Scouring the Web for Clues to a Suspected Attacker’s Motives
By ROBERT MACKEYOne person with a belief is equal to the force of 100 000 who have only interests.
Anders B. Breivik
AndersBBreivikLast Updated | 8:06 p.m. As my colleague Steven Erlanger reports, “The Norwegian police on Saturday charged a man they identified as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian in connection with a bombing in central Oslo and a shooting attack on a nearby island that killed at least 92 people.”
After Norwegian news organizations identified the suspected attacker as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, journalists began scouring the Web for clues about what might have motivated the attacks. Late Saturday, Reuters reported that a Norwegian newspaper, VG, and the state broadcaster, NRK, reported that Mr. Breivik had confessed to both attacks.
On Saturday, Norway’s TV2, citing police sources, reported that the suspect uploaded a video to YouTube and a 1,500-page manifesto, written in English, to the Norwegian Web site Freak.no just hours before the attacks.
Scanpix, via Associated PressAn image of the man charged with Friday’s attacks in Norway, from a manifesto police said he posted online. A patch on his arm says: “Marxist Hunter.”
Both the manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” and the YouTube video were signed “Andrew Berwick,” an apparent Anglicization of Anders Breivik. Both also make extensive reference to the Crusades and the supposed threats to Christian Europe posed by Muslim immigrants and leftist political leaders.
Kevin Slaughter, an American blogger, posted a copy of the manifesto on Google Docs, and embedded the original video in a post on his blog. The video was removed from YouTube later on Saturday, but copies of it quickly appeared on other Web sites.
This copy of the deeply anti-Islam, anti-Marxist video was downloaded from YouTube and posted on TwitVid by Leah McElrath, who writes on Twitter as @alphaleah:
As Sven Grundberg and Vanessa Fuhrmans of The Wall Street Journal report, the video’s captions call on conservatives to “embrace martyrdom.” The text also says that if “the multiculturalist elites of Europe continue to refuse to voluntarily transfer political and military power to our conservative revolutionary forces,” then World War II “is likely going to appear as a picnic compared to the coming carnage.”
The video’s extensive text also bemoans the fact that postwar “Europe never had any politicians of the McCarthy caliber.” It complains of “the demonization of cultural conservatives” and the “persecution and vilification of nationalists” by liberal elites, who are described as “cultural Marxists.”
An image of President Obama appears at one point in the video, as the text describes a strategy of cultural Marxists to “systematically vilify ancestral heroes and instead glorify new, more appropriate ‘idols’ who adhere to Marxism.”
Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, worked his way through the long written manifesto on Saturday and provided a running commentary as he read on his Twitter feed. He noted that the text ends:
I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12.51. Sincere regards, Andrew Berwick Justiciar Knight Commander
The bombing in Oslo took place barely more than two hours later.
In a subsequent post about the manifesto on Foreign Policy’s Passport blog, Mr. Hounshell wrote:
In it, “Berwick” declares himself a “Justiciar Knight Commander,” a leading member of a “re-founded” Knights Templar group formed at an April 2002 meeting in London. He claims the founding group has 9 members, whom he does not name, and that three other sympathizers were not able to attend the original meeting.
“Our purpose,” the document reads, is to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”
In grim, apocalyptic language, it advocates attacks on “traitors” across Europe who are supposedly enabling a Muslim takeover of the continent.
“[W]e should… not exceed (per 2010) aprox. 45 000 dead and 1 million wounded cultural Marxists/multiculturalists in Western Europe,” the author writes. “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”
The manifesto also provides detailed instructions for everything from making a bomb to raising funds to preparing physically and mentally for what the author describes as a coming “civil war” between patriotic nationalists and “multiculturalists” who are, wittingly or not, destroying European civilization.
Before the manifesto was discovered, attention focused on accounts opened in the suspect’s name on Facebook and Twitter this week seemed to support his identification with conservative politics. The Facebook profile, which has been removed, described the suspect as a conservative, Christian hunter who enjoyed the video games World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare 2.
The Twitter feed, which remains online, includes just a single message, in English, posted last Sunday: “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”
The Norwegian newspaper VG Nett, which is based in a building damaged in Friday’s bombing, explained that the message was a reworking of a thought from the English political philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote: “One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.”
In his “Considerations on Representative Government,” Mill wrote:
The power in society which has any tendency to convert itself into political power is not power quiescent, power merely passive, but active power; in other words, power actually exerted; that is to say, a very small portion of all the power in existence. Politically speaking, a great part of all power consists in will. How is it possible, then, to compute the elements of political power, while we omit from the computation anything which acts on the will? To think that because those who wield the power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. They who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken towards ranging the powers of society on its side.
Several bloggers have preserved what they say is a copy of the suspect’s Facebook profile. The authenticity of these copies cannot be verified, but they do appear to match a description of the page’s contents reported by Reuters. Those copies of the profile indicate that the suspect’s list of favorite books included several classic works of political philosophy — like Mill’s “On Liberty,” Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” and Plato’s “Republic” — and literature — among them, “1984″ and “The Trial,” but also the collected works of Shakespeare and “The Divine Comedy.”
The Oslo daily Aftenposten reports that a Norwegian Web site, Document.no, which hosts discussion critical of Islam and leftist politics, has published a cache of about 75 comments posted there in recent years attributed to the suspect.
As Aftenposten notes, included in those comments are virulent attacks on Muslims and socialism, equating Islam and Marxism to Nazism. The author of the comments suggested that a “patriotic regime” was needed to “save the West before it is too late,” from radical Islam, which he said was responsible for 300 million deaths.
According to a rough, automated translation of those comments, the suspect wrote in 2009:
Can you name ONE country where multiculturalism is successful where Islam is involved? The only historical example is the society without a welfare state, with only non-Muslim minorities (U.S.).
Even before that comment came to light, a discussion of the attacks in Norway on FreeRepublic.com, a popular, conservative American Web site, included the suggestion that the American government would now “keep tabs on the white angry nationalists who speak out against Islam and promote conservative views” in the United States.
FreeRepublic’s readers went on to discuss the attacks in Norway in relation to a new public service announcement released by the Department of Homeland Security this month, which enraged some conservatives because the actors who played terrorists in the video were “white, middle-class Americans.”
2011-07-24
Scouring the Web for Clues to a Suspected Attacker's Motives - NYTimes.com
