Many things, of varying accuracy, have been said about the Norwegian shooting and car bomb that it seems almost superfluous to comment on the horrific massacres. When the first reports came in with Norwegians describing this as their September 11th or Mumbai attacks (this was before the death toll on the island of Utoya became clear), I thought it was a little over the top, maybe reflecting that in a country regularly topping international quality of living stats, littler events in terms of numbers or carnage can be just as a shock as the more destructive previous two events. But as the full scale of the murdering hove into sight, this clearly was a close approximation to Mumbai or indeed the Oklahoma City bombing. And like Timothy McVeigh, Anders Behring Breivik was captured alive. Indeed, the latter surrendered willingly to police rather than risk a shoot-out with them that might result in his death. Also, unlike most mass shooters he did not take his own life – he is not mad in the conventional sense or even mad as angry but he is a psychopath. Although it goes against the grain of the greater openness promised by the Norwegian prime minister in the wake of this tragedy, I think it was the right thing to do to have Behring Breivik’s hearing behind closed doors to deny him the public platform he clearly wanted to use to spout his vile rhetoric.
What needs to be done is to see what can be done in response to the overall assault. The Norwegian police have a lot of explaining to do. Instead of flying by helicopter to Utoya, police special forces drove by road then took boats, taking five times longer than if they had flown there directly. Also, they miscounted - badly - the number of people who died, eventually revising it down and were so chaotic that they let this error stand for three days – for mourning families and for all society that is totally unacceptable. On Sunday morning – a day and a half after the event - police held a conference on the steps of their headquarters and almost every answer to a question was ‘don’t know’ or ‘we don’t have the details’ – it was farcical and these are the people charged with maintaining order in Norway.
There are though deeper, sinister undercurrents in European societies though, particularly Scandinavia. A lot of anti-immigration commentators after blowing smoke up the arses of the public are now seeking to cover their own. Behring Breivik was a social misfit with unpalatable viewpoints who, at some point in his life, fused these into a desire for murder. His talk of a monoculture can be dismissed – riddled with inconsistencies, ‘white’ Europeans are actually declining in number through falling birth rates and the ‘monocultures’ of South Korea and Japan that he admires are rapidly aging to the point where the retired will, in the not too distant future, place a near intolerable burden on those of working age. But in his mind he was planning a revolution and must have thought there was a groundswell of opinion on his side, if only he could provide the right conditions and he drew succour from the columns of the hard right of mainstream, high-selling newspapers (among others). It in no way justifies mass murder but influential people must be responsible in their published comments.
Much of Europe in the last decade has turned rightward and one doesn’t need to read Scandinavian fiction to realise that dark forces bubble below a seemingly tranquil surface. The eugenics programme practised by Sweden for forty years between the 1930s and 1970s is a reminder that inhumanity can occur in apparently liberal societies. The leaders of the anti-immigrant True Finns (who now hold the balance of power in Finland) even received Behring Breivik’s manifesto before the attacks and merely forwarded it on to their members as ‘something of interest’. Radio 4 has been running a programme called ‘Turning Right’ about these disturbing trends. Across Europe, east and west, there is a general fear that Europe’s time has passed and it is in decline. The elites say the best way is to integrate the EU further so that we all stand together in order to prevent us all hanging separately but the nationalist populists want to tear this down as well. Fear can drive ordinary people into doing things they would not normally do, such as voting for extremist parties. The economic uncertainty just adds to the sense of malaise and so they lash out at outsiders and minorities – those they see as other. In the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, when they broke into London the first to be slain were the Flemish merchants. No Jews were affected as they were n other parts of Europe because they had already been expelled a century before. Now, quite a lot of people would like to expel not Jews but Muslims, the ‘new’ outsiders. We have supported oppressive regimes and unfair trade deals to our general benefit (not to mention perpetuating climate change that affects the poorest) and the disadvantage of the populations of these countries but we don’t like it when the chickens are coming home to roost, as immigrants see the richness of Europe and, not unnaturally, want a part of it. Issues such as these take decades to resolve yet politicians prefer easy(ish) power to make serious effort to tackle them. Grim times.