#werner is both perpetrator and victim

[lunar-years]

I haven't read the book but I looked up the plot and it does say the character enlists as a Nazi and in the end is 'redeemed' because both characters are 'flawed' which isn't exactly great, to put it mildly. 'Anthony Doerr found the novel's popularity unexpected because it features a sympathetic Nazi'. Asking genuinely if you can please shed some light on this because based on that, I have no intention of reading or watching it.

I pulled out my book and read the jacket and also the amazon description and neither mention redemption, so I'm not sure if the descriptions are differing between more recent versions or what; Basically, I think that is a very...simplistic... plot description, and if they're slapping that on the book jackets nowadays they should not be doing it, lol. It is a lot more complicated than just "this nazi character is sympathetic and therefore redeemed."

The general plot of the book is that it follows two children from a very small age up until they are teenagers during WWII. The girl is French and she and her dad are forced to flee Paris at the start of the invasion; The boy is a German orphan in a mining town whose life trajectory is essentially to become a miner and die in poverty in the mines like his father while trying to care for his younger sister. When he is 13-14ish (it's been years since I've read it so the exact age may be off) he is enlisted by the Nazis because he knows how to fix radios. They offer him a "way out," i.e., joining a Nazi Youth school. By 18 he's become a fully-fledged, indoctrinated soldier who eventually is sent to fight and work the radios in France, where his own sense of self-preservation and complicity is constantly at war with the horrors he recognizes all around him.

The book is about the total devastation and horrors of war. There are no winners here. I would say the narrative treats Werner (the German boy) as deeply human, with all the complexity that entails, but it doesn't forgive him and it certainly doesn't treat him as a "Good Nazi." It never tries to argue that his humanity or his good choices outweigh the evils of the system he participates in & therefore is helping to uphold. Without giving away the ending, I promise he isn't "redeemed" in any traditional sense. It is a book that operates largely in the gray areas. It forces readers to question, "could I be a Werner? what would I do about it if I were?" and also appreciate that we will never truly know because we are not in his place and time.

That said, it is a war novel that yes, involves a nuanced “Nazi” character (if we’re being completely accurate, Werner isn’t a Nazi, he’s at first a child and then a Wehrmacht soldier complicit in the Nazi regime) and I totally understand why that isn't for everyone. It is also extremely sad. If you don't enjoy those types of narratives, I wouldn't recommend it!

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Jan-Werner Müller

The horrific attempt to assassinate Donald Trump – and reactions to it – created a kind of X-ray of our body politic. It demonstrates how, contrary to the conventional wisdom about “polarization” – which suggests some kind of symmetry between the parties moving towards extreme poles – US politics is fundamentally asymmetrical. Democrats, from Biden to AOC, have been statesmanlike and stateswomanlike, condemning political violence in unison. Republicans, by contrast, have immediately blamed the attack on Biden. Worse, they have used the attack for a novel form of blackmail: stop warning about Trump’s authoritarianism or be accused of inciting violence. Of course, Trump must be protected on the campaign trail and beyond; at the same time, US democracy must be protected from Trump.

Democrats were right to repeat the civics textbook wisdom that democracy is about processing conflicts – including deep moral disagreements – in a peaceful manner. Meanwhile, commentators, out of naivety or noble idealism, did not always choose to remain faithful to the historical record: political violence might, in theory, be “un-American”; in practice it is, alas, as American as apple pie. If anything, the recent period – both in the US and European democracies – has been somewhat exceptional in not featuring many high-profile attempts on politician’s lives (which is not to deny the continuity of racist domestic terrorism in the US).

Democrats also resisted the temptation to point out that Trump’s rhetoric since 2015 has encouraged violence – not a subjective impression, but a question of social scientific findings. There are specific incidents when perpetrators invoked his name; what’s more, large numbers of citizens who identify as Republicans profess their willingness to countenance violence in defense of “their way of life”. Like other rightwing populists around the globe, Trump has been instilling fear that somehow the country is being taken away from what he regularly calls “the real people”. As in so many instances of terror, it is those willing to commit violence who see themselves as victims, convinced that others, not they, engaged in evil first.

Plenty of Republicans have shown no restraint in their reactions to the events in Pennsylvania. It’s the reverse of what happens after mass shootings: Democrats ask why civilians should have the right to carry assault weapons; conservatives, offering thoughts and prayers, warns against “politicizing” mass killings. Now, in the absence of real information on the shooter, leading Republicans have not hesitated a second to “politicize” the assassination attempt, which is to say: turn it to partisan advantage. Trump’s running mate JD Vance blamed those who dare to call Trump authoritarian (after having, before his MAGA conversion, warned of Trump as “America’s Hitler”); Greg Abbott pointed to a “they” who first tried to put Trump in jail and how attempted to kill him; Mike Lee demanded that all federal charges against the former president be dropped (by that logic, the possible guilt of any defendant dissolves if they are attacked by some random person).

Whether such bad-faith claims succeed depends on professional observers: pundits and journalists. Will they adopt a framing according to which “all sides” have to “lower the political temperature”, and somehow “come together”, as the kitschy communitarian rhetoric of many commentators has it? Or can they accept two things as true at the same time: that political violence is wrong, and that the Republican party, transformed into a Trumpist personality cult (with new narrative elements and iconography after Saturday) poses an existential danger to American democracy.

Under relentless assault from the right for supposedly being “biased”, plenty of media professionals seek refuge rather than truth, as the journalism professor Jay Rosen has memorably put it. Refuge-seeking can take different forms: one is to deploy euphemisms; instead of calling a second Trump term potentially authoritarian, call it “disruptive”. Another is use of passive voice (a blogger opined on Sunday that norms of peaceful transfer of power have been “strained” – as if some impersonal force, or force majeure, was to blame); and, most of all, there is the seemingly unassailable descriptive claim that the two parties live in “two realities”.

Most damaging, perhaps, is false equivalence. This past weekend, observers could point to deeply irresponsible, if not outright crazy, claims on the left and the right. But the crucial difference remains that such claims were made by highly influential office holders only on the right. It’s one thing to have conspiracy theories advanced by some leftie internet personality; it’s another to have an ominous “they” invoked by the governor of Texas.

If all else fails, horse race analysis of elections can provide refuge, since it requires only speculation, not political judgment: is the assassination attempt good or bad for Trump’s campaign? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with asking the question – especially in light of the fact that the attempt to kill far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 appears to have helped the Brazilian aspiring autocrat at the time. But it’s hardly the most important one.

No one should give in to blackmail based on the notion that criticizing politicians’ authoritarian aspirations is equal to incitement to violence. Aspiring authoritarians do want to control speech; before they have reached power, they cannot do so – unless the fearful or the ignorant become their accomplices.

[henryschwittay-blog]

Danielle Factual Research

Danielle factual Programme research

QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

Focusing on the Siegel family as they attempt to build the largest house in the United States, this 2012 documentary explores the various possibilities within a capitalist state and the impact of the U.S. economy’s decline on the Siegels. Directed by Lauren Greenfield, a “fly-on-the-wall” filming style is in use throughout documentary in an attempt to allow the Siegels and interviewees to be hindered as little as possible as they proceed with their business.

Throughout the documentary, the fraudulent idea of the “American Dream” and its lack of deliverance is referenced in several ways. David Siegel, the family patriarch, faces massive loses within his company (Westgate Resorts) as their PH Tower in Las Vegas causes certain financial struggles and difficulties between 2009 and 2011 during the filming of the documentary. This results in the Siegel family having to reduce their housekeepers substantially, resulting in obvious unemployment for many, and the death of a family pet due to neglect.

SUPER SIZE ME

Morgan Spurlock directs and stars in this documentary, examining the rapid growth in obesity amongst American citizens. Filming himself over the course of a month, Spurlock eats only McDonalds in a gonzo-style journalistic attempt to document the deterioration of his own health a nutritional balance.

The film uses a diary-style in which Spurlock self-inspects his mental and physical changes (with aid of a medical professional) over the 30 days. The film also uses interviews with various doctors, health specialists and his girlfriend.

Spurlock’s means of accomplishing the set goals within the documentary were heavily criticised post-release as he avoided exercise, and ingested 5000 calories a day, whenever he was only required to ingest as much as the average daily calorific intake to give a “realistic” result. The film was made on a 65,000(USD) budget, and grossed 22.2 million(USD) at the box office.

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GRIZZLY MAN

Directed and narrated by Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man inspects the self-made documentations of Timothy Treadwell, a man living in the wilderness amongst grizzly bears. Treadle and his girlfriend spent nearly 13 years in Alaska, spending every summer amongst the bears in the wilderness. Both he and his girlfriend were ultimately killed by the bears they were certain to have befriended.

Treadwell’s footage is used throughout the documentary, and due to its raw and amateurish quality, gives the film an anxious and unpredictable atmosphere. The film also uses interviews with those closest to Treadwell and his girlfriend, and those who found the corpses of the two.

Throughout the documentary, Treadwell is depicted is a “free spirit”, a man undeniably passionate and compassionate toward those around him and the various wild animals he felt connected with. However, many criticise the actions of Treadwell, claiming him to be naive and careless. During his death, his camera was left on. However, due to the lens cap covering any footage, only the audio was picked up. Herzog attempts to listen to a portion of the tape, but is unable to listen to the entire recording due to its distressing and traumatising nature.

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS

This documentary was directed by Andrew Jarecki in 2003, focusing on the criminal activities of convicted child moldesters Arnold and Jesse Friedman. The film is comprised one-to-one interviews with victims and those involved in the case, using archive footage of the Friedman family as opposed to re-enactments. The use of archive footage builds a linear story in which the audience are presented a “normal family”. The use of their personal footage creates a dark and eerie atmosphere due to the heavy nature of their crimes.

The documentary develops into a conspicuous case-study in which the audience is wrapped up in various accounts of the events. The documentary portrays the investigation as a possible corruption, as children (arguably) falsely admitted to being victims of sexual harassment due to the pressure of the officers investigating them.

THE BRIDGE

The Bridge is a documentary exploring the significance of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in regards to the high level of suicides from jumping. The film was inspired “Jumpers”, an article featured in The New Yorker magazine in 2003.

Friday, 24 March 2017

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Friday, 24 March 2017

The film confronts several issues and topics, specifically that of suicide. However, an important issue the film brought attention to was the ethical-debate of knowingly filming a suicide. Director Eric Steel claimed to be shooting a nature-documentary around the San Francisco bay-area, purposefully lying to successfully apply for filming-permits. I consider the film undoubtedly important, as it creates a narrative amongst audience members about mental health related issues. However, I believe in regards to these ethical-debates surrounding the act of filming a suicide, that an alternative approach could have been considered, such using footage in a way that implies what is happening, rather than showing an actual scene. I found the footage highly disturbing and I think shooting such a scene can have particular consequences on the crew members’ own mental-health.

Although each crew member was trained in suicide-prevention, and had the coast-guard on speed-dial, Steel justifies these disturbing shots by claiming that by the time anybody on the wrong side of the bridge-railing was spotted through the lens, the crew would not have enough time to take action against the jump.

Various static-shots of the bridge are used throughout the filming, often in wide-angle and/or using time-lapse. Extreme zooms on pedestrians are often partnered with ambient music to give a haunting, foggy atmosphere. I find these shots especially overwhelming as they provide a strong visual/audio insight into how it may feel for those in a suicidal state of mind.

TOUCHING THE VOID

Touching The Void was produced in 2003 as a documentary-drama. Based on the book telling the story of Simon Yates and Joe Simspon attempting to clim the Siula Grande in Peru, and how the trek brought about disastrous consequences.

The documentary uses a combination of controlled-interviews in which Simon and Joe retell their stories, and scene re-enactments which successfully draw the audience into an intense viewing.

CATFISH

Catfish was directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, following an anonymous friendship between Nev Schulman (a 22-year old photographer) and Abby, an eight year old child-prodigy from Michigan. This friendship evolves into a relationship between Nev and Abby’s older sister Megan, who only communicates through text, email and phone- call.

When Megan send Nev an mp3 recording of a song she claims to have covered, the two directors become suspicious of Megan’s claims and her intent. This inspires the film-

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team to travel to Michigan to confront the family on their lies, ultimately finding out the truth; online profiles all over Facebook, including that of Megan, had been created by Angela Wesselman, Abbys mother. As a result of this discovery, Angela deletes these profiles and personas out of embarrassment, consequentially forcing the filmmakers to recreate these profiles and messages for cinematic/filmic purpose.

I am on the side of several critics, believing the documentary is fake and created as somewhat of a “scare story” in relation to the rise of social-media and Facebook’s prominence in modern societies.

THE IMPOSTER

This 2012 documentary is based on Frederic Bourdin, a French imposter acting as the returned Nicholas Barclay (an American teenager who went missing for several years in 1994).

The Barclay family were alerted three years after their son’s disappearance that he had been found in Spain, forced into a child-slavery ring throughout Europe. Bourdin had blonde hair and blue eyes, despite Nicholas Barclay’s dark hair and brown eyed appearance. DNA and fingerprint scans later revealed the child was in fact a 23-year old Frederic Bourdin posing as Nicholas Barclay.

Charlier Parker, the private investigator who ousted Frederic Bourdin, is convinced Nicholas Barclay was in fact murdered and the the Barclay know more than they let on, thus accepting Bourdin nearly without question despite his obvious physical and characteristic differences.

This documentary successfully uses re-enactment that allows audience members to further understand and speculate the gravity of each situation.

THE WORLD AT WAR: GENOCIDE

This documentary was directed by Michael Darlow and released early 1974, a year before the end of the Vietnam War. It inspects the atrocities of the WW2 and the Holocaust, and its impact on the world and its inhabitants. With a budget of 9million pounds (post inflation), the series took four years to produce, using eye-witness accounts and interviews to build a strong narrative.

The film was released only 30 years after the war ended, and although one may argue the advantage of hindsight, the documentary is told from a British perspective (although Laurence Olivier’s narrative is fairly objective, focusing primarily on factual statistics).

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BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

Directed by Michael Moore, Bowling For Columbine explores the mass-shorings and gun-culture within the United States, specifically inspecting the Columbine High School shooting committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in April 1999. Twelve students and a teacher were murdered, whilst a further twenty-one people were injured before the two perpetrators committed suicide.

The film’s first act builds a strong and convincing argument against the use of firearms within America. A strong scene supporting the argument against simple obtainability of a firearm follows Michael Moore joining a bank/opening a bank account and receiving a rifle as a thank-you from the bank.

Although this scene faced criticism due to recipients not actually receiving the rifle on the same day as opening an account, Michael Moore debunked this claim when releasing footage of bank employee Jan Jacobsen stating that the firearms are secured locally onsite of the bank.

Friday, 24 March 2017

[consciousowl]

Stop Pretending to Be a Victim

You may have had the pleasure of catching one of the classic Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoons, the perfect option to watching Disney’s Mickey Mouse. While the cartoons were repetitious, they stayed extremely funny. Wile E. Coyote devoted his entire existence to a futile attempt to catch Roadrunner and eat him alive.

Despite Coyote’s best efforts, he always seemed to run off a cliff, suddenly look down and crash at the bottom. Roadrunner always honked a warning “Beep Beep,” but Coyote never seemed to get it. He was caught in a futile cycle of the persecutor who becomes his own victim.​

In a way, we are all like Coyote, which is why I never tire of viewing that series.​

Are We Ever Really a Victim?

You may have heard of the iconic Helen Keller of a previous generation. Helen suffered the supreme misfortune shortly after birth of becoming both blind and deaf, forever locked into her own world.

A profoundly inspiring film, The Miracle Worker, depicts the heroic efforts of her parents and caretaker to do everything humanly possible to give Helen a normal life. Helen actually became highly literate; an author of 12 books, and sought after speaker the world over.

While shit happens--and no one can forget the shock of 9/11--a careful examination of what lead up to this tragedy reveals that the U.S. had done much to provoke Arabs and Muslims to create Al Qaeda and inspire such a dastardly conspiracy. We can’t forget the day President George Bush decided to bomb Baghdad, bringing American troops into Saudi Arabia in Operation Desert Storm.​

Why We End Up Playing Victim

We opt for victimhood because it is the easy way out. It requires no soul searching. We get to blame others without being blamed ourselves. We blame the rapist, the attacker, the racist and the religious bigot. People will often pay us handsomely to tell our story, and the media thrive on juicy content to entertain their bored viewers.

We finally get to be right. We justify positions we have assumed about the world since childhood. Mom and Dad were mean to us on various occasions. They slapped us, humiliated us and occasionally abused us. How can we forgive them? Soon enough the whole world starts acting that way.

I remember the zany TV series, McHale’s Navy, about a PT-boat lieutenant commander that continuously outwits his superior, Captain Binghamton. Whenever the captain is foiled, he looks up into heaven and asks God, “Why me? Why always me?” We laugh, but it is all too often us raising the question. The captain was mediocre. It took the lieutenant commander to bring any life to the party.​

Victimization Is Always a Choice

Victimization is an unconscious interpretation of our experience. When we base everything on appearances, we fall victim often enough. I can never forget the moment in the epic film, Gandhi, where the Mahatma as a young man gets thrown out of a South African train for being “colored” and insisting on a first-class booth. A shocked Gandhi rises from the dust, scratches his head and begins to deal with the “real world” in very creative ways.

Nelson Mandela started out as a tribal chieftain who sought freedom for his people. He wanted to end South African Apartheid once and for all, and have an equal voice with the English and the Afrikaans. He ended up trying to detonate a bomb, was imprisoned, tried and confined to hard labor. As we see in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, how Mandela decides to come to terms with the world and treasure his prison cell.​

In that same cell, he becomes the model prisoner and develops a new vision of South Africa. His process of Truth and Reconciliation stunned the world.

Martin Luther King was an exceptionally bright student attending Harvard University. He could have gone on to live a comfortable life as a prominent Black minister in a segregated society. However, when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on a Little Rock bus, King chose to side with his own people and end segregation. Like Gandhi, he repeatedly ended up in jail, where he did some of his best writing. King continually chose NOT to play victim, even when being monitored by the FBI.​

The Shocking Cost of Blame

When you blame someone else, you give away your power. Who is the creator of your experience, you or him? It is within your own experience that he abuses you. By interpreting his actions as hostile, you increase the likelihood he will become even more hostile and you will violently retaliate.

When we read the “Sermon on the Mount,” and consider how Jesus advises us all to turn the cheek and love and forgive our enemies, it seems like a total fairy tale to us today, rather than a viable option. Few of us consider just how much forgiving our opponents and enemies actually empowers us. Divine love is a force that is very difficult to overcome. Perpetrators usually break down and sob. They can resist anything but total love and acceptance.

When you blame other people, not only do you disempower yourself, you lose all possibility of experiencing love, love from others, and love towards others. When you put conditions on who gets your love and who doesn’t, you cheapen love and rob life of all its vitality.​

The less love in the world, the more suppressed is the quality of our lives.

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How Transformation Put an End to My Act as a Poor, Innocent Bystander

Many years ago, fresh out of college, I was starry-eyed about the possibility of enlightenment and how the est training could shift ordinary people’s consciousness in extraordinary ways and supercharge their life. I had already heard about Werner Erhard being highly controversial, with everyone bitching about his never letting anyone go to the bathroom.

I took the plunge, doing the 60-hour training over a couple of weekends in a hotel ballroom. It was the most amazing experience of my life, in that it made real what I had only read about. It took me from being my nametag, body and mind to the space in which the galaxies spin. I realized on the heart level that the God we all worship is actually hiding out as each one of us. I was introduced to a new perspective, a context of self-responsibility, where I could look at everything that had happened to me up to that point as not accidental, but perfect.​

Werner and the est trainers invited participants in all phases of the program to come from the perspective that that they are responsible for what happens to them, what they do to others, and even what another does to another. Over time, I developed an unshakable preference for empowerment, for shunning victimization. From thereon, in every single upset in my life, I had the growing sense that I had something to do with it.

The Alternative to Adversity: Change the World

Gandhi hated racism sanctioned by the British Empire, and ultimately chose to bring it down. Nelson Mandela hated being a disenfranchised citizen, and did whatever it took to end Apartheid. The early Christians chose to cling to their faith in the King of Kings, even though it meant being thrown to the lions. Even though a violent death awaited each of them, they chose to go with hymns on their lips. In the process, the Roman Empire was ultimately transformed into the Roman Catholic Church.

When you choose to experience injustice in a transformed manner, the power of exploitation is blunted. It is no fun to continue to persecute people who insist on thinking the best of you. When you choose the higher road, it is infectious. Who wants to opt out of love, joy and peace, when they are made abundantly available? In truth, we are all magnificent. It is just that we get so lost in our acts that we stop believing in ourselves.

President Obama was an Afro-American whose father abandoned him. He grew up in white society and continued to interpret his experience as a change agent. He ended up in Harvard, then in politics. Who would ever have predicted that this little boy from Hawaii would end up American President at a crucial point in history when the global economy had all but collapsed?​

World Leaders Who Chose NOT to Play Victim

Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and was largely self-taught. He went nowhere with his life until he was past 40. When he got the big break, the South decided to separate from the Union, precipitating the Civil War. President Lincoln fought the war with extraordinary tenacity, forever ending slavery with his Emancipation Proclamation. Just before being assassinated, he decided to forgive the South for a thankless war.

When Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister, Adolph Hitler had totally armed Germany, already setting the stage for the Third Reich. He consoled his people, “I have nothing to offer you except blood, sweat and tears.” This same Churchill, after the Battle of Britain, commended the British pilots with the words, “Never have so many owed so much to so few.” This bulldog Brit joined forces with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ending the Great Depression and setting the stage for a new golden age.​

Ronald Reagan grew up during the Great Depression, became a movie star, ran for Governor of California, and became a charismatic conservative U.S. President. He was actually shot in his very first month in office, yet went on to serve two full terms. Reagan went on to confront the Soviet Union and actually end the Cold War, becoming close friends with General Secretary Gorbachev.

Each of these leaders saw the greatest reversals as unparalleled opportunities.​

Our Call to Greatness

Today, we are challenged by terrorism, continuous military intervention and severe climate disruption. The nominated female candidate of a major party won the popular vote, only to be defeated on an electoral technicality.

If you want to play victim, you will never have more company.

Lot’s of people are convinced things are truly hopeless.

Yet, think of this. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton broke all norms in running for the highest office. Bernie Sanders reached out with his heart, despite limited means, and created a popular revolution. These people need never consider themselves victims. They have set a powerful precedent that will never be forgotten.​

Now the torch has been handed to you and me to play big. We know there is zero satisfaction in playing small. We know that heroes are ordinary people in extraordinary times. We know that we have something to do with everything that happens.

If we look at Buddha, Christ and Muhammad, we see transformed people who overcame tremendous odds, even crucifixion, to reach out to humanity for thousands of years. They did what they did to be an inspiration to us, to remind us all of our divinity, that together, we can do even greater things.​

Stop Pretending to Be a Victim appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.

[nothingman]

By Sindre Bangstad | ( OpenDemocracy.net) | – –

We ignore the terrorist threat from right-wing extremism at our peril. But the main threat to democracy in our time is even more insidious.

On 29 January 2017, a gunman opened fire in a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, killing six Muslim worshippers and wounding 19 others. 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a student at Laval University, and known for expressing far-right views, was named as the suspected shooter.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called the murders “a terrorist attack”, and though Quebecois prosecutors have so far only brought six charges of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder against Bissonnette, the attack meets any standard definition of terrorism. But the peculiarities of Canada’s criminal code, which requires prosecutors to prove ideological motivations and a group affiliation in order to charge a person for terrorist offences, makes it difficult for Canadian prosecutors to file this as a terrorism case.   

For Norwegians, it struck an eerily familiar note. We are approaching the sixth year commemoration of the worst act of terrorism in modern Norwegian history. These attacks took place on 22 July 2011, when the white Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik detonated a massive bomb at government headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and proceeded to the small island of Utøya, where he massacred scores of defenceless teenagers attending the annual summer youth camp of the social-democratic Labor Party of Norway.

Like Breivik, Bissonnette appears to have had a childhood which left him mentally scarred and socially marginalised in his environment. The attacks in Utøya and Quebec City illustrate that a pre-eminent terror threat in our age comes from what is known as ‘lone-wolf terrorism.’ In Breivik’s case, as has been the case for a number of ‘lone-wolf terrorists’ in recent years, the strategic inspiration was drawn from the advocacy of ‘leaderless resistance’ among white supremacist ideologues in the US dating back to the 1970s. These are the ideas which also inspired Timothy McVeigh, the man behind the Oklahoma bombings in 1995.

As in Breivik’s case, Bissonnette seems to have gone through a process of online ‘self-radicalisation.’ For Bissonnette, that process seem to have lasted no more than a year; for Breivik, it lasted several years longer. Once more in a Norwegian courtroom, this time over alleged violations of his human rights as a prisoner, Breivik last month declared his admiration for US president Donald Trump. Both Breivik and Bissonnette have sympathised with hardliners in the Israeli government, as well as Marine Le Pen.

But unlike Breivik, who fancied his terrorist attacks as a bizarre promotion exercise for his cut-and-paste ideological tract, Bissonnette appears to have left limited traces of his political sympathies, except for an attraction to far-right ideas, sentiments about Islam, Muslims and immigration, and a revulsion at purportedly ‘multiculturalist elites’ that he shares with Breivik. In the Norwegian context, it is often conveniently forgotten that Breivik toyed with the idea of massacring Norwegian Muslims long before he decided (fearing that such a massacre would elicit societal sympathies towards Muslims) to target Norwegian social democrats instead.

Breivik’s overriding and explicitly stated aim was to contribute to a situation of conflict, which he envisioned would, in the long-run, lead to the forced expulsion of Muslims not only from Norway but from Europe. The lessons that the world should have learned from the terror attack in Norway in 2011 was that we ignore the terrorist threat from right-wing extremism at our peril.

Since al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, most of the attention of terrorism researchers, international news media and mainstream politicians have been brought to bear on the terrorist threat from Salafi-Jihadist outfits such as al-Qaida and as of late, ISIS. That terrorist threat is – as attacks in France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, Denmark and Turkey show – all too real, and should not be ignored. In Norway, a relatively small nucleus of Salafi-Jihadist sympathisers going under the name of the “Prophet’s Ummah” has, since the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, been central in the recruitment of an estimated 90 Norwegian Muslims, overwhelmingly from socially, economically and educationally-deprived backgrounds, to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq.

But a Norwegian government-commissioned report on the 22 July 2011 terrorist attacks did indicate that Norwegian intelligence services had, in the years prior to the attacks, been ‘blind on the right-eye’. So much so that until the next morning – long after Breivik was arrested by a SWAT team on the island of Utøya on the evening of 22 July, and was identified as a white Norwegian with professed right-wing extremist sympathies by Norwegian news media – the police security services were still focusing their intelligence gathering on Norwegian Muslims.

With that lens, it’s no surprise that congregants at the Islamic Center of Quebec City told journalists that they felt local police had not reacted with appropriate seriousness with regard to hate crimes against the mosque in recent years.

Large parts of the international news media’s coverage of the terrorist attack in Quebec and Breivik’s massacre in Norway are also telling. In 2011, international news media kept trotting out so-called ‘terrorism experts’, declaring with absolute certainty that Breivik’s terrorist attacks must be ‘al-Qaida’ – countless hours after Breivik had been arrested and identified by the Norwegian police and in the media.

Similarly, early reports in international news media about the attack in Quebec zoned in on the fact that the man detained along with Bissonnette after the attack (who later turned out to have been a witness, and was released without charges) was a Muslim of Moroccan origin. Fox News posted a tweet falsely alleging that the Quebec shooter was “Moroccan.�� The same media outlet also trotted out as yet unconfirmed reports about the perpetrator having allegedly shouted “Allahu akhbar” in the mosque prior to the shootings.

In the cloud cuckoo land of the new White House press secretary Sean Spicer, the news of the attack in Quebec was even presented as a vindication of the Trump administration’s ban on immigration from a number of predominantly Muslim countries, as if the perpetrator was not a Trump sympathiser, and as if the victims were not all Muslims, and likely to have been targeted by Bissonnette for that very reason.

Meanwhile, in Norway, many other European countries and the USA, right-wing extremist groups have in the years since 2011 continued to grow in the shadow of the lavish media and political attention accorded to Salafi-Jihadist terror and ‘radicalisation’.

Less than six years on from Breivik’s terrorist attack, the Norwegian Police Security Services have published their annual open threat assessment for 2017. It once more places the threat from ‘radical Islamists’ on top of a list of potential terror threats to the country, claiming that “Norway has so far not been struck by…right-wing extremist violence and terrorism to the same extent as several other European countries.” A clearer example of official Norwegian denialism about Breivik’s right-wing extremist views and sympathies through resignification and reclassification would be hard to find.

Though there is no direct and unmediated causative link between right-wing populism and right-wing extremism, it is a myth that the worldviews propagated by ascendant right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic have nothing to do with right-wing extremist worldviews. Breivik’s ten years as an aspiring politician in the populist right-wing Norwegian Progress Party did not dent his successive ‘radicalisation’, and no doubt to his delight, the party entered the Norwegian government for the first time in its history on the back of its long-standing opposition to immigration and hostility towards Muslims in October 2013. Bissonnette himself appears to have been profoundly inspired by a visit to Quebec of the far-right French Front National politician Marine Le Pen in 2016.

In What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller correctly notes that the main threat to democracy in our time emerges from within. Müller identifies illiberal and undemocratic populism as that main threat. Right-wing extremism and salafi-jihadism do constitute the pre-eminent terrorist threat of our times; they are likely to continue to inspire people to kill and to maim, and to continue to try to wreak havoc on the social and political fabric of our societies. But compared to the threat against democracy, human rights and equal citizenship that a triumphant right-wing populism and its mainstreaming of hatred against Muslims and other minorities represent, right-wing extremism and salafi-jihadism are but distractions. 

via OpenDemocracy.net

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Gathering to mourn victims of Quebec City mosque shooting

via Informed Comment