Breivik’s Manifesto: The Mind of a Madman!
Just hours before the attack, Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Oslo attack, posted his 1492-page political manifesto online.
At some point in the late evening hours yesterday, the press seems to have discovered the political manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the Oslo bombing. Shortly after the press had started referring to the document, I received a Facebook message from a former college mate, with a link to a PDF file. “It’s the manifesto of the psycho. It was just confirmed on TV that it’s the real thing!”. For a moment, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to read it, then curiosity took overhand!
Entitled 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, the document is a full 1492 pages long. For obvious reasons, I haven’t read all of it, and I frankly don’t see myself sacrificing the number of hours it would take to plough through it all.
The sections that I did read, scared me, though! While some commentators seemed to believe that this was a young loner, radicalized through extremist websites, and driven to commit the attacks as an act of desperation, his manifesto paints a completely different portrait altogether.
Obviously, the man is an ideologically schooled extremist, continuously radicalized over more than a decade. An ardent islamophobe, he propones an extreme brand of Christian conservative euro-nationalism.
He aligns himself with hardline Serb nationalists, and the most extreme Israeli nationalists, such as Avigdor Lieberman. He explicitly supports ethnic cleansing at a continental level, and deems the English Defense League too moderate.
Anders Behring Breivik advocates a Europe-wide, violent revolution, with mass executions of about 200 000 people (politicians, business leaders and media figures), and ethnic cleansing of millions. Viewing Turkey as an irredent land of Europe, he proposes to expel millions of non-Christian Europeans, and supporters of multi-culturalism to that territory, as part of a program of ethnic and ideological cleansing.
After the revolution that he advocates, a new government is to be constituted by a conference of military and church leaders, setting up a new system where the latter two have a significant influence. In practical terms, what he advocates is a semi-democratic, church controlled system. Ironically, that would probably end up similar to what Iran has today.
He explicitly endorses the concept of theocracy, and calls for the restoration of traditional, patriarchical structures in European societies. Skimming through the document, one could be forgiven for for thinking that Breivik has taken an Al Qaeda manifesto and replaced “Muslim” with “Christian”, and “Arab” with “European”.
Now, for those who have already concluded that this guy is a nazi, hold your horses: He distances himself from NSDAP. Not on the basis of a major ideological gap, though, but because he disagrees with their views on Israel. He sees Israel as a key ally in the Middle East, and believes that it would have been a better “solution” for Hitler to deport the Jews to Israel, rather than killing them! It should come as no one’s surprise that the issue of Palestinians having a legitimate claim to their own land does not bother Breivik much! Furthermore, he believes that NSDAP’s “tactical mistake” of killing all those Jews, alienated a lot of “cultural conservatives”, and radicalized those “cultural marxists”. Really? Duh!
Despite obviously advocating the creation of some type of European super-state, he vehemently rejects the EU, arguing that it is a conspiracy by the elites, conspiring to take power back from the people. In that sense, his views are quite compatible with those of some Norwegian anti-EU campaigners.
Isn’t it quite ironic, though, that someone who dedicates so much effort and energy to a paranoid fear of “islamic extremism”, ends up advocating an Iran-like system, and sounding like a Christian parallel to Al Qaeda?
What scares me the most, is not the evidence that the attacks were meticulously planned for years. Breivik’s description of a Pan-European network of ideologically schooled, nationalist extremists is far more unnerving. It might all be a product of his imagination, and I sure hope it is. The fact that Breivik was able to plan, prepare and carry out his attacks without any alarm bells ringing, proves that he was more than just some crazy extremist acting out of momentary rage, though. If a Christian/nationalist network of Al Qaeda-like radicals has been able to build up under the radar of European intelligence services, then we are in for some serious trouble!