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Norway: Breivik's Real Enemy: Himself
Clarence Page

Anders Breivik, the far-far-right-wing monster charged in Norway with the biggest mass murder by a single gunman in modern memory, reminds me of how often delusional minds hate others for what they really see in themselves.

"The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman," wrote historian Richard Hofstadter in his often quoted 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." "(T)his enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him."

Thus the Ku Klux Klan, for example, imitated Catholicism to the point of priestly robes, elaborate rituals and elaborate hierarchy, Hofstadter wrote. The John Birch Society, leading anti-communist zealots at the time, organized its own version of Communist Party cells and quasi-secret "front" groups.

Today we see a similarly sly envy revealed in the 1,500-page manifesto against Muslims, immigrants, "multiculturalists" and "cultural Marxists," according to news reports, that Breivik wrote and distributed before he went on his truck-bombing, gun-wielding rampage.

By his warped reasoning, he had to protest the dangers of al-Qaida style Muslim terrorists by committing al-Qaida style terror against his fellow Norwegians.

He joined a Knights Templar organization and, judging by his document, thinks he still is engaged in the Christian Crusades against Muslims.

His document offers detailed accounts of the Crusades, according to reports, and a pronounced sense of historical grievance, plus calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

Deep down, Breivik's root problem appears to be a mirror-kissing narcissism so fierce and fanatical that it would drive a man to murder his fellow citizens in order to "save" them, in this case, from immigrants.

In the end, he has achieved quite the opposite of his stated goals. He reveals his delusional anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-"multiculturalism" hatreds to be no less of a menace than the Islamic extremists he claims to oppose.

For example, in his truck bomb in Oslo and machine-gun massacre of a nearby youth camp he singlehandedly killed more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the July 7, 2005, London attacks did -- and for no better purpose.

It should bring us no comfort here in the United States that he found so much of his venom in the blogs of Americans known for their anti-Islam rhetoric and writings. Yet his case also brings attention to what Europeans could learn from America's experiences in navigating their own debates about immigration and multiculturalism.

For one thing, America's version of multiculturalism tends to be geared toward cultural sharing, but mainly as a path to assimilation into our great legendary American "melting pot," which many prefer to call a "salad bowl" or "mulligan stew," depending on how much melting they want to do.

Europe, by contrast, tends to view "multiculturalism" as the recognition of different enclaves of "foreign" cultures within their own cities and borders. The result is a lot less assimilation and more isolation and resentments -- as well as suspicions of racism and "reverse racism."

Much has been said and written about Europe's "failed experiment." German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron have each declared that multiculturalism has failed. But multiculturalism in Europe has been less of an ideology than a weak patchwork of policy initiatives and hopeful-sounding rhetoric aimed at filling labor shortages with as few culture clashes as possible.

Worse, Europe's hate speech laws often criminalize the free-wheeling discussions of immigration problems that we in the U.S. consider to be rather routine, even when it infuriates one side or the other. Censorship can push people to more extreme ways to express their thoughts, as we see in some Islamic countries. We can't blame Breivik on hate speech laws, but censorship only serves to build tensions, not ease them.

Cultural conservatives often fret about the rise of multicultural studies here in the U.S. crowding out the classic work of "Dead White Males" who created most of the classics of Euro-American history. But compared to our European cousins who find Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality easier to praise than to practice, I think we're doing things about right.

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