Understanding the Oslo Attacks: “It’s the Violence, Stupid!”

It is very doubtful that Anders Breivik is insane; terrorists very rarely are, because they would not be able to effectively carry out their attacks if they were prone to anxiety, doubt, depression, mania or mental instability. If we want to understand why he chose to commit these horrible acts, we need to look closer to home and consider the central role of violence in our culture, in particular, the almost universally accepted and commonsense idea that violence can sometimes be the right thing to do – that violence can be an effective and legitimate tool to bring about positive political change. It was this widely-shared belief that Anders Breivik was acting on; it is the same belief that our leaders act on when they bomb and invade other countries to try and bring about democracy. It is, in fact, the same belief that drives all forms of political violence, from terrorism to war, humanitarian intervention and capital punishment.

In other words, it is a simplification and a distraction to assume that it was his extremist right-wing ideas or his desire to rid Europe of Muslims that made Anders Breivik commit mass murder in Norway last week. After all, there are probably millions of people across Europe who hold to very similar beliefs without ever considering going out and slaughtering children. These ideological beliefs were merely the justification he used to rationalize his decision to use violence, and the way he strengthened his resolve to act. All violent actors use ideological justifications to justify using extreme violence, such as when politicians claim they have to bomb a country in order to bring about democracy or create greater security. This is a reason for the violence, not its cause.

The fact is: extremist ideology or particular political creeds do not cause violence in the sense commonly meant, nor is violence the direct consequence of any particular set of beliefs. Violence has been committed by, and continues to be committed by, all belief systems and ideologies: fascists, nationalists, communists, socialists, democrats, patriots, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and even humanitarians. People from all these faiths and creeds regularly commit, and almost universally support, certain forms of political violence. At the same time, the fact is that most people who hold to a particular belief system or ideology chose not to use violence and instead to pursue their goals non-violently – although most do support forms of military violence.

The real problem is not ideology or belief therefore, it is violence and the decision to use it. It is the almost universally accepted idea that violence can be an effective and legitimate way to achieve a good political goal, whether it is ending an occupation, ridding the world of a dictator, eliminating a threat to one’s way of life, stopping human rights abuses or resolving conflict. The real problem is the widely accepted belief that killing and injuring thousands of fellow human beings may be a way to do something positive in the world – the idea that violence can be good if it is done in the right way by the right people.

This idea is embedded in our culture and our politics. We give children toy weapons and violent video games to play with, and teach them to kill the ‘bad guys’ for hours at a time. We watch ‘good people’ – cops, vigilantes, soldiers, spies – killing all the ‘bad people’ on television and movies a thousand times a day. We consume violence in comics, novels, songs, cartoons, plays, and a thousand other cultural artifacts without question. Our societies maintain powerful militaries which are almost universally supported and valorized as heroic and necessary. We commemorate and celebrate military victories and military sacrifice in the name of freedom and democracy through regularly held national ceremonies, and in the statues and plaques which adorn every town and church. We have entire economic industries which research and make new weapons by the ton, which we then export all over the globe until you can buy an automatic weapon for a few dollars almost anywhere in the world. And our politicians launch wars and military interventions regularly and without significant opposition to solve their political conflicts or to try and bring about the political goals they want to achieve.

The fact is that we live in a culture of violence, and most of us accept and celebrate violence and agree that violence can often be the right thing to do. The hard truth is that as a society, we love violence; we are addicted to it, especially as entertainment or jobs. Anders Breivik loved it too, as photos showing him holding weapons and dressing up in military style gear reveals. We may try to maintain a separation between ‘good’ kinds of violence and ‘bad’ kinds of violence, but violence is always unjust and bad to its victims: a child killed by a NATO bomb is just as dead and her parents suffer equally to the child killed in the name of a Muslim-free Christian Europe. We may try and devise ways to control when violence is used, who it is used by and how much violence may be applied, but such justifications – just war theories – have failed to control or limit violence for thousands of years. The fact is that we live in the most war-like, aggressive and violent period in human history; within our lifetime, our societies have killed hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of the most vicious and deadly wars in history, and there are dozens of violent conflicts going on right now.

The only possibility for really ending violence and stopping people from using it is to de-legitimise it completely – to make it as abhorrent as slavery and racism now are. If we want some people to stop using violence, we must all stop using it. To do this, we will have to face up to our deep love affair with and acceptance of violence, and try much harder to change our violent culture and our violent politics. We will have to take the philosophy and values of non-violence seriously.

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A Letter to the Norwegian Government following the Oslo Terrorist Attacks

Dear Prime Minister Stoltenberg,

I heard your press conference and I can appreciate that you want to react cautiously to the latest terrorist outrage by Christian fundamentalists. I respect that you do not want to compromise your country’s values and way of life. It is admirable that you want to treat this horrible act as a crime, and try as best as you can to maintain an open, free society. And I understand that you do not want to spread unnecessary alarm among your citizens.

However, my concern is that you do not recognize the supreme danger you – and indeed, the whole world – are now facing. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists have declared war on your society, your entire way of life. Their intentions, and the capability they have shown in this attack, clearly demonstrate that they seriously threaten your very democracy, perhaps even civilization itself. They are probably linked to Christians all around the world in an international network of terror. In other words, there is no doubt that they pose a clear and present danger, a supreme emergency to the state, to which the only reasonable response is a total war on their evil ideology. You must prepare yourself for a long, difficult struggle, a struggle which will not end until every single right wing extremist, all the evildoers who hate your society and its values, have been killed or captured. It will not be easy, and you must be prepared to make real sacrifices in lives and resources to achieve this victory.

I must also warn you, as a terror expert, that there can be no compromise or negotiations with these people; Christian fundamentalists do not want a seat at the table, they just want to shoot everyone at the table. A new crusade against this anti-modern, anti-democratic ideology is necessary, not just because you owe your citizens protection, but because the victims of this atrocity demand justice. I suggest that you not rest until every right wing fundamentalist Christian has been hunted down and brought to justice. You must be prepared to go to war if necessary, against any nation who will not hand over suspects.

I recommend that you begin this War on Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalism (WORCF would be a useful short-hand for this campaign in media communications), this war which you must and can win, if you show enough courage and determination, immediately. You should begin with the following simple measures, which have all been successful in reducing other forms of religious terrorism in countries like America, Britain and Afghanistan.

Your security forces should start by immediately profiling young, white Christian men, especially if they have blonde hair (the Oslo bomber, Anders Behring Breivik, was blond; it could be a factor). Call them in to their local police stations for in-depth questioning, and stop them randomly at airports and train stations. They should be quizzed on how often they go to church, what websites they visit, what books they read, whether they are members of nationalist groups, and what beliefs they hold. They should be carefully monitored for signs of increasing religiosity and any and all political involvement in demonstrations, protests or letter writing. They should also be made to state their religion before boarding an international flight. In some cases, where there is insufficient evidence to prosecute, it may be necessary to indefinitely detain individual Christians who are deemed to pose a threat to national security, until such a time as they can be safely released back into the community. Control orders may then be necessary to keep tabs on their activities.

You should also put churches under surveillance and monitor the sermons preached and the views expressed by parishioners, as well as any nationalist political parties or groups like the so-called Viking swimmers (they clearly have nationalist tendencies and the ice-swimming may be a kind of paramilitary training). Universities should be encouraged to report the expression of any extreme nationalist or Christian viewpoints, and should discourage Christian fundamentalist speakers from visiting their campuses. Right-wing and Christian fundamentalist websites should be blocked, and new laws should be passed which ban glorifying or promoting extreme nationalism and Christian fundamentalism.

It is also clear that you will need to set up a government-funded counter-radicalisation programme with moderate nationalists and liberal Christian leaders to try and deflect young white men in the Christian and nationalist communities from turning to extremism. Preachers should be encouraged to speak out against fundamentalism and nationalism, and to demonstrate their loyalty to Western values. It is clear that nationalism and Christianity are the conveyor belts of violent extremism; non-violent Christian fundamentalism leads directly to violent fundamentalism and terrorism. It now also seems obvious that the policy of Secularism has failed to prevent the rise of violent extremism in your midst. A greater effort to eradicate Christianity from public life must be made; Christians in politics have been tolerated for too long and now you have reaped the terrible consequences. Young people need to be taught about the value of secularism from an early age, and should be encouraged through educational programmes to eschew religious dogma and expressions of nationalism.

It will also be necessary to encourage the public to get involved in this campaign against terrorism. They should report any suspicious behavior to the authorities, such as praying in public, religious t-shirts and badges, or the whistling of religious songs. The presence of religious literature in the mail could also be an important clue of an individual’s hostile intentions. I recommend establishing a telephone hotline and a poster campaign to warn the public about reporting suspicious religious behavior. I also recommend that you relax your gun laws and encourage every citizen, including children, to carry a concealed weapon and be familiar with its usage. They can then shoot any terrorist that dares show their face. Carrying guns has worked well in places like the United States and Brazil, which are rarely attacked by terrorists anymore. The point is simply that it will take a collective effort to root out this evil which has infected your society like a cancer. It is everyone’s responsibility, not just the security services’, to fight right-wingers and Christian fundamentalists.

Finally, it seems clear that you should greatly expand your security measures. The fact that you did not anticipate and prevent the actions of a single man shows that your security infrastructure is inadequate. I would recommend deploying the military in the streets, the construction of Peace Walls, setting up checkpoints around the city, putting concrete barriers around all public buildings (except schools, hospitals, supermarkets, stadiums, and places where civilians gather; protect your officials first), and surveillance cameras on every single street corner of every single town in Norway. You should also seek to immediately double the size of your security budget and target moderate Christians for recruitment into the intelligence services so they can more effectively infiltrate these groups.

Unfortunately, you may be forced to use unsavory methods to ensure the safety of your society. You may have to torture suspects for information, especially if there is any evidence at all of a ticking bomb. Studies show that secular rock music played loudly will make a Christian fundamentalist tell you anything, as they believe that the Devil himself is in the music. It may be unpleasant, but in a time of war, hard decisions sometimes have to be made to keep society safe.

I hope you will take serious note of what I told you in this letter. Your security – and the security of the entire world – greatly depends upon it.

Yours Sincerely,

Richard Jackson, Terror Expert

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The Oslo Bombing and the Theatre of Terrorism

Terrorism is a drama, a kind of deadly theatre. It is a political and cultural spectacle. And at this moment as I write, and the television plays endless pictures of the rescue efforts and talks to endless experts, officials and witnesses, all the key actors in the drama are playing their assigned parts to perfection. I know exactly what is going to happen over the next few days and weeks; it is very predictable.

The central actors in this spectacular production are the terrorists, the victims, the media, and the authorities; the audience is the viewing public, local and global, who will spend hour upon hour consuming the drama, vicariously re-living the horrifying events, always hungry for more salacious details. The plotline is almost always the same; it unfolds in four acts:

Act 1: The terrorists attack (or threaten) the victims in a dramatic violent act which usually has a raft of symbolic aspects to it; it targets government buildings, vital infrastructure or political leaders, or it takes place on a particular symbolic date, for example.

Act 2: The media gives wall-to-wall coverage of the attack, focusing in particular on the victims and the response from the emergency services, and employing well-used explanatory frames, such as the Innocent Victim frame, the Good Guys versus Bad Guys frame, the Evil Perpetrators frame, or the Heroic Rescuer frame.

Act 3: The authorities respond with ritual expressions of absolute condemnation for the perpetrators, sympathy for the victims, and vows of justice and greater security.

Act 4: In the coming days and weeks, the authorities will enact a series of new measures to try and reassure the public and protect them from a danger for which there is actually no full-proof protection. The media will speculate on why Oslo was a target in this case, whether the attack is a sign of even greater danger approaching, whether the authorities responded sufficiently at the time, and how the victims are coping with the aftermath.

All the actors to this deadly theatre will play their parts, unconsciously cooperating with, and responding to, each other to bring this lethal play to life in the global amphitheater. In many respects, and disturbingly, the relationship between the main actors is symbiotic; they are dependent upon each other for their roles in the drama. They parasitically feed upon each other. Whether they admit it or not, many of the actors will benefit greatly from the drama: the media will get increased ratings; the terrorists will get publicity; the authorities will get greater powers. Of course, the victims will not get anything out of this horrible play, only suffering.

As I watch the drama unfold, I can’t help but feel a little sick. I feel sick for the seemingly endless victims of violence – all the people who die and are injured because individuals or groups think that they can achieve political aims through murder and destruction. The victims in Oslo, like previous victims in New York, Bali, Madrid, London and Mumbai, share in the suffering of the victims in Palestine, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Chechnya, and dozens of other forgotten places; the fellow human beings hurt in each of these conflicts suffer because of the misguided and immoral belief that killing others can be a good way to resolve conflict.

I feel sick because the terrorists who committed this act are playing the role assigned to them in the drama and getting exactly what they hoped for: world-wide publicity and an undeserved reputation for being a powerful enemy. The media, in a perverse interdependency with the terrorists, plays along, encouraging the terrorists to believe that they are powerful, effective warriors in a war, able to punish their enemies whenever and wherever they like. This will undoubtedly embolden them and empower them to try again. They know they can make us tremble because we always respond like this in this particular play. They know they can make us react rashly because it is in the script that we will.

I feel sick because the same thing has happened so many times before, and as before, I just know that no lessons will be learned and no progress will be made in ensuring it will not happen again, because all the actors in the drama are already playing their assigned parts so perfectly, almost robotically. They will not deviate from their established roles; there is too much invested to change the script now. In particular, I know that the media and the authorities will not take the opportunity provided by the tragedy to ask the really important questions: Why does this keep happening every few months? What are the real reasons for it? Could it be due to our own policies and beliefs? Are the terrorists following our own example by using violence to resolve political conflicts? Are there alternative ways of dealing with political conflict, apart from force? Should we seriously explore the option of dialogue and reform? Why do we continuously fail to understand the reasons and motives for political violence?

In writing this, I do not intend to trivialize or point-score on the back of the real suffering of the victims. In fact, I would assert that it is the established, almost programmed response we are now witnessing which actually trivializes the victims. By failing to take seriously the context of political conflict in which such violence occurs, by failing to seriously inquire into the reasons why individuals commit such acts and the kind of political struggle they are pursuing, by giving the terrorists exactly the coverage and notoriety they crave, and by treating terrorism as a kind of theatre and relying on the same old tired narratives and frames to describe it, the response we are witnessing trivializes those who have been killed and injured as merely unfortunate victims of random pathology or mythical evil; it reduces them to bit players in a depressingly repetitive television serial.

There is an even more important issue: not only does this predictable response trivialize them by failing to fully account for why they have been attacked and what the real meaning of the violence might be, but it does absolutely nothing to prevent future victims of violence. Until we ask serious questions and seek serious answers as to why individuals and groups feel they have to use violence to solve conflict, and the role we might be playing in generating the violence which we abhor, we have little chance of preventing such attacks from occurring again. There is no foolproof defence against terrorism, except to persuade potential perpetrators not to engage in it and to pursue their grievances non-violently. Such a task requires the courage to ask different kinds of questions, and the opening of a new kind of conversation. Most of all, it requires a serious effort to find new ways of understanding the old problem of the deadly attraction of political violence.

Trapped in the theatre of terrorism, and having witnessed the opening scenes of this particular tragedy, I remain pessimistic about whether anything will be different this time. Keep watching the spectacle and see if I’m wrong.

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The World’s Most Warring Nation

The history of US foreign policy is a violent and bloody one, although this is not necessarily the dominant perception of most Americans. From the frontier wars of subjugation against Native Peoples to colonial wars against Mexico, Spain and the Philippines, the Cold War interventions in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Lebanon, Panama, Libya and elsewhere, the post-Cold War interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Kosovo, and the post-9/11 interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya today, the US has an unrivaled record of war and foreign military intervention. There are in fact, few periods in its history when the US has not been engaged in war or military attacks on other countries. In addition, the US is the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter of military weapons, and has a military budget several times greater than all its nearest rivals combined. It is in fact, the most warring nation in modern history. It is in this historical context that we have to try and understand its current military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Libya.

Although it is sometimes argued by apologists that these military actions are always defensive in nature rather than proactive and expansionist, and are the result of real and serious threats to US security or the wider international system, the virtually impregnable security position of the US, notwithstanding the 9/11 attacks a decade ago, makes this argument unconvincing. The reality is that the size of the US landmass and population, the vast oceans to its eastern and western borders and the friendly countries to its north and south, and the extent of its economic and military power, means that there are no serious obstacles to the adoption of an isolationist foreign policy or even the adoption of a pacifist role in international affairs. In other words, there is nothing inevitable or predetermined about its long record of war and intervention. Explaining the historical record of US foreign intervention requires a careful evaluation of both its strategic interests and its ideological system, as it is the almost unique combination of these factors and the way in which they underpin and interact with each other which helps to explain why the US continues to be the most violent state in the international system today.

[To read the rest of the article, please go here.]

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