Norway massacre and anti-government obsession

By Anne Applebaum
WashPost

In the past 48 hours, Anders Behring Breivik has been described as a racist, a white supremacist and an anti-Islamic fanatic. News reports of his arrest are now accompanied by analyses of Europe’s failure to absorb its immigrant population, commentary on the rise of far-right political parties, discussions of the threats posed to Muslims living in Europe. Having mistakenly assumed at first that the story of terror in Oslo belonged to the narrative of the war on terrorism, we are now placing it firmly within the equally familiar narrative of white racism and anti-Islamic fanaticism.

Aren’t we missing the point once again? Breivik was not, in fact, a killer of immigrants or Muslims. He was a killer of Norwegians. The obsessions that led him to madness and then to mass murderer were not merely racist. They also sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.

This particular form of obsession is not new. Nor is it confined to blond, white, racist Norwegians. Raskolnikov, the hero of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” brutally murdered a pawnbroker in the name of a vaguely defined “freedom” that was not available in decadent, Czarist St. Petersburg. Since then, revolutionaries and madmen of all kinds, from Russian anarchists to the Irish Republican Army, have justified the murder of innocent people on the grounds that it would hasten the end of an illegitimate government and bring to power some theoretically more authentic regime.

(Continued here.)