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

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

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.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

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.

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

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.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

We can always hope.