There is no doubt that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass-murderer, is a savagely dehumanized, socially disconnected, and incorrigibly evil person. Breivik is also, however, the product of a civilization that is itself dehumanized, whose implacable program of subordinating every aspect of society to a tendentious politics hinders the making of authentic, non-politically mediated personal connections. If Breivik were the monster of the Utøya enormity, Norway’s anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-historical, feminist, Marxist, Muslim-loving elites – along with the purveyors of a debased popular culture that is now, regrettably, global – would be, collectively, the monster maker.

How to explain Breivik? René Girard teaches that the chief human characteristic is a propensity to imitate other human beings (mimesis) and that institutions are “mimetic.” This explains how babies learn language, and how we all learn the driver-code, but it also explains how people come into conflict, including violent conflict. [i] A man will imitate the aggression of another, or even what he suspects to be the aggression of another; he will seek to appropriate, or to annihilate, all of the advantages of another. Breivik’s violence is mimetic, or imitative, in Girard’s sense, as violence superlatively tends to be, but there is a qualification to this statement. Mimetic violence normally conforms to the order of tit-for-tat: A slugs B and then B slugs A, only harder. This model, while familiar from Herman Kahn’s theory of “escalation,” seems not to fit Breivik’s crime. How to adjust for the discrepancy?

It is the case whether anyone likes it or not that criminal violence in Norway – in the form of an epidemic of rapes and beatings in Oslo and other major cities – comes conspicuously if not exclusively from the largely Muslim, non-Norwegian, immigrant part of the Nordic polity’s recently imported and dictatorially imposed demographic. It is likely that ten years of Muslim immigrant violence against Norwegian autochthons influenced Breivik’s notion that it had fallen to him, in some heroic way, to settle scores. And yet he chose as his victims, fellow Norwegians.

Marshall McLuhan wrote of “retribalization” as a trend in modernity. [ii] Girard has argued that morally there is nothing “beyond” the Prophetic and Gospel condemnation of human sacrifice; there is only a relapse into human sacrifice. Could Breivik be such a “retribalized” atavism, in McLuhan’s – also in Girard’s – sense? When we look at the phenomenon of reciprocal violence in pre-Christian Norway or Iceland, a pattern emerges. [iii] In classic feud, after the instigation of violence (as when A kills B, who is, let us say, C’s brother), retaliation is typically indirect (as when C avoids killing A, directing his ire instead against D, who is, let us say, A’s brother). Feud metastasizes through the ranks of the innocent and non-involved.

This oblique structure of retaliation in medieval feud corresponds to Breivik’s private holocaust. He did not wreak vengeance on Muslims or even on those who have directly fostered the Muslim presence; he killed the children of those who have directly fostered the Muslim presence. In terms of fostering, another Old Norse institution, those Norwegian children were figuratively the brothers and sisters of the non-Norwegian, Muslim immigrants (they were the D to Breivik’s C). The relapse into a peculiarly ritual type of violence could not be clearer. [iv]

There are also tantalizing echoes in Breivik’s bloody Utøya rampage of other heathen customs – of berzerkgång and holmgång. The berserker is often, but erroneously, supposed to be a man who goads himself into a state of wild frenzy. In fact, the berserker makes himself cold and implacable, so that he becomes a sharply focused, unemotional killing machine who succumbs to no distraction on the field of battle. This is Breivik to a T. (It also fits the Beslan killers.) In holmgång, representatives of two feuding factions meet on an island to settle the conflict.

The so-called conservative element in Breivik’s on-line self-representation is opportunistic and unconvincing. In many statements in his manifesto Breivik indeed explicitly repudiates essential conservative positions. He puts science over religion as the vessel of the highest truth; his vision of himself as a Knight Templar is yet another debasement of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, he is a biological materialist, and much else. Far more important in shaping Breivik than any actual discourse was his lifelong immersion in “World of Warcraft” and other violent video games. Set in a pagan fantasyland beyond good and evil, these electronic diversions belong to the sadomasochistic strain of the degenerate popular culture, pornographic and anti-social in character, that actual conservatives constantly and forcefully decry. These games desensitize the player to images of killing and make actual homicide emotion-free and easy. [v]

Judaism and Christianity are anti-sacrificial. Leftwing “progressive” ideology, like Islam, is anti-Semitic and anti-Christian. Islam, which the Left extols, is blatantly a cult of blood offerings. Islam’s supreme value, indicated by its highest reward, is the killing of infidels in the name of Allah. To suppress Judaism and Christianity and to encourage Islam is to open the way for the resurgence of sacrifice. [vi] The ruling Labor Party of Norway actively collaborates with the Fatah Party of Palestine, feral and murderous to its core, and is plausibly the most explicitly anti-Semitic and anti-Christian political party in Europe. [vii]

Leftists who work aggressively to suppress Judaism and Christianity and to encourage Islam should not be surprised when they witness the resurgence of human sacrifice as the solution to social problems, whether perceived or real. The rest of us should not be surprised either even though as people of Biblical conscience we feel badly shaken and rightly appalled.

 

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