Category: politics

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto XI

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages 848-948), Breivik talks about the details of actually planning a terrorist attack. These hundred pages are very detailed and it is easy for the reader to feel a chilling sense of the ruthlessness with which Breivik carried out his own operation.

Opening with the quote “Violence is the mother of change”, this section is as comprehensive as any of the previous ones.

It goes into considerable detail in advising would-be terrorists how to keep their intentions a secret from their fellows. For example, there are several pages devoted specifically to the advantages in pretending to have a World of Warcraft addiction when it comes to explaining away the avoidance of social occasions, and pretending to be gay is given as a good strategy for deflecting intrusive questions.

Ironically, the document references the success of Muslim terrorists at several points during this section, in particular when Breivik is talking about the need to maintain psychological discipline and motivation, and how the very same psychological straitjacket that Breivik despises is so effective when it comes to guerrilla warfare.

Keeping with the same vein of the earlier parts of the document, this section goes into bemusing levels of details when it comes to planning an operation. There is an exhaustive account of all the considerations necessary for putting together a suit of ballistic armour that would resist even rifle fire.

This section also covers the use of steroids to achieve the maximum physical ability to carry out a terror attack, as well as the use of ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin stacks. No detail is too trivial to be added here, which underlines the degree that Breivik was serious about action.

Perhaps the strangest part of this document is the passage relating to the possibility of using like-minded white nationalist or national socialist contacts to secure weaponry. Here Breivik takes care to point out that these groups are likely to view the potential operative as hostile if they learn that he is pro-Israel. This passage more than any other speaks to the self-imposed social isolation that was necessary for Breivik to carry out the actions he did.

In a passage that is reminiscent of the reasoning of Charles Manson, Breivik talks about targeting Muslim women out of the specific hope that male relatives will swear revenge against the people of Europe and thereby create a continent-wide race war.

Further underlying the isolation that Breivik found himself in, his list of prime targets for terror operations consist of the political parties that he considers to be Cultural Marxists. These lists contain almost every party in the Parliament of every country.

The Closer the Election Gets, the More Degraded Political Discourse Becomes

We’re fortunate that no campaigning is allowed on Election Day – if there was, it would just be the candidates throwing feces at each other

There’s a psychological heuristic about the effectiveness of logical arguments compared to emotional ones. In essence, rational arguments weigh more heavily in the long term, often producing permanent changes, but emotional arguments weigh more heavily in the short term, often producing immediate action. This simple rule explains why the quality of political discourse has degraded so sharply in recent weeks, and why it will degrade further in the next two.

This human tendency was demonstrated with a study that examined tooth brushing habits. Two groups listened to two different lectures from dental health professionals. The first lecture used calm, reasonable, logical arguments to explain why people should brush their teeth, the second used fire and brimstone and tried to scare the listeners into doing so.

Although people who heard the first lecture only made a small increase in how regularly they brushed their teeth, the change in behaviour lasted for a long time. This was in stark contrast to the emotional lecture. People who heard this one made a sharp increase in tooth-brushing behaviour immediately after the lecture but, over the long term, this then fell away to much lower levels than the people who had heard the logical arguments in the first lecture.

Our political class and their advisers, highly sophisticated in the art of psychological persuasion, know all of this and are using this knowledge against the plebs right now. The rule they are operating by is: the closer we get to the day of the election, the less effective logical arguments become, and the more effective emotional arguments become.

One year out from an election, there’s no real reason to get emotional. The voters themselves have not yet been whipped into hysteria by the mainstream media, and so any politician that noticeably becomes emotional will look unstable and lose support.

That far out, it’s much better to focus on calm, logical arguments that a potential voter can ruminate over at their leisure before making a solid commitment to a party on the basis of reason. This is because, as with the toothbrush study, this influence will be minor but permanent.

The day before an election, by contrast, is not the time for calm and logical arguments. It doesn’t make psychological sense to aim for a moderate but long-term gain when the election is the next day and the preferences of voters in one year’s time doesn’t count for shit. At this point, it only makes sense to appeal to the heart (and almost always to fear), in the hope that this wave of raw emotion will not have subsided by the next day.

Right now, two weeks out from Election Day, fewer logical arguments are being made. “Let’s Do This!” is not a logical argument, and that is why we have seen expressions of it much more often over the past week. Neither is whipping up fears about being taxed into the poorhouse.

Here the political discourse can already be seen to have degraded, but things will only get worse over the next two weeks as the miserable calculus of persuasion shifts the balance ever-further towards whipping up hysteria and fear.

In two weeks’ time, the discourse will have degraded so far that National supporters will simply be yelling “COMMUNISM!!!”, Labour supporters will be screaming “SOLD DOWN THE RIVER!!!”, New Zealand First supporters will be bellowing “NEOLIBERALISM!!!” and Greens supporters will be shrieking “POO IN THE WATER!!!”

And it will take us three years to get over the shame of how low we all stooped before we can do it again.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto X

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (c. pages 776-847), titled “A Declaration of Pre-emptive War”, Breivik discusses how “Christian/conservative/nationalist” forces can organise themselves to best resist the coming chaos. Here he is particular about making sure that the work is seen as hypothetical and fictional, apparently for the reason that he is concerned about potential legal consequences from being too explicit.

Here again Breivik demonstrates that he is not a neo-Nazi, at one point by demanding that the national governments of Europe issue a statement in support of Israel against Muslim aggression, at another by calling Hitler a “twisted mass murderer.”

Here also he holds European politicians accountable for every single crime committed by Muslims in Europe, a crime rate that he describes as “an average 1000 atrocities per 100 000 Muslims annually.” The line of reasoning Breivik pursues here is that, without Muslims being in Europe, none of these crimes would ever have happened. This is perhaps the most untenable of all the claims in this document.

Although it’s literally true that none of the crimes committed by Muslims against Europeans would have happened if there were no Muslims in Europe, the absolute numbers of crimes in a particular country is primarily a function of the absolute numbers of people – after all, America manages to maintain an extremely high rate of crime (by developed world standards) with far fewer Muslims than Europe.

Breivik tends to conflate all genuine criticism of European traditions and institutions into the category of the great Marxist/feminist conspiracy against Europe. He does this with the nature of the Church’s influence on European society – here Breivik can not tolerate any criticism of the Church on libertarian or humanist grounds. All criticism of the Church is a Marxist plot to destroy Europe.

The paranoid nature of some of the earlier parts of the document resurfaces when Breivik details a media-led conspiracy to deny the truth about historical Islamic violence. This also misses the mark.

The media doesn’t educate anyone, ever – it sells advertising. Breivik considers it a kind of bias for the media to be silent on, for example, the genocide of Hindus and Buddhists in the Hindu Kush, but that degree of historical detail is reserved for special and academic interests, not for a mainstream media which speaks to a twelve-year old intellect.

There is an eerie foreshadowing of the future when Breivik cites Jefferson as saying “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Indeed, later on in this section he goes as far as declaring that “The time for dialogue is now over. The time for armed resistance has come.”

The legal measures suggested in this section are those that Breivik appears to believe should be instituted by any genuinely patriotic European front, should any take power. Curiously, one of the policy points allows for the immediate release of all “patriotically-minded” individuals from Western European jails.

Perhaps Breivik himself, incarcerated as he is for life, is counting on such a policy in order to get out of jail himself.

When he writes that “Norway and Sweden are two of the world’s most repressive Marxist regimes,” he echoes a sentiment that is common among Scandinavian conservatives, especially Christian ones. This sentiment is grounded in a disbelief that the conservatives are in a genuine minority. Where majority opinion does not agree (and it’s far from agreeing with Breivik’s demands that all Muslims be deported on pain of execution), this is considered evidence of brainwashing.

Interestingly, Breivik lists all of Communism, Cultural Marxism, Islam and Nazism as “hate ideologies” which must be opposed by any European male who wishes to be accepted into what he hopes might become a renewed European chivalric order.

It’s apparent that anyone who thinks like this in contemporary European society is bound to experience a certain degree of social isolation. This might ultimately help to explain the reasoning that led Breivik to take the actions he did.

Masculine and Feminine Expressions of Political Aggression

Aggression is a universal phenomenon within the human species. Both genders and all races are capable of it. Not only are we capable of aggression when it comes to sex, property and dominance but we are also capable of it when it comes to politics. This essay looks at the masculine and feminine expressions of political aggression.

The nature of the masculine is to discriminate. This is represented metaphysically by the straight line, the angle and the number one, and is represented biologically by the sperm. A straight line is, after all, the shape of a sword, and the purpose of a sword is to separate and keep apart those things that the wielder believes should be separated and kept apart.

The nature of the feminine is to bring together. This is represented metaphysically by the circle, the curve and the number zero, and is represented biologically by the egg. The circle is the optimal way to achieve the largest possible surface area for the smallest possible perimeter, and is therefore the most inclusive shape that can be drawn.

The characteristic masculine political sensibility is disgust when confronted with disorder. This means that the masculine is that which desires to keep the peace and to keep things under control. This is partially achieved by means of the sword – to be more precise, the masculine keeps order by inspiring fear with its use of violence.

The ultimate feminine emotion is fear, and so the masculine right wing fights an eternal “War on Terror.” This it carries out by attacking places of excessive chaos. And so, it can be observed in the modern West that masculine aggression finds a political expression in conservatism, which seeks to impose order on as much of the world as possible.

The Republican Administration of George W. Bush is an excellent example of this. Under George W. Bush the masculine sentiments of Americans found a home in the War on Terror – which is essentially a war on the excess of feminine emotion. This led them to attack the Middle East in the belief that it was a chaotic place that produced terrorists, and which therefore needed order imposed upon it.

The characteristic feminine political sensibility is horror when confronted with oppression (this probably developed as a consequence of being confronted with the possibility of rape). This means that the feminine seeks to include as much as it can (in other words, to discriminate as little as possible).

This can be observed by looking at the nature of a circle, which is the appropriate shape for including as many people as possible on even terms. Inclusiveness, and a belief in the value of inclusiveness, was probably how prehistoric matriarchal societies prevented any frustrated reproductive instincts among its malefolk from spilling over into jealous violence.

The ultimate masculine emotion is hate, and so the feminine left wing fights an eternal “War on Hate.” This it carries out by attacking places of excessive order. And so, it can be observed in our societies that feminine aggression finds a political expression in liberalism.

There are any number of examples of this, perhaps the best one being the neo-Communist street gang Antifa, who are known for indiscriminate violence in the name of fighting discrimination.

Feminine political aggression is usually expressed as a will to tear down all borders, walls and hierarchies that separate people. Feminine political aggression thus occurs when the masses get together to get rid of a monarchy, for example, or through voting Marxist policies into law in democratic elections.

In many ways, these two sentiments work together. Most Westerners consider slavery, for example, to be both disorderly and oppressive, and consequently the vast majority of Westerners abhor the practice and it is illegal in all Western countries. Likewise, public health epidemics create both disorder in making people sick and oppression in making people suffer from the disease, and so society is capable of working together harmoniously to fight such things.

In other ways these sentiments work directly against each other. The most obvious example of this is immigration, especially immigration from refugees. The masculine sentiments are generally against refugees turning up because of a belief that they create disorder and disharmony, and many masculine thinkers are duly disgusted by politicians who argue in favour of this.

The feminine sentiments, on the other hand, are generally in favour of refugees because they do not want to exclude them from the perceived benefits of society. To exclude, after all, is to discriminate, and that is a masculine political expression.

Another common example is that of the drug war. Because using drugs causes original thoughts and original behaviours to arise, the natural masculine reaction is to punish their use in the belief that they cause chaos. The natural feminine reaction, on the other hand, is to reject punishment for taking drugs in the belief that this is oppression.

These two differing forms of aggression share what is common to all aggression, namely a will to remake the world in the image of the aggressor. They only differ in terms of what is targeted for destruction – chaos in the case of masculine aggression, and order in the case of feminine aggression.