Right-wing terrorism as folk activism

I won’t waste time condemning Anders Behring Breivik for being a political murderer. Our society, right or left, has no standing whatsoever for condemning political murder. Che murdered over twice as many of his political enemies. He’s a hero to millions.

No one who condones Che, Stalin, Mao, or any other leftist murderer, has any right to ask anyone else to dissociate himself from a rightist who didn’t even make triple digits. ABB is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. Nelson Mandela is the most revered living political figure on our beautiful blue planet. Besides just killing people with bombs, here’s the sort of thing “armed struggle” meant to St. Mandela:

On the record, I note, St. Mandela “opposed” the ANC necklacing of “traitors.” No—possessed of infinite reserves of human compassion, this living symbol of man’s global unity favored a far milder punishment. He just wanted to cut off their noses. Do you need a picture of that, too?

If you ask me to condemn them both, because terrorism is inherently wrong, I can respect you, though I may ask you to think harder. (I don’t think terrorism is inherently wrong. I just think right-wing terrorism is inherently wrong.) If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck.

Brown Scare! Brown Scare! The Brown Scare is on! But then again, when hasn’t it been on? Certainly not since your grandpa was a little boy. Can’t we get another two minutes’ hate for the Nazi Peril? The world progressive community had sure as hell better hope it can raise a new global hard-on over Anders Behring Breivik. If you have Claudia Schiffer on your lap and a gram of Viagra up your nose, and you’re still limp, age has finally defeated you.

Age has certainly not defeated us. So as an act of collective defiance, we have to start by praising ABB, in every way we possibly can. What ways are those? Not many.

We can note the only thing he didn’t screw up. At least he shot communists, not Muslims. He gored the matador and not the cape. While still basically animal behavior (especially when it comes to the 15-year-olds—is there a 15-year-old in the world who isn’t a communist?), it’s more than I’d expect from a rogue Gates of Vienna commenter. We should also praise ABB for his spectacular stupidity, which I’d like to think can be a learning experience for the entire right—from Instapundit to Stormfront. You can relax now, because we won’t be praising him again.

But we do need to remember that terrorism, left or right, is a legitimate military tactic. Just as a nation that idolizes Che has no genuine moral grounds for condemning ABB, a nation that annihilated Dresden has no genuine moral grounds for condemning OBL. We’re not exactly history’s pure and precious little snowflake.

For instance, the entire political landscape of postwar France—closely allied, of course, to the great and good of the noble, innocent, grieving Norwegian Labor Party—was created by the 10,000 murders of the épuration sauvage. If you lived in France in 1945 and your political record was anywhere to the right of Larry Beria, you had a pretty good chance of being murdered. Your murderers had zero chance of being punished. Indeed Norway had its own purge, though nowhere near so bloody. I’ve never seen any liberal pundit shed so much as a milliliter of sterile saline for these events. When they start, I might begin to take their deep moral convictions a little more seriously.

Terrorism—the random killing of defenseless civilians—is an act of war. It needs to be judged by the laws of war, not the laws of peace. ABB’s personal hero was the Norwegian resistance fighter Max Manus. Would Max Manus have hesitated to single-handedly wipe out a Nazi Party youth camp? Would Norwegian history books describe him as a hero for doing so? Of course they would. It is impossible to go directly from hypocrisy to morality. A cleansing bath of amoral realism must intervene.

Anders Behring Breivik made war on communist Norway, just as Max Manus made war on fascist Norway, just as Osama bin Laden made war on imperial America, just as Nelson Mandela made war on apartheid South Africa. Terrorism is the normal mode of warfare in our delightful post-WWII utopia. That is, it is the most common way to use force to achieve political objectives. Condemning terrorism, as such, is in every case retarded. You are simply condemning the 20th century. Fine, but where does this leave you?

So let’s judge ABB—but let’s judge him by the natural and historical laws of war. Ironically, by the (pre-20C) laws of war, ABB does quite poorly.

Whose terrorism is more morally legitimate? The right-wing terrorism of ABB, or the left-wing terrorism of OBL? As a rightist, I am obviously far more in sympathy with the goals of ABB. But by the natural law of war, which no man made and no man can unmake, 9/11 was far more legitimate as a military act than the Utøya massacre. ABB is worse than OBL.

Why? Because the law of war is that all war’s carnage, whether it affects “soldiers” or “civilians” (a completely arbitrary distinction) is legitimate if and only if it serves a military purpose. What is a military purpose? Since the purpose of all war is the transfer of political power, a military purpose is a political purpose.

Slaughter that serves no purpose is sadistic, insane, terrible. Slaughter for purpose is the very nature of war, and cannot be separated from it. Since right-wing terrorism does not work, it is illegitimate as a tactic of war. Since left-wing terrorism does work, it is perfectly legitimate. Thus, OBL is legitimate and ABB is not.

Islamic terrorism (which is in every case left-wing—as you can see every time Osama quotes Chomsky) is legitimate because it’s effective. It’s effective because its political result is to expand the political power and privilege of Muslims and their progressive sponsors. Right-wing terrorism is illegitimate because it’s ineffective. It’s ineffective because its political result is to contract the political freedom and influence of conservatives (extremist or moderate).

If it was militarily possible to free Norway from Eurocommunism by killing a hundred communists, or a thousand communists, or ten thousand communists, we might have an interesting moral debate over whether this butcher’s bill was worth paying. Since it is not possible to free Norway from communism by killing a hundred communists, i.e., roughly 0.01% of all the communists in Norway, leaving the other 99.99% with a permanent raging hard-on, no debate is possible. The verdict is clear: illegitimate, ineffective and wrong. I condemn Anders Behring Breivik! So there.

Of course, there are plenty of historical contexts in which right-wing terrorism did work—for instance, Germany in the 1920s. In these contexts, it was legitimate. Conversely, left-wing terrorism was ineffective in the fascist nations, and hence illegitimate.

Why does left-wing terrorism work, and right-wing terrorism not? As Carl Schmitt explained in Theory of the Partisan, terrorist, guerrilla or partisan warfare is never effective on its own. While an effective military strategy, it is only effective as one fork of a pincer attack. The terrorist succeeds when, and only when, he is allied to what Schmitt called an interested third party—either a military or political force.

Left-wing terrorism succeeds as the violent arm of a political assault that would probably be overwhelming in any case. In every case, the terrorist plays Mutt in a Mutt-and-Jeff act. Right-wing terrorism in the modern world is cargo-cult terrorism: Mutt without Jeff. Indeed, in historical cases where right-wing terrorism has been successful, in every case we see it aligned with powerful forces within the state. Right-wing terrorism worked in Weimar Germany, for instance, or prewar Japan, because it aligned with fascist conspiracies in the security forces. Somehow I don’t see a lot of that in 2011 Norway.

Thus, we note that there are two responses to terrorism: the natural response and the unnatural response. The natural response is to take revenge on the terrorist and everyone even remotely resembling him. If he is a Muslim, the natural response is to chastise the Muslims. When Grynzspan, a Jew, kills the German vom Rath, the German people must chastise the Jews. And, of course, when a right-wing piece of filth slaughters the cream of the Norwegian Komsomol, all racists and reactionaries are automatically suspect.

The unnatural response—which will not happen by itself, but can be made to happen by a sufficiently powerful psychological-warfare machine—is to look instead at the grievances of the attacker. After all, no one commits terrorism unless he has some complaint. No complaint—no terrorism. Thus while the Nazi response to the terrorism of Grynzspan is to collectively punish the Jews, the Atlantic response to the terrorism of Grynzspan (ineffective and thus illegitimate) is to attribute it to the injustices suffered by the Jews. This of course is also our response to the terrorism of Mandela (effective and thus legitimate).

Actually, there was no nuance at all in the response of the great and the good, the same wise and trusted organs now deploring ABB with the sound of a thousand jet engines, to Nelson Mandela. There’s no room for nuance when a saint is in the room. But St. Osama is a bridge too far.

So in typical cases, when the cause is good but the means a little too gory, the interested third party of a successful terrorist campaign adopts a strategy of dualism. Here is our Mutt-and-Jeff act: the unnatural response. We can always tell a Mutt-and-Jeff strategy because Mutt and Jeff have the same demands. Mutt tells you to satisfy these demands, or die. Jeff tells you to satisfy these demands, to “take the wind out of Mutt’s sails.” Also, Jeff and Mutt are frequently found at the same parties, enjoying the hell out of one another’s company.

Thus, Islamic terrorism is productive, because it results in increasing communal deference to the Islamic community and its progressive allies. Fascist terrorism is counterproductive, because it results in increasing communal intolerance toward the fascist community—which of course has no conservative allies.

Rather, the community—whose information source consists almost exclusively of progressive organs—adopts a monist approach, ascribing guilt by association to everyone even remotely resembling a fascist. I.e., everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. Since the monist response is the natural response, it is not at all difficult to orchestrate. The story writes itself.

This gets us to the essence of what’s wrong with ABB’s thinking. The error of ABB goes far beyond his decision to run wild with a Glock. This is just his specific error.

His general error is what Patri Friedman calls folk activism—a broad pattern of ineffective or counterproductive political action which extends across the entire right-wing spectrum, from moderate libertarians to hardcore neo-Nazis. It’s not just that running wild with a Glock is stupid. Almost everything the right does is stupid. Very few rightists are running wild with a Glock, but most are in some way or other guilty of folk activism.

Why did ABB think right-wing terrorism could work? Because ABB grew up in a leftist world, he thinks like a leftist. His heroes are leftist heroes—Max Manus, not Vidkun Quisling. Terrorism works for leftists—and so do many other forms of democratic activism.

Terrorism is anarchism: a shattering of order. Is there such a thing as right-wing anarchism? Of course not: the concept is retarded. If the word “right” means anything, its goal is not to shatter order, but impose it.

Who governs Norway? The Norwegian Labor Party? If an ABB wanted to accomplish something useful, he shouldn’t have decimated the Norwegian Labor Party. Rather, he should have joined the Norwegian Labor Party. After all, Chinese communism became fascist—why can’t Norwegian communism? ABB could have been Norway’s Deng Xiaoping, not its Timothy McVeigh. That’s the difference between action and folk activism.

The thoughtful people at Document.no (who should move to the US just for their graphic design) have assembled Anders Behring Breivik’s comments, which Google Translate does a pretty decent job on. Obviously, Herr Breivik’s problem started with his own lying eyes:

Speaking of stubborn multiculturalists. I remember a story from the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten for approx. 6 months ago very good (I find, unfortunately, not this).

I can remember that it was a school in the City Center East, in a class where there was only a single Norwegian boy again (the majority were Muslims). Most others had taken their children out of school. The mother of this boy was, of course, a hardcore Marxist who died and life was to prove that multiculturalism and Islam will be functioning. She refused to move to another area or take him out of school. Her son would prove once and for all that Islamophobes on documents and other cultural conservatives were wrong and that it WAS possible.

The poor boy was harassed for several years until satisfactory one day he began to self harm. He told his marxistmor that he wanted to die. Only after this the mother realized that she had been wrong. The result was that they moved to another neighborhood and changing schools.

So one should not underestimate the fact how “hardcore” some of these kulturmarxistene is. I’m sure some of these actually had sacrificed their own children just to prove this sick Marxist theory.

But there are, after all, some justice up in it all. The positive for us, the cultural conservatives, is that we are among the first to protect our children, we move to safe areas where our children do not need to live in dhimmitude.

It is often the children of the boundless naive and Marxist kids who end up as victims. The irony here is that those who survive with psyche intact ends up as a dedicated cultural conservatives or to with which etnosentrerte of great frustration for their kulturmarxistiske or humanist parents:

I have left Google’s delightful Norwegianisms intact. I’m sure you can translate them.

Note this emphasis on victimology. ABB is following the exact script of left-wing terrorism. Why does he commit his bloody deeds? Because he is a victim. He is persecuted. Personally, in fact:

Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment of Muslim youth. I myself am born and raised here and chose out of necessity to the friendships / alliances with A and B team to move freely. The alternative is that you stick to your neighborhood or west side. I know of hundreds of incidents where non-Muslims were robbed, beaten and harassed by Muslim gangs.

My friend aged 12-17 was Pakistan that I was one of the protected sphere “potatoes” who had protection. But I saw hypocrisy at close range and was disgusted. Muslim gangs have / could devastate free (racism / Jihad behavior), while all attempts “potatoes” do / did to make the same thread are systematically stamped on racism and deconstructed by the local police.

Well, as Leonard Pitts put it, cry me a river!

Of course ABB and his fellow “potatoes” (perhaps any Nordic readers can enlighten us on the meaning—is this Norwegian for “wigga”?) are victims. When your country is conquered by ruthless communists, which import a new people to oppress the old one, you don’t think you’re going to be robbed, beaten and harassed in your own former capital city? Hypocrisy is a prerogative of the rulers. Submission is a duty of the ruled. Bend over, Norwegians.

Don’t forget, the British were the first to violate Norway’s sovereignty in 1940. Was Norway liberated? Sure—she was liberated by German fascism in 1940, then liberated back by Allied communism in 1945. Arguably, Norway has been a tool of British diplomacy since the Royal Navy liberated her from Denmark. Norway is the bargirl of Scandinavia. She’s so liberated, she’s lubricated. Just slap her butt and she presents obligingly. It’s only a question of who will liberate her next—the Russians or the Chinese. I’m sure she can’t wait.

What ABB is doing here is, in plain non-Google English, whining. Whining is the act either of a slave, or a bitch. The slave whines to his master. Master, the overseer is beating me! And so, the protected minority whines to the communist judge. Whitey callin’ me a bad name! But ABB would be a free man—who, then is he whining to? He’s whining to nobody. He’s whining because, having grown up on heroic Nelson Mandela, he thinks he can free himself and his nation by a combination of (a) whining and (b) mass murder.

The entire spectrum of right-wing folk activism, from pointless whining through spectacular terrorism, is what Roissy would call “beta.” It is strictly man-bitch behavior. Look, if you think Norway should be ruled by patriotic, axe-wielding, Odin-worshipping Vikings rather than Euroquisling kulturmarxistene, I agree! A gelded and humiliated Norway, mentally sodomized by her raceless, epicene internationalist masters as she gradually morphs into Somalia North, is a pathetic and sickening spectacle. Haakon the Fairhaired could not possibly approve.

What would Haakon the Fairhaired do about it? That would depend on whether he had any viable options, or didn’t. If he could do something that worked, he would. If not, he wouldn’t. He certainly was neither a man-bitch, nor a mass-murderer.

What strikes the reactionary observer about all this beta folk-activism, harmless or lethal, is its enormous intellectual timidity, to the point of cowardice. Do you want to turn back the clock in Norway? If so, why are you stuck in the 20th century? Do you hate communism? Why are all your models for dissent and change and rebellion straight out of the communist playbook?

A restoration of traditional, pre-liberal or even pre-Christian Norway is a herculean task of social and political engineering. It cannot possibly be carried on without absolute sovereignty. Indeed, the task of eradicating liberal institutions and liberal culture in Norway, though tremendous (and itself requiring absolute sovereignty), pales before the much more difficult task of recreating a genuine Norwegian society that isn’t a ridiculous theme-park joke.

The idea that any incremental political change, achieved by any sort of “activism” (from mass whining to mass murder), can advance this project in any way at all, is inherently retarded. It’s as if you wanted to replace your horse with a BMW, so you start by cutting off one of your horse’s hooves and whittling it into a crude, wheel-like disc.

Rather, any significant regime change can happen only in one step. The stable must become a garage. There is no way to have a combined stable and garage, which contains a means of transportation which is half a horse and half a BMW. There is no way to have a Norway which is half communist and half Crusader, let alone 99.9% communist and 0.1% Crusader.

Furthermore, it’s very hard to imagine any successful regime change which involves killing, imprisoning, deporting or otherwise liquidating the former ruling elite. You’d certainly have to bump off a lot more Young Pioneers if you want to eradicate Norwegian communism this way. I will certainly concede that it is theoretically possible to conduct regime change via aristocide, if you’re going to be really thorough about the matter. But think of the impact on the gene pool. Does Norway really need a Pol Pot?

Rather, if you’re going to change Norway into something new, you need the present ruling class of Norway to join and follow you. Or at least, you’ll need their children. Rape is beta. Seduction is alpha. Don’t slaughter the youth camp—recruit the youth camp.

After all, how in 2011 can anyone genuinely, truly, believe in “kulturmarxisme”? They think they do—just like that pretty girl thinks she’s looking for a sensitive, new-age guy. But actually what brought the cream of young Norway to Utøya was the blind, eternal human quest for good old political power. Can you find a way to offer them that? Haakon the Fairhaired would…