hawkwing_lb | Norway: Right-wing domestic terrorism

Seven dead in the Oslo bomb. At least another eighty-five, mostly teenagers, dead in the mass shooting at the youth camp at Utoeya, 35km northwest of Oslo.

The gunman arrested, one Anders Bering Breivik, is a Norwegian believed to be a rightwing Christian with Islamophobic views. The Guardian has more coverage.

There are no words to describe this. Outrage, massacre, atrocity: they've been so often on people's lips in recent that they don't have any meaning for me anymore. Horror, barbarism, abomination: they're empty sounds, compared to the reality of eighty-five young people dead.

Dear Norway: I'm sorry.

I find it ironic, in one of the universe's most cruelly pointed ironies, that in the hours immediately after the Oslo bombing and the first reports of the Utoeya shooting, all the English-language sources I had access to were practically eager to speculate that some extremist Muslim group must be responsible. The pointed irony is that a domestic rightwing Islamophobe has been arrested.

Not a Muslim, but a Muslim-hater.

Such speculation as appeared in those early hours can only encourage Islamophobia, xenophobia, mistrust and hate: all things, which, it appears now, go in to the makeup of people like the man actually responsible.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-- from "Dirge Without Music," Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Something that occurred to me this morning:

Breivik counted on the sort of lazy racial profiling that automatically attributes actions like this to Middle Easterners. He apparently got onto the island by presenting himself at the boat dock in a police uniform and saying, "because of the bombing, I need to go check the camp's security." They looked at him -- blond hair, blue eyes, obviously Norwegian by birth -- and didn't check his story.

The assumption that OF COURSE it was a brown-skinned person who did this didn't just lead to a lot of stupid reporting. It led to 85 murdered teenagers.

At this point, I don't think we know whether he had fake ID apart from the uniform or how good it was - the mere fact that he had more than one fully functional fertiliser bomb and a plan indicates he'd done his homework - but yeah, it seems likely that it was a contributing factor.

Though it would be hard to blame the folks at the boat dock if the guy had good ID. For one thing, the initial bomb was in the city centre, targeting a government office - to switch immediately thereafter to targeting teenagers twenty miles away with guns is a paradigm shift that you wouldn't necessarily expect. It doesn't fit the profile of politically-oriented terrorism - which rather leads one to suspect that his real target was Utoeya, and the city bomb a diversion.

(But if he didn't have ID apart from the uniform, well, that's another thing.)

I saw an article saying that he had a fake ID.

You raise a good point about this being a shift in the mindset. But I can't get over the fact that the security guards called a boat over and he got on with enough of an arsenal to murder 80 people. If he'd looked Middle Eastern, would they have at least looked in his bag? My knee-jerk suspicion is that yes, they would have, and they'd have called HQ to check his story. But honestly part of the problem here is the Milgrim "Obedience to Authority" problem, from another angle. He presented himself as a police officer, who is automatically an authority over security guards in most places. (I had a college friend who worked as a student worker on campus security; they were officially required to render aid to law enforcement on request, as one of their job duties.) People are taught not to challenge authorities, and saying, "would you open your bag, please" is a challenge. So is, "can you tell me the name of your boss, so I can call and make sure you are who you say you are?"

This is just so utterly horrifying from nearly any angle.

Yes. People in a crisis tend not to challenge people who present themselves as authorities who know what they're doing. I hate to say it, but Breivik planned this quite well, really: if he'd had an exit plan, it's entirely possible he could've gotten away before any first responders could stop him.

I spent some time this afternoon catching up on the EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2010 (http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/TE-SAT%202010.pdf). It seems that "individuals motivated by extreme right-wing views, acting alone, pose far more of a threat than the current networks or groups." [p37]

It's far harder to keep track of the intentions of individuals working alone. And an event like this is methodologically (and I suspect, psychologically) as close to spree murder as it is to political terrorism. I suspect that Norway might go the route Britain did after the Hungerford massacre, and ban private ownership of semi-automatic weapons - but god. Ninety-two people from a population of five million, most of them still too young to vote?

People in a crisis tend not to challenge people who present themselves as authorities who know what they're doing.

This is a good point. I have actually done this, and it's really true. (The times I've done it, the crisis was medical. I'm not a doctor or EMT, but I've had basic CPR and first aid training so mostly what I have done is send someone to get help while I stay with the injured person and reassure them. People are very relieved when someone who acts like they know what they're doing gives them some sort of clear and sensible instructions.)

(If you've read James McDonalds' series on emergency management, a lot of this relies on this phenomenon: if you act like you know what you're doing and start ordering people around, odds are good that people will obey you. And if you DO know what you're doing, better you than some idiot, right? When the authorities show up to take over they will let you know.)

It's certainly true that individuals are harder to track than groups. If a group recruits, you can infiltrate and monitor.

I am just aghast at the amount of damage this particular individual was able to cause. My husband was wondering today if this would be the worst single-shooter mass murder ever. (I just wandered around Wikipedia and concluded that the answer is probably yes.)

It's definitely up there, anyway. It's certainly the worst single-shooter mass murder in the history of Europe, and quite possible the worst solo act of terrorism in the last couple of decades.

(I have indeed read his series, and learned much thereby.)

What strikes me most about this is how rational and non-random the targets were, if you start from Brevik's twisted premises. Kill as many of the enemy as possible when they're still young.
That they were children didn't give him pause; it seems to have been the entire point.
I've been worried about xenophobic extremism turning into violence for a while, but I thought it would be something crude and obvious, like the Malmo shooter (who only managed to kill one person, though he wounded many). I thought ultranationalists were all stupid. This is acute tactical intelligence, horrifically perverted.

Yeah. His tactics were calculated, and if he'd been willing to settle for a lower death toll and applied the same tactical intelligence to an exit plan, he probably could have gotten away before any first responders came on scene.

If the economy across Europe doesn't improve, we're probably going to see more events like this. Hopefully not as terrible, but since economics is a major social factor in triggering radicalisation...

Goddamn.

Hopefully it will go the other way- after Oklahoma City, the militia movement lost a lot of its momentum, for example. Though it's probably safer to expect an uptick in violence and not get one than the other way around.

Norway's economy's been doing okay, but the last big spate of far-right terrorism (Bologna train station, Oktoberfest, a French synagogue) was in 1980 also during a recession.

The shooter quoted from the Declaration of Independence in his ramblings, to justify himself. It's something close to sacred here in America, and he's using it to justify mass murder. And the revulsion and disgust I feel must be only a fraction of what Christians are feeling toward Brevik or Muslims felt toward bin Laden.

We can always hope.

Norway: Right-wing domestic terrorism

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