Much as I find unpalatable the rhetorical endowment of a "law" to the Norwegian monster who forsook his humanity, ripples larger than his malignancy, generated by its acts, are nevertheless sufficiently significant for the purport and telos of the Anti-Islam Movement to formulate from them a law.
Now then, Breivik's Law. The law has seven points, which I will first present in succinct form, then in more elaborately explanatory form:
1. Breivik considers the West to be evil and self-destructive at an emergency level.
2. Given #1, the only eventualities are
a) totalitarian oppression (already beginning in earnest) with the suffering and oppression only getting worse;
or
b) pan-Western civil war.
3.
a) Given #2, the time for dialogue and persuasion is over: the only choice now is Submission to the evil West, or War against it by the good remnant of Westerners who remain and wish to save it.
b) Breivik in these terms logically chooses the latter, and takes the initiative to jump-start the civil war,which in turn logically entails fighting, attacking and killing representatives of the evil Western "Elites" who are in power.
4. Many members of the Anti-Islam Movement agree with Breivik from #1 clear through to #3a, but...
5. ...their vehement rejection of #3b seems incoherent and they provide no argument defending this rejection.
6. The PC MC mainstream has insinuated that the Anti-Islam Movement created an ideological and emotional climate conducive to inspiring and motivating Breivik to commit his atrocity. Absent a cogent argument as stipulated in #5, however, the PC MC mainstream has a point in this regard.
7. The more that the PC MC mainstream does #6, the more the Anti-Islam Movement representatives and members reiterate their theory about how hopelessly and self-destructively wicked the modern West has become -- thus reiterating the very same ideological structure of premises and conclusions, imbued with a quasi-Gnostic mood of alienation, which they share with Breivik.
What follows is an expanded, more detailed version of the above adumbration of "Breivik's Law":
1. Breivik notices that the modern West has been (or is being) taken over by evil "cultural Marxists" who are destroying our societies in two ways: through their own wicked "cultural Marxism" and through making us lethally vulnerable to a Muslim invasion -- both of these evils dovetailing in some grand Macchiavellian plan which is becoming an accelerating and dire emergency.
2. Under the extreme terms of this emergency as described in #1, there are only two logical outcomes, and either or both of them are fast approaching:
a) the evil "cultural Marxists" and their evil allies, the Muslims, will succeed in finalizing the wicked totalitarian tyranny they are constructing for the West (which will furthermore entail much oppression, misery and violent mayhem along the way)
b) the attempt of (a) will provoke a pan-Western Civil War among all the good Westerners who will wake up (even if this internecine reaction may be relatively fitful and sporadic), and this in turn may result, after years of horrible violence on both sides, in a victory for the good Westerners, or in their defeat, or in a horribly violent and protracted and chaotic stalemate for decades.
3.
a) Breivik sees the emergency of #1 and #2 and sees that internal dialogue and rhetorical persuasion will no longer ameliorate the situation and comes to the logical conclusion: it is either War or Submission.
b) Breivik sees that the only right and good thing to do is to plunge into (and also jump-start) #2b pre-emptively in order to increase the chances of success for the good Westerners in their emergent struggle against the evil "cultural Marxists" of the West and their evil Muslim allies.
c) Breivik thus sees logically that the sooner we begin, pre-emptively, #2b (engaging in earnest in civil war against the evil "cultural Marxists" of the West and their evil Muslim allies), the better our chances at survival and victory.
d) And Breivik therefore takes the initiative and plans and initiates a pre-emptive strike against the evil cultural Marxists -- which means no more talking and blogging, but actually fighting and killing people as a "resistance fighter".
4. A significant number of individuals in the Anti-Islam Movement, many of them quite prominent, meanwhile, have come to the same conclusions, derived from the same premises, as has Breivik -- the premises and conclusions, that is, detailed from #1 clear through to #3b (and some even to #3c, though often mincing their words in complex and seemingly disingenuous, though perhaps merely sincerely incoherent, obfuscation).
5. For no cogently and coherently argued reason, however, all of these same individuals (with some cryptically worded seeming exceptions among some lower on the totem pole expressed in comments here and there on blogs) refuse to go further -- as expressed, at the very least, by simply endorsing it -- on to #3c and its inexorably logical next step, #3d. In place of a cogently and coherently argued reason why, they simply apodictically assert their ethical opposition to #3d.
Such an ethical opposition, however, makes no ostensible sense if one endorses #1 through #3b (and even worse, through #3c). Now, it might be possible to argue for such an ethical opposition to #3d, given a simultaneous endorsement of #1 through #3b (and perhaps even including #3c); but no one in the Anti-Islam Movement has even bothered to begin to attempt such an argument -- opting stubbornly to behave as though simply apodictically asserting their unargued opposition suffices, when it doesn't do anything but betray one of the great virtues of the West, its principle of Reason.
6. Meanwhile, the PC MC mainstream has insinuated that the Anti-Islam Movement created an ideological and emotional climate conducive to inspiring and motivating Breivik to commit his atrocity. Absent a cogent argument as stipulated in #5 (particularly paragraph 2), however, the PC MC mainstream has a point in this regard. (It is some small measure of consolation, perhaps, that the PC MC isn't smart enough, apparently, to zero in on this glaring deficiency and, by implication, demand that representatives of the Anti-Islam Movement come up with such an argument in their defense.)
7. Here's where Breivik's Law takes a perverse turn:
The more that the PC MC mainstream does #6, the more the Anti-Islam Movement representatives and members reiterate their theory about how hopelessly and self-destructively wicked the modern West has become -- thus reiterating the very same ideological structure of premises and conclusions, imbued with a quasi-Gnostic mood of alienation, which they share with Breivik (cf. #1 through #3b, as clarified in #5), but which, again, they incoherently and insufficiently assert has nothing to do with Breivik's logical conclusion of #3c-#3d.
Further Reading:
"Breivik's Law" in action
The Thin Blue Line
Lawrence Auster (et al. in the Anti-Islam Movement) supports the same Gnostic alienation that motivated the Oslo murderer)
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3 comments:
Hi Hesperado.
If I might perhaps articulate the reason why those prominent in the AIM do not go on to the violent phase, it is because of a simple economic reality.
The nations of the West (particularly America and Europe) are mired in massive debt. Combined with general economic stagnation, they view the present system as doomed to collapse, and are happy to stand back and let the present leadership run the West off the cliff. When that happens, they will be discredited and their theories will be left in tatters.
In short, they (and, to some extent, I) are simply going to wait for the chance to say "We told you so", and then move in and clean up the mess. Within the economic ruins of the once-mighty West, opposition would be hard pressed to claim victory.
Of course, this doesn't apply uniformly. Outliers such as Australia (not sure, but I think New Zealand and Canada might be in this club too) do exist, as does Japan, which has massive debt, but borrows it ultimately from its own people.
There's a common tendency for people who are deeply dissatisfied with the shape of the world they live in, to hope for an unspecific but universal apocalyptic cleansing.
Just look at the opposite end of the political spectrum - all the people who are convinced we are doomed by Climate Change, Peak Oil etc.; and compare their number to those who actually do something about it, as opposed to "activism" which especially if online, is only a sublimation of doing.
Those people who are utterly convinced that we are faced with imminent destruction from some threat, but not only choose radical inaction in deed but also distance themselves from the logical consequence of their position in speech are perhaps only feigning that position in the first place.
i.e. their apocalyptic radicalism with regard to the chosen problem X stems from a deeper discomfort with or inability to interact with the world surrounding them, that is not caused by that problem alone (although it may be a component).
They don't really want any set of incremental or imperfect solutions to the problem at hand - they want a confirmation that the world they cannot properly interact with is doomed and needs to go away in its entirety to be replaced by a mystical new dawn. which will often be imagined as a revival of a pure past, that never has existed.
and when this kind of person does act on their apocalyptic views it will usually be in a unproductive way as they are acting on the basis of a phantasm both in view of problem and solution.
one of the problems with the mohammedan religion is that it has so well perfected the channeling of any dissatisfaction, grievance or distress into precisely such modes of thinking, so that instead of working on solutions within their countries and societies, their energies are directed to the destruction of modernity, opposing all the greater and lesser Shaitans, and reaching the re-establishment of the imagined perfection of the 7th century.
but the same fallacious mechanisms that are unproductive in Mohammedan minds are also unproductive in Western minds.
silberblick,
Very well put. I would just add that the quasi-Gnostic mood operative among the Anti-Islam individuals who figure in my "Breivik's Law" seems to have become a kind of subculture, and seems to continue to develop that way.
So far, it seems, their main modus operandi is in the role of "armchair extremists"; but to the extent they are influential -- even if only by mutual reinforcement of their cosmion -- they may well be able to exert actual policy effects or even paramilitary effects in the future, in the form I fear most: exacerbating an irrationally excessive polarization of society that never needed to happen in the first place.
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