22 July saw Norway’s orderly life blown apart by bomb blasts and the massacre of over 70 youth by a gunman. Scores of others were injured and Norway was left stunned, traumatized, and bleeding.

Much of the western media immediately went into a knee-jerk ‘Muslim-terrorism’ reaction. Obama used it to justify his wars against ‘terrorism’. Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper, The Sun, ran a front-page headline that read, “Al-Qaeda’ Massacre: Norway’s 9/11.” In the United States, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal also initially blamed “jihadists,” reporting that “Norway is targeted for being true to Western norms.”

The same media, when they discovered that it was a white Christian male who was the perpetrator immediately dropped the word ‘terrorist’ to refer to him as a lunatic/madman etc. After all, in their vocabulary, the word ‘terrorist’ is strictly reserved for Muslims only. It would be well to remember that of the over 350 ‘terrorist incidents’ in Europe over the past year only 2 involved Muslim perpetrators!

No Lone Madman

This modern-day Christian Crusader who openly and proudly owns responsibility for these heinous crimes is a young Norwegian citizen called Anders Breivik. There has been a frenzy of speculation about him and the reasons why he committed this crime. Is he a white supremacist, a Freemason, an Aryan racist, an extreme right-wing nationalist, a xenophobic fascist, a rabid Islamophobic, an anti women’s rights male chauvinist or an anti-communist Christian fanatic? Actually, his 1518-page manifesto ‘2080: A European declaration of independence’ reveals that he is, in fact, a mix of all of these ideas and ideologies!

Secondly, a debate is raging whether he is an isolated case of a crazy psychopath or something more. It is very interesting that a whole range of press and intellectuals who first blamed the killings on Islamist forces are now bending over backwards to say that he is a ‘lone wolf’ and refuse to accept that there is rightwing terrorism growing in their own backyard.

Fascism of Today

Breivik’s Manifesto shows that he shares fascism’s hatred of the organised working class and socialism, as can be seen in his numerous tirades against the left and cultural Marxism. His on-line video of the colonization of Europe by the left begins with the famous picture of WWII with the hoisting of the communist flag over the ruins of the German Reichstag. The left have always considered fascism as a reaction of bourgeois society to the threat of proletarian revolution. Interestingly, Breivik replaces Nazi fascism’s anti-Semitic hatred with an equally virulent ant-Islamic hatred and admiration for Israeli Zionism.

Breivik was in the process of forming a right-wing organisation called ‘Justiciar Knights’ whose Manifesto contains a range of political concepts including support for varying degrees of cultural conservatism, right-wing populism, anti-Islamization and “far-right Zionism”; and argues for the violent annihilation of Islam, Marxism, and multiculturalism in Europe. His Manifesto vows to wage a campaign that will graduate from acts of terrorism to a global war involving weapons of mass destruction — aimed at bringing down what Breivik calls the “cultural Marxist” order. He is also vociferously against the Norwegian Christian church and the ruling political parties and accuses both of having compromised with Islam and Marxism. Breivik’s attack on the youth camp held by the Norwegian Labour Party was specifically to target youth of the left and working class.

Many rightwing groups in Europe and US are hailing Breivik’s actions. A very large part of his Manifesto is influenced by American sources and one critic says that he is a great admirer of America because he says United States, unlike Europe, has maintained its ‘Christian identity.’ He is deeply influenced by American right-wing ideologue Robert Spencer, who operates an anti-Muslim website called Jihad Watch, quoting Spencer 64 times in his Manifesto!

Admirer of Hindutva

But it is not only American right-wing thought that influences him. It is important for us in India to know that he is also influenced by Hindutva, the Sanatana Dharma ideology, modern Hindu right-wing movements and Hindu nationalists in general. He devotes 102 pages of his Manifesto in praise and analysis of right-wing Hindutva ideology and explains that Hindu nationalists “are suffering from the same persecution by the Indian cultural Marxists as their European cousins.” He declared that the goals of Justiciar Knights and Hindu nationalism are identical! He praises Hindu groups who “do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims…..and form military cells and actively seek the overthrow of the cultural Marxist government”. He goes on to say that European and Indian resistance movements should learn from each other and cooperate “as our goals are more or less identical”.

The link between the fascist/Nazi forces in Europe and rightwing Hindutva goes back to pre World War II years when the Hindu Mahasabha leaders were great admirers of Hitler and Mussolini and their fascist views both on the purity of race and their anti-left politics. Many of the articles written by Hindu Mahasabha ideologues of the ’30s and ’40s sang praises of fascist Germany and Italy, of the purity of the Aryan race and the militant Hinduism. The writings of Golwalkar, Savarkar, and Moonje show that the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS were certainly influenced by fascist Europe in a number of ways!

Breivik’s Manifesto is also highly critical of the Indian UPA government, which he says “relies on appeasing Muslims and, very sadly, proselytising Christian missionaries who illegally convert low caste Hindus with lies and fear, alongside Communists who want total destruction of the Hindu faith and culture.”

Breivik even lists the websites of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the National Volunteers’ Organisation, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in his Manifesto.

The Manifesto pledges military support “to the nationalists in the Indian civil war and in the deportation of all Muslims from India.” This is part of a larger campaign to “overthrow of all western European multi-culturalist governments” and evict “U.S. military personnel on European soil.”

But amid all the confused ravings in his Manifesto and even as he hails India’s Hindu nationalists as a key ally in the global struggles to bring about a new world order, his intrinsic white supremacist bias spills over as he envisages the role of Indians in his new society as providing cheap labour and forming a ‘servant class’ totally subservient to their white masters! This servant class, he says, would be made up of non-Muslim Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. They would live ‘segregated in pre-defined areas’ (ghettos?) in each major European city, would work 12 hours a day, have contracts between 6 to 8 months at the end of which they would be flown back to their land of domicile!

Footsteps of Fascism in Europe

One of the survivors of the 22 July shooting is an economist, Ali Esbati, who was conducting a workshop at the youth camp. Originally Iranian but now a Norwegian citizen working in an economic think-tank he says that there are a number of small, fragmented ultra-rightwing groups in Europe and America who spread the bogey of an Islamic-Muslim take-over of Europe. Breivik was in touch with many of them in Europe, the UK and the US and also visited them. The ‘English Defence League of Britain’ and ‘Stop the Islamisation of Europe’ both have Norwegian branches which he supported. Breivik’s rants against multiculturalism and his defence of nationalism echo commentaries found on many neo-Nazi websites and publications. They were not very successful or well-known. But Brievik’s actions have certainly put them on the world map now.

Many see the links between these isolated right wing extremist groups growing, their hold over political thought in Europe and the US increasing and their influence over the media and many democratic institutions rising. These fascist tendencies are being more and more accepted by the mainstream. The French government’s ban on the head scarf and later the burqa which is now spreading to Belgium, Italy, Norway and other parts of Europe, the agitation against a mosque being built in Switzerland, the Danish cartoons on Mohammad, the increasingly shrill campaign against Muslim immigration and multiculturalism in Europe are symptoms of a fascist cancer that is spreading. Denmark has also recently enacted the most vicious anti-immigration laws.

Many are outraged that the Norwegian government and police could not requisition a single helicopter to go to the aid of the helpless young people being shot down in their own country, even as it sends troops to Afghanistan and supports the air strikes on Libya. Are they so busy fighting terrorism abroad that they could not protect their own people at home?
Why are the media and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly speaking the language of modern fascism – anti-multiculturalism, anti- Islam, rabid national chauvinism and hatred of the political left? And why are they playing down Breivik’s ties to fascist politics and trying to keep it hidden from public gaze?

Ali Esbati does not agree that Breivik was a lone madman or mentally unstable; he rightly concludes that Breivik “didn’t just go on a shooting spree” but that what he did was conscious, preplanned and “shaped by the political environment of the right wing”!