Oslo and Utøya – of words and mass murder
torsdag 11 augusti, 2011 kl. 2:37 e mIt is with dismay, sorrow and anger we’ve been following the last weeks’ reports from Oslo and Utøya. Our sympathy goes to the young Social Democrats and their relatives who have been forced to endure what no one should have to go through. We have heard some of the survivors’ stories from the nearly hour-long massacre on the island and the nightmarish situation they suddenly found themselves in.
What happened to them got under our skins. We have participated in political camps in the past and we will do so in the future. It could just as easily have been us. We could have been there and we could have been among those who remained.
The stories these youths and children tell bear witness of the vulnerability, fear and powerlessness they experienced but also of solidarity and compassion, how people disregarded their own safety to help others.
The most frightening part of it is how coldly calculating Behring Breivik put his plans into action. He had planned the massacre for years and dealt with every aspect of it based on a single purpose – to achieve the most devastating effect.
Execute children and young people in the Workers’ Youth League to strike a blow against Norwegian social democracy? Check.
Arrange a massacre in order to market a manifesto? Check.
Use anabolic steroids to decrease empathy and escalate aggression? Check.
Disguise as a police officer to confuse and deceive terrified youngsters to leave their hiding places? Check.
Although he, for historical reasons, does not call himself a Nazi, his line of action and inhumane rationality shows similarities to the effective dehumanization that characterized the Third Reich’s bureaucratic machinery of extermination. He can call himself whatever he wants, Behring Breivik is a fascist. Fascists have always committed similar atrocious acts, it is consistent both with their goals and methods.
But the fascist movement that Behring Breivik belongs to is no direct heir to the Nazis’ Third Reich or the nineties’ white power subculture and has closer ties to the Sweden Democrats than to the Swedish Resistance Movement. It is ”an extreme right-wing acting on a European level rather than nationally, being pro-Israel and pro-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic, islamophobic and culturally racist rather than rooted in racial ideology, seeing the cultural struggle as a major venue, and rather disguising its rhetoric in a supposedly ”anti-racist” language rather than an onerous and stigmatized extreme right-wing rhetoric”, writes Mathias Wåg from the Research Group and continues, ”Breivik’s views, as expressed in the manifesto, are well-entrenched in the two pillars forming the base for the new European extreme right-wing: counterjihad and meta-politics/cultural struggle.”
Already when the first news telegram reported that a person shot and killed children and adolescents in Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking AUF’s summer camp, we said ”that must be a fascist.” But the word ‘fascist’ was not mentioned in the reports. We also noted that the word ‘terrorist’ went missing when the offender proved to be Norwegian and blonde and the speculations about possible Islamist motives behind the bomb in Oslo trailed off.
”The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik got his ideas from a conceptual world in which Europe is about to be occupied by Islam, an occupation that Social Democrats are alleged to be primarily responsible for” wrote Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter DN on Monday July 25th on its editorial page. They’re right, Behring Breivik is a product of the social climate in which islamophobia is widespread and his values, fear and hatred echo in the streets and in Parliament.
The editorial, however, continues by asserting: ”There are exceedingly few ideologies, if any, that do not cause evil acts. We must dare to criticize opinions with which we disagree, sometimes in strong terms. Too much self-censorship can cause great harm to freedom of speech and thus to democracy. Those who advocate violence, those who use violence, are the ones responsible for the violence. Not those who share their values but express them by peaceful means.”
Fascism is, according to this reasoning only an ideology among others, and may, but does not have to, lead to ”evil acts”.
The problem with such a line of thought is that fascism, no matter what packaging it comes in, is not an ideology like any other. It’s an ideology of war that does not settle for criticizing others’ opinions. Striking against social democracy by executing members of its youth league seems logical from a fascist point of view. An opponent’s death is a political victory.
It is fascinating to see how the editorial staff of DN – within days of one of the worst politically motivated mass murders in the postwar era – are talking about the risk of ”self-censorship” should the perspectives that made Behring Breivik go from words to mass murder gain less media space. Does ”freedom of speech and thus democracy” benefit from the possibility of gaining cheap political points by fomenting fear of and hatred towards immigrants, particularly against muslims? Is it a coincidence that the numbers of hate crimes have increased as the right and the extreme right have taken seats in more and more European parliaments? Not only does the editorial staff of DN detract the actual threat fascists pose to other people’s lives and health, they do also make a serious mistake believing that there is a moderate wing ”who share their values but express them by peaceful means” to safely discuss with and not at the same time legitimizing and nurturing ”those who commit violence.” Fremskrittspartiet, the peaceful ones, co-shaped Behring Breivik, the violent one.
”What distinguishes the different branches is one of degrees, not one of species. Their basic analysis and world view is the same, the only difference between them is the perception of temporality, how imminent and urgent the threat of Islamisation is”, says Mathias Wåg. ”The terrorist deed came from within established right-wing populism, the extreme right today considered to be housebroken, euphemistically called ‘immigration-critical’, ‘islam-critical’, ‘xenophobic’.”
In another article in DN, Ola Larsmo draws on an analogy – speaking of euphemisms and concept drifts – to the fascist arsons in the nineties Germany: ”And when the two guilty of the fire in Mölln were interrogated, they said something which I since then have often thought of. They did not understand the outcry: they had done what ‘everyone’ wanted. What ‘everyone’ talked openly about that one ought to do. They performed a collective punishment.”
Further Larsmo quotes Victor Klemperer, author of LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: ”Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, they seem to have no effect, but after a while the poison takes effect anyway.”
Political correctness and multiculturalism are examples of words loaded with a new meaning and whose venom is becoming more effective the more they become established and spread.
Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg described the terrorist attacks as an attack on ”open society” to be met with ”more transparency, more democracy, more humanity.” More than being an attack on our open society these were a direct assault on social democracy and in the longer term the entire Left and labour movement.
How is this aggression to be countered? How can open society be defended?
The way we see it, our common response must be to put the incident in its proper context and drain the very ideological soil that fed Behring Breivik. We need to take the threat behind the words seriously and deny the extreme right the interpretative prerogative. If we want to preserve a society where everyone can live without fear, we must prevent their brownwashing of life, society and the political debate. If we want to reduce the risk of future acts of violence, we must fight those marketing the opinions, even those would-be housebroken right-wing populist parliamentary parties like the Sweden Democrats, Danish People’s Party and True Finns.
These past weeks we have been watching right-wing party leaderships’ winding so as not to be associated with the terrorist attacks, while some of their grassroots supported Behring Breivik and defended his actions on the same ideological foundations on which he is standing.
Not everyone does consider it desirable to put these tragic events into context. On the contrary, there are those who want to keep it on a strictly non-political level, where it is all about a lonely madmans’ attack on open society that can be treated with dignified commemorations and a broad political consensus. Not least at the press conference held by Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt the day after the bomb and the fatal shootings, it became clear that one should not try to excavate the motives. Mathias Wåg describes how Reinfeldt called for national unity instead of recognizing what a political deed the attack was, because ”such a discussion would only benefit the uttermost ‘extremists, living in symbiosis with each other’”.
Once and for all, let there be no mistake about it: anarchists and autonomists are not, never have been and never will be just the same as fascists. How ever far you go to the political left you will not all of a sudden emerge in the extreme right, such claims are nothing more than a play on words designed to de-legitimize the radical left. Extreme left and extreme right – not much of a difference there, is it? Yet, they are worlds apart. On the surface you may find similarities of course. In the security police report Violent political extremism the Swedish security police Säpo points out that the autonomous left indeed commits politically motivated crimes, something fascists do as well. But the whole comparison gets absurd when you look at the kinds of crimes it is about – how many broken windows or thrown rocks equal a murder? We pursue entirely different goals which we try to achieve with entirely different means.
It is not us, the extremists, who live in symbiosis, but the right-wing populist parties in parliament with the extreme right in the street and parts of the bourgeoisie who have played a significant part in increasing marginalization and widen the gaps in society and thus in contributing to a climate in which xenophobia, fear, insecurity and distrust between people sprout.
If they fish for political points in troubled waters they do not weaken the electorial strength of the extreme right, they rather broaden its base. To think otherwise is an aberration. The politics of the right have contributed significantly to making islamophobia and xenophobia housebroken.
We need to be perfectly clear on the fact that, regardless of its packaging and expression, fascism in itself is and remains to be a latent crime against humanity. It always poses a threat to minorities and dissidents. And anti-fascism is a necessary work to defend and help each other.
The young socialists dreamed of a completely different society, just as we do. We mourn the murdered children and youngsters who never got a chance to realize their dreams. And we honor their memory by fighting fascism and collectively replacing hatred, distrust and fear with community, solidarity and mutual aid.
Just a week after the attacks in Oslo and Utøya, activists from Kulturkampanjen were digging the first sod for the Cyclops 2.0, a new autonomous cultural center in the southern outskirts of Stockholm. It will fill the void after the first Cyclops that was burnt down by Nazis in 2008. We do not give up, we rebuild.