Was Norwegian’s Marik Breivik driven to mass murder of children by conservatives like Keith Windschuttle and climate realists like Lord Christopher Monckton, as some leftists try to suggest?
Hardly. The idea of killing children with the wrong ideology could have come only from one place:
Recall the details of this fun “blowing up climate sceptic children” campaign by Environmentalist Organisation 1010 and many charities from October 2010 here.
It is big totalitarian ideologies, such as current climate environmentalism, that delegitimises opposing ideas, dehumanises dissenting individuals, and removes people’s rights to opinions, to democracy and sometimes even to life itself…all for the greater good. Conservatives, promoting stability and family values, and libertarians arguing for individual freedom are hardly the models for revolutionary mass murder.
Nevertheless, leftist commentators have wasted no time in gleefully attempting to further delegitimise climate sceptics and a global rise in vocal and angry conservatism because of the rampage of a deranged man in Norway, espousing some of these views. Having correctly outlawed incitement to violence, the left now perhaps wants to outlaw incitement to disagree… with leftist government policies.
So is he just mad?
It is unhelpfully inaccurate to call Breivik just ‘mad’. Most people think of delusion, paranoia and even psychotic breakdown when talking about madness. Breivik does not appear to be floridly delusional or psychotic.
His main reported rationale appears to be multiculturaliam and cultural destruction of his country and Europe. But his assessment of the decay of Europe due to multiculturalism and socialism is hardly radical, the former having been concluded by many EU leaders including Angela Merkel, David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and the latter not yet illegitimate in our nominally capitalist societies. Are these ideas to be blamed?
Brevik’s actions were clearly monstrous, those of someone without empathy, emotion and morality central to what it is to be a human being. Breivik’ behaviour is more like that of a psychopath also termed sociopath. Some say this condition is more common than we think, albeit in milder forms. Perhaps 1 in 10 office workers are said to exhibit milder features of this disease, namely being perfectly rational and charming, but lacking a sense of empathy for others, quilt, remorse or morality prevailing in their society.
Breivik appears to be more like the psychopathic lone serial murderers of Columbine and Port Arthur type, the black swan event, rather than an extreme tip of a political movement.
His psychopathic atrocities also clearly differ from those of Stalinism and Nazism, or more recently the Serb atrocities in Kosovo, which were due to state sponsored moral distortion allowing ordinary people to act immorally. He is also not a mirror image of Islamic terror, as some suggest. Islamic terrorists do not need to be and appear not to be psychopathic, because they do conform to a community morality – that of extremist fundamentalist Islam, where outsiders are dehumanised and vilified to an extent, where killing them is honourable and rewarded in heaven and not at all inhuman.
The conservative and climate sceptic movement preaches the opposite of what Breivik did, individual liberty, tolerance to diverse ideas and, yes, axiomatically the peaceful but determined intolerance of the intolerant. The more strident and the more the conservatives get, the more these values are reinforced, preventing violence on our behalf. History teaches us that ideas that lead to mass murder are mainly those of the leftist and totalitarian ideologies which elevate an imagined common good or government dogma or a religious fervor, such as action on climate, above the individual.
Breivik is not a result of conservative anger, he just a a lonely psychopath.
For a more learned and fascinating counter argument regarding the emerging right in Europe, see Catalaxy Files and also Ann Coulter on the opportunistic mislabeling of Breivik’s as a Christian.
Is the carbon tax discussion driven by an emotionally charged fear campaign? I am sorry but the Breivik thing has nothing to do with climate change. Nothing. He was a religious right wing extremist who went and killed a bunch of lefties. And you are trying to say it’s the lefties fault? You are just surfing a fearful hateful emotional haze and inserting every warped piece of your agenda you possibly can. No facts, no real connections just strong emotion. This is not a discussion it is a manipulative frenzied blur. You people are nuts.
jakubxyz@gmail.com, the left, not I, have been opportunistically linking Breivik with conservatives and climate sceptics like Lord Monckton through his quotations in his 1500 page manifesto. They clearly suggest that dissent from leftist status quo, or ‘hate speech’ is it is nowadays called, is partly responsible for his actions:
As for Breivik being a “religious”, its more in the Freemason promoting, pro-abortionist, approving of extra-marital loose kind of way.