There is one more thing I have hardly seen addressed in media about Anders Behring Breivik and it’s the fact that practically his entire online history, his extremist right wing, Islamophobic, anti immigrant, anti multiculturalism rhetoric, in spite of being borne out of a sense of Norwegian nationalist pride, was communicated… in English.
- His collected written body of work (compiled by one intrepid blogger, obviously very committed to bringing this out to light), all in English.
- The video where he calls for a pan European return to the crusades, is in English
- His book, Defeating Eurabia, is in English
- The blog posts, under the pseudonym Fjordman (which media have confirmed as belonging to him, so far), were all in English
- His 1500 page manifesto, instigating, yet again, a war against a supposed “foreign invasion”, called “A European Declaration of Independence” was in English (and yes, because self flagellation is “my thing”, I read a good chunk of it because I was interested in finding out whether he spoke about Geert Wilders or not -he did, on numerous occasions across the pamphlet).
- His forum activity on Jihad Watch and Atlas Shrugged, both were conducted in English.
For the past few years, I’ve been clumsily trying to explain that the current right wing euphoria sweeping Europe is part of a larger, global phenomenon that certainly includes (and I suspect, draws inspiration from as well) the US. People like Pamela Geller are hailed by these individuals as beacons of political enlightenment. And on a European level, these people all look up to Geert Wilders, who has made a consistent effort to communicate his ideas in English, for a broader audience as well.
Maybe the framework under which we have been analyzing the phenomenon of right wing nationalism is all wrong. This clearly goes beyond local, national borders. Instead, I am unsure what the correct way of framing it would be (it is too new to yet have much we can draw upon), but it has to be tied to globalization and uniformity and, perhaps, with certain forces who would benefit from the creation of a mono culture (one of consumers, maybe, instead of civil subjects?).
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