Norway: Right-wing domestic terrorism

[hawkwing_lb]

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.

Comments

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

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?

[naomikritzer]

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.)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

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.)