Oh, that Stumpy Cat…the places she goes, and the things she finds! Virtual kitties are awesome at sniffing out the most intriguing things. And here’s what Ms. Manx has dug up on Anders Behring Breivik & Co.:
Alternet reports that Breivik attended a right-wing party rally at which the speaker was none other than the Koch-sucking teabagger, Tim Phillips — president of the astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity. Yep, nothing like predatory capitalism to whet a fascist’s bloodlust, says the Manx.
In a similar vein, ThinkProgress reports that Breivik released a video replete with teabaggish views. All the standard stupid teabag tropes apply, from Barack Obama’s (actually nonexistent) socialism to his (also nonexistent) jihadist ties. Plus a strange and creepy, historically inaccurate mass of sludge about the Templars and the need for new martyrdom and a new series of crusades. The Stumpy Cat remarks that she smells a pattern forming here….
Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald calls the Oslo massacre a “calculated attack on the future of the nation’s left wing”. Given that the bulk of the victims came from the shoot-up on the Norwegian Labour Party’s island campground, it smacks of terroristic baby-killing of the worst kind. Which is kind of ironic, says the Manx, when you consider that Breivik’s lengthy, deranged (and plagiarized from the Unabomber!) manifesto calls for, among other things, forced breeding of white children by depriving women of birth control and discouraging them from receiving higher education.
Sheer lunacy? It certainly sounds that way. But…
Al-Jazeera has oodles of good analysis of the method behind Breivik’s seeming madness. Ahmed Moor notes that even if Anders Breivik appears to have acted alone, he actually did so within a context of systematized “clash of civilizations” hate, which has been fomented for years by the neo-cons. Along similar lines, Ibrahim Hewitt dissects how it is, in fact, the “west” of the neo-cons that has been waging war on Islam, not the other way around. This context matters, and for that reason, nothing about this case should be regarded in isolation. Writes Hewitt, “[Breivik] may well be [a madman], but this is one way that the motivations for heinous crimes can be airbrushed out of the story before they have the chance to take hold in the popular imagination.” There are really NO lone nuts when you consider the political climate of the times, says the Manx…
Meanwhile, from The Nation, a blast from the past. This 2007 analysis of anti-Muslim hate in Europe, overwhelmingly concentrated on the right, shows how Nazi-like thinking has stealthily infiltrated the conservative partisan mainstream. (And if you don’t believe it, says the Manx, just substitute the word “Jew” for “Muslim” in any prominent right-winger’s discourse, and see what it sounds like.)
And while we’re on the subject of hateful climates, Lenin’s Tomb offers up a caustic, and very cleansing, take on why the media would rather blame Muslims than confront the real problem of home-grown fascism. Which is, in fact, a much greater source of terrorism, in Europe and the Americas both. Perhaps, says the Manx, licking one paw and hooking it behind her left ear, it’s because the crooked corporatist media knows its collective hands are not exactly clean in the matter of helping to foment that self-same right-wing extremism?
And one way the media keeps dirtying its hands, of course, is in providing a space for the seditious yammerings, yodelings and yawpings of the bull-goose loonies. Case in point: Pamela Geller et al. The good folks at LoonWatch point out that freedom of speech is not an absolute right in Europe, and for good reason. It may be Europe’s unwillingness to tolerate open hatemongering that will help stanch the bloody tide that all the crazytalk might otherwise engender.
But on the other side of the coin, it can’t be denied that Europe still has a simmering fascist problem on its hands, and one that has remained unexamined too long. Our good friend Jymn analyzes this very nicely over at Sister Sage’s place, and issues a call to put the neo-nutters under the microscope. Hear, hear! says the Manx.
Speaking of calls, the Stumpie thinks Alan Woods’s unabashedly Marxist one is a crackerjack. It’s also an indicator of where things really stand. Recall Gandhi’s saying: First they ignore you… At this point, we are at “then they fight you”. Meaning, the win is in sight, but it is not yet a done deal. Far from it. Time to seize it from the jaws of Breivik & Co. — passivity is passé. Time to fight the entire neo-con crapitalist culture, media whores and all. Time to tell the truth, and keep on telling it, until no one can live the lie any longer.
If there is any hope, wrote Orwell’s Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it lies with the proles. And in this particular situation, the hope lies with the Norwegian people. Here, the Manx is much heartened. HeadOn Radio Network host Bob Kincaid shares a letter he got from a listener in Norway, which, if it is any indication, shows that most Norwegians aren’t buying the “multiculturalism has failed, time to fear and fight jihadism” hype. Similar sentiments are shared by Oslo native Aslak Sira Myhre in the Guardian, who echoes his prime minister’s declaration that more openness, more democracy and more tolerance, not the slamming of the gates, is Norway’s best response to this attack on its openness, tolerance and, well, democracy! And that, says the Manx, is what she loves about the Norwegians, and Scandinavians in general: they love reason, not fear. And they love, period. It is this love that will see them through as this massacre becomes a legal trial, and the political and social reckonings get going in earnest. We would do well to emulate it, says the Manx.