By Tim Dunkin
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| Anders Behring Breivik |
Rahm Emanuel, probably one of the most corrupt and disgusting politicians in America in recent years, once remarked that it was always good policy to “never let a good crisis go to waste.” The bald-faced and naked way in which the leftist establishment puts this into practice has rarely been on display more plainly than the response of those on the Left, especially in the media, to the recent mass shooting of 69 children and concurrent bombing of a government building in Norway by homegrown terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. Once it finally became apparent that the shooter was not yet another crazed Islamic wacko, but was instead a blond-haired, blue-eyed exemplar of Scandinavian-ness, the media lost its lethargy and that “deer in the headlights” look and immediately started trying to find ways to spin the story to the Left’s advantage. Especially in the American media, the meme quickly became that Breivik was a “Christian fundamentalist extremist,” that somehow it was a deeply Christian religious conviction that motivated him to commit his terrible crimes.
Anybody remotely familiar with Breivik’s own words and writings knows that this was pretty far from the truth. In point of fact, Breivik was a secularist, perhaps nominally “religious” in the way that many people in societies with state religions are, but one who nevertheless professed to be influenced by the secular worldview, and who didn’t really take religion seriously. Indeed, from his writings, it is openly seen that Breivik was a staunch Darwinist, disbelieved the Bible, believed in “survival of the fittest” eugenicism, and was pro-homosexual. Hardly a paladin of fundamentalist Christianity. While Breivik did say that he wanted Europe to be a “Christian society,” it is quite obvious that he intended this to be a sort of bland “cultural Christianity” only – the kind that has the form, has the buildings and the robes and the fancy gravestones, and where everybody goes to church once a year, but otherwise is emasculated. Elsewhere, he stated that he thought Christians “should have no say in making scientific or governmental policy.” So while the European press (largely) steered clear of the “Breivik was a Christian fundamentalist” storyline, not so with the American press, for whom the term “right-winger” is pretty much synonymous with the stereotype of the Bible-toting Tea Partier which has so psychologically traumatized those in the American Left by beating them so many times in so many elections.
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Nevertheless, despite his lack of actual Christian fundamentalism, Breivik is admittedly still a creature of the Right, to some degree at least. What primarily drove this man’s politics was his sense of powerlessness over the massive Islamic immigration into his native Norway, and the profound (and detrimental) social changes being caused by this immigration. Breivik saw his country, his native land, as being overrun by barbarians who were intent, not on assimilating and becoming good Norwegians, but on turning Norway into a frigid outpost of Somalia.
One has to admit, I think, that he has a valid point, though (obviously) his method of expression was completely reprehensible, shooting a bunch of children crosses more moral event horizons than I care to count. After all, Norway, as well most other European countries, is being objectively and adversely affected by the influx of Islamic immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Remember France, where there were weeks of rioting, car-b-ques, and other related violence by Muslim immigrants who have turned many of Paris’ suburbs into no-go zones for non-Muslims (even the police and firefighters). In England, we see “shari’a zones” where Islamic law is, unofficially at least, in force. Who can forget about Pym Fortuyn in Holland, murdered in the street by an Islamic jihadist for the crime of exercising free speech? And of course, in Sweden they have the rape jihad, where Muslim males travel in packs and sexually assault native Swedish women who are outside without being veiled. And so on.
And people wonder why Europeans are growing less keen on their Muslim “guests” with each passing year.
Frankly, I was not surprised that a violent event like the shooting and bombing by Breivik took place. In fact, I’ve thought for years that something like it would happen, somewhere in Europe, sooner or later. I certainly didn’t and don’t want violent attacks like that to take place, but it has seemed almost inevitable that something would blow, sooner or later.
Why?
It has to do with the particularly insidious nature of the Left and its efforts at cementing total control over everything it touches.
We have to understand an undeniable truth about the Left, which is that it seeks total, complete, unchallenged control over every aspect of society. In that sense, the Left is a true totalitarian philosophy, since it seeks to control society in toto. Leftists will use every tool at their disposal – the media, government agencies, the schools, whatever – to neutralize, discredit, and destroy any and all opponents. That’s the essence of the Cloward-Piven strategy – isolate, demonize, and destroy. The Left is not interested in “competing in the marketplace of ideas.” The Left wants to send the stormtroopers in to close down the marketplace, arrest all the participants, and send them to the gulags.
They are this way everywhere they go. I remember over a decade ago, I became involved in what was called a “micronation,” named Cyberia. Basically, Cyberia was a political simulation, sort of a wannabe World of Warcraft for political nerds. You had a map of the country, it was divided into several provinces, each province elected its own Governor, the nation as a whole elected a legislature and a President, there was a Supreme Court, etc. etc. Cyberia operated under a constitution that served as a framework for the operation of the simulation. There were various forums in which citizens would debate politics, various bills before the legislature, the latest political scandals, and so forth.
Well, the thing about Cyberia was that it had been founded by a small cadre of left-wing college students. Naturally enough, the constitution for Cyberia included a “right” to pretty much everything – abortion, health care, housing, and whatnot. I think the idea that this initial cadre had was that they were going to run their simulation only with other leftists being involved, so that the boat never got rocked, and they could all pat themselves on the back for how well their socialism was working in the simulation – after all, when you can simply post on a forum that the government has taken in enough money to pay for all the social programs and whatnot you’ve said you have without the economy being hurt, you can convince yourself that your model is working. This all worked out well for them until somebody, at some point, apparently got the idea to start recruiting outside the circle of friends of the initial cadre. That’s when horrid things like “ideological diversity” started happening (I joined about this time). Suddenly you had conservative people joining. You had religious people showing up. You had small government types becoming citizens. And all these people started doing things like, you know, voting and running for office. Even worse, they read the constitution, and started trying to use the legislative process to edit out all of the junk like constitutional rights to abortion and free health care. In other words, the conservatives were doing what the simulation, ostensibly at least, was designed for.
The leftists fought it tooth and nail every step of the way – incidentally doing all the same things that they do in real life. They tried to get people banned, their citizenship taken away. They would use their judges to rule bill and laws unconstitutional – even constitutional amendments (which, theoretically, can never be “unconstitutional”). They would invent all kinds of “scandals” to try to use to destroy the reputations of conservatives and get them removed from office, and would use all kinds of other heavy-handed tactics to basically try to remove any conservatives they could from positions of power in the simulation, often using the power of the President (who was one of the founding leftists) in ways that were unethical, and even “questionably” legal by the rules of their own simulation. Nevertheless, it eventually worked out that despite all this, a solidly conservative Christian was elected President, and the leftists went so berserk that the simulation basically fell apart after that. Cyberia, incidentally, still exists, but for about the past eight years or so has consisted of a small cadre of eight or nine left-wingers who refuse to allow anyone to join unless they pass long and grueling ideological tests. One supposes that they’re happy that way.
So what does this all have to do with Anders Behring Breivik and the totalitarian Left? A lot, actually. See, the behavior that we saw with the Left in Cyberia was nothing unusual. They were merely leftists being leftists. In the real world, the Left acts the same way. They pull down. They slander. They destroy. They use “speech codes” and “political correctness” to limit the bounds of “acceptable” discourse. They will punish students who ask the wrong questions in class or say the wrong things on campus by lowering their grades and sanctioning them in phony judicial hearings. They use their control over the MSM to caricature dissenting viewpoints, and selectively filter for their viewers only the things they want them to see. When they can, they use the police powers of the State to punish those who dissent against them. In short, leftists habitually use any and every means at their disposal to suppress and destroy any dissent to their program.
In Europe and other western countries, it’s even worse than it is here in the USA. Basically, in many European countries, it is illegal to vocalize the wrong position on a number of hot-button issues, such as homosexuality and Muslim immigration. You can be punished for saying the wrong things. Just look at Geert Wilders, a Dutch MP who has vocally opposed the destruction of his nation by inassimilable Muslim immigrants who are radically altering Holland’s open and tolerant society. He was just brought up in the dock, put on trial for his speech. What about the pro-lifers in Austria who are being prosecuted for being vocally pro-life? In Canada, pastors and others have been brought up for punishment before that nation’s “Human Rights” Commission for opposing homosexuality. Indeed, it’s illegal in Canada to cite certain Bible verses that condemn that practice. In several European countries, political parties that oppose Muslim immigration have been banned when they became too popular and threatened to become influential. And so on. Further, as with the USA, the nearly uniformly left-wing media systematically work to delegitimize all dissent against the leftist party line, taking away yet another outlet for free discourse.
It is unsurprising that, eventually, people placed into such a situation will eventually begin to crack. When you claim (as western nations generally would) that you are a free society with things like free speech, don’t be surprised if your citizens take you seriously. Don’t be surprised, also, if a certain number of them grow increasingly agitated when your government and media consistently controvert those claims at every opportunity. While the USA, however socialistic we may have become, still has outlets for our citizens to speak freely and to feel that they can peacefully and effectively work for changes in our government and its policies, the European doesn’t really have that any longer. Not when the ruling government can arrest them for saying the wrong thing, or ban their political parties outright for having the wrong platform, and there’s nothing they can do to redress it. Americans don’t generally understand just how far much of Europe has gone down the road to socialism, not just economically, but also socially and politically. In many places in Europe, you really do only have the “freedom” that the government says you can have.
In such a situation – especially one as emotionally charged as seeing the very fabric of your nation ripped apart and changed by a tidal wave of hostile, arrogant foreigners – someone like an Anders Behrens Breivik is entirely predictable. The Left, by clamping down on all modes of dissent and by trying to socially and politically isolate anyone who would rock the boat, has effectively shut out the European from doing anything more than choosing between two heads of the same socialistic system, one often labeled “Socialist,” the other labeled something like “Christian Democrat” or “Conservative,” but which operates on the same basic premises as the Socialist Party, if only maybe a little less rabidly. True dissent is forbidden, isolated, and destroyed. So those who feel they are being destroyed lash out in the only way that they feel is left to them.
Hence, the Left is really, ultimately, responsible for creating the conditions that led to Breivik’s massacring of 69 children at Utoya Island and 8 government officials in Oslo. The Left is simply too efficient at what it does, which is isolate, ridicule, and destroy. Last week, the Norwegian Prime Minister (a Socialist) lamely proclaimed that Norway was going to “become more democratic” in response to this tragedy. While I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have greater openness about controversial issues in mind, if Norway were to actually become a freer and more open society in the realm of free speech and toleration for dissent, if they were to actually allow their people to have a sense of true participation in the sense of going beyond letting them vote for the Socialist and the semi-Socialist, they would avoid things like Breivik’s terrorism in the future. If opposition to massive Muslim immigration, to pick a random issue of contention, was something that was “on the table” for discussion in European countries; if it was a topic that Europeans could feel free to discuss, debate, to disagree about without being prosecuted and treated like racist Neanderthals who should be shunned by polite society, maybe Norway (and, potentially and unfortunately, other European countries where this sort of thing is all too likely to happen again no matter how much gun control and surveillance exists) wouldn’t make themselves into a pressure cooker for their own people. Human freedom is always preferable to slavery and suppression.
