On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe
Guy Rundle
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: B005YDA8YQ
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In a challenging new book, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the Left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs - expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ - were part of a huge volume of Right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman - so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far-Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is - a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far-Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O'Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.
Islam and Violence in the Modern Era
Tolerating Terrorism in the West : An International Survey
Threat Finance: Disconnecting the Lifeline of Organised Crime and Terrorism
people as people. The racism that military occupation required from serving soldiers was mirrored in sentiment fostered back home as the extreme bloodiness of the Iraq war became clear, and the indiscriminate nature of drone killings became a major issue. Such processes demanded dehumanisation. In a discussion of the slaves of his time, Montesquieu famously concluded that ‘it is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe
French Revolution; and the systemic invention of non-state terror as a political tactic, most particularly with Gracchus Baboeuf and the ‘conspiracy of equals’. Faced with political failure, and the resurgence of reaction, Baboeuf’s advocacy of terror is a crucial step, because it suggests that the ‘general will of the people’, as elaborated by Rousseau and instanced by the storming of the Bastille, can be extracted, abstracted and carried out by a numerically small group, who fully represent
organisation, claiming to abide by the norms of democratic politics while simultaneously organising terror gangs on the ground against the Left and minorities. We see this pattern today with the EDL’s disingenuous insistence that it is ‘peacefully protesting against militant Islam’, or in the BNP’s specious claims to have cast aside its previous racism in a bid for electoral respectability. Second, fascism’s mass base is rooted in the petty bourgeoisie. It appeals not to the very poorest in
Israel. Loewenstein notes that Islamophobic fascists have been able to reform ‘themselves as today’s crusading heroes’, attracted by the racial domination and mono-ethnic state argued by extreme Zionists. For Tad Tietze and Elizabeth Humphrys in Part Three, the aftermath of Utøya has been dominated by arguments Breivik was alternatively or simultaneously insane, a lone wolf and a distraction from what is truly important. Tietze considers how to understand claims Breivik is mad, and explores the
hard Right, simply prove itself similarly censorious, repressive and intolerant? In order to ground an effective political strategy for the Left, it is important to deconstruct the arguments being mustered by voices in the mainstream as to how to respond to the context in which Breivik acted. Below I will look at three such approaches that have repeatedly emerged in the media and among the political class in response to violence associated with political language. By developing a critique of the
