Police in Norway have yet to determine whether Anders Behring Breivik acted alone when planning and carrying out the bombing and shooting spree that claimed at least 77 lives in Oslo last week. Yet Breivik himself left little room for doubt about the intellectual origins of his political views. In a rambling online manifesto posted shortly before the attacks began, he named a raft of rightwing pundits who have long enjoyed notoriety for their dark warnings about the insidious dangers of multiculturalism in the Christian West. For years, some of Breivik’s most-frequently cited authors have argued that Europe has effectively set the stage for its own demise by accommodating religious, cultural and political traditions that are fundamentally incompatible with its core values.
Understandably, some of the writers embarrassed by Breivik’s regurgitation of their views were quick to point out that the manifesto also contained references to Burke, Churchill, Gandhi, Jefferson, Locke, Orwell, Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain. While true this is largely beside the point, for Breivik’s most impassioned arguments were clearly drawn directly from the writings of these modern xenophobes. Just two months ago, for example, the Swiss-based conservative Gisèle Littman (writing under the nom de guerre Bat Ye’or) criticized President Obama’s credulousness towards promised reforms in the Middle East thus: “The words ‘reforms,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘democracy,’ taken in their Islamic interpretation, would lead to an Islamist empire.” Similarly, the Canadian conservative Mark Steyn opened his provocative 2006 book America Alone with a promise to expose “the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia.” Littman’s conflation of Islamic and Islamist and Steyn’s almost throwaway reference to the ‘remorseless’ nature of Muslim encroachment have long been standard features of right wing analyses of the ‘Arab Mind’ or the ‘Muslim World.’ Indeed the dismissive tone of such breezy generalizations appears to have emboldened key neoconservatives in the Bush years. So it seems somewhat disingenuous for these writers to dissociate themselves completely from the thought-world of someone like Anders Breivik.
There has been widespread support within Norway for a closed trial, to deny Breivik the platform he appears to be seeking. Given the scale of what has happened there is unquestionably something obscene about the prospect of watching him expound his lunatic worldview to an international audience. But the fear that such exposure would necessarily boost Breivik’s cause, and encourage likeminded bigots elsewhere, must be resisted. In fact it is precisely on occasions like these that a vibrant public sphere matters most.
The belief that freedom of expression is the fundamental requirement of an open society is based on the idea that grievances like those which animate racist and xenophobic political groups throughout Europe are better aired in the context of civilized debate rather than allowed to fester in private societies.
Distasteful as it may seem to many of us, it is better in the long run for prejudices to be openly debated and defeated by better arguments. Otherwise the hatreds of these groups become self-reinforcing. Without the pressure of the public sphere, a group like the English Defence League – which describes itself as “a human rights organization that exists to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims” – gets to set the terms of the debate. In turn their extremism tends to provoke equally intemperate responses, such as the threat by a British Islamist last year to march 500 coffins through a Wiltshire town where the bodies of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan are honoured after they have been repatriated.
Distancing itself from the massacre in Oslo with the ambiguous disclaimer that there had never been any “official contact between [Breivik] and the EDL,” the League quickly returned to its usual mischief. The group’s leader, Tommy Robinson, recently told Lauren Collins of the New Yorker that “We don’t want English lads blowing themselves up on our soil, but that will happen if they don’t give us a platform … if British politicians don’t learn from this, God forbid, it might happen again.” The knowing tone of this comment offers some indication of how serious the problems of hate speech can be, but Robinson’s implied threat is no different from the pleading of scores of other fringe groups who clamour for attention only to be exposed as morally bankrupt when they face serious public scrutiny. Prejudice and paranoia never survive the rigours of open debate, and the horrors of the massacre in Norway should not be allowed to obscure this important truth.
