[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]
Much as folks on the Right seem eager to dismiss the murderous
rampage of Norwegian domestic terrorist Anders Breivik as yet another
"isolated incident" involving someone who was mentally unstable, a lone
wolf whose views had nothing to do with his violent act -- after all, it
worked so well in
the Gabrielle Giffords shooting -- the story is not going to go away so readily.
First, there's the news that
Breivik says there are still "two cells" in his organization out there. So the terrorism may not be over and done with just yet.
Moreover, as we sift through the discernible facts about
Breivik and his motives for embarking on a murderous rampage, it's becoming increasingly evident that he was
an ardent right-winger
-- but decidedly not a neo-Nazi or any other kind of fascist. Breivik
did not belong to any overtly racist, white supremacist or anti-Semitic
organizations.
Breivik's only known political affiliation is with the Progress
Party, which is functionally Norway's version of the Tea Party. Indeed,
Tea Party heavyweight Tim Phillips of Americans for Prosperity spoke at the Progress Party's
national convention in Oslo last fall.
(It would be interesting to determine if Breivik was in attendance;
hopefully, some enterprising Norwegian journalist will look into it.)
This has produced some interesting commentary from the sane world,
and a frantic scramble among right-wingers eager to distance themselves
from this madman. In
the New York Times, Scott Shane
reported on the significance of Breivik's right-wing politics in
inspiring his rampage -- and how the sources of that inspiration
included supposedly mainstream conservatives:
His manifesto, which denounced Norwegian politicians as
failing to defend the country from Islamic influence, quoted Robert
Spencer, who operates the Jihad Watch Web site, 64 times, and cited
other Western writers who shared his view that Muslim immigrants pose a
grave danger to Western culture.
More broadly, the mass killings in Norway, with their echo of the
1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by an
antigovernment militant, have focused new attention around the world on
the subculture of anti-Muslim bloggers and right-wing activists and
renewed a debate over the focus of counterterrorism efforts.
... Mr. Breivik frequently cited another blog, Atlas Shrugs, and
recommended the Gates of Vienna among Web sites. Pamela Geller, an
outspoken critic of Islam who runs Atlas Shrugs, wrote on her blog
Sunday that any assertion that she or other antijihad writers bore any
responsibility for Mr. Breivik’s actions was “ridiculous.”
“If anyone incited him to violence, it was Islamic supremacists,” she wrote.
At
the Atlantic, Joshua Foust
tried his hand at a bit of sophistry to see if the culpability for
Breivik could be scrubbed away from his political cohorts and the
like-minded:
Behavior, ultimately, is a product of one's environment:
ideas, yes, but also social pressure, family pressure, norms,
constraints, inspirations, barriers, and expectations. Sometimes, these
constraints push a man to do any number of heinous things. It doesn't
excuse the man himself (at the end of the day, you always have the
choice and the responsibility not to react to your circumstances
violently), but it makes the question of "why" terribly difficult to
understand. It is deeply complex.
Focusing only on Breivik's words, as the commentariat has done this
weekend, is not just hypocrisy, it misses the point. Breivik wanted us
to focus on his words -- in a way, his disgusting butchery was meant to
advertise his writing. We owe his victims better than that, better than
playing his game. Breivik the man was more than a book-length rant on
race politics. He was the product of his own environment, one we have
not even begun to understand. Moving from rhetoric into action is really
difficult, and it happens for reasons we just don't understand. To
really answer the question of why Breivik committed such atrocity, we
have to move beyond his politics and his carefully placed manifesto.
Anything less would be a disservice to the children he so ruthlessly
murdered.
We commend Foust for his high principle, but we have a feeling that
such complexity would not be admitted if the perpetrators had turned out
to be Muslim. Certainly it is rare to see such considerations be
applied to Islamic radicals. Rather, what happens uniformly among the
"anti-jihadist" crowd (particularly Geller, Spencer, et. al.) is that
they readily leap to condemn all of Islam for the acts of a few radicals
whose motivations, indeed, are never considered "beyond their
politics".
Indeed, the scramble among right-wing pundits to come up with some
kind of decent rationale that will let them talk about Breivik -- or
better yet, blame liberals or Muslims for him -- is on, as
Media Matters reports. Over
at Red State,
a regular contributor tied Breivik's attack to the pro-choice movement
and end-of-life issues. Then there's the post over at Breitbart's "Big
Peace" site titled "Anders Behring Breivik: Jihadist":
This Norwegian terrorist was not a Christian or a
conservative. He acted contrary to the teachings of the Bible and
conservatives from Burke to Madison. He was instead a jihadist, blinded
by an ideology who resorted to violence rather than engaging in a
public debate of ideas. He was a coward who planted bombs and killed
innocent people. For him, violence was the only answer. He claimed to
be fighting jihadists...but he actually became one. He didn't kill
one islamist [sic] terrorist with his actions-only innocent Norwegians.
Change the location, and he acted like so many jihadists in the Middle
East. He became one of them.
In a way, he's actually onto something, a reality that right-wingers
themselves don't ever admit: Islamic radicals are themselves
fundamentally
right-wing ultra-conservatives in their
orientation.
They are devout anti-modernists who despise all things
liberal. They have far more in common, in terms of their personal
psychological orientations, with the anti-immigration radicals who
dominate the modern Right, both in Europe and in the USA.
This is why you can
put together a map of violent incidents over the past three years
involving right-wing extremists in the USA and come up with 24 of them
and counting, but you can't even begin to do the same with left-wing
extremists because the map would be blank.
Let's be clear: Initially at least -- until it becomes condoned -- it
is only a tiny subset of these movements that is ultimately inspired to
violent action like this. The real question to ponder is: Why are
right-wing movements so attractive to people who eventually act out
violently?
This is an issue that is brilliantly illuminated by the case of
Shawna Forde, the erstwhile Minuteman group leader who wound up overseeing
the murders of a 9-year-old-girl and her father in Arizona:
The people who broke into her home late at night while
she was sleeping with her new puppy on the living-room couch and
cold-bloodedly shot her in the face while she pleaded for her life were
people who did not see her, or her father or mother, as human beings.
They were people who had become so accustomed to dehumanizing Latinos
that they didn't care about the devastation they brought to Arivaca and
the lives of this family. They were so consumed by hate that they had no
humanity left themselves.
The dehumanizing language of scapegoating and eliminationism -- the
naming and targeting of other humans for the supposed social ills they
incur, followed as always by words urging their excision from society,
if not the world -- is endemic on the American Right. And among
right-wing extremists, it intensifies, grows and metastasizes into
something lethal and monstrous.
One of the early and most sustainable critiques of the Minutemen was
that they were doomed to descend into violence because -- while
adamantly and angrily denying that they were themselves racist, and
"screened" out any such influences -- their
scapegoating rhetoric
attracted serious numbers of people who were functionally sociopathic
and violent. Shawna Forde -- a woman with an abusive upbringing, a
former petty criminal and hooker who liked to tout herself as a music
promoter -- was attracted to the Minutemen, and rose high within their
ranks, precisely because she was attracted to dehumanizing rhetoric that
scapegoated specific targets to blame for their own lousy lives. And
she became the manifestation of that.
Right-wing movements attract people who are likely to act out
violently because they indulge so overtly and, in recent years,
remorselessly in the politics of fear and loathing: indulging in
eliminationist rhetoric, depicting their opposition as less than human,
and aggressively attacking efforts to blunt the toxic effects of their
politics as "political correctness" -- or, in the case of
both Anders Breivik and Andrew Breitbart, "Cultural Marxism".
Scapegoating is, as
Chip Berlet explains
"the social process whereby hostility and aggression of an angry and
frustrated group are directed away from a rational explanation of a
conflict and projected onto targets demonized by irrational claims of
wrongdoing, so that the scapegoat bears the blame for causing the
conflict, while the scapegoaters feel a sense of innocence and increased
unity." Moreover,
he explains, it is a constant feature of both mainstream and extreme right-wing politics, and has been so historically:
Scapegoating of immigrants and welfare recipients is used
regularly by mainstream politicians to attract votes. This dynamic has a
long history in the US, with the scapegoated targets being selected
opportunistically-Reds, Anarchists, Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, all the
way back to witches in Salem. Periodic waves of state repression are
justified through conspiracist scapegoating that claims networks of
subversives are poised to undermine the government. Right wing populist
movements mobilize the middle class by claiming a conspiracy from above
by secret elites and from below by a parasitic underclass. On the far
right are the scapegoating themes of collectivist New World Order plots
and Jewish banking conspiracies.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US has been exporting its
media-intensive election model, which favors style over substance,
argument over debate, slogans over issues. This election model
facilitates the success of not only those politicians that can raise the
most funds, but also demagogues willing to use scapegoating as an
ideological weapon.
A similar case involving a mentally unstable killer is one I've
frequently cited as illustrative
of the power of right-wing politics to attract unstable and violent
people -- namely, the 1986 case of David Lewis Rice, who killed a
Seattle family under the delusion -- given to him by a group of
right-wing McCarthyite conspiracy-mongers -- that he was ridding the
world of Communist conspirators and their offspring.
Likewise, Richard Poplawski's lethal attacks on Pittsburgh police officers back in 2009 was
inspired by supposedly mainstream talkers spreading paranoid conspiracy theories:
Because we believe in freedom of speech and freedom of
thought, there will probably always be haters like Richard Poplawski
among us. Inevitably they will be driven by fear: the fear of
difference. Because to them, difference of any kind is a threat.
And what we know from experience about volatile, unstable actors like
them is that they can be readily induced into violent action by hateful
rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes other people. And thanks to
human nature and those same freedoms, we will certainly always have
fearmongering demagogues among us. But the purveyors of such profoundly
irresponsible rhetoric need to be called on it -- especially when they
hold the nation's media megaphones.
Calling out those culpable is not the same as assigning criminal
blame, but it is a socially significant act similar to shaming and
shunning. And because failure to do so only invites more of the same --
if right-wing pundits aren't held accountable for encouraging extremist
beliefs, they not only will keep doing it, they'll become increasingly
radical and exponentially irresponsible -- it is also a necessary one.
Unfortunately, it is all too clear that accountability is not going
to be the order of the day among our right-wing friends and their many
apologists.
