More Details Emerge on Norway's Fundamentalist Terrorist

As more details emerge about Anders Behring Breivik who has reportedly confessed to the bombing and shooting massacre in Norway, the more the man sounds like a clone of some of the far right Christians and white supremacist extremists in the USA. Yesterday, one commenter left a nasty comment attacking me for focusing on the parallels between what appear to have been Breivik's views and those that I see as a threat in this country. I did not publish the comment because I refuse to provide a platform for such people - they can get their own blog if they want to publish such drivel. If the truth hurts as to what such constant anti-immigrant, anti-liberal Christian and anti-Muslim propaganda can lead to I'm sorry. I will continue to call things as I see them. If individuals don't like my views, then my advice: don't read this blog. An Associated Press story in the Virginian Pilot has these highlights:
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A manifesto published online - which police are poring over and said was posted the day of the attack - ranted that the European elite, "multiculturalists" and "enablers of Islamization" would be punished for their "treasonous acts."
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More was coming to light Sunday about the man who police say confessed to a car bomb at government headquarters in Oslo and then, hours later, opening fire on young people at an island political retreat. Both targets were linked to Norway's left-leaning Labor Party, and authorities have said Breivik held anti-Muslim views and posted on Christian fundamentalist websites.
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"He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution," Geir Lippestad, his lawyer, told public broadcaster NRK. "He wished to attack society and the structure of society."
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"We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe. ... We know who you are, where you live and we are coming for you," the document said. "We are in the process of flagging every single multculturalist traitor in Western Europe. You will be punished for your treasonous acts against Europe and Europeans."
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CNN has highlights from the manifesto here. Yes, it's frightening stuff - and it sounds far too similar to things being said by anti-immigrant factions in the USA and far right Christians who have claimed that the freedom of religion rights under First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution apply only to Christians. As for Breivik's views on liberal Christian denominations - which likely included the Church of Norway that allows partnered gay clergy - the Christian Post has these highlights:
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He chose to be baptized into the Protestant Church at the age of 15, but over recent years has grown weary of the state of the modern Church. In one blog posted in 2009 he wrote: “Today's Protestant church is a joke. Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic.”
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Another Christian Post story has this highlight:
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“In Norway and Sweden extreme Marxist attitudes have become acceptable/everyday while the old-established truths of patriotism and cultural conservatism today are branded as extremism.”
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Candidly, his complaints against liberal churches sound like the screeds one sees on the website of the far right's so-called Institute for Religion and Democracy. This highlight from the New York Times is also note worthy:
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Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.
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According to the police, Mr. Breivik first drew security services to central Oslo when he exploded a car bomb outside a 17-story government office building, killing at least seven people.
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Then he took a public ferry to Utoya Island, where he carried out a remarkably meticulous attack on Norway’s current and future political elite. Dressed as a police officer, he announced that he had come to check on the security of the young people who were attending a political summer camp there, many of them the children of members of the governing Labor Party.
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He gathered the campers together and for some 90 hellish minutes he coolly and methodically shot them, hunting down those who fled. At least 85 people, some as young as 16, were killed.
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Given the constant drumbeat of grievances against gays, liberals, Hispanics, blacks and Muslims being put out by so-called Christian "family values" groups and far right GOP aligned organizations, one can only wonder how many would be Breiviks are being cultivated here at home in the USA.

The End of White America?

The End of White America? That's the title of an new article in the Atlantic Monthly the substance of which will no doubt get the Kool-Aid drinking elements of the GOP and Christian Right all a twitter and hyperventilating since they go absolutely crazy over the idea that America may cease to be a white majority nation. These are after all the same folks - or their descendants - who used the Bible to justify segregation and bans on interracial marriage. The only segment of the population that they like less than non-whites and mixed race individuals are LGBT citizens. They do not judge people by their character or abilities but rather only by their skin color, religious affiliation and sexual orientation. In my view, they are what's wrong with America and U.S. politics. And I expect that we will see even more intolerance arise from these self-styled "real Americans" as they seek to marginalize non-whites, mixed race, and gay Americans, all of whom are examples of the dreaded "other." Here are some story highlights:

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Whether you describe it as the dawning of a post-racial age or just the end of white America, we’re approaching a profound demographic tipping point. According to an August 2008 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, those groups currently categorized as racial minorities—blacks and Hispanics, East Asians and South Asians—will account for a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2042. Among Americans under the age of 18, this shift is projected to take place in 2023, which means that every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation. Obviously, steadily ascending rates of interracial marriage complicate this picture, pointing toward what Michael Lind has described as the “beiging” of America.

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As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs. For some, the disappearance of this centrifugal core heralds a future rich with promise.

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Not everyone was so enthused. . . . [I]in his 2001 book, The Death of the West, [Pat] Buchanan rote: “Mr. Clinton assured us that it will be a better America when we are all minorities and realize true ‘diversity.’ Well, those students [at Portland State] are going to find out, for they will spend their golden years in a Third World America.” Today, the arrival of what Buchanan derided as “Third World America” is all but inevitable.

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You can flee into whiteness as well. This can mean pursuing the authenticity of an imagined past: think of the deliberately white-bread world of Mormon America, where the ’50s never ended, or the anachronistic WASP entitlement flaunted in books like last year’s A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style, a handsome coffee-table book compiled by Susanna Salk, depicting a world of seersucker blazers, whale pants, and deck shoes. . . . But these enclaves of preserved-in-amber whiteness are likely to be less important to the American future than the construction of whiteness as a somewhat pissed-off minority culture.

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Like other forms of identity politics, white solidarity comes complete with its own folk heroes, conspiracy theories (Barack Obama is a secret Muslim! The U.S. is going to merge with Canada and Mexico!), and laundry lists of injustices. The targets and scapegoats vary—from multiculturalism and affirmative action to a loss of moral values, from immigration to an economy that no longer guarantees the American worker a fair chance—and so do the political programs they inspire.

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[T]his white identity politics helped swing the 2000 and 2004 elections, serving as the powerful counterpunch to urban white liberals, and the McCain-Palin campaign relied on it almost to the point of absurdity (as when a McCain surrogate dismissed Northern Virginia as somehow not part of “the real Virginia”) as a bulwark against the threatening multiculturalism of Barack Obama. Their strategy failed, of course, but it’s possible to imagine white identity politics growing more potent and more forthright in its racial identifications in the future, as “the real America” becomes an ever-smaller portion of, well, the real America, and as the soon-to-be white minority’s sense of being besieged and disdained by a multicultural majority grows apace.

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There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.