The Thin Blue Line

There's an interesting paradoxical dynamic afoot here, with regard to some in the anti-Islam movement (i.e., with those who seem to be more anti-modern-West than they are anti-Islam per se, of which the latter is a subset at best):

The more they press the lessons we have learned about the Breivik attacks, the more the modern West, as enthralled and controlled by "liberals" or "Leftists", seems to be depicted by them as colossally stupid and (self-)destructive -- and thus the more Breivik's acts were justified.

This dynamic is a vector process; it is not a position. It approaches the justification of Breivik; it does not necessarily actually espouse it. For to do the latter would be to arrive at coherence -- and the dynamic subsists through incoherence: basically, the incoherence that combines two colloquial fallacies:

Having Your Cake and Eating It Too

The Emperor With No Clothes.

The stronger the language used by these certain anti-modern-West individuals to describe the colossally stupid and (self-)destructive nature of the modern West (where "self-destructive" entails literal destruction of our society and tyranny over our fellow citizens), the closer they come to crossing the Thin Blue Line separating them from Breivik.

Thus, for example, take a gander at Lawrence Auster's latest excoriation of modern liberal Norway, which epitomizes the West at its worst. Auster begins by quoting Adrian Pracon, a youth leader at the Utoya camp who survived Anders Breivik’s rampage by playing dead:

“Some of my friends tried to stop [Breivik] by talking to him. Many people think on the island that it was a test … comparing it to how it is to live in Gaza. So many people went to him and tried to talk to him, but they were shot immediately.”

And goes on to say:

"The man was systematically shooting people dead, so others of his intended victims walked up to him and tried to talk him out of it? There’s the Norway philosophy for you! All evil can be ended by talking with it. Or, rather, evil doesn’t exist. There are only misunderstandings, which can be resolved by rational dialogue.

"How appropriate that the country which believes in that philosophy gave the name of its capital to the famous “peace process” in which it was imagined that people whose sadistic god commands the destruction of Israel would be willing to live in peace with Israel. And how appropriate that the same youth camp members who tried to talk with Breivik, even as he was mass murdering their friends, also believed that Breivik was behaving as Israel does to the Palestinians.

"These leftists turn reality on its head, seeing mass-murdering jihadists as innocent victims, and the jihadists’ innocent targets as mass murderers. Pretty, pristine, morally superior Norway: you epitomize the madness of the modern West." [emphasis added]

Isn't this proving Breivik right? Were Breivik in his right mind (which is questionable), he would ask Auster: Are you content to do nothing and merely continue trying to persuade people with words, while the mad modern West continues to careen down the path of self- (and our) destruction? In opting to pursue your method of rhetorical persuasion in the face of this colossally mad and self-destructive force, the modern Leftist West, aren't you behaving like the Utoya youths who tried to dialogue with me even as I was lethally destroying them one by one?

But for Auster (or Baron Bodissey, or Fjordman, or El Ingles, or I dare say Bat Ye'or too, along with a few others) to see this, they'd have to work out the tangle of kinks of their incoherence.

Dymphna over at Gates of Vienna, to take another example, describes Breivik thusly:

Breivik knew and probably still knows right from wrong. He knew that he was making a political statement, a horrendously bloody political statement, one that in his view was meant to save Norway from destruction at the hands of barbarian invaders — an act that was perhaps meant to teach appeasement-minded Norwegian leaders that violence now awaits them on either side.

But this starkly incisive crystallization of Breivik and his motives stands out in an essay where everything else she says implies condemnation of Breivik as a psychopath -- a condemnation insufficiently assimilating the crystallized analysis. Dymphna is trying to have her cake (of condemning Breivik) and eat it too (recognizing the logical pragmatic strategy of Breivik's act in the context of agreeing with his view about the modern West). What's the point of describing his political statement as "horrendous"? Would she describe the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo as "horrendous"? If she did, she would be sure to add "yet tragically necessary". She can't have it both ways. Either we should be at war with a modern Leftist West literally destroying our societies as we speak; or we should dial down our exaggerated rhetoric about how bad the West is currently.

So, once these anti-modern-West analysts approach coherence on this issue (if they ever do), the question becomes:

Is the modern West as apocalyptically mad and destructive and evil as your inflammatory rhetoric makes it out to be? Or are you not exaggerating the problem? If they say Yes to the first and No to the second, they have exposed their absence of any defense of a Thin Blue Line separating them from Breivik.

Further Reading:

Three Theories on the Oslo Mass-Murderer

Lawrence Auster (et al. in the Anti-Islam Movement) supports the same Gnostic alienation that motivated the Oslo mass-murderer

Lawrence Auster contradicts himself

"Breivik's Law"

"Breivik's Law" in action

I cheated