In July of 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in front of government buildings in Oslo, killing 8 people, then gunned down dozens more at a summer camp for the youth league of the Norwegian labor party; in all, 77 people died by his hand. Breivik, a virulent Islamaphobe with a manifesto he wanted to publicize, thought he was striking a blow at the “Cultural Marxists,” multiculturalists, and feminists who, in his mind, were destroying European culture.
On Free Northerner, a far-right manosphere blog run by a self-described “Christian Reactionary,” the regulars are debating if Breivik did their cause more good or harm.
In a post that is equal parts pedantic and pernicious, the anonymous blogger behind the site tries to assess whether or not Breivik was engaged in a “just war” against his foes. Free Northerner argues that
Breivik did have a just cause for war; the rapes, violence, and slow genocide of his people by foreigners and hostile elites are just causes for war, but he was not carrying out a just war.
While Breivik’s cause, in the blogger’s mind, was a noble one, he failed the test for a “just war” by acting alone and targeting youth rather than “legitimate military targets.” Also, Free Northerner laments,
his actions had no real chance of success. Given that propaganda outlets are almost entirely in the hands of his enemies, the most realistic outcome was that his actions would actively hinder his cause.
In order for his attacks to qualify as a just war, Free Northerner suggests, Breivik would have had to rally a significant portion of Norwegians to his cause. And been a bit more picky about his targets:
Given the nature of the conflict in Norway, I think a legitimate case could be made that the ruling elite and politicians are legitimate military targets, but the spawn of the ruling elites were not. He should have targeted the politicians, media, and bureaucrats, not their children.
Good to know just which particular forms of murder are ok with you.
The readers of Free Northerner’s blog aren’t all this squeamish about the whole “indiscriminate killing” thing.
One anonymous commenter, giving himself the name of “A. Breivik,” writes
I don’t agree. Breivik lurks in the subconscious of reactionaries and SJWs alike.
I think a decentralized “lone-wolf” campaign of violence directed at SJWs could have a multiplier effect. Terrorizing weak minded sophists, while inspiring innumerable disaffected members of the majority to finally stand in self defense.
America could sorely use a Breivik or two.
A commenter calling himself Pode decides to do the whole “devil’s advocate” thing, although it’s clear he agrees pretty thorougly with this particular devil.
Argument could be made (not necessarily by me, just advocating for the devil) that the traitorous elites of Norway have in fact declared war, by allowing the invasion, violence, & rape. Thus any member of the Norweigan people would be justified in undertaking a solo mission in that existing civil war … since the war has already begun.
In a followup comment, he added:
Further, compulsory exposure to the content of the public school system could arguably be considered a kidnapping attack on the children of the Norwegians, making their opponents children equally legitimate targets
Commenter Mark Citadel is fine with political assassinations; he just thinks the far-right needs to get a bit more organized about it. Yes, “the Norwegian government is an enemy, like all Western governments,” he argues, but “lone wolf” attacks like Breivik’s can backfire.
Yes, there can be positive effects such as inspiring others, but these are often outweighed by big negatives and tricky moral questions. I think the issue is where do we draw the line? Modernity is the aggressor in this conflict and its adherents are not shy about using violence against us. Where can we respond in kind, and where can’t we. That’s a question that really needs hashing out on the radical right.
But hey, Citadel continues, while Breivik wasn’t really a proper Reactionary, he had some “good instincts,” and picked the right targets. “I do give him props for not blowing up a mosque or something similar,” Citadel writes. “He did actually ‘gore the matador, and not the red sheet’ as I think Jim put it.”
It’s not news that there are those in the right-wing of the manosphere who think Anders Breivik was at least partially on the right track. Shortly after Breivik’s mass murders in 2011, after all, the radical and repellent MRA Peter Nolan wrote that “in different times” Breivik “would be called a hero”; the equally repellant Matt Forney described Breivik’s manifesto as lucid and “sensible,” and a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors praised excerpts of Breivik’s manifesto before realizing just what it was they were praising.
But it is a little startling to see reactionary manospherians talking so openly, and even enthusiastically, about the pros and cons of murdering their political opponents and/or their children.
So Free Northerner draws a moral distinction between murdering adult members of a country’s political elite and murdering the children therof – and very likely praises himself for his refined sensibilities.
I’m guessing the option of not killing your political opponents just doesn’t occur to him.
Yes it has. That’s what they love about it. They wish they could be like him. They wish there were many, many more like him. These men are fucking evil.
Re: evolutionary pressure and easily kicked gonads- (that reads like the greatest biology thesis ever, btw)
My understanding was that keeping the little buggers alive for the week and a half or so that they’re viable meant keeping them at some particular temperature range, that’s lower than body temperature.
Just more evidence that evolution doesn’t care if you get kicked in the nuts, as long as you can still have kids afterward.
Whoa. Look at all the stooooooopid…
Not tonight, Josephine.
Binjabreel:
Well, yeah. I’m just pointing out that, instead of evolving a fragile and easily injured external storage mechanism, evolution could maybe have considered evolving more heat-resistant sperm?
That is, if evolution was anything resembling intelligent design and not a complex but random process that often goes with the less-logical seeming solution simply because it’s what showed up first and hey, it worked well enough.
Lea-
That is what I will never be able to comprehend. How people can 1) do something like this in the first place 2) hero worship such people knowing full well that innocent people were senselessly murdered and that many people are left devastated 3) actually WANT to be like them knowing what these people have done. The lives of others and the grief of victim’s families mean ABSOLUTELY nothing to these people. Nothing! It makes my blood boil.
Bina-Yep! It is a wall of stupid, that’s for sure!
http://i.imgur.com/MHuW96t.gif
@misseb47:
I think it goes as follows:
A) Holy balls, this guy (who looks just like me) just killed 77 people!
B) That means that, for a while, he had the power of life and death over those 77 people.
C) You know, I don’t get a lot of power of life or death over people. Or even any sort of absolute power, really.
D) It must be nice to have absolute power. I wonder how I can go about doing it?
E) Yeah, society isn’t really set up to give ordinary folks absolute power over their neighbours whenever they desire it. That sucks.
F) Waitaminute. That guy on TV did it. He used violence! Violence gives me absolute power over people! Why didn’t I think of that?
G) It must have been great to be him, with all that power. I could just sit here all day and fantasise about it.
H) Like most people, I define “good person” such that I am one. Therefore me having that kind of power must be a morally good thing.
I) It is therefore a moral imperative that I use violence to achieve my goal of having absolute power over other human beings. Hand me the gun.
EJ (The Other One)-Oh dear! That should be titled ‘How People Become a Entitled Mass Murderer in 9 Easy Steps!’. I won’t be surprised if that is the actual thought process, though, especially since we are talking about MRAs. The ‘men’s rights’ movement doesn’t exactly attract the best thinkers. ^^;
I dunno. Ideal functioning temperature is probably something inherited directly from the reptiles, who are exothermic. The sperm would have to be redesigned from the ground up, with different chemistry. Evolution doesn’t do wholesale chemical redesigns – that’s why plants are mostly green even though that actually makes them less efficient at capturing sunlight than if they were almost any other color. Chlorophyll came first, and any plant that tried to lose it in order to develop a better light-grabbing chemical would be at such a disadvantage in the meantime that it wouldn’t work.
A scrotum, on the other hand, is just a bag of loose skin. Skin growth is easy for evolution to play with.
So it sucks that men have such vulnerable testicles, but it’s no evolutionary mystery.
Breivik is sickening, but the fact that he could be out of prison in as little as 20 years’ time is hardly reassuring either.
I’m from Norway and was three blocks away from the bomb that Breivik detonated in the government block before heading to Utøya to murder random teenagers. I followed the trial against him closely, and WOW. This is one sick dude.
During the trial, there was this big question as to whether he was schizophrenic or just a violent narcissistic psychopath. The courts decided on the latter and sentenced him to 21 years in prison; luckily, I’ve heard many people say that it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be set free. I personally believe that he is not delusional, but definitely narcissistic and one of the most disgusting persons who ever set their foot on Planet Earth.
The real horror of this case, however, is that his ideology is shared by many. Breivik’s brand of racism and fascism is not unique. Just thinking about these guys gives me the creeps, but he is already being held up as some kind of twisted martyr in some circles, no matter how disgusting his actions are.
The fact that the manosphere can even discuss so casually whether or not he may have been partly justified in his repulsive actions definitely makes you realise what kind of people they are. To sympathise with this guy, you need to lack both compassion, common sense, and basic human decency. These people clearly lack all three.
I remember not long after that horrible day Breivik killed all those people. I was reading some discussion forums. And people were saying that what he did was horrible, but that he had a point or two that were correct. I never understood why people would use someone like Breivik to try to get a point across, rather than someone else who has said something similar but is not a mass murderer.
Karalora:
Hey, thank you for a thoughtful and informative answer to something I had actually always been a bit puzzled about! That makes a lot of sense!
Fruitloopsie, you should be aware that the inestimable Ms. White has declaimed uttering that quote (she said it was a little ‘too blue’ for her); it’s not uncommon in the internet to find words misattributed, unfortunately.
Hell, there’s even a meme out there where you take a photo of a speculative fiction character, slap on a quote from a second character, and then attribute it to a third, usually all from different intellectual properties, like so:
http://i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/810/473/63b.jpg
I think my favorite takes a photo of Harry Anderson (the judge from Night Court, who is also a stage magician), slaps on a quote from Harry Potter, and then attributes it to Harry Dresden.
You know, I do agree in part with the original blog article. Yes, Breivik killing 77 policemen or 77 soldiers would also be horrible. But at least those are “valid targets” according to the laws of war. It would be terrible in the sense that war in general is terrible – which we rightfully hold to be the case, yet, just as rightfully, are outraged even more by *atrocities* committed during wars. Agents of a state do stand for that state, whereas children and youths… killing them is really nothing more than sadistic.
It would still be deplorable if Breivik had set out to strike at the state of Norway by killing its agents, but killing children and youths is not even a strike to any state. Not only is its mass murder, it’s nothing *but* mass murder.
Of course, that does not excuse the blogger stating ” I think Breivik did have a just cause for war; the rapes, violence, and slow genocide of his people by foreigners and hostile elites are just causes for war”. And, as was stated further above, “rape, violence and slow genocide” meaning foreigners live in Norway and OMG, they’re taking our wimmenz! Also, his other two reasons why Breivik was not waging a “just war” really are pedantic and pale besides the fact that Breivik was in fact killing children!
“America could sorely use a Breivik or two.”
America has already had a Breivik. At least two of them in fact – Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh. Both of them who were just as narcissistic and wacko as Breivik and both dismissed by the majority of the American public.
What I get from that comment is that he’s basically saying that terrorism is bad unless it happens to someone you don’t like.
Flint, please don’t use the word “wacko” here. We don’t do ableism. It’s not cool to simply go “Oh, these people were terrible, they must have been mentally ill!”
Those of us who are mentally ill are sick of having to defend ourselves.
I followed the link about Matt Forney endorsing ideas of Anders Breivik to this post
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2011/07/25/manosphere-blogs-hey-that-breivik-guy-has-some-good-ideas/
but Matt Forney wasn’t mentioned. Wrong post? Or wrong name?
Pansirus, sorry, should have made this clear: Forney used to blog under the pseudonym “Ferdinand Bardamu,” so he’s quoted in the link under that name.
Unique Fucking Snowflake said:
“I remember not long after that horrible day Breivik killed all those people. I was reading some discussion forums. And people were saying that what he did was horrible, but that he had a point or two that were correct. I never understood why people would use someone like Breivik to try to get a point across, rather than someone else who has said something similar but is not a mass murderer.”
I think it’s because they believe on some level that the level of violence used was necessary to see change for those given issues. So, they are ascribing seriousness to an issue they also believe in without themselves *technically* condoning extreme violence.
In a way, it’s similar thinking to those who make veiled threats. They use threatening language without “technically” or “legally” making a threat, but the message gets conveyed.
It’s like saying “I don’t condone violence… but….”
You either condone violence or you don’t.
A person who says they don’t condone violence is more believable when they say “I totally am against our country’s immigration policies but I don’t condone violence especially when used as a vehicle for social change.”