In Blood and Rage, his brilliant cultural history of terrorism, Michael Burleigh attempts a unifying theme for an ideologically and geographically various subject:
The unexpressed goal of bringing about transformative chaos becomes the element in which terrorists are most at home. Destruction and self-destruction briefly compensate for some perceived slight or more abstract grievances that cause their hysterical rage. As endless studies of terrorist psychology reveal, they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic. If that affliction unites most terrorists, then their victims usually have one thing in common, regardless of their social class, politics or religious faith. That is a desire to live unexceptional lives settled amid their families and friends, without some resentful radical loser – who can be a millionaire loser harbouring delusions of victimhood – wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants. That unites the victims of terror from Algiers, Baghdad, Cairo, via London, Madrid and New York, to Nairobi, Singapore and Jakarta. They all bleed and grieve in the same way.
So now do the Norwegians. Worth noting is that Burleigh had to plow through three chapters of Fenian, Narodnik and anarchist terrorism before arriving at the Islamic variety.
Grief metamorphosed quickly at the weekend into guilt once it emerged that the destroyer of downtown Oslo and Utoya Island summer camp was not a disciple of Mullah Krekar, the longtime Norway resident who heads the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam and once mentored Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Rather, it was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired giant who mugs like a Benetton mimbo and fancies himself a Knight Templar for a church that exists solely in his own mind. We weren’t expecting the Timothy McVeigh of the fjords. Stereotyping was mugged by empiricism and the ensuing media catch-up hasn’t been pretty.
From the left, attempts to marry Scandinavian payloads dropped in Afghanistan and Libya to corpses in a Scandinavian morgue have to be banjaxed or consigned to the phantom zone of blog archives. Much more comfortable for the root-causes lot will be the inevitable linkage of Anders Behring Breivik to a French burqa ban or debates about sharia banking. The New York Times, in its mandatory story on resurgent fascism in Europe, already displays difficulty distinguishing between Geert Wilders’ thuggish call to ban the Koran and David Cameron and Angela Merkel’s sober recognition that state multiculturalism has been less than a runaway success in Britain and Germany.
But from the right, there are batsqueaks of self-pity and unseemly strategising. How will this latest act of non-Islamist terrorism complicate measures to combat the Islamist variety? The typically excellent Bruce Bawer, an American expat living in Oslo, has termed the Norway massacre a “double tragedy”. The first tragedy, he writes, is that 93 people were horribly murdered; the second tragedy is that the right-wing Progress Party has just been delivered an electoral setback because one of its own members caused the first.
Bawer would have made easy work of any leftist who suggested that 9/11 was a bad day twice over because 3,000 dead Americans gave the Republicans a healthier poll rating. And flicking through Breivik’s fevered 1,500-page “manifesto,” Bawer professes a feeling of creepiness that he himself was deemed too “liberal” an opponent of state multiculturalism to ever amount to much. Being insulted by a mass murderer is a compliment, not cause to wonder how one’s own team has been let down.
In assessing long-term consequences for Norway, Bawer also misses the unintended. One of the reasons that people automatically thought Krekar was the instigator of Friday’s bombing and shooting spree was that cleric had recently been jailed for making death threats against Norwegian politicians. Will such threats be taken less seriously now that he hasn’t been fingered as the true culprit? Not even the “peace country” is that masochistic. If anything, Krekar’s name has just become world-famous thanks to an international misassumption. And Norway’s imminent security rethink will affect its airports, government buildings and other sensitive locales without prejudice for Christian or Muslims offenders, unless Breivik’s atrocity prompts the racial profiling of men of Nordic appearance. In which case, good luck to Norway.