vjmp reads – Page 17

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto VII

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (c. pages 426-573), Breivik discusses “Modern Jihad”, or how adherents of the Islamic religion fight for supremacy in the modern world. Opening with a quote of Surah 9 verse 5, in which Muslims are admonished to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them”, this section details the existing Jihads carried out by Muslims against non-Muslims.

In his characteristic way, Breivik exhaustively catalogues the crimes committed by Muslims against non-Muslims. No offence, not even ones as prosaic as common assault, is too minor to be listed here. This is enough to give the impression that Islam is at war with every other culture that it shares a border with.

To some extent, Breivik has a point here. There are very few peaceful borders between Muslim-controlled areas and non-Muslim controlled ones, and prospects for there being more are very slim.

However, one glaring point is missed: if Islam is so ruthlessly aggressive when it comes to purging non-Muslims from Muslim lands, why are there still non-Muslims there? Nazi Germany managed to exterminate the vast bulk of European Jewry in fewer than six years of trying – how can it be that non-Muslim communities still exist in Muslim lands after what we are told has been 1,300 years of relentless extirpation?

Breivik mentions that one-sixth of the population of Egypt are Christians still. This seems like an extraordinarily high proportion for a group that has suffered 1,300 years of ethnic cleansing. The Native American population of the USA, the Aboriginal population of Australia and the Maori population of New Zealand are all much lower than this – and they were displaced over 400 years or less, meaning that the Christian exterminations of unwanted populations has been an order of magnitude more efficient and aggressive than those carried out by Muslims.

Moreover, the exhaustive list of Muslim crimes against non-Muslims is not compared to the list of non-Muslim crimes against non-Muslims, so there is no reference point against which to decide whether this list has any import. 800 Americans are shot dead by other Americans every single month – a monthly list of crimes much longer than the Muslim crimes detailed by Breivik in this document. And this is with a population one-fifth of the size of the Muslim world.

To some extent, Breivik is playing on the infamous persecution mania of Christians who see enemies everywhere and a never-ending infernal plot to drive them from the world in order to conquer it in the name of Satan. Ironically, although Breivik correctly points out that Muslims always try to cast themselves as the victims in order to gain sympathy, he does the exact same thing in this document.

There are many ways in which Breivik’s discontent with the current European situation is a consequence of the failure of European leaders. He correctly points out that part of the reason why Europeans are losing rights to increased security measures is because of the Islamic presence in Europe – had Europe never let the Muslims in, they never would have lost the freedoms that have been taken from them in the fight against extremism.

What needs to be done in response is clear. According to Breivik the terms of victory are “the total banishment of traditional Islam from a specific country. Widespread emigration/deportation and large scale conversion of Muslims in the country.”

This is necessary because “An objective analysis can never reach the conclusion that Islam is peaceful, tolerant and consistent with human rights.” Here, Breivik re-emphasises the point that Islam has never undergone a reformation of any kind. What Westerners foolishly call “moderate Muslims” are simply Muslims who are not particularly religious.

This section ends with a frightening question: “How was it possible that Immanuel Kant, who lived in a German state without liberal democracy, could criticise basic aspects of religion in the 18th century, while in the West of the 21st century there are social and legal consequences for criticising other religions and cultures?”

Have we really gone backwards since the Enlightenment?

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto VI

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (c. pages 366-425), Breivik traces some of the reasons for the weakness of the modern West. Although the reasons for the West’s decline are many, some weigh more heavily than others.

Curiously, from the perspective of 2017, the document points out that in the absence of a meaningful life people will gravitate towards mindless destruction. In this sense, the document appears to be somewhat prescient.

Breivik laments a lack of order and structure in the modern West. Society, he claims, has essentially broken down. Nobody wants to have children any more because they want to live carefree lives of perpetual adolescence. The plummeting birthrates have led to a demand from many quarters for mass immigration to replace the non-existent native children.

And so, conflict between the natives and immigrants becomes ever more likely, following the maxim “demography is destiny”.

Not that mass immigration is proposed merely for economic reasons. Breivik details a large conspiracy on the part of European elites to radically transform the make-up of their nations, especially in Britain under Tony Blair. Interestingly, Breivik is willing to criticise big business for their complicity in mass immigration – something that few on the right are willing to dare.

Perhaps unavoidably for a document of this length, the rhetoric swings from entirely reasonable libertarian critiques of Marxism to unreasonable demands, such as the total banning of the discipline of sociology. Sociology is inherently untrustworthy: “Their academic weapons are to deliberate spread their falsified and corrupted Marxist world view.”

Breivik makes an accurate criticism when he points out that the advocates of cultural Marxism are seldom the black, poor or disabled people that the Marxists claim to be agitating on behalf of. Instead, the vast majority of Marxists in the West are from privileged, wealthy families.

When Breivik writes that “Cultural Marxists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful” he agrees with some of the columnists of this newspaper, who have previously written about the overlap between modern leftist thought and slave morality, in particular the feeling of resentment that induces the weak to oppose anything strong.

This tendency is also equated with the feminine, with masochism and with suicidal ideation.

He also echoes this newspaper when he quotes a British politician as saying “When all the politicians agree, the rest of us should suspect a plot against the ordinary citizen.” Like this newspaper, the intent in raising such paranoid conjectures is to crystallise dissent against the system.

Breivik makes no effort to hide his dissatisfaction with the political process. Electoral politics is dismissed as an “empty ritual” directed by the collusion of the political and media classes. Important issues are not discussed by the media, who has failed to do its job as a Fourth Estate holding the government to account. Instead, they are decided upon “behind closed doors”.

In this section, Breivik manages to list who his enemies are. In short, his three major groups of enemies to the European people are:

1. The media and academia, who have an anti-Western bias
2. The political elites, who seek to remake the world in their image regardless of the cost, and
3. Muslims.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto V

This reading carries on from here.

This section (pages c. 286-415) is entitled “Europe Burning” and details a deliberate strategy, on the part of Breivik’s enemies, to destablise the European continent. This is achieved through a variety of political and sociological means.

Breivik appears to be an ardent believer in the Eurabia theory. This theory has it that the elites of the European and Muslim spheres have secretly agreed to come together in order to act as a counterweight to the influence of America and Israel.

The Eurabia theory sounds plausible on the face of it. But much of the rhetoric around it is misleading. A cynic might argue that the Eurabia rhetoric was deliberately dishonest.

Mass Muslim immigration to France happened not because of a conspiracy but because of economic reasons. We can surmise this because other Western nations also saw an influx of poorly educated third-worlders to work the jobs that the natives had become too highly educated to want to do.

Likewise, European prejudice against Jews and Israel did not arise as a consequence of Muslim and Arab leverage on European politicians. Anyone with so much as a passing knowledge of European history will be aware that native Europeans were more than capable of hating Jews without outside encouragement.

This document exhaustively references antisocial actions taken on behalf of certain Muslims and explains them in terms of collective Islamic anti-Western action. It’s certainly true that if a person would read a several hundred page list of crimes committed by Muslims they could come away thinking that such an agenda existed, but the document does not make an effort to determine whether such a list of crimes is unusual.

Another place in which the document makes implausible assertions is with regards to the sentiment that Judaism and Christianity are traditional European religions and Islam is not. Why Christianity and Judaism should be considered any more European than Islam, when all three Abrahamic sects come from the same place and exhibit similar characteristics, is not discussed by Breivik.

Neither does Breivik explain why he can so ardently attack Communism, Marxism, liberalism, globalism and feminism, but defend the very same Judaism that is most commonly associated with those ideologies.

This unusually benevolent stance towards Judaism is underlined by the multiple references to the work of Bat Ye’or, – who is the most energetic proponent of the Eurabia conspiracy theory – and the claim that Israel is a “cultural cousin” to Europe.

It is, true, however, that Breivik’s grasp of history is much deeper than those of the mainstream commentators whose political opinions inform the masses. He points out that the advent of the nation state, this enemy of the globalist, was itself a reaction to the religious wars that plagued Europe until the mid 17th century, and that wars predated the nation state by thousands of years.

Therefore, there is no reason to agree with the lazy consensus pushed by mainstream leftists that the end of the nation state will bring about a greater level of peace.

Ironically, Breivik “the neo-Nazi” comes across as decidedly less totalitarian than some of his enemies in certain regards. His dislike of the European Union is based in part on the phenomenon of unelected Eurocrats having more power than elected representatives of national governments.

He is correct to point out that critics of the unelected Eurocrats are often dismissed as “anti-democratic” elements – an absurdity on its face.

Although Europe has many enemies in Breivik’s analysis of the world, from the European Union to the mainstream media to mainstream academia to right-wing libertarians who deny the pull of culture, the major enemy is undoubtedly Islam: “The Islamic world always has been our enemy and always will be.”

Throughout this section, Breivik demonstrates an acute historical knowledge on the one hand, and a tendency to rapidly jump over several logic steps on the other. This leads to a number of uneasy conclusions.

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.