Oslo Killer Posted On My Site
After the excruciating, but ultimately unanswerable, questions that all Norwegians have asked themselves over the last few days about an evil that we cannot understand, these thoughts have plagued my mind since Friday. I have asked myself these questions in part because they are important to us these days. More personally, though, I, as editor of the conservative Norwegian website Minerva, have been forced to confront the fact that Anders Behring Breivik, the mass murderer of my countrymen, has visited our website and posted comments in our forum. Though it was impossible to detect this extremism in his comments at the time, I have often worried about the increasingly aggressive tone that characterizes too many not only in our forum, but everywhere that the multicultural society is debated.
In Norway, Breivik has been particularly active at the anti-immigration website Document.no. The website has come under intense scrutiny in Norway over the last few days. Some have indicated that websites of this kind foster an atmosphere where the likes of Breivik can arise. At Document.no, Breivik has debated with others who share parts of his worldview: That Norway confronts a Muslim invasion and that those who allow multiculturalism to happen commit treason. That rhetoric is not confined to the obscure fringes of the web: Less than a year ago, two prominent members of the populist Progress Party wrote an article that accused the Labor Party of “cultural treason”; the term “cultural Quisling” has also been used used. Norway’s World War II collaborator was, of course, executed for high treason after the war.
The US had also had its debates about rhetoric, not least after the Tucson shootings in January. There is, of course, an enormous difference between hyperbolic talk of “don’t retreat, reload”, and a discourse and worldview where people are seen as actual traitors, actual invaders, causing an actual civil war. Disturbingly, however, growing fringes on the American right seem to be starting to see political opponents as actual, rather than political, enemies, increasingly approaching politics as an epic game between good and evil rather as a process designed to make legitimate policy choices. It is not always easy to distinguish between what is mere rhetoric, and what is fanatical political conviction. The US has its share of activists in the “counter-jihad” movement that Breivik, too, claimed to be part of. Following the debate about the Ground Zero mosque, there was an increase in “counter-jihad” rhetoric in the American blogosphere. Breivik cites several of the most prominent American counter-jihadis approvingly in his manifesto.