The killer in Oslo was exactly the kind of guy who Stieg Larsson spent his pre-novelist career trying to warn the Scandinavian people about. Maybe they should have listened before Larsson created Lisbeth Salander.
In the Times' heavy coverage of the killings in Norway... the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up. That is curious. The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway... to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence... [H]omegrown fundamentalist movements have been gaining power in Scandinavia since, decades ago, the citizens of those countries began to lose faith in the benevolence of their vaunted welfare states...
Larsson had an unglamorous job as the Swedish correspondent for a magazine, Searchlight, that was English journalism’s watchdog against right-wing movements in Europe. In his articles for Searchlight he describes the car bombings, the rallies, the magazines of Sweden’s extreme right. He has only one message: fascism is on the rise. “For too long,” he writes, “Nazis, in the eyes of society, have been simplistically and credulously equated with a few dozen skinheads on a Saturday-night stampede.” That’s not the case any more, he writes. They are men in suits and ties, and they are getting elected to office...
Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews... Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women...
The summer camp that Anders Breivik invaded last week, a hatchery for the children of the liberal ruling class, included young people whose parents and grandparents came from Africa and Asia.
Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power...
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See also: A Tale of Two Norways by Anand Girdharadas in The New York Times.
Norwegians "have accepted that they are no longer Vikings. They’ve come to enjoy a degree of shock absorption from the bumps of fate that places like the United States cannot offer. They have slowly learned to live with those Others, many of them the Muslims that Mr. Breivik… so loathed. Order and law, painted over that old Viking ethic, can be binding, but they now allow the weakest in Norway to flourish without fear of the strong.
"One Norway has allowed itself to become another. And its people may mourn the past, but they have also remade themselves and moved on. Norway gained decency in far greater abundance than whatever it was feared to have lost. The tragedy of the attacks is that one angry man seemingly could not accept Norway’s bargain with modernity."
See also: Norway shows we must expose dangerous fictions by Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
"Every act of terrorism is built on a foundation of widely repeated ideas. To convert an ordinary person into a believer who’s willing to commit murder, those ideas must warn of an urgent threat of devastating proportions, one whose resistance and exposure will turn the terrorist into a hero and martyr. They must be repeated so often that they can be perceived as a crystalline truth that will be unveiled by the terrorist’s act… "
See also: What Anders Breivik has in common with war criminals by Nick Hayes (one of my academic heroes) who holds a chair in critical thinking at Saint John's University.
"In addition to mass murder, the perpetrators of genocide have one thing in common. It is obvious in the press coverage of Anders Breivik, the terrorist charged with the mass murders in Norway last week, just as it had been in the coverage last May of the last days of Osama Bin Laden or the arrest of Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic… The political philosopher and author of "Eichmann on Trial: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1963), Hannah Arendt, would recognize it instantly.
"The extraordinary evil in our time has been the work of ordinary men… Eichmann in his time and his ilk in today's generation are not larger-than-life dark knights of evil or the Darth Vaders of genocide. They are actually a rather pathetic bunch of Walter Mittys gone sour…
"These are pathetically ordinary men… Think of the last days of Osama Bin Laden as an aging man with dyed hair, wrapped in a blanket and watching old videos of himself.
"Osama Bin Laden, Goran Hadzic, Ratko Mladic and now Anders Breivik — they would fit as case studies in a revised and updated edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem."
Ever have one of those days where any number of disparate things converge?
See also: Female pastor and Imam unite for first funeral of Norway massacre
Exactly what the Norwegian fascist/terrorist feared.
"A female pastor and an imam celebrated together Friday the funeral of 18-year-old Bano Rashid, the first victim of Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree in Norway to be buried.
"The double heritage of the young woman, of Kurdish origin, and her commitment to politics were celebrated during the ceremony at an overflowing tiny church near the Oslo fjord.
“'An imam and a pastor side by side for this funeral is a very powerful message,' Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said after the service…"
From the Daily Independent in Lagos, Nigeria:
Nigerian Girl, 15, Victim of Norway Terror Attack
"A 15-year-old Nigerian girl, Modupe Ellen Awoyemi, has been named in a list of… victims of the Friday, July 22, 2011 terror attack in Norway…"
Dale Stahl wrote, "Wow. Chilling and telling. Thanks for sharing!"
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