to get into life as others have had all along. They come of their own free will, determined to learn, often after years of failure and loss, and they want to know, at last, desperate sometimes to soak up all the things they've missed. Catastrophic lives come to find order and meaning. I teach literature. I teach from stories about the universal experiences of Man. Science might be fine, and History is good, but I think that fiction is the higher truth.
Like drug addicts or alcoholics or the wild settling at last, they come of their own accord from their own driven need, often like those who return to church. It's far easier to live a normal and reasonable life from the beginning, but the prodigal son is most welcome. For me it's a celebration of the human to see someone take up Socrates rather than a bottle or a cudgel. It happens. It's maturity. Sometimes it happens late in a life.
That Breivik murdered children is for me a gnostic vision of man. I've come to this understanding late in life, but I am now deeply impressed by the concept. That man is so far removed from humility that he thinks himself a demi-god capable of seeing the perfect truth and feels justified in slaughtering the masses to make it real in the world is what they do and who they are. They can easily lay them down; but not a one can raise them up those they've laid down. Not a one of them.
My concern with death isn't that people are no longer with us and living and experiencing their own lives; the horror for me is that if they die too soon they can never have that epiphany that allows them to redeem themselves, assuming it's necessary for a decent live. When people come back to school to learn to read and think and to wonder, they do so because they want to be better people. It's what they want. They desire the good at last. To cut that off before they have a chance to want it, and not many do, is to rubbish the life of men who might have wanted, and one has no right, none of us being so prescient.
Breivik was a gnostic, I think, who felt that his superior wisdom justified his actions. He destroyed the chances of those who might have, as we say, seen the light. He did wrong.
In terms of gnostic insight, he was clever, doing the rational and, to me, Satanic, right. He wiped out a segment of a class that will be hard to replace, and he terrorised the survivors into something we can't foresee. It was cunning, but it wasn't smart.
I'm not a better man than Breivik. When I hear that Clan Islam has stolen a pot from Clan Modern I reach for my sword and turn into a raging beast ready for massacre. I'm ready and willing to run through the glen hacking like a savage at anyone who looks not my own clan. Temper. We temper that with Reason. It makes us far the harder for it.
Too often I am in favour of violence against our enemies; but one must look ahead of ones immediate rage to see what is possible for others, enemies or not. If we kill them all in a fury, yes, they are done; but if we can wait and teach when they come instead as desperate men and women who want to know at last, then we are blessed.
For all of that, I am still a terrible Highlander.
Dag, forgive my bluntness, but your last post looks as if you're slowly arguing yourself into Christianity.
Good point that none of us are in ourselves better men than Breivik. Such cruelty is doubtlessly there in many other human hearts, only there are numerous ways in which it is restrained.
I'm a terrible atheist, Kepha, and I can't see any gain in being a terrible Christian.
Having made that claim, half jokingly, I do argue in favour of Christianity for, if only one reason, the sake of it bounding the evils one might do without it. If one has not the strength of mind to resist the evil one would do, then one might turn to all things Christian, if not being a better person, at least not being an actively evil one in the world. If one has no "Ludovico Treatment" that we see in Burgess' _A Clockwork Orange_ to make us sick at the thought of crime and violence, then Christianity might be the internal trigger, the Ludovico Treatment of the self to make us at least behave against ourself's desires.
I would say yes to Christianity without any deep qualms if I could. I can't. This is not because I am Mister Big Science and I think I know better than the history of men who have thought deeply and come to Christianity. I'm not so smart; I'm an atheist because I have won in this life an unbounded lack of imagination.
It's always hilarious to realize that you consider yourself some sort of intellectual.
Anon., I leave your comments up to allow people to see how stupid and vile you are as a human being. This was your last proof.
Couple of comments, Dag:
I'm a guy with some imagination, but generally pretty prosaic myself.
Second, I think out anonymous friend thinks he's being "intense" and epater-ing us bourgeoisie with his strings of insults. I'll use the little imagination I have to guess that you probably said something that popped his bubble. Maybe the temptation to come over to our "dark side" is getting a little strong fore him, so he rages against what you have said.
I'll exhaust my store of sociological knowledge here, (with the exception of passing knowledge of Erving Goffman's sometimes hypnotic freakshow writings) by noting that some "outsiders," as anonymous is, sometimes present themselves for admission to the group by posing themselves as aggressive, this in the hope of unchallenged admission. This self-presentation here, as I see it, is to the realm of what sociologists call the "homosocial," i.e. the world of men. Anonymous is clearly a desperate metrosexual longing for acceptance into a masculine group, for a place among men, and he has no idea how to accomplish this. Thus, he becomes a parody of a masculine male, and comes across, as is likely his whole nature, as organically incapable of mid-range thought and lacking in any male socialisation. Most guys would just punch him in the face and be done with him. He'd then learn his position in the male pecking order. He can't learn that when he is protected from the male world by a corrupt culture that stigmatises masculinity in males. It's obviously driving this kid nuts, and he can't find any relief beyond lashing out and demanding attention.
I don't care. Men learn or they don't. I'm not here to baby-sit a loser.
On the other note, I think it takes something of great imagination to believe in something more than nothing. I look at the universe and see an endless empty sky, a heart of darkness. Too bad for me. But life is full of surprises. I certainly prefer it to what I've seen of the alternative.
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