As usual on such occasions, I haven’t had much to say about the horrific events in Norway. It’s generally better, in such circumstances, to pause for reflection, and certainly some who rushed to judgement have gone badly wrong in doing so, here as on previous occasions. This is not the time for judgement, but that time will come.
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John Quiggin 
The shooter apparently quotes, positively, John Howard, Peter Costello, Cardinal George Pell and Keith Windschuttle in his manifesto. Well chosen role models? I expect Andrew Bolt feels snubbed.
…and Alan Jones is rabid?
Nay Freelander, the accused apparently quotes Andrew Bolt also.
I think he is maybe not a terrorist. Terrorists try to use terror to achieve their goals. He wasn’t trying to scare current and future political leaders from following the policies he disliked – he was trying to kill them all so that they couldn’t.
As such, you could never release him. A person who is prepared to kill to stop others implementing policies they don’t like should not have the liberty to do so.
He also links to Monckton. ABB apparently loved the idea that Copenhagen was a step towards world government and the stuff about environmentalism being a trojan horse for “cultural” marxism. Someone needs to see if Vaclav Klaus is in there somewhere. He’s bound to be, because his quote to this effect is a regular at Quadrant.
@Steve at the Pub
Must be put out if he doesn’t quote you as well?
Got any cite that he quoted Bolt also, Steve?
gerard @ #7 gleefully pounces on quotes mined from Brevik’s 1516 page manifesto:
Knopfelmacher used to mock the “theologico-deductive” method of social analysis ie analysing the behaviour of political agents on the basis of supposed canonical texts. Not surprising to see gerard fall for this elementary methodological error with his customary gusto.
Its true that Brevik’s manifesto “praises Australian conservatives” with evident satisfaction. Presumably this makes Howard, Pell, Windschuttle et all the inspiration for Right-wing reactionary mass-murderers. Even Ross Cameron – Minister for Family – gets a guernsey – what did this innocuous fellow do to deserve this unwelcome attention?
Unfortunately for gerard’s intellectual MO, Brevik also praises Churchill, Jefferson, Orwell and just about any other worthy in the liberal democratic pantheon with equal fervour. Logically that means that they too must shoulder some of the blame for his homicidal rampage.
Brevik saves his most furious denunciations for “cultural Marxism”. I guess that means that Gramsci is off the hook. Not my first choice for “enemy of my enemy”.
Of course anyone can play thegame of “if A supports x & y this implies that B who supports y must also be in favour of x”, Hitler was a Greenie – so Bob Brown must be anti-semitic! Guilt by association is the oldest fallacy in Aristotles book. Otherwise known as guilt by smearing association. Should be a job open for you in Murdoch’s Sun.
Logical fallacies are about the existence or absence of a conclusive line of reasoning. Most reasoning is probabilistic, rather than of the simply logical and therefore conclusive kind. Balancing probabilities and evidence and using judgement is subtle, and difficult, and not as easily transmissible.
Concerning the validity of any inferences about who the shooters heros are or were, and where was the source of his influences, Jack can use his judgement, and we’ll use ours.
really I was just pointing out to Steve that there are cites for Breivik praising these folks, but not Andrew Bolt, as Steve incorrectly claimed.
Of course Bolt’s ideology and rhetoric is far closer to Breivik’s than is Howard’s or Pell’s, so I can understand why Steve might leap to that conclusion.
However Breivik’s writing is far more lucid, intelligent and honest than Bolt’s.
@Jack Strocchi
Well Churchill did like using WMD against unruly third worlders. He was an imperialist of the first rank, so hardly surprising. Nobody hated the left more than he did. Jefferson held slaves. Orwell is the odd one out here — initially leftist and anti-Catholic, but then again, by the end of WW2 he too was a Cold Warrior. The separation of decades (and in Jeferson’s case, centuries) probably earns them a pass on salience.
No he wasn’t. He believed in scorched Earth, and left Albert Speer to carry it out. Bolt has already done “Greens = f@scists” so really Jack, more novelty is needed. Glenn Beck of course thinks that the youth of Utoya were comparable to H|tler Youth, so again, the Godwin is in already. And unlike Pat Robertson, Brown has never praised H|tler nor suggested that the shootyer might have been well-motivated. Unlike Pell, Brown’s eyes were not opened to the Islamic threat by 9/11. Vaclav Klaus and Minchin and Monckton see environmentalism as a trojan horse for marxism, like ABB.
So ABBs choices are not random.
Glenn Beck of course thinks that the youth of Utoya were comparable to H|tler Youth, so again…
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Check out how much sympathy Breivik is getting from Glenn Beck’s demented fans on Beck’s blog.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/26/999200/-Glenn-BeckConsider-yourself-on-notice?via=siderec
“Orwell is the odd one out here — initially leftist and anti-Catholic, but then again, by the end of WW2 he too was a Cold Warrior.”
By the end of WW2 (and for some years before that) Orwell was a democratic socialist who had drawn the obvious conclusions that many other democratic and libertarian socialists had drawn about the vileness of Stalinist persecution and oppression of democratic and libertarian socialists and dissenting communists, and Stalinist betrayal of the interests of the workers and peasants whose interests were front and centre of the political concern of genuine leftists.
You are right Paul Norton – George Orwell was never a Cold Warrior. He was concerned about Russian Communism which was evil – but he was equally as concerned about what was happening in the UK and other European nations to people’s health, wealth and freedom.
Extremism in all its forms deserves to called for what it is. Just yesterday I saw an email calling for a form of political assassination in the form of a joke picture calling for a “cull”. Normal people forward these without thinking, although it can end up anywhere and encourage someone who is politically motivated to carry out the message feeling that they are acting for the majority. Senator Scullion has won a cake competition with a cake in the form of a crocodile eating the PM.
It is time that the right wing realised that dangerous extremism is well entrenched in their ranks and by those people who are most prone to frothing at the mouth about others. Their words and actions mean that they are part of the dangerous problems which arise.
7#, What a zoo, I read, laugh, then realise that it involves the deaths of eighty people in the revised toll. FB,#11, I’d think this is part of his fantasising; his grandiosity.
Jill Rush, re your last para, do you remember how contrarian they went after 9/11 when we thought the USA might pause for thought?
But your “frothing at the mouth” remark has me in mind of Johnn Boehner and the manipulation of American Democracy that’s been going on, like Gillard here,Obama is leaned on by faction hacks and the corporates while pinned by media and press. Frelander, Gerard, thanks also.
@Paul Norton
From Wikipedia:
{…}
His apologists of course tried to distinguish him from Joseph McCarthy, but for the man who possibly coined the term “Cold War” here, he was the notorious Wisconsin Senator’s cultural patron, social-democratic dissembling notwithstanding.
the events he described in the final section of Homage to Catalonia would explain a lot though
back on topic:
an interview with the author of the Department of Homeland Security’s 2009 report on the Rightwing Terror threat in the US, which provoked massive GOP outrage forcing Napolitano to apologise.
@gerard
Doubtless. Demoralisation accompanied by the lack of a coherent account within which to situate setbacks typically nudge people either in the direction of withdrawal from politics or capitulation to the most powerful classes within their own countries, which is, self-evidently, incompatible with being a revolutionary socialist. Orwell admits he went to Catalonia not as a socialist or communist, but as someone seeking “decency”. He was impelled towards the POUM, and found them aimiable. That’s not a political program. That’s a sentiment.
He became quite ill and quite bitter post-war, and with nothing else to which to attach himself, became a dag on the backside of the British Labour Party, which, in Cold War mode assigned him his marching orders.
not to derail, but I was referring mainly to Orwell’s disgust at how many British Leftists attempted to deny and suppress information regarding the Stalinist betrayal of the POUM in Spain, and the way that they parroted the Stalinist propaganda about these “anarchists” and “Trotskyists” being fascist allies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia#Aftermath
I think Orwell simply believed that Stalinism was a greater threat to democratic-socialist principles than bourgeois liberalism.
“I think Orwell simply believed that Stalinism was a greater threat to democratic-socialist principles than bourgeois liberalism.”
And he was clearly correct in this belief.
For that matter, a card-carrying Australian communist facing the threat of banning by Menzies in 1951 had a much longer life expectancy than a card-carrying Soviet communist facing the prospect of being purged by Stalin in 1936-38.
@Paul Norton
Shorter Paul Norton … Orwell pleads guilty to being a cold warrior, with an excuse. The excuse however, still puts him on the wrong side of the class line however, as he has abandoned the socialist principle that the first enemy of every socialist is one’s “own” capitalist ruling class.
Fran Barlow @ #23 said:
Since when is being a “cold warrior” a crime, with an accusation equivalent to a guilty verdict? That would of course make A. Solzhenitsyn a criminal, master criminal at that.
Really Fran, try and dial down the Leftyier-than-thou to below 10. We are not a class of unruly 12 year olds. And you are coming across as an ideological scold.
Ah, the old “No-friends-to-the-domestic-Right” principle, stuck gamely to by the German and French communist parties during the thirties. Which, to paraphrase Peter Cook, “did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”.
Fran, if being on the correct side of the ‘class line’ puts you on the same side as Stalin and his local supporters, you’ve drawn the line in the wrong place.
Socialists, liberals and some conservatives banded together to defeat Nazism. In my view, a sensible socialist would prefer to band together with liberals and the odd conservative against Stalinism, rather than siding with the runner-up to Hitler in the nasty stakes for the sake of class solidarity. But then I guess I wouldn’t make a very good communist.
@Jack Strocchi
The use of “plead guilty” was rhetorical Jack. Of course it’s not a crime to be a cold warrior. That’s a political characterisation. It is however, incompatible with being a socialist (i.e. someone who believes that the working class should become a class for itself, remaking production and therewith the nature of class society to serve working people on a world scale in order to lay the foundation for material abundance, the dissolution of class society and their states). It’s orthodox socialist politics that the work of liberating the working class is the task of the working class itself rather than the bourgeoisie/imperialists. That’s why socialists defend unions and bona fide organisations of the workingclass against attack by the bosses, don’t cross picket lines, don’t take sides in imperialist wars, don’t join the police or become prison officers or judges or ministers in capitalist governments and so forth. This is primer level socialism Jack.
@Tim Macknay
The formulation is wrong here. Socialists were not “on the side of Stalin”. They were on the side of the workers of the world, asserting the political independence of the workers from the boss class and its agencies. They knew that Stalin’s regime was a consequence of abandonment of that very principle, which is why for example, Stalin handed over communists for internment in the US during WW2, endorsed the A-bombing of Japan etc …
Indeed you wouldn’t, which is why you are ill-placed to evaluate what “sensible” socialists should do, or even why they should do it. Sensible socialists understand their paradigm, and either embrace it with adequate warrant, or abandon it and become something else. Whatever Orwell once was, he clearly chose the latter course in the years before his death, becoming a Cold War liberal.
I like the way having been quoted by the shooter, the editor of QuadRant, Buttscuttle, is now vigorously trying to distance himself. Problem with espousing their philosophy of nastyism, some hear the dog-whistles. But isn’t that the intention?
Someone at the Drum made the pithy observation that the dogwhistle can also be heard by wolves. Wish I’d thought of it.
@Freelander
It passed with only scant notice, as with so many of the rude extremes of American life in a kinetic media age. The bodies of those Norwegian children slaughtered by a terrorist had yet to be fully recovered, let alone buried, when Glenn Beck compared the victims to Nazis.
The summer camp where children of the Norwegian Labor Party went for soccer, swimming, political debates and lectures “sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth,” Beck said in his national radio broadcast.
No, Beck wasn’t justifying the killing of 68 people on Utoya Island. He was merely muddying the humanity of those young people executed by Anders Behring Breivik, the self-professed “Christian Knight” who has confessed to the attacks. But Beck’s Web site, The Blaze, was full of justifications for the mass murder of innocents, and provided a sampling of the troubled audience he caters to in this country.
Glenn Beck doesn’t dog whistle as he is catering for the ‘Hard of Thinking’. Some of his audience are now doing a sterling job in congress.
PrQ … is there any there any reasoreason why my response to Strocchi, J and Macknay, T is still in moderation 24h + after posting? Similarly is there any reason why my other post in Monday Message board, on a pure question on macro-economic questions is held up?
ooh yuck! on a pure question of macro-economics is held up?
@Fran:
Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? 😉
The milieu of vicious and malicious hatemongering from which Breivik emerged, pitiless and cruel (he used dum-dums so his child victims were mutilated as well as dead)is absolutely ubiquitous in the West. The dominance of the Right, economically, politically and in the MSM brainwashing apparatus, means that Rightist pathopsychology is also dominant and ruthlessly projected onto society as a form of pseudo-religion. And we know what that entails, every time we pick up a copy of ‘The Fundament’ (The Fundamental Orifice of the Nation). Hatred and vilification for all the Right’s enemies, from Moslems to Christine Nixon. And when these hatemongers are identified by one of their acolytes as his inspiration, they have the utterly cynical hypocrisy to plead innocence, deny their culpability and reject their progeny, then go on to spread yet more hatred. Not just the deranged depths of a Beck, spitting on the dead, mutilated, children and projecting his own pathopsychology on them, but The Fundament’s Augean rabble of hate-opinion writers, editorialists and pet correspondents and letter-writers, who already have turned to blaming ‘multiculturalists’ and Moslem immigration for the outrage. In fact beginning the process of blaming the victims, exculpating the monster and keeping the hate flowing. And in the Stygian darkness of the Rightwing blogs you have open admiration and support. The soul of the Rightist is that of a killer, one who tries to overcome his existential fear of death by pretending to be its master, and dealing it out to others, to inflate his death-worshipping ego. Whether Auschwitz, Einsatsgruppen, ‘shock and awe’, ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, from Hiroshima to Fallujah, the Right’s lust to kill and destroy will never be slaked.