psychopathy – Page 24

Why Anarcho-Homicidalism Is Not Terrorism

The obvious reaction of someone trapped in a slave mindset, when told that they have the right to kill anyone who is trying to enslave them, is to protest that such a thing must be “terrorism” or some other crime against good order. Learning to think like a free person means learning when your rights have to be defended, and an anarcho-homicidalist has taken steps to ensure that his actions are legitimate resistance and not terrorism.

They might overlap in a lot of ways, because both use violence to bring about a vision of correct order in the world, but anarcho-homicidalism is very distinct from terrorism.

The primary difference is that anarcho-homicidalism, being a branch of anarchy, does not tolerate either hierarchy or forced collectivism. This means that, not only is the anarcho-homicidalist forbidden from killing on command, but he is also forbidden from justifying an act of anarcho-homicidalism on the grounds that his target merely shared a demographic category with someone trying to enslave him.

Both of these qualities are distinct from terrorism. Although there are terrorists who act on their own initiative, the majority of terrorist deeds are carried out by individuals who have been coerced, intimidated or tricked into action.

Also, a clear majority of terrorist actions are carried out to further one side in some “us vs. them” narrative. The Muslims who kill themselves in suicide bombings are able to motivate themselves to take action by rationalising that the collective benefit to Islam of killing many of Islam’s enemies outweighs the individual loss of life.

The anarcho-homicidalist is different from these in that he must arrive at the decision to kill out of his own philosophical reasoning, and that his efforts must be targeted upwards at an authority figure, not sideways at the lackeys of one.

The secondary difference is that anarcho-homicidalism leads to less violence – in contrast to terrorism, which leads to more violence.

In fact, a crucial element of anarcho-homicidalism is that the action ought to decrease the amount of suffering in the world. Therefore, it is legitimate to kill a politician whose actions are causing suffering, but not to start a blood feud between one group and another group that the politician just happens to belong to.

The usual example given when arguing for the merits of anarcho-homicidalism is that of conscription. It’s trivially easy to see how widespread anarcho-homicidalism would make raising slave armies impossible, because an anarcho-homicidalist would simply shoot any conscription officer that came to their house.

A terrorist, by contrast, is unlikely to shoot a conscription officer. This is because nothing about terrorism explicitly goes against the idea of hierarchy. A terrorist is more likely to bend the knee and take orders from a conscription officer, in the hope that they will get the chance to kill the enemies of whatever collective the terrorist considers themselves part of.

Another stark difference is that a terrorist is usually happy to create collateral damage. Bombing a civilian airliner is a common terrorist act, for the reason that it makes people afraid to get into planes, and because the targeted country tends to waste enormous resources on security in the aftermath.

All of these terrorist actions have the effect of causing more violence to happen, because they will either provoke the authorities into crackdowns or provoke the groups whose members were killed to violently retaliate.

An anarcho-homicidalist, by contrast, will not cross the boundary into terrorism. His action is surgical, clinical, unpredictable, unstoppable. The only terror created by the anarcho-homicidalist is in the hearts of those who would rule, and the effectiveness of his action is not determined by the destruction of an enemy but by whether it persuades the ruling authorities to treat their subjects correctly.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto IV

This reading carries on from here.

Much of this section (pages c. 200-286) relates to further elucidation of the nature of the relations between Muslims and Christians. Here Breivik takes care to ensure that the Christians are always cast as the victims. When recounting the Muslim conquest of Lebanon, he draws special attention to the fact that the percentage of Christians there has declined from roughly 79% to 25% in the last century.

One point that is hard to refute is that Islam conquered immense swathes of territory in the century after the death of Muhammad. Breivik points out the unlikelihood of a fundamentally peaceful religion spreading so rapidly and so violently so quickly – indeed, such a rapid, aggressive expansion can only be explained by the religion being fundamentally violent.

This perhaps has led to the world-view expressed in the early part of the document as being one of noble resistance against the plundering Islamic hordes. It also explains why much of this document painstakingly recounts the specifics of the conflicts.

This world-view has led to some far-reaching conclusions, such as that a reluctance on the part of European leaders to protect Christian communities in the Middle East is the equivalent of high treason. This might make some sense if a person considers themselves part of the Christian yang locked into an eternal struggle with the Islamic yin, where all Christians are part of the same “team”.

Most of Breivik’s rhetoric appears designed specifically to appeal to Christians: the “us and them” nature of relations between Christendom and the Islamic world is emphasised. There doesn’t seem to be much room for people who aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Christianity – if these people are Westerners, they have let Team Christian down by refusing to join them in their eternal struggle against Islam.

That concludes this section of Breivik’s manifesto. The next section looks at the problems currently besieging Europe.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto III

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages c. 90-200), Breivik details the history of relations between the West and Islam. In his analysis here, there is nothing peaceful – Islam has been attempting to conquer the West since its inception, and would have succeeded already if not repelled at either Tours or Vienna, or other places.

The destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, Breivik claims, is how the West has earned some breathing space against this relentless assault. The Caliphate was shattered after the Battle of Megido in 1917, and only because of this has Islam been unable to attack Europe in recent decades.

With sentences such as “the Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam,” and “Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission,” a particular kind of Nordic bleakness shines through in this document.

It’s a kind of bleakness that has resigned itself to violence as a grim but inevitable outcome of the play of natural forces. They are attacking us is Breivik’s message. They always have been attacking us and they always will be.

Perhaps the following paragraph summarises this section of the document best:

The spectacular acts of Islamic terrorism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are but the most recent manifestation of a global war of conquest that Islam has been waging since the days of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century AD and that continues apace today. This is the simple, glaring truth that is staring the world today in the face — and which has stared it in the face numerous times in the past — but which it seems few today are willing to contemplate.

In this section Breivik continues to emphasise the point that no reformation of Islam is possible, for the reason that would-be reformers are unable to refer to any scriptural injunctions towards peace with non-believers. The example set by Muhammad himself was an example of war and of violence, so anyone with a will to reform is snookered from the beginning.

Essentially, anyone trying to move Islam away from violence has to work against the scriptures. Therefore, Islam cannot be used as a civilising force in the same way that Christianity could; no-one could discover through serendipity a message of peace and tolerance in their study of the Koran.

From reading this section there are two elements of Breivik’s reasoning that seem objectionable.

The first is that, although the list of historical atrocities by Muslims and modern apologies for these atrocities by Muslims is long, there are over a billion Muslims and Islam stretches back to the seventh century. As an inevitable consequence of existing for that long on a planet as violent as Earth, a cherry-picked list of bad things committed by or in the name of a group that large and old is going to be lengthy.

There’s no doubt, for example, that one could compile a hundred pages of grossly supremacist and chauvinistic admonitions to violence from a number of nationalities, including the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the British, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, Huns, Persians and others, not to mention every other major Abrahamic sect.

Breivik may well have a point that most Westerners are not taught a deep general historical knowledge of Islam, but this only reveals a kind of autism on his part – after all, most people couldn’t care less about history full stop, let alone someone else’s.

The second obvious point of objection is that, although Breivik is correct in many ways when he criticises the unwillingness of Western historians, historical educators, or politicians to write or speak honestly about Islam, he doesn’t say much about an alternative.

If his contentions about the warlike nature of Muhammad and of Islam are accurate, and that they intend to subjugate the entire rest of the world, then there is a very good reason to not acknowledge this: doing so would be tantamount to an immediate declaration of war.

If Western leaders chose to go on television and say that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile and that the history of Islam was one of bloodshed, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy in short order.

They appear to be gambling on the idea that, if left for long enough without provocation, Islam could reform itself. In this they stand in complete opposition to Breivik.

However, a wiser head might make the claim that if faced with an apocalyptic war today, just about any alternative is preferable, and therefore if there’s any doubt about the willingness of Islam to subjugate the world we should accommodate that doubt in our conversations with them.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto I

Few are aware that the manifesto of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik has already had a considerable impact on the narratives within Western popular culture, but over the next few months we will have a close look at how. Today we introduce the VJMP Reads column, in which we try to get to grips with lesser-known or suppressed works of philosophy, especially those of a political bent.

Titled 2083: A Declaration of European Independence and published in 2011, the manifesto is not a light read. The version we are using weighs in at 1,515 pages – a similar length to War and Peace or The Stand.

Neither does it have any ambitions to be a light read. The vast scope of the document can be appreciated from a cursory glance at the table of contents, which runs to over 300 items.

The introduction starts off with a very powerful, and very unsettling, argument: that all ideologies are necessarily false. All ideologies, according to Breivik, declare a model of reality to be reality itself, and, when inevitably proven false, attempt to suppress that reality to the extent that they have the power to do so.

Their ultimate goal is to suppress the very thinking of thoughts that, although they may reflect reality, do not further the ideology.

Breivik is very direct about approaching these questions from a conservative perspective. Like many other conservatives, he harkens back to an idyllic Golden Age in the past – in Breivik’s 1950s,

“Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes…”

Western Europe, he laments, has been conquered by ideology. The dominant ideology – variously referred to as ‘Marxism’, ‘political correctness’, ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘feminism’ among others – is one that seeks a classless society where the outcome for every person is the same.

Because people are different, they will end up with different outcomes as a consequence of natural laws. Therefore, in order for equal outcomes to be reality, people have to be forced into this reality against their will and against nature.

Variants of this basic argument are made by most conservative commentators, and to that end Breivik is not unusual.

Much of the introduction to the manifesto is taken up with a history of the ideology of political correctness and Marxism, which Breivik treats as having waged a many-decades long war against the order of the West.

What Breivik is decrying, fundamentally, is chaos; what he fundamentally desires is order. The current order is correct, and therefore efforts to destabilise it are wrong. Although the situation is grim – there is a distinctly paranoid tinge to the introduction – Western Europe can still be saved through a sufficient effort of will.

One curiosity is that Breivik, who is approaching the issue from a conservative perspective, uses many arguments that echo George Orwell, who was a leftist libertarian. “Whatever controls language also controls thought” is a paraphrasing of a famous line from 1984.

This explains why many of his arguments have broad appeal. His criticisms about how the emphasis of higher education has changed over time, from providing an education in the liberal arts to providing a cultural uniform that one learns to wear to display one’s political virtue, ring home with any freethinker that has been through university.

Breivik also identifies with Christianity, decrying a university course “designed to denigrate the Bible as cleverly crafted fiction instead of God’s truth.” The patriarchal nature of this Abrahamic cult is considered by Breivik to be a positive thing.

Indeed, the enemy, in summary, is “anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti-conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti-ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality.”

And it’s these qualities, Breivik contends, that have weakened European culture and society to a point where Islamic conquest becomes possible.

What’s clear from the introduction to this document is that, if there’s a team yin and a team yang, Breivik is fully committed to team yang. For him it is order, not free expression, that is the foundation of all that’s good and moral in the world, and threats to that order cannot be improvements but are necessarily evil.

The VJMP Reads column will continue with Part II of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.