Homegrown Norweigan terrorist is a right wing eliminationist, authorities say

Although few­er than one hun­dred hours have tran­spired since the world learned of the hor­rif­ic ter­ror­ist attacks in Oslo and Utøya, we’re already start­ing to get a clear­er por­trait of the man who Nor­we­gian author­i­ties say was the mas­ter­mind behind the cold-blood­ed spate of killing and destruction.

Anders Behring Breivik, thir­ty-two, appears to be the worst kind of per­son there is: A big­ot­ed elim­i­na­tion­ist who under­went a dan­ger­ous, yet unno­ticed, trans­for­ma­tion from fanat­ic fun­da­men­tal­ist to terrorist.

He is among a cadre of fright­en­ing indi­vid­u­als who believe that slaugh­ter­ing inno­cent peo­ple will bring about some sort of good in world.

Breivik pur­port­ed­ly authored a pair of man­i­festos  — one is a doc­u­ment and one is a video. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press sum­ma­rized the for­mer as fol­lows:

Breivik’s man­i­festo chron­i­cled events that deep­ened his con­tempt for Mus­lims and “Marx­ists” he blamed for mak­ing Europe mul­ti­cul­tur­al. He sug­gest­ed his friends did­n’t even know what he was up to, and com­ments from sev­er­al peo­ple who had con­tact with the qui­et blond man indi­cate he was right.

From Sep­tem­ber 2009 through Octo­ber 2010, Breivik post­ed more than 70 times on Dokument.no, a Nor­we­gian site with crit­i­cal views on Islam and immi­gra­tion. In one com­ment, he enter­tained the idea of a Euro­pean Tea Par­ty movement.

The AP quotes the edi­tor of the afore­men­tioned web­site as say­ing he had no idea of Breivik’s mur­der­ous plot. Evi­dent­ly Breivik kept his plans to him­self. If he had co-con­spir­a­tors, there weren’t very many of them.

In the doc­u­ment Breivik styles him­self as a Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tive, patri­ot and nation­al­ist. He looks down on neo-Nazis as “under­priv­i­leged racist skin­heads with a short temper.”

Part of Breivik’s man­i­festo was tak­en almost word for word from the first few pages of the anti-tech­nol­o­gy man­i­festo writ­ten by “Unabomber” Ted Kaczyn­s­ki, who is in fed­er­al prison for mail bombs that killed three peo­ple and injured 23 oth­ers across the U.S. from the 1970s to the 1990s.

David Nei­w­ert, a respect­ed jour­nal­ist and friend of NPI who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about right wing elim­i­na­tion­ism and its trig­gers (he has even authored books on the sub­ject), weighed in an hour ago with his thoughts at Crooks & Liars.

Breivik’s man­i­festoes remind me a great deal of the man­i­festo left behind by an Amer­i­can right-wing ter­ror­ist who tried to embark on a sim­i­lar ram­page tar­get­ing as many lib­er­als as he could kill, but who was con­sid­er­ably less suc­cess­ful: Jim David Adkisson, the Knoxville church shoot­er, who exhort­ed his read­ers to “Go Kill Lib­er­als”. His man­i­festo was func­tion­al­ly the log­i­cal absur­dio ad reduc­tum of the hatred spewed dai­ly by the Fox News talk­ing heads and radio pun­dits whose works filled his library — whose word­ing it rather close­ly reflect­ed in the lead­up to the exhor­ta­tions to violence.

Like­wise, Breivik’s work is large­ly a regur­gi­ta­tion of ideas and claims that have been cir­cu­lat­ing on the Right for a long time, includ­ing main­stream sources such as Fox News and Andrew Bre­it­bart. There’s noth­ing orig­i­nal here — except that he, like Adkisson, sim­ply takes the “log­ic” (as it were) of the cul­tur­al war­riors he par­rots and ratch­ets it up the next log­i­cal step into vio­lent action.

We know that hate speech is a pre­cur­sor to vio­lence. Intol­er­ance has a way of lead­ing to more intol­er­ance. It’s time that we, as a soci­ety, stopped per­mit­ting the right wing to spew so much filth over the pub­lic air­waves. There is no room in our dis­course for hate speech. Con­trary to what the right wing hate talk­ers may say, there is a con­nec­tion between their rhetoric and the destruc­tive actions of fanat­ics like Breivik. Their rhetoric is what influ­ences the think­ing of the Breiviks of the world, who go on to com­mit mass mur­der. So they are indi­rect­ly responsible.

When a tragedy like the ter­ror­ist attacks per­pe­trat­ed by Breivik occurs, the inevitable ques­tion, How could some­one do some­thing like this? is always asked. The answer is that when a per­son­’s mind becomes filled with fear and prej­u­dice, he or she can become capa­ble of doing some very evil things. If we want to stop future atroc­i­ties, then we have to stop the hate speech. Pro­longed expo­sure to hate speech does ter­ri­ble, awful things to a vul­ner­a­ble mind.

Com­bat­ing hate speech is dif­fi­cult. That is because there are no easy reme­dies. For instance, even if the First Amend­ment per­mit­ted the ban­ning of cer­tain kinds of speech, a ban would be ineffective.

Per­haps the place to start is with our hap­less media, which equates ter­ror­ism with Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ism. In truth, a ter­ror­ist is not an angry Mus­lim, but rather, any per­son who uses vio­lence or the threat of vio­lence to fur­ther some agen­da. One trou­bled per­son can do a great deal of dam­age if he or she takes the trou­ble to.

If our media own­er­ship was­n’t so con­cen­trat­ed (and we had more media diver­si­ty), per­haps hate speech would­n’t be so preva­lent. The rea­son the Glenn Becks of this coun­try can get on air and find a fol­low­ing is because their shows make mon­ey for the media con­glom­er­ates that dis­trib­ute or syn­di­cate them.

If media own­er­ship was­n’t so con­cen­trat­ed, there would be more non­prof­it and local­ly-run media out­lets broad­cast­ing bet­ter programming.

Revers­ing the trend towards con­cen­trat­ed own­er­ship could do won­ders for our dis­course in so many ways. We ought to make it a top priority.