The Norwegian tabloid VG is reporting that part of the 1500 pages excreted by the Norwegian shooter/bomber was copied directly from Ted Kaczynski’s screed, with a little search and replace:
He has replaced the concepts, so it should fit better into his own ideology. For example, switching out the word “Leftism” (left orientation) with the words “Multiculturalism” and “Cultural Marxism” (Multiculturalism and cultural Marxism)
(That’s a Google Translate version of the original Norwegian.)
I’ve already spent too much precious time on this idiot, but it is worth noting that he’s a third-rate psycho killer, whose spittle-flecked, incomprehensible manifesto is another loser’s screed after a few minutes work with Microsoft Word. Since a big part this idiot’s motivation was to rise to greatness by performing a self-perceived grand act, it’s worth pointing out that his ideological underpinnings have the intellectual heft of a cheating high school stoner’s term paper.
Davis X. Machina
It was funny when Kevin Kline did it in A Fish Called Wanda. But only that once.
MikeJ
We already knew that. He cited Pam Geller.
aimai
A diarist at Kos ran pictures and bios of three kids who were killed. I’m beyond snark at this point. These were incredibly beautiful, promising, politically aware, generous kids–kids who were driven to act and to succeed in acting in the world for the betterment of others. I’ve got a 13 year old and a soon to be fifteen year old and I just broke the news to them before they heard it from others. This is cruelty on a mammoth scale. Those lives can never be brought back.
aimai
beltane
Plagarizer or not, he is developing a following among right-wingers http://dailykos.com/story/2011/07/24/998052/-Right-Wing-DEFENDS-Anders-Behring-Breivik?via=siderec. While we’re sitting here ridiculing this fellow’s lack of intellectual heft, others are saying “Hmm, it’s about time someone did something about all those liberals.”
MattF
I suppose it’s (thug) + (delusions of grandeur) that does it. And don’t, please, offer me neurochemical explanations. I’m gonna be judgmental about this.
Linda Featheringill
Has he explained how killing all those young people would further his agenda?
I’ll assume he didn’t plan on getting caught. Was he doing a “helter skelter” thing like Manson, thinking that the bombing and the massacre would be blamed on the “Other”?
That tactic worked well for Charlie and maybe it’s worth repeating?
DFS
What does “cultural Marxism” even mean?
Villago Delenda Est
Jeff Spicoli’s lawyer on line two, Mr. Mistermix!
arguingwithsignposts
@Linda Featheringill:
Oh, he planned on getting caught. You don’t gun down 80+ people *on an island* and blow up a building *and live* unless you planned on getting caught.
BalJu Commenter #2401
Hate the Mass, not the Murderer.
beltane
@Linda Featheringill: I read that he was taking the “Helter Skelter” approach. Furthermore, as an act of terrorism, this was strikingly effective. The guy just eliminated a large number of future left-wing politicians and public servants, and probably frightened a whole lot more into avoiding being in situations where they could be identified as being left-of-center. My son canvassed for Obama in 2008. As a mother, I will have to think twice about exposing my children to possible wingnut attacks in the future.
beltane
@DFS: You’ll have to ask SteveKingMicheleBachmannAnnCoulterRushLimbaughGlennBeckMichelleMalkinJonahGoldbergSarahPalinPamGellerNewtGingrich about that. All this person did was regurgitate standard wingnut media swill and then take it to the next step by acting on it. I don’t see any point in attacking this person on the basis of style points when there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, who agree with his underlying “philosophy” even if they may not be pleased with the bad PR this is giving to their cause.
Alex S.
I don’t find his manifesto incomprehensible at all. And I resent anyone’s calling him crazy. There is a method behind it, there is a network of like-minded people, from the Tea Party to european right-wing populists. This might a question of how to define ‘crazy’ but there is a difference between this manifesto and the illogical videos of a Jared Lee Loughner talking about words as a currency, or something.
wrb
Beltane @ 11
And some are justifying it
This is from the comments at Geller’s site
wrb
oh damn. Done by the S word
Beltane @ 11
And some are justifying it
This is from the comments at Geller’s site
RSA
Over at redstate Erick and his commenters are trying out all possible variations of the “no true conservative Christian” argument.
WereBear
It is a sturdy pattern; the more someone lacks internal discipline, the more they crave the external kind.
This was beautifully illustrated with Chris Cooper’s character in the movie American Beauty. All that rigid order in an attempt to corral the chaos seething in his brain.
So, to me, it’s no wonder that violent crazy people are drawn to the right wing; they beckon with straightjackets for the mind. And some people find that appealing.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
Reading some right-wing European sites, there is no overt approval, but many, many comments saying this incident shows the dangers of multiculturalism/immigration because it will drive people to such acts. I guess that now it’s ok to appease terrorists.
Southern Beale
Did the Washington Post ever apologize for that awful Jennifer Rubin piece blaming this on Islamic Jihadists?
beltane
@Alex S.: I agree with you. The only thing that distinguishes him from the average Teabagger is that he transformed the rhetoric into action. The rhetoric itself is standard fare in “mainstream” Conservative circles, and the fact that no one on the right is condemning his philosophy, only his actions, tells me all I need to know about the nature of the Conservative movement. Conflating “crazy” with “evil” is an indirect way of absolving Conservative “thinkers” from the crimes of Conservative actors.
tomvox1
And McVeigh was lousy with woman and spouted Right Wing boilerplate on taxes. WGAS? Being able to mock a mass murderers’ personal failings after they’ve performed an unspeakable atrocity is what you call cold comfort, bro. For all intents and purposes, this fuck in Norway did what he set out to do, just like McVeigh. You can call them “losers” but unfortunately “highly successful” in an evil context also applies.
R. Porrofatto
He didn’t write much of the 1500 pages. Some of the stuff about “leftism” is lifted from Kaczynski but that isn’t nearly the bulk of it. Many pages are entire articles and posts with the bylines of authors from right-wing journalists like Melanie Phillips to bigoted blogging hatemongers like Fjordman. What should make it all the more chilling is that much of this hateful crap is lifted right from mainstream British media and American blogs, and there’s a lot that he and Kaczynski write about their enemies that is not a bit different than what you find on right-wing sites every day, and would be praised without question in right-wing circles. Which is why, contrary to spending too little precious time on this idiot, I think a giant spotlight should shine him and his dreck so that maybe a little light will also be shed on the cesspool it all comes from.
beltane
@Southern Beale: No, they did not. Jennifer Rubin issued some sort of half-assed retraction where she claimed that the fact the terrorist was a right-wing Aryan was besides the point she was trying to make whichwas that it was the fault of the Mooslims.
me
@RSA: While pinning muslim terrorism on (almost) all muslims.
@Southern Beale: She did yet managed to double down at the same time. It’s kind of amazing.
beltane
@tomvox1: Most of the early followers of Nazism and Fascism were also “losers”, as were their leaders. Mocking Mein Kampf for grammatical errors would not have done a damn thing to stop the rise of Hitler, and it won’t do a damn thing to stop this new incarnation of right-wing eliminationism.
Cacti
Maybe some enterprising soul could take some of this loser’s screed and make a template for a terrorist Mad-Lib.
I don’t find acts of terrorism funny, but the ideology that motivates them should be subject to all the scorn and ridicule we can heap on them.
Pillsy
@DFS:
It’s an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
You know how there’s a long history of wingnuts who rant endlessly about sexual immorality getting caught in improbably tawdry sex scandals? Wingnuts who obsess about anti-Semitsm on the left aren’t so different.
It makes the eagerness of right-wing Jews like Pam Geller to team up with far-right “anti-jihadists” all the more crazy and pathetic.
RossInDetroit
This is weird. I’m reading Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman and just came across an essay about Kaczynski. He agrees with him that technology has caused him to give up nearly all ‘freedom’, as Kaczynski defines it, in his life but concludes that he doesn’t care. It’s fine to work at someone else’s idea of useful labor as long as you have air conditioning, clean water and an emergency room minutes away.
tomvox1
As an aside, I think this sort of mind-numbingly horrific event shows the limits of blogging when trying to come to grips with it. The Norwegians have just gone through something 10 times worse than Oklahoma City and yet most bloggers in their haste to comment have A) Been wrong, wrong, wrong in their surmises as the story has unfolded and/or B) Used facile snark to somehow try to deal with this atrocity and/or C) Drawn really useless parallels/metaphors to try to explain this monster’s actions.
The rush to provide content and the haste to be clever are the enemy of reflection. And in the aftermath of a horror like the Norway political murders, somber reflection should be the default position of every sympathetic human. But blogging abhors a vacuum and so we wind up with water cooler talk rather than reverence for the dead and muted respect for the sheer awfulness of what just transpired.
Julia Grey
Has he explained how killing all those young people would further his agenda?
As I understand it, those particular young people were the up-and-coming generation of the Labor (left) party in Norway. Every politically engaged, ambitious leftist teenager goes to that camp in the summers. (The current Prime Minister, for example, went when he was a teen). They learn about things like history and politics and civics and how to conduct themselves in public alongside the usual summer fun. It’s kind of a farm team operation. No equivalent institution in the US, obviously.
Breivik hoped to wipe out the entire future “bench” of the Labor Party in one go.
Pongo
I don’t think enough time has been spent on this loser. After a quick search of headlines on the major network news sites, it’s really rather stunning how quickly this became below the fold news. Had it been tied to Islamic extremists, we’d be hearing about it ad-nauseum, no doubt. Why is it our tolerance for rightwing extremism so high?
beltane
@Pillsy: Pam Gellar erroneously believes that if she sucks enough neo-Nazi c*ck, they’ll make her on honorary Aryan. Her schtick is to stand on a chair screaming “Look over there! There are people more Semitic than me. Go get them!!”
There were certain Italian-Jewish Fascists like this. They were sent to the camps along with everyone else. Idiots.
arguingwithsignposts
@tomvox1:
I just want to say that I found this a stupid analogy when James Fallows linked the Norway tragedy to 9/11 the other day, and it’s just as stupid today when you’re comparing it to OKC.
How is this *10 times worse* than OKC, when 168 people died there, along with all those injured. It’s not *10 times worse* than 9/11, either.
They are equally tragic in their own horrific ways. Per Capita quantification of terrorist attacks is stupid and lazy hiding behind a veneer of statistical analysis.
Thus, I guess, proving your point.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
I don’t think that “cultural Marxism” has a lot to do with anti-Semitism. It’s more a general dog-whistle for multicultural policies, as well as anything else associated with the left.
It’s fucking hilarious that Mad Mel is associated with this, though.
GregB
Arguingwithposts,
On a per capita basis this attack in Norway has resulted in a larger death toll than even 9/11.
Norway is a nation of under 5 million.
Anya
I agree with aimai. I just have no stomach for the tirade of a terrorist, who murdered innocent kids in cold blood. I rather we focus on the lives he cut short, their potential and the enthusiasm of young hearts who wanted to change the world for better.
I am so sad for the lives lost and the families affected. I don’t know what could be done to prevent future terrorist from inflicting more pain or preventing wars from happening. I am at a loss.
RossInDetroit
It’s the same kind of terror effect as 9/11. After the AQ atrocities Americans became afraid of so many things. Airplanes, malls, trains, etc. Millions of people restricting their own freedom out of fear of a madman. It’s likely that the Norway massacre will have a similar effect on their Labor party.
mistermix
@arguingwithsignposts:
Fallows said this:
I think it’s a reasonable point about the impact of the killings on a small country.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
THIS.
lacp
This guy reminds me of the wingnut who planned on taking down the Tides Foundation because Beck told him how evil they were. As a matter of fact, he reminds me a lot of that guy. Fortunately that time the cops were able to stop him.
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix: No, it’s not. We’ll just have to disagree on this one.
tomvox1
arguingwithsignposts@32:
Population of Norway: 4.9 million
Dead in the Oslo attacks: 93
Population of the USA: 300,000,000
OKC bombing deaths: 168
You can call it stupid and lazy but do the fucking math and you can figure that there were many, many fewer American families that lost loved ones as a percentage of the total population than Norwegian families in these latest events and by far.
Maybe living in a very large country has dulled your ability to see things outside of a big American context but yes, per capita does count in an event like this since the Norwegians have fewer citizens and a blow like this will be felt by more of them as a percentage of the nation.
WereBear
One thing we can do is call out mental illness, and agitate for better treatment.
I don’t care if it this does tag a whole political movement. I care about accuracy. If the damn shoe fits, make them wear it.
dslak
I think arguingwithsignposts is actually talking past mistermix:
The position some are taking is that the lives lost in Norway were uniquely valuable, and that the tragedy’s effect on the individuals cannot be adequately compared to how those affected by 9/11 suffered.
What others are noting is that, in terms of its affect on Norwegian society, the attacks are comparable to 9/11, due to the number of people affected vs. the population of the country.
Both of these can be true, and the truth of one does not diminish that of the other.
Ash Can
I agree. It’s a form of illustration of how Norwegians themselves are likely to regard the event. What’s so stupid and lazy about it?
ETA @ dslak: I’ll buy that.
Max L
He is exactly the same kind of insane as every religious extremist and it’s a mistake to let him off the hook as a madman just because he is Christian. While Eric Erickson and his ilk may try to explain away this event as madness and “No True Scotsman”, lets not play the game anymore.
gocart mozart
If you excerpted any part of his manifesto and stuck it in the comment section of Atlas Shrugged, Gates of Vienna, Free Republic, or any article involving Islam at Politico, Wash. (com)Post or Yahoo, would it stand out at all?
jimmiraybob
And, Ode de Tea Party:
From here – UK Daily Mail Online.
Frankensteinbeck
Werebear:
I’ll cut and paste some of this from what I said in the last entry on the topic.
Even learning he copied a lot of it doesn’t change that. Did this guy show any signs that would cause a psychiatrist to treat him before this happened? A history of manic episodes? A sudden withdrawal from society that might presage a schizophrenic breakout?
You may well have seen evidence I haven’t that he’s mentally ill, but you don’t have to be crazy to do horrible things.
Head Bulshytt Talker in Chief of the Temple of Libertarianism(superluminar)
How so? The point is that these events are all equally tragic for both the families and nations involved, the per capita death count doesn’t really matter one way or another.
wrb
The fact that he didn’t write much of what people keep calling his “manifesto” doesn’t make it less significant, but rather more. He repeatedly calls it not a manifesto but a compendium. It is what he has harvested from the international right-wing blogosphere. His world view and his act are not connected to it in some vague way, they are its ripened fruit., as he makes clear.
He also believe that they will carry on the work- this is why the act can succeed, in his mind. He is not, in his mind, an ineffectual lonely guy in Norway, but part of an international movement of mutually supporting actors.
Elie
“Crazy” is a slidding scale or range of being. He may not be completely psychotic and out of touch with reality and still be quite ill, similar to Timothy McVeigh. Clearly, if we go spiritual, his soul is very ill.
In many instances, whether we are dealing with someone who is technically mentally ill, or otherwise spiritually ill, they send out signs. They may be subtle or people don’t string together the full picture from the pieces, but at the end of the day, lots of people say, “Oh yeah, I thought something was wrong with him”.
Well, he was definitely homicidal but unfortunately not suicidal. His grandiosity and sense of megalomania would probably interfere with that impulse…
A bitter bitter day for Norway…I pray for any of his loved ones who can see the horror or this.
beltane
Norwegian police are not convinced the gunman acted alone http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/24/norway-attacks-unaswered-questions. Can we please stop pretending this attack is the result of mental illness? It is both a slur on the mentally ill and a dangerous underestimation of the right-wing’s capacity for evil.
kay
What a brave, brave patriot. He tricked 13 year olds into standing still and letting him approach by wearing a uniform representative of a state entity that they trusted, the same state that he (allegedly) opposes and despises, and then slaughtered them.
I also notice the tree of liberty hasn’t been refreshed by any of his blood.
Anya
The alliance between right wing Likudists and neo-nazis in Europe is a trend. They both share the goal of ridding Europe of the Muslim stain. This Haaretz article “The unholy alliance between Israel’s Right and Europe’s anti-Semites” gives you a little flavor of the extend of the alliance and what some Jews have to overlook for a little Muslim persecution.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
From some critter at American Thinker, it’s the liberal’s fault!
No link. I got it via fReeperVile if you really must.
One thing has become clear: American fReichtard’s have a poorer grip on English than Norwegian ones.
kay
Does anyone know why Jennifer Rubin is still employed by a major US newspaper? This is the partisan press release she wrote (and the Washington Post published) when they were still pulling bodies out of the water:
She’s changed the text in her (later) non-apology excuse-making to pretend her reaction was sincere or humane or that of a normal human but this is what she wrote during the crisis. Is the Washington Post just going to pretend we didn’t all see her exposed like this?
Didn’t we just last week have a big international OUTRAGE over amoral hired hacks at Right wing rags exploiting tragedy for political gain/profit?
Why does Rubin still work there?
scav
Hey, for everybody ranting on about why you don’t know why a per capita measure matters, put things this way. I currently know one single family in Norway and through them I’ve already got low order connections to both the current govt and a girl that should have been at that camp at this time. Those are tighter and more personal connections than I have to anybody in 9/11 and how many people do I know in the freaking US? Norwegians are statistically more likely to be able to put faces they know and love on that island. That matters.
El Cid
Drones would be an effective way to monitor and destroy the training camps for this sort of activity in Norway.
Kyle
It makes as much sense as “the imminent threat of Sharia law in the US”.
The entire rant would fit comfortably alongside the contents of Glenn Beck’s teleprompter.
JGabriel
@Julia Grey:
I keep seeing this “No US equivalent” formation. They’re not exactly the same, and probably not as influential, but we have equivalents in the form of camps and retreats run by Young/College Republicans/Democrats.
In fact, even John Cole has mentioned “going to Teenage Republican camp” as a kid.
.
Mike G
An acquaintance of mine went to a John Birch Society youth camp as a teenager. He said it was seriously creepy.
jimmiraybob
JGabriel@61
And, don’t forget Jesus Camp(s) where Warriors for Christ are nurtured.
gelfling545
@Alex S.: And he DID get a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that it was somehow Muslims who did this. Even now some of the loonier ones are saying it was similar to Al Queda in some way or other totally disregarding the fact that there has been what is now called terrorism since well before Al Queda was ever heard or thought of.
Dr. Benway
@tomvox (#29.):
FUCK YOU. You try having your mother blown up in a federal building by a right-wing extremist. You’ll find that the ‘atrocity’ scale doesn’t really slide all that much.
Comrade Kevin
@kay:
Of course they are.
trollhattan
For those who consider all firearms “equal” under the hallowed second amendment, I offer this:
http://www.surewest.net/news/read.php?id=18703250&ps=1018&cat=&cps=0&show=big&lang=en
joeyess
Great. That’s all the Brethren will need. Now they’ll simply claim that this guy was a lefty because he read Kaczynski.
Martin
It’s a holdover from the civil rights fight.
Basically, if you think of Marxism/communism as a redistribution of wealth, then cultural Marxism or cultural communism describes a redistribution of social power.
Put short, the folks bandying those terms about believe that whites, christians, heterosexuals, etc. have an earned right to greater social authority – typically defended by the Bible, natch. That they’ve somehow worked harder as a group than whoever their target it to command social power – to have legislation adhere to their ideals, etc.
It’s an old idea, when civil rights and the red scare were both running full-bore. See the first image here. (I have no idea what that article says, but google found the image for me, so pardon me if I linked to something shitty.)
But if you want to know why the Marxims/soçialism card came out so quickly with Obama, where it was never played with Clinton, that photo is why. It a dogwhistle that taps into something old and deeply buried.
Martin
@kay: The public wants a certain narrative to be written, and you can’t run a paper without the revenue generated by selling to that public.
Here’s an analysis of terrorist activities in Europe. Bottom line:
Fax Paladin
Presented without comment, other than to say that it’s very much on topic: I note that among the ads in rotation on this site now is one for Ann Coulter’s new book, “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America”…
kay
I don’t believe that Martin.
Well, generally I believe it, but I don’t think “the public” (the majority of whom are not soul-dead psychopaths) want the Washington Post to put up a gross, purely political and inaccurate screed from their paid Right wing hack the day that 100 people are slaughtered and a whole country is reeling from the loss.
She miscalculated, Martin. She didn’t know the facts, and she didn’t bother to find out, but she saw an opening to push her political agenda and be FIRST, so she jumped on it. So sorry, Jennifer. Mistakes like that get people fired.
I’m not shifting the blame from the Washington Post and Rubin to “the public”. She wrote it, and they published it. She should LOSE HER JOB if they want to retain any credibility or decency, on anything.
scav
The Washington Post isn’t writing in theory for “the” public, they are writing for “their” public, which changes the entire Venn diagram for the inclusion of soul-dead psychopaths. Besides, they very likely see themselves as shaping rather than reflecting opinion, in which case mistakes, facts, ad naseum are all trivial minor irritants. Or they just don’t give a shit so long as it moves newsprint.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@DFS:
In Wingnutese, “cultural” means “not white or acting like one of us” and “Marxist” is just pure EVIL!. Putting them together you get “people who aren’t like us who want to force their evil cultural ways down our throats!”
I would like to counter Erickkk Erickkkson’s “cultural Marxism” with my description of what he espouses:
“Religious Fascism”,
because that’s what his dog whistling is all about. Erickkk is a religious fascist, end of story.
BruinKid
Per his manifesto, Breivik also wrote this:
El Cid
__
Really?
I’d think that killing upwards of 80 people in one go is a pretty good indicator of first rate status.
What sort of “first rate” psycho killers did you have in mind? A nation-state or large organization leader like Stalin or Pol Pot? That’s a completely different category.