Let Liberty Be Our Shield

How Much Love We Could Show: Norway's response to terrorism was to call for more openness, more democracy and, yes, more love. When it comes to the power of government, Thomas Jefferson warned, "the people themselves are its only safe respositories".

 

THE UNITED STATES Department of Homeland Security, dangerously overloaded with surveillance and interception powers, could not save the Boston Marathon. But, then, no one could have saved the Boston Marathon. Short of imposing a monitoring regime of Orwellian proportions – one which would utterly obliterate all civil rights and democratic freedoms – no state can promise its citizens absolute safety.

 

The world is a dangerous place.

 

Assailed by its dangers, the most important thing a government can do is make sure that by its actions it does not contribute to the world becoming a less free or a more oppressive place.

 

When New Zealand experienced its last terrorist attack – the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 – the first response of the David Lange-led Labour Government was not to bring down a series of draconian “security” measures. His instinct was to allow the NZ Police to get on with their job.

 

Note that: the NZ Police. Not the NZ Security Intelligence Service, and certainly not the Government Communications Security Bureau. Those agencies had proved completely worthless as protectors of New Zealand’s national security.

 

In spite of our membership of the UKUSA Agreement, and after years of loyal (some would say sycophantic) service to our Cold War “allies”, not one of them saw fit to warn us that a French “Black Ops” team was about to launch a deadly attack on a British registered vessel moored peacefully at an Auckland wharf.

 

A Deadly Blow: Neither the SIS, the GCSB, nor any of New Zealand's so-called "allies", provided the New Zealand government with the slightest warning that the French were planning to attack the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior when it docked in Auckland. The culprits were identified by the NZ Police - aided by the New Zealand people.

 

And the NZ Police – magnificently assisted by a host of Kiwi sticky-beaks – did a splendid job. Indeed, if our Aussie “mates” had held the French “getaway boat” in Norfolk Island (as the New Zealand authorities had requested) then we would have nabbed the whole gang.

 

Why were the Police so successful? Because New Zealanders trusted them. When the Police asked for help in apprehending the people who had done this (because, let’s not forget, French saboteurs’ bombs had taken the life of Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira) everyone who harboured even the slightest suspicion of “Swiss” newly-weds, or who’d noticed anything remotely out of the ordinary on the night of 10 July 1985, did not hesitate to call the cops.

 

No gang of terrorists can escape the surveillance of an entire nation. “National Security” only has meaning if we are all, collectively, determined to preserve it.

 

In 2011, the Norwegians gave the world additional proof. The response of Norway’s government to the shocking slaying of 77 of its citizens – many of them teenagers – by a right-wing racist terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, was very different from that of the United States Government in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

 

At a memorial service in Oslo Cathedral, the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, declared: “We must not allow this attack to hurt Norwegian democracy: the proper answer to such violence is more democracy, more openness … No one has said it better than the [young woman] who was interviewed by CNN: ‘If one man can show so much hate, think how much love we could show, standing together.’”

 

And stand together they did. In Oslo, on 25 July 2011, more than 200,000 people gathered to show their solidarity for the victims of Breivik’s savagery, and to demonstrate their commitment to Norway’s proud traditions of social and political democracy.

 

“Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone”, wrote the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. “The people themselves are its only safe depositories.”

 

How depressing that John Key, so strong an admirer of all things American in every other respect, should place so little value on the words of America’s most illustrious Founding Father.

 

How unfortunate that the example of his own country’s, and Norway’s, democratic response to terrorism has been lost on him.

 

How disappointing to see our liberties sacrificed to the Prime Minister’s reactionary notions of security.

 

And, how extraordinarily insulting to hear Mr Key justify empowering the GCSB to spy on his fellow citizens with some uncorroborated story about Weapons of Mass Destruction. (As if that alarmist excuse had not failed its deceitful fabricators’ once before!)

 

It was Benjamin Franklin who wrote: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

 

Another American Founding Father we’d all do well to heed.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 April 2013.

Something Else

Right-wing Terrorist: Before the world learned that the Oslo bomb had been detonated by Anders Behring Breivik the global news media correctly described the event as a terrorist attack. But, once it became clear the perpetrator was a Norwegian national, his carefully planned military mission suddenly became something else. Breivik himself became "the gunman", while his Labour Youth targets became the "teenage" victims of a "shooting spree" or "deadly rampage". Why does the Western media find it so hard to call Breivik's actions by their proper name: terrorism?

HOW EASILY WE ACCEPT the peculiar moral alchemy of our masters. Their effortless, almost magical power to transmute the Norwegian tragedy into something else; something quite distinct from a terrible and despicable act of political terrorism.

Anders Behring Breivik is indisputably a political terrorist, and the Norwegian authorities have treated him as such. He is being tried for terrorism.

So, why have governments and newspaper editors around the world shied away from using the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” to describe the murderous acts of this 32-year-old ultra-nationalist, anti-socialist, cultural exclusionist?

Over and over again we hear and read about Breivik as “the gunman” who went on a shooting “rampage” or “spree”.

Breivik’s victims have been similarly misrepresented. These young people weren’t gunned down for being “teenagers”, and Utoya Island wasn’t chosen simply because it was a “summer camp”. Breivik’s target was the annual gathering of the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party – the dominant partner in Norway’s left-wing coalition government.

In court, Breivik calmly explained that he had targeted the Utoya Island gathering quite deliberately. Partly to punish the Labour-led government for its promotion of multiculturalism. Partly to wipe out the next generation of Labour Party leaders and impede the recruitment of replacements.

And yet, all over the English-speaking world, these decisive facts of Breivik’s terrorism are blurred, smudged – even erased. Politicians and journalists ask us instead to focus on “the gunman’s” singularity. They speculate about his mental state, emphasise the extreme or “fantastic” character of his beliefs, and do everything within their power to distance Breivik from what they consider to be “normal” political activity.

HOW DIFFERENT things were in that confused hour before the terrorist’s Norwegian ethnicity was confirmed.

Prior to this crucial confirmation, all the talk had been about “Islamist terrorism”. Experts from far away countries effortlessly detected Al Qaida’s “signature” among the Oslo rubble. In the fog of war, well before all the facts were known, nobody seemed in any doubt that they were looking at an act of terrorism.

So, why did the language and the ontological perspective change when the world discovered that Norway wasn’t Al Qaida’s latest victim after all, but that it was, in fact, dealing with an act of home-grown terrorism?

Why do the Western World’s opinion-shapers feel so uncomfortable applying the word “terrorism” to anything other than the deadly acts of Islamist extremists?

THE MOST OBVIOUS ANSWER is that it is difficult to wage a “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) if the terroristic “them” have not been clearly, unequivocally, culturally and religiously distinguished from the innocent “us”.

Terrorists are supposed to come from hot desert countries, have brown skins and shout “Allahu Akbar!” They are not supposed to be blond-haired, blue-eyed, and, like the medieval Knights Templar, make war in the absolute certainty that “God wills it!”

Our masters become distinctly uncomfortable when they realise that Anders Breivik clearly considers himself a co-belligerent in GWOT. While Norway’s soldiers fight the Taliban alongside their American, British and New Zealand comrades in Afghanistan, Breivik’s new Knights Templar are pledged to unleash death and destruction on Islam’s treacherous fifth-columnists back home.

In the eyes of this uncompromising nationalist, Norway’s Labour prime-minister, Jens Stoltenberg, is indistinguishable from Vidkun Quisling – the infamous fifth-columnist who headed-up the Norwegian puppet-government imposed by the Nazis in 1940.

We are repelled by his moral insouciance, but wouldn’t our own special forces personnel, after a night of carnage in the streets and alleyways of Kabul, wearily concede that their actions had been, to use Breivik’s own words, “atrocious – but necessary”.

THE NEED to label Breivik’s home-grown terrorism “something else” is explained by the painful fact that about the only thing that distinguishes his massacre from the West’s is authority and geography.

Like the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, Breivik set out on a military mission to achieve a number of clear political objectives. The horror he unleashed on Utoya Island appalled the world. So, why is the world not equally appalled when an American drone obliterates a Pakistani compound? Or a Nato gunship cuts down 68 Afghan wedding guests in Helmand province?

Significantly, Breivik asked his police captors if he could wear a uniform to his arraignment. It’s as if he was challenging us to admit that, when shielded by the emblems of authority, terrorism is always “something else”.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 July 2011.

Why?

Utoya Island, Norway, Friday, 22 July 2011: A calculated act of political terror. 

SIXTY-EIGHT idealistic young Norwegians shot to death with chilling efficiency. Eight of their compatriots blown to pieces by a massive car-bomb in the Norwegian capital. What other question can there be but: “Why?”

The answer is frighteningly straight-forward: both the bombing and the shootings were carefully calculated acts of political terror.

The man Norwegian authorities have charged with these atrocities, a 32-year-old businessman named Anders Behring Breivik, is a self-confessed Christian and an ardent Norwegian nationalist. Between 1999 and 2005 he was a “youth member” of the Norwegian Progress Party – a party whose principles and policies closely align with those of America’s “tea partiers” and New Zealand’s Act Party.

Breivik’s resignation from the Progress Party was in reaction to the severe internal stresses brought on by the often bitter debates over how far the party should go to curb the influx of Muslim immigrants to Norway.

Throughout the 1990s the Progress Party was torn apart by splits and divisions over the immigration issue. Breivik was a supporter of those he described as the “idealistic” faction of the party: hardliners who despised the “multiculturalism” preached by the Norwegian Left, and who were committed to restoring the racially homogeneous Norwegian society of the 1950s and 60s.

It was the Progress Party’s radical ideas on race, and the extreme positions adopted by some of the leading protagonists of the anti-immigration faction, which led Norway’s other political parties to declare it persona non grata in that country’s generally tolerant and liberal political culture.

Opposition to the Progress Party’s racial and religious prejudice was most pronounced among the left-leaning Labour and Green parties – both of whom strongly promoted the ideal of multicultural tolerance. But even Norway’s centrist and conservative parties were put off by the Progress Party’s extremism and excluded it from the real and potential governing coalitions of the centre-right.

Essentially, the entire Norwegian political class (aided by the news media) came together to mount an effective political boycott of the Progress Party.

The only problem with this strategy of exclusion was that the Progress Party was not simply an anti-immigration party. In Norway’s still very strong social-democratic political culture the Progress Party stood out as the only mass political movement whole-heartedly committed to introducing the policies of “free market” neo-liberalism.

By bringing together rural and provincial Norwegians antagonistic to the influx of non-white, non-Christian immigrants, with the growing number of young, urban-dwelling Norwegians chafing under the benign collectivism of Norway’s social-democratic institutions, the Progress Party had grown rapidly to become Norway’s second-largest political party after Labour.

The result has given rise to what writer and social-critic, Dr Chris Harris, has aptly described as a “civil cold war or cold civil war” in which upwards of one quarter of the population found its political beliefs and aspirations deliberately excluded from government.

Paradoxically, it may have been the Progress Party’s incremental movements towards the political centre (and thus towards participation in a future centre-right government) which set Breivik on his path towards political terrorism and mass murder.

IN SPITE OF looking like the healthy, blond-haired, blue-eyed young man any Norwegian mother would have been delighted to have as a son-in-law, Breivik had not made a conspicuous success of his life.

Aspiring to be part of Norway’s entrepreneurial elite, he’d tried his hand at several businesses but all had ended in failure. Refusing to abandon his dreams, he’d talked himself into “The Pillars” – one of Oslo’s leading masonic lodges. But even here, among the rich and the powerful, he could find no backers for the right-wing newspaper he’d hoped to launch. Lonely, frustrated and increasingly marginalised, Breivik was reduced to venting his spleen on right-wing social-media sites, and chatting on-line with the dark denizens of Europe’s neo-Nazi underworld.

And after them – who?

What triggered the final descent into practical planning: the amassing of fertiliser; the stockpiling of ammunition; the acquisition of a policeman’s uniform; we’ve yet to discover.

Did he find himself in an Oslo bar one evening, locked in conversation with a pretty young student attracted to his buffed six-foot frame and cute, cupid-bow smile? Did he feel the pangs of sexual yearning? Wonder if this girl might be the one? Only to ruin it all by getting into an argument about politics. Was it before or after she’d called him a racist pig that he noticed the Labour Youth logo on her T-shirt?

Did he imagine them all on Utoya Island? All those happy little Marxists rutting in their pup tents. Mocking a vengeful god with their easy fornication and treacherous tolerance of the filthy defilers of Norwegian purity.

Did he imagine all their Labour Party mentors, beavering away in their downtown Oslo offices, plotting yet more ruin for the Fatherland?

Well, he had a surprise for them.

And afterwards, Norway would never be the same.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 July 2011.