So is Anders Breivik mad, or just right-wing? His lawyer has decided to go with the former, presumably on the basis that the Norwegian courts will look more kindly upon someone who is doolally than on someone who is a shade to the right of centre. He is probably right about this. There is a (usually) unspoken subtext within the liberal media here that the two are in any case synonymous, an elision between these two states of mind, right-wing and doolally. This was borne aloft on the palpable triumphalism that it wasn’t a Muslim wot done it, as we all thought; quite the reverse, it was instead one of you lot who always thinks it is Muslims, one of you Islamophobes, with your irrational fears about Muslims. The subtext being that while machine-gunning lots of kids and raving on about the Knights Templar may be conventionally mad, it is in fact only a brief hop and a skip from holding the view that multiculturalism has failed and that Islam is a threat to western society. One position can lead, in extremis, to the other; indeed Breivik, they would argue, privately, is the logical consequence of such a view.
And so you begin to understand the glee with which the press pounced upon the fact that the murderer once met some members of the English Defence League and rather admired Jeremy Clarkson (he quoted from both Clarkson and John Stuart Mill — now there’s postmodernism for you). It is a whole bunch of dreams come true at once, an entire spectrum of right-wing opinion, from the phlegm-spattered football terrace to the gin and tonics of the 19th hole, magnificently tainted by association. And when you add in the fact that Breivik was about as conspicuously Aryan as it’s possible to get, and bourgeois to boot, he appears to be a villain the left could scarcely have dreamed would come into existence. He is, for the liberals, an even more potent poster boy than was Abu Hamza al-Masri for the Islamophobes. Hell, he even took advantage of Norway’s relaxed gun laws. He’s too good to be true: you could not make him up.
I don’t have much time for the EDL who I believe are at root thoroughly unpleasant football hooligans deprived of their regular sport as a consequence of all-seater stadiums and intensive policing and forced to turn elsewhere for a bit of fun. But the suggestion that they are somehow intellectually complicit in Breivik’s murderous spree is itself as bonkers as suggesting that the Labour party was somehow complicit in Raoul Moat’s murderous rampage because he once attended a party rally. But Breivik is at the least a corrective for the secular liberal left; you see, Muslims are not the only ones who blow people up, or kill them. Christians do it too. All as bad as each other. Equivalent, you might say.
Still, it is hard to blame the left for its triumphalism; everybody uses catastrophes, tragedies, call them what you will, for their own purposes, shoehorns them however uncomfortably into their own agendas. As the Daily Telegraph blogger Ed West points out, even the Stormfront website has got in on the act.
Stormfront is home to Britain’s vibrant and dedicated community of educationally subnormal neo-Nazis, whose members are often pitched into confusion by contemporary political developments. A few years ago, when the boss of the Muslim Council of Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, was threatened with prosecution for having delivered himself of the opinion that by and large homosexuals were not good for society, Stormfront was thrown into a quandary: who to support of these two unpalatable sides, they wondered, the wog or the poofs? They decided, after much soul-searching, to support Sacranie: on the far right there is nothing quite so terrifying as a homosexual, for reasons which I suspect Freud would understand. This time around they have studied the Anders Breivik business, taken stock and decided that the Jews are to blame; the whole thing was set up by Mossad. That is the only way in which the event can be assimilated into their somewhat narrow and vengeful way of thinking: it must be the Jews.
More shoehorning into agendas: this time, the British populist right, epitomised by the British popular press. Norway, like the rest of Scandinavia, is repulsively liberal — so how will their lax, crim-friendly judicial system deal with the likes of Anders Breivik? It’ll let him go! It’ll make him do a few hours of community service! Even if he goes to jail he will be in the lap of luxury! Liberal Scandinavia, then, hoist by its own sopping wet petard, if a petard can be sopping wet. The papers soon found out that Norway’s maximum sentence was supposedly only 21 years and that he could be out much sooner if he kept his nose clean and didn’t machine-gun anyone else. Furthermore, his prison would be swish and comfortable and he’d probably be allowed to have sex in his cell with an attractive blonde woman of his choosing and also watch TV all day.
None of this is quite true, of course (his sentence could, in theory, be indefinite, for the rest of his natural life, and not all Norwegian prisons are quite as the press imagines them to be), but that doesn’t really matter because the point has been made. Truth is, Anders Breivik lends himself to any argument you care to make, from the right or from the left.
Spectator.co.uk/Rodliddle
The argument continues…
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