Throughout the previous three looks at Anders Behring Breivik and Fjordman, I did my best to remain on topic with the text only.  I still will derive most of Part Four from the manifesto text, but I will also be using information from the news and other sources as I discuss what I think this text reveals about Breivik.   If one reads the text closely,  Breivik reveals a lot of answers to questions that are troubling people.   I also think the text reveals a lot about Breivik’s motives in a way that gives lie to the idea that stopping Islamic immigration and ending what he refers to as cultural Marxism were his only goals.

In Part Three I mostly discussed the things that Breivik planned and the things he actually did.   Because of the level of plagiarism that Breivik engages in throughout the manifesto, it is hard to look at his writing and know if the words are indeed his, but there are patterns that emerge, times when it seems like writing flows and when it seems like he is parroting ideology from others in an awkward manner.   When he writes from a place of experience or a place of emotion, it flows smoother and simply feels more real.  So I tell myself that there are times I know I am reading Breivik’s actual thoughts, as well as text that is not plagiarized.

I need to explain that I am looking at his manifesto the way I read any text.   I am looking at the whole of the document – how it is arranged, how the writing appears, what Breivik considers important, what he does not.  There is truth in this manifesto of lies.   You know how it is when a seasoned poker player can judge the hands of the other players at the table?  It is because the other players, even as they try to present a flat demeanor, have what are called “tells.”  A finger twitches, eyes dart to the left, someone unconsciously clears his throat.  And the experienced poker player knows.  Breivik’s manifesto is littered with tells.

While I hope I am not sounding too arrogant, I am a reasonably good “poker player.”   I’m no expert on literary construction.  But I fancy that because of my time in the trenches of odd books, strange books, bizarre books, and the people who naturally accompany such books, I have a pretty good grounding in the unusual mind.   I also had some excellent teachers and professors in my day who instilled in me a habit of engaging with words in a manner that, at times, makes reading very involved for me.  So I fancy that I enter into Part Four with some skills for analyzing text.

But at the same time, I will be engaging in psychological analysis of Breivik that should likely be taken with a grain of salt.  In a way, psychoanalyzing him will be no different than analyzing other literary characters because in its way, this manifesto is as much a piece of fiction as any novel.   I don’t need a psychological degree in order to discuss the mental state of Emma Bovary, Gregor Samsa, or Catherine Earnshaw.   But if I acknowledge that I am analyzing the text in the same way that I would a fictional novel, hopefully that will make it clear that this is just speculation.   Once the professional psychological reports come back,  I have no doubt large chunks of this entry will be proven completely off-base.  As you read this, please keep in mind I am doing my best to discuss Breivik in relation to what I think his manifesto tells me about him, with some news articles to bolster the opinions I posit. I could be very wrong.

And all that having been said, I think I’m right on more than I am wrong.  I wouldn’t have written all this out if I didn’t have some belief I was right.

So let’s look at the insight the manifesto text gives us into the mind of Breivik.  Let’s look at how his text arrangement and emphasis show his priorities.  Let’s talk about what some of his plagiarism really means.  Let’s look at how so much of what he writes contradicts itself.   Let’s see if some of the initial media responses to him are borne out in his manifesto. Let’s see if we can pin down the mind of a killer via the words that meant so much to him.When I began reading this manifesto, nothing in it seemed right, above and beyond the obvious.  I mean, the manifesto left behind by this particular mass murderer is likely not going to be a source of that which makes a whole lot of sense to those who are not bigots, misogynists, and narcissists.  But even within the paradigm of knowing that Breivik was a mass murderer who likely had delusional thoughts, there was much that was utterly discordant in this manifesto.  Things that when looked at make it clear that Breivik presented information that was contradictory.  His motives for killing 77 people, on an overt level seem clear – he is an Islamophobe and anti-Marxist who was encouraged to kill because of his hate, influenced at times by the hate of others.  But there is more to the rampage he went on than just religious, right-wing bigotry.  (And I cannot emphasize this enough – just because I think there are other motives at play with Breivik, that does not mean the crystal clear motives of hatred of Marxism and Islamophobia are lessened.  They are definitely motives and I do not wish to suggest that any one of my suggestions replace them as his stated motives behind the massacre.)

Mixed Motives

Breivik’s sense of loss about the destruction of his family

In his manifesto, Breivik goes into depth about his loathing of Islamic immigration, reproducing article after article that showed his bigoted notions, as well as occasionally writing out some beliefs of his own.  He begins his manifesto with what ostensibly is an example of a dystopia caused by cultural Marxism, and the implication that Muslim immigration has created crime.  On its surface, he begins his manifesto by honoring the silly, bigoted, repressive and regressive ideas of Diana West, who would like nothing so much as to force society to move back 60 years into the past when women had fewer choices, when minorities knew their places and when the white, middle class society was the arbiter of all that is proper and decent.  But there is more to it than that, I think.

In Breivik’s introduction to cultural Marxism, the social disease he thinks ushered in Islamic immigration, indeed on the second page of the real material in the manifesto, he is expressing a deep longing for a time in the past he thinks is a paradise lost.  Of course, as you look at these passages, they will probably strike you as being ridiculous, overblown and hopeless in their advocacy of a time that didn’t exist except for a select few of upper-middle class families in the West.  But pay attention to the ideas he is espousing.

From page 12, Breivik begins:

Most Europeans look back on the 1950s as a good time. 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, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.

Of course, this isn’t how life was for most Europeans in the 1950s and I would wager there are a fair number of Norwegians who do not remember the 1950s so fondly, as a time when Mom was waiting after school for little Timmy and parents never divorced and ladies did volunteer work.  It’s interesting to note that Breivik thinks that the world was an episode of Leave it to Beaver until cultural Marxism robbed us all of a place where no moms worked and the worst afflictions of school children were sass and tardiness.

This is the next full paragraph, also from page 12:

If a man of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into Western Europe in the 2000s, he would hardly recognise it as the same country. He would be in immediate danger ofgetting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear. He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of the city, thathis car must not only be locked but equipped with an alarm, that he dare not go to sleep at night without locking the windows and bolting the doors – and setting the electronic security system.

It’s hard to see that most men in Northern Europe live in a state of constant fear, and I am pretty sure there were bad sides of town where good people did not dare to venture even in the 1950s, but I reproduce this section mostly because it shows that Breivik is possibly a man who lived in constant terror (or he really absorbed the less-than-stellar thinking of Diana West and engages in her hyperbole and unfounded statements),  but also because it helps segue neatly into the next paragraph, wherein the real strangeness begins.

If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably cheerfully pack their children off to the nearest public school. When the children came home in the afternoon and told them they had to go through a metal detector to get in the building, had been given some funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality is normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.

Are there many schools in Norway that require metal detectors?  Some in America require them but I don’t yet see metal detectors as being as common as Breivik seems to think.  Who knows about funny white powder?  Generally one does not see a lot of cocaine or powdered heroin freely given about to the new kids in public schools.  And as for homosexuality being normal and good?  Who knows.  Clearly Breivik thinks he went to school in a system that is reminiscent of the set of the television show The Wire and a continual re-reading of Heather Has Two Mommies.  Of course, he is presenting a very jaundiced look at the modern school experience, a very hysterical and frightened look that isn’t really borne out by his own experiences.   This is pure Diana West here, this belief that the entire world is an open cesspit because of multiculturalism.

But here’s where it starts to get very interesting.  Still on page 12:

In the office, the man might light up a cigarette, drop a reference to the “little lady,” and say he was happy to see the  firm employing some coloured folks in important positions. Any of those acts would earn a swift reprimand, and together they might get him fired.

Breivik, like many other privileged white men who feel sorely aggrieved because they cannot shout epithets to women and people of color with cultural impunity, seems to think that not being able to refer to “coloured folks” is a great burden the modern man must carry.  More to the point, I don’t know of any company that would fire a man for referring to a woman as “the little lady.”  All extremist examples yet again but mostly comical if looked at in depth.  And thank heavens no one can smoke anymore in the office place – again, the examples he uses to paint a picture of how terrible the modern world is are so ridiculous.  Oh, how terrible the world is when white men cannot smoke at the office.  Breivik’s view of the world sounds like he is worshiping Don Draper from Mad Men:   a world of white, upper middle-class men.  Note he did not discuss the words a man who worked on the docks would use.  Nor the words of a garbage collector, of a butcher or a farmer.  Just the man who sits at a desk in a suit, smoking.

Next paragraph, still on page 12:

When she went into the city to shop, the wife would put on a nice suit, hat, and possibly gloves. She would not understand why people stared, and mocked.

This is pure Diana West, with her insistence that modern dress is somehow indicative of a decline in morality and traditional ethics.  “The wife” would be mocked because it would look like she was a character in a television show.  People changing the way they dress is not an indicator of how terrible a society is.   “The wife” would be just as derided if she went into town dressed in traditional Norwegian dress.  And again, only the upper middle class wife dressed in a hat, suit and gloves to go into town, presumably to run errands and do the grocery shopping.  Not in Norway, not in America.  That sanitized view we have of how people looked and behaved, derived from movies and television, does not portray the mass of people from the 1950s.

We end with this, also from page 12:

And when the whole family sat down after dinner and turned on the television, they would not understand how pornography from some sleazy, blank-fronted “Adults Only” kiosk had gotten on their set.

Were they able, our 1950s family would head back to the 1950s as fast as they could, with a gripping horror story to tell. Their story would be of a nation that had decayed and degenerated at a fantastic pace, moving in less than a half a century from the greatest countries on earth to Third World nations, overrun by crime, noise, drugs and dirt. The fall of Rome was graceful by comparison.

Why did it happen?

By this point, we know that the answer to that rhetorical question is cultural Marxism and Islamic immigration.  And there is no need to further dissect the whitebread alarmist nature of Breivik’s prose.  Most of us don’t turn on the TV and find porn, and I think since the Industrial Revolution anyone who goes 60 years into the future would find the future strange and unsettling.  But I think this beginning is mostly important because of the implications of it simply being the first thing Breivik writes about.

It is in the beginning of the section of cultural Marxism, and I think on one level that it is folly to discuss much about the order of this manifesto.  It is a mess in terms of logical lay-out.  But at the same time, this is the document Breivik left behind to influence people, to try to bring people around to his way of thinking.  There are any number of ways he could have started the meat of his manifesto.  He could have started by enumerating what he perceives as Muslim atrocities committed in Europe.  That would be logical, as he committed the murders ostensibly with the goal of interrupting cultural Marxism recruitment because the cultural Marxists are the ones he blames for allowing Muslim immigration.  He could have started off detailing why Muslim immigration is bad.  He could have started off by explaining exactly what cultural Marxism is.  He could have started off this manifesto in any number of ways.

So I think it is worth looking at his beginning and see what it represents.  First of all, obviously he buys into the pearl-clutching ideas of Diana West that modernity is degenerate, despicable, violent and pornographic and that the 1950s were the halcyon days of innocence, happiness and decency.   But he also discusses exclusively how the terrors of cultural Marxism play themselves out on the traditional family unit of a man, wife and children.  Not the toll cultural Marxism has taken on society at large, but rather a close focus on the microcosm, the family that can no longer exist in the current atmosphere.  And he placed this part first because it is the part that means the most to him, even above and beyond the Islamification of Europe.

I assert this is because  Breivik is bitterly angry about his childhood.  I know, I know, this is simplistic armchair psychology at its worst.  It’s the first thing that comes up when discussing a killer – he must have had a bad childhood.  But this idea is supported by other things he says throughout his manifesto, and that this discussion of an upper middle-class, white family that is horrified by the present and cannot live there with anything approaching peace, happiness and safety is the first real writing in the manifesto indicates it was in the forefront of Breivik’s mind as he wrote.

Breivik experienced a sense of loss about his childhood.  His parents divorced when he was one-year-old.  Both parents remarried and both subsequently divorced again.   In his manifesto, he discusses how he felt he was feminized because he was raised by his mother, and this point will come up later when I discuss Breivik’s misogyny, but he makes it clear he would not feel so victimized by the world had he been raised by or with his father.  This may not seem like the strongest of ideas on my part but as you read, you will see even more proof that shows that Breivik appears to be reacting to the destruction of what he wanted in a family.  Breivik literally begins his manifesto bemoaning the lost family of the 1950s.  In a novel, this would be a large symbol, leading off with the lost, doomed family of the past.  Given Breivik’s opinions about the way he was raised, I think the opening of this manifesto is significant.   At times I wonder if he was trying to destroy the futures of kids he saw as happier than him.  In his eyes, if his family was destroyed, then other families needed to be destroyed, too.  I genuinely feel as if he was trying to kill a generation that had far more happiness than he thinks he got to experience as a child.

Narcissism

On their face, the passages about the Knights Templar are ridiculous.  The notion that Breivik is a part of a resurrection of a long defunct order of Crusaders set on releasing Europe from the grasp of Islam is laughable.  It pains me that anyone believes it because Breivik had contact online with people involved in bigoted and racist groups.  Having spoken to Paul May, attending a boot camp in Belarus and culling e-mails from a Facebook group do not an actual movement make.  So given that I know the revived Knights Templar is not real, why did he create such an elaborate back story for his rampage?

Part of it comes from the notion that he was engaging in a sort of delusional game, a fantasy role-playing game, a topic I discussed ad nauseum in Part Three.  Part of it is because Breivik wanted to instill that he wasn’t acting alone, that he was a single-cell in a larger organization.  But it was also because, in my decidedly non-professional opinion, Breivik has some traits one associates with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  He has a need to appear as that which he is not – brave, chivalrous, and an important member of a larger group, a group that is destined by God to return Europe to its lost glory.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder isn’t just about being self-impressed.  One is tempted to look at the pictures of himself he included in his manifesto, the ones released to the press of him in make-up and posing with a turned-up collar, and the ones of him in uniforms, and think, “Oh yeah, this guy’s a narcissist.”  Add to it that Breivik is still carefully maintaining  a specific image behind bars as he refuses to permit a mug shot and only appears in public in that damned red Lacoste sweater, and it seems like it’s an easy enough assumption to make.

But NPD goes beyond just vanity or excessive concern about one’s appearance.   Of course, it will take a good evaluation from a psychiatrist to explain with any accuracy or believability whether or not Breivik suffers from NPD, but he certainly has some of the classic traits of the disorder.

One trait is excessive belief of self-importance.  Breivik’s manifesto insists that he was selected to represent Norway in an international meeting with Knights Templar representatives, meaning of all the people in Norway, he was the most important person to represent his nation in a chivalrous military group.  Out of all the men and women in Norway with classical educations and military experience, this man who never graduated from college and was exempted from Norway’s compulsory military service (and this also brings to mind the idea that perhaps the best reason to shoot kids was because they had not yet undergone their compulsory military training and would have been easier targets), was the best candidate.  Breivik also, in his diary, gives several examples of how he thinks others admire his status.   Take this from page 1462, emphasis mine:

After I had scraped out the yellow PA crystals and the brown DDNP crystals putting them in plastic boxes and placing them in the cold cellar I went to do some shopping in the northern town. There is a festival and there was a lot of things happening, a faire, various food stands, concerts etc. Since this town has a limited variety of fast food I decided to drive down to the southern town, eat and pick up some Chinese takeaway. There was a relatively hot girl on the restaurant today checking me out. Refined individuals like myself is a rare commodity here so I notice I do get a lot of attention in both the southern and the northern town. It’s the way I dress and look. There are mostly unrefined/un-cultivated people living here. I wear mostly the best pieces from my former life, which consists of very expensive brand clothing, LaCoste sweaters, piques etc. People can see from a mile away that I’m not from around here.

Again with the Lacoste.  I wonder if the brand is going to take a hit the way Bruno Magli did after his shoes were associated excessively with the OJ Simpson murders.  Note in the beginning of this paragraph he has been at work making his bomb but so convinced is he of his superior looks and refined tastes and how the villagers admire him, he can’t bring himself to keep a low profile as he plans his mass murder spree.  In certain respects, he reminds me of the spree killer and murderer of Gianni Versace, Andrew Cunanan.  I find that very interesting, his sense that the world is always looking at him admiringly.

Another trait of NPD is the need to exaggerate or lie about one’s accomplishments.   Breivik stated that he had become a millionaire in his 20s, a claim that has since been completely debunked.  After the horrific events of 7/22, the website document.no posted a collection of all the comments Breivik had left on the site.  His interactions on the site are what appear to be a vainglorious attempt to promote his own image as a man who could help the site with a publishing venture (and forgive me if I am not specific enough because Google Translate gives me the big picture but sometimes smaller details get lost in the translation).  Of course, we know now Breivik had no ties to any publishing company or any pull in the magazine industry.  He was posturing to inflate the perception of how he hoped others would perceive him.  Almost comically he chides the site for not taking his recommendations to heart, because failing to do as he suggested means the site will never achieve the success they could have had if they had just followed his advice.

People with NPD also have a tendency to run roughshod over others as they set out to achieve their goals.  Other than shooting those children, I can imagine nothing more callous than the way Breivik discusses his family in this manifesto.  I will not reproduce names because his family has suffered enough, but he took special glee offering up their lives in a very sanctimonious way.   He trashes his sister, condemning her for living a life spent pursuing money.  She evidently, along with her husband and children, lives on $150K a year, a relatively modest middle-class income for the place where she lives.   But taking her to task over her greed in comparison to his own sacrifice was not enough – he took it one horrible step further.  From page 1171:

My half sister, Xxxxxxxx was infected by chlamydia after having more than 40 sexual partners (more than 15  Chippendales’ strippers who are known to be bearers of various diseases). Her chlamydia went untreated and she became one of several million US/European women who were suffering from PID, Pelvic inflammatory disease caused  by untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia which leads to infertility. As she lives in the US, costs relating to this were not covered by the state. She and her husband spent 40 000-50 000 USD on two IVF treatments (in vitriol fertilisation) a process by which egg cells are fertilised by sperm outside the womb. She was lucky compared to many as these treatments may cost upwards of 100 000 USD. Furthermore, as far as I know, due to her condition as a result of the untreated disease, she needed a caesarean section for both childbirths. The last c-section almost killed her due to complications and she needed blood transfusion of more than 5 litres of blood in total. It is unknown if her two children suffered from pneumonia and conjunctivitis and other problems in infants born with chlamydia transmitted from my sister during childbirth.

And in case you were wondering, this is filled with the “tells” of lying.  How on earth would this man know his sisters’ sexual history to this detail.  Perhaps his family is extraordinarily open about such things.  Probably not.  The Chippendales dancers bit is a “tell” that he is likely lying.  It beggars belief that his sister slept with so many strippers, and it is not really a proven social fact that male strippers carry disease.    I also find it interesting that he had no idea if the babies she was able to have were actually sick as a result of being born with chlamydia.  Funny he doesn’t know such an important fact about the babies but knows his sister slept with 40 men.  He made all of this up to aggrandize himself in comparison.

Why did he see fit to bring this up at all? Also from page 1171:

Under normal circumstances I would never reveal intimate details about my friends and my family’s personal lives due to societal taboos and shame, confidentiality issues and loyalty. However, how are we supposed to have a chance at changing our societies when we refuse to reveal the negative impacts surrounding the disintegrating moral?

How magnanimous of him, to offer his sister up as evidence of the “disintegrating moral.”  Funny he didn’t discuss his own sexual details, especially the ones about using prostitutes as prepared for his rampage.  One presumes he had no need to humiliate strangers – only those close to him.  He goes on to discuss how some of his friends have diseases, how his mother has herpes and how she got it from his stepfather, who had over 500 sexual partners in his life.  He also insinuates that brain damage from herpes that turned into meningitis left his mother brain damaged, with the intellectual capacity of a child.  I could not find anything to bolster his assertions about his mother.  He was scoring points off of his friends and family to make himself seem more like a hero, a man who can stand above all this sex and disease.

But don’t worry – he’s not telling us this because he is jealous of other people getting laid, also on page 1172:

I don’t blame them personally and it has absolutely nothing to do with envy. I could easily have chosen the same path if I wanted to, due to my looks, status, resourcefulness and charm.

Feel free to also file this last quote under inflated sense of self-worth.

Another symptom of NPD that Breivik has in spades is a preoccupation or fixation on ideas of success, control and power.  The man created an entire delusional manifesto in which he hoped to lead people to believe that he was part of an elite group that was going to change the world.  But more importantly, he is now the most talked about man in Norway.  He is famous.  He is infamous.  He now has achieved his twisted idea of success.

There are other characteristics that fit Breivik.  One characteristic is that people with NPD often feel as if they are somehow exalted or extraordinary in some manner.  Breivik, who writes of how other people noticed his good looks, his good taste, felt he was above the rest of his fellow men.  He even created a role for himself in an international but non-existent conspiracy to change the course of history.   If he could not justify his self-absorption with reality, then he would create it from whole cloth.

While I could go on about this for a while, I will end this section on NPD with a look at one last characteristic: a demented belief that others should definitely follow his beliefs and instructions.  Breivik, in his interactions on document.no, chided people several times for failing to follow his advice, as if the people who ran the site somehow were being derelict or stupid by not immediately engaging in his detailed publication instructions.  When I take this manifesto into account, in addition to showing a man who was willing to worry to death every detail, I also see a man who thinks he has all the answers.  One of the best examples I will discuss later in this article are his demented, detailed, excruciating instructions for what Europe should do if the birth rates among native Europeans do not improve.  The level of attention was stupefying and, more to the point, it was written with an expectation that it would be lauded, perhaps found revolutionary.  Either that, or my initial feeling that it was more game manual minutia was on point.  In the case of Breivik, I am unsure if you have to pick – there are many motives to choose from.

Misogyny

Like his idol Fjordman, Breivik is no fan of women.  It’s pretty safe to say that any man who finds it merry and fitting to trash his mother and sister in such a humiliating fashion is probably not going to be really fond of women in general.  Since beginning this four part series, I have received a lot of e-mails from people, and a few of them claim to have irrefutable evidence that Breivik is a homosexual and that, of course, all male homosexuals hate women/their mother/the world.  I have no idea where such ideas come from but I do wish they would stop.  The logical inverse of this would be that all heterosexuals hate the sex to which they are not attracted.  Life is not a Tennessee Williams play and if Breivik is indeed homosexual, I tend to think that should be the very last thing analyzed when looking at why he killed so many people.   But people can be misogynists regardless of their sex, gender or sexual orientation, and Breivik is definitely a misogynist.

A desire to destroy the concept of mother

When I finished the manifesto and began writing about 2083, I was under the impression that the current Norwegian Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, was Breivik’s intended target and as a result I had a hard time understanding why it was that he decided to kill so many teenagers who were not even on his traitor list.   I wondered if perhaps his failure to kill the Prime Minister turned into impotent rage that he took out on the kids on Utøya.   When I realized I wanted to read this manifesto, I decided to stop reading the news because what good is my interpretation if my thoughts could be contaminated by blogs, news reports that discussed his state of mind, etc.  I really did want to stick to the words in the manifesto alone.

It was clear after Part Three that I was going to have to relent and read some news sources.  Helpful comments I received to my entries made that clear.  In the context of trying to assassinate Stoltenberg, much of what happened on Utøya seemed odd.  But even taking into account that Breivik srtayed from his own dementedly detailed traitor categories and killed teenagers, the events of Utøya make far more sense when I understand who the real target was.

To those who followed the news carefully, the real intended target will be no surprise.  Breivik wanted to assassinate former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, a woman called “The Mother of the Nation” in Norway because of the length of time she spent as Prime Minister.  And had there not been a traffic accident that delayed him, Breivik may have succeeded as she was on the island that day to give a speech.  He only missed her by about an hour.

I know many people are unwilling to engage in armchair psychiatry and I can see the folly in it.  But it is tantalizing, isn’t it, the notion of a man wanting to kill “The Mother of the Nation.”  A man who demeans his own mother in his manifesto may have some issues with mothers, especially a Socialist  mother who led the country.  I do not think it is particularly far-fetched to think that Breivik looked at the teenagers on that island, knew when a matriarch in the Socialist movement was coming to speak, and decided to kill the mother and her children.  This ties back into the idea of family as well.  Breivik was wiping out a sort of Socialist family when he decided to kill “The Mother of the Nation” and the young people whom she had influenced.

But even if you don’t want to jump into the whole notion of a psychological desire to kill a type of mother and her children, it can’t be denied that wanting to assassinate a woman who led three Labor governments in Norway speaks to a certain level of misogyny.  He could have planned to kill the current Prime Minister and that would have been as equally if not more attention-worthy, but he wanted to kill Gro Harlem Brundtland, a woman and a leader of the party Breivik thinks pushed the feminist movement and cultural Marxism in order to sell out Europe to the Muslims.  Much like Fjordman, his first choice of victim shows how Breivik lays the blame for societal woes on women, and a woman who was the opposite of the woman in his intro, a 1950s, glove-wearing, dinner cooking, stay-at-home-wife and mother, would be an excellent target to drive home his point.

Patriarchy is the only way to save Norway

Just to show I did not cherry pick all of the anti-woman horrors in Breivik’s manifesto and ignored it when he took a middle ground, here’s a quote from page 1177:

I’ll be the first to admit that there are many sensible feminist policies. The goal should obviously not be to reverse ALL feminist policies just for the sake of it. Ignore these sensible feminist policies, and instead focus on the destructive policies.

But this is immediately followed by an assertion that due to cultural Marxism, all of Europe is now a matriarchy,  also from page 1177:

The current matriarchy in Western European countries is partly the cause of the symptoms that have become increasingly prevalent. To counter the symptoms it is required to fix the underlying flaws of our systems. One of the primary flaws is the matriarchal supremacy we see in several arenas.

And since he wanted to kill Gro Harlem Brundtland, it is not too far out there to think politics is now a matriarchy.  But he specifically names the areas which are now controlled by the matriarchy.  One is divorce, and interestingly, he wants to do away with no-fault divorces because he feels it is a legal inconsistency not to punish a person who breaks a contract, and therefore doing away with no-fault divorces will ensure that spouses who did not want divorces will have a moral high ground.  There’s a little jab at homosexuals at the end, whom he does not think want traditional marriage, only the “watered-down version” that is prevalent now, but he never comes out and make an assertion, as does Fjordman, that women are responsible for most divorces.  It’s a curious paragraph to prove the presence of the matriarchy.

But the next paragraph does show it, and this links back to the idea that bringing back into existence the perfect 1950s family was  possibly a motive.  He feels that giving child custody to women in divorces must stop.  From page 1179:

To truly reverse the decline of the family, the momentum must be carried forward to confront the current destructive matriarchal policies that have institutionalised “broken family” policies. Our current system produces broken families and prevents traditional norms based on discipline. The most direct threat to the family is “divorce on demand”. Sooner or later, if Western Europe is to endure, it must be brought under control. The father/patriarch must be given considerably more influence as this is the only way to ensure the survival of the nuclear family as it will enhance family integrity. The matriarchal supremacy within the modern households must seize to exist

As of now, the mother will always be awarded child custody rights unless she is mentally ill or a drug/alcohol addict. The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default. This will ensure that that divorce rate will be significantly reduced (by up to 50-70%) and will contribute to uphold the nuclear family.

Yes, you read this correctly.  He wants to return to the Victorian ideal wherein in the event of a divorce, the man always got the children.  Worse, if one takes into account that Breivik wants to end no-fault divorce, this means that even if a man initiates a divorce, he is still going to benefit because he will always get the children.  This serves to trap women into bad marriages on pain of losing their children, and one cannot help but remember my idea that part of Breivik’s motives are to reinstate the 1950s family he lost out on.  If his mother had known she would lose him in a divorce, would things have been different for Breivik?  Actually, he would not have existed as the marriage to his mother was not his father’s first marriage.  But really, as self-absorbed as he is, I think he thinks his broken home was the primary home that was broken – that is the one he wants to retroactively restore.  And he wants to restore it by eliminating a woman’s right to her children in a divorce.

And the matriarchy seems to have a stranglehold in the realms of abortion and birth control.  Here are two quotes, also from page 1179:

Abortion should only be allowed in case of rape, if the mother’s life is in danger, or if the baby has mental or physical disabilities. The liberal zones may be exempt by this rule.

Contraceptive pills and equivalent methods will be severely restricted in conservative territories. The liberal zones may be exempt by this rule.

Fabulous.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, will ensure a complete dearth of women in academia, the workplace and in politics better than removing women’s right to control their fertility.   Stripping women of the capacity to determine how many children they want is the best way to control women and this is some high level misogyny here because Breivik understands this fact – women who cannot control their family size cannot assert their place in the world.  It makes marriage a continual crap-shoot and given the youthful predilection for romantic love, it will ensure generations of women get married and forced out of the decision-making in Norway.  I can sense some of the comments and e-mails I will receive, wherein men will say, “Is removing women from the decision-making a bad idea?  Women can still influence via the home and how they raise their children. What about the idea that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world?”  If you pose that question and it is not rhetorical, you need to understand that you are engaging in misogynist thinking because what you are asserting is that women must never be able to assert power directly, but must do so via the male children they produce.  You are diminishing women to their reproductive functions – only by ovaries can a woman shape her world.  That is misogyny.

This is all also very likely to end poorly in Breivik’s misogynist utopia because he also goes on to ban sex education.  I can just see fifteen year old girls all over Europe getting pregnant with no recourse but marriage.   He also, as a virtual afterthought, bans quotas and female hiring preferences, as if that will be much of a concern in a place where the women have no choice but to remain single or be pregnant as often as their bodies will permit, like the worn-out women of the Quiverfull movement.

Brave New Norske

But what will happen if women cannot get their reproductive acts together and bring up the population numbers among the native Europeans?  What happens if the white women do not breed to Breivik’s satisfaction?  From page 1180:

Future national reproduction policies will rely on how we choose to reform women’s rights, media-government-social directives/the Church/drug-alcohol policies/sexualfamily ethics and moral. In order for women to be truly liberated, according to hardcore feminists, she must be free from the pressure of carrying offspring. But that is not really possibly or at least acceptable as humanity would be extinct within a generation.

Ensuring sustainable fertility rates does however not necessarily mean that we have to strip away women their rights as there are alternatives.

We need to increase our fertility rate from the European average (non-Muslim) of 1,5 to 2,1-2,3 (2,1 being a minimum).

This will to a certain degree involve encouraging many 3 child families.

It’s good to know that I am evidently a hard core feminist.  I had always thought I was ardent but moderate but us hard core feminists like to control our reproductive rights so I’ll take the label.  But if he has banned birth control and abortion, how is it he plans to fix this without completely stripping away women’s rights?  Well, he enumerates his previous points of making abortion illegal and birth control hard to obtain and stripping away sex education.  He also goes on to discourage women from seeking education because it only means they will want to work jobs, offer tax incentives for being a mother, and limit media so people will not want to have a Sex and the City lifestyle, which he mentions about as often as Fjordman mentions the Vagina Monologues.  This he calls the 1950s solution.

But never fear, there is a “feminist/liberal” model and it reads like something out of a science fiction nightmare.  Seriously, if you wanted to write a scenario for a zombie apocalypse game wherein the world must be repopulated quickly, you could do worse than Breivik writes in this section.  From page 1182:

The following suggestion can only be applied in a highly pragmatical and rational society that isn’t bound by the paralyzing grasp of today’s cultural Marxist non-ethics.

An alternative which would prevent the need to restrict women’s rights and media rights would be to allow the state to play an essential role in national reproduction. This would mean allowing European Federation women to continue their current path toward liberating themselves from the pressure of carrying offspring.

Okay, despite the fact that I knew he thought he was throwing us women a bone by creating a world wherein we can still work, when I read the words “pragmatical and rational” I knew the idea was going to be outrageous and absurd (and in Breivik’s case, completely over-thought and full of strange details).  He did not disappoint, from page 1182:

This would involve the creation of a network of surrogacy facilities in low cost countries and basically “outsource breeding”. A gestational surrogate carrier refers to a woman who carries a pregnancy created by the egg and sperm of two other individuals by using IVF[1].

He goes on to describe what IVF is and how it would work in his society, still on page 1182:

IVF or in vitro fertilisation is a process by which egg cells are fertilised by sperm outside the womb, in vitrio. IVF is traditionally a major treatment in infertility when other methods of assisted reproductive technology have failed. The process involves hormonally controlling the ovulatory process, removing ova (eggs) from the woman’s ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a fluid medium. The fertilised egg (zygote) is then transferred to the patient’s uterus with the intent to establish a successful pregnancy. The first “test tube baby”, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. IVF can also be used when parents want to have multiple births. The first pregnancy achieved with the use of donor eggs was reported in 1984. By using in vitro fertilisation (IVF) techniques, eggs are obtained from the ovaries of the donor, fertilised by sperm from the other donor, and the resulting embryo’s are placed into the surrogate’s uterus. If pregnancy is achieved, the resulting child will be genetically related to the two donors but not to the surrogate.

But wait, there’s a rub!  Still on page 1182:

Who will care for these children? Career obsessed women who does not prioritise reproduction is not likely to have the will to care for these surrogacy babies either so there would not be enough foster parents.

So…  The surrogacy is not to create babies for working women who do not want to pause to give birth?  Nope.  He goes on, still on page 1182:

The only alternative would be that the state, or state funded institutions take on the role for fostering these children.

He explains how this plan will work.  Here’s the overview from page 1182:

This is how the arrangements could work:
A large facility or a so called “boarding home” is created which is divided into 5 separate areas:
- Kindergarden boarding home (age 0-6)
- Primary school boarding home (age 6-12)
- Secondary school boarding home (age 12-16)
- High school boarding home (age 16-19)
- College/university boarding home (age 19-25)

By boarding home, he means orphanage where school is taught.

More detail on pages 1182-1183:

6 babies, 3 boys – 3 girls, are delivered to the boarding home during the first 6 months of the year, 6 more babies, 3 boys – 3 girls, are delivered during the next 6 months. The first 6 are assigned a specific surname, f example Andersson and two full time “parents/guardians”, one male and one female. From now on, these 6 babies are considered brothers and sisters. Together with their two “parents/guardians” they are considered a unique family, and will not be separated for the rest of their lives. These two full time employees (one male, one female) who will act as their parents/guardians will follow them throughout their lives.

This setup will facilitate and encourage close bonding as they will do as many activities as possible together to ensure a stable and warm relationship allowing the development of trust, friendship and “family ties”.

A lot of thoughts ran through my brain reading this.  I thought of the clones raised in a boarding school in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.  I thought of Oliver Twist.  I thought of all those children discovered in Romania when Ceausescu was finally killed, the evil bastard.  I thought nothing good ever comes from assuming that all people are noble and will care for all children like they are their own.  Breivik himself bitterly resents not being raised with his natural parents.  That he wants to inflict this strange idea on children at all speaks of a depravity that I cannot fathom.  There is nothing wrong with foster homes.  There is nothing wrong with adoption.  Some children need to be rescued and some people cannot have children or their hearts are open to children who are not theirs by birth.  But this is setting up entire generations of children who are motherless and fatherless, being born by women who will not keep them but will presumably continue serving as an incubator for the state.  Breivik’s own father rejected him because of chronic misbehavior in high school and he discusses the 1950s family enough that we can all agree that it plays in his mind somehow.  Again, it seems like he wants to destroy untold generations because he never got the family he wanted.

He discusses the plan for all these IVF via surrogate children and the life he has set up for them in the predictable, game manual-like manner that I have come to expect from him and then also predictably it gets worse.  If it occurs to you to ask where the European baby factories get their ova and sperm, he explains it, from page 1184:

This option is usually arranged through established egg/sperm donation programs.  Existing European programs must be drastically increased to facilitate large-scale programs. Women in IVF programs may forward their excess eggs to other surrogates. One donor should however not donate more than 100 eggs/sperm doses to avoid potential future inbreeding effects. This number may be adjusted based on distribution area. All donors will be compensated financially for their expenses, time, risk, and inconvenience associated with the process.

But what is in it for the surrogates, other than pregnancy after pregnancy until their bodies wear out?  Wouldn’t such a life wear thin even for the most Nationalistic woman.  If she is healthy enough to be able to bear all these children, wouldn’t she like to have one of her own?  Or what if she marries and wants a family of her own?  Breivik has the solution on page 1187:

The development of advanced incubator machines/artificial wombs could become an alternative (or even a substitute) to using surrogates in low cost countries. This can be done by investing in and developing highly advanced neonatal intensive-care units (NICU)[1] or by continuing the development of artificial uterus’s[2] (ectogenesis[3]).

Wow.  Of course, this is dystopian science fiction, but the subtext is clear:  Women are not doing what men like Breivik think they should, which is giving birth as much as possible.  In order to assuage the women who want to have educations and careers, a frightening industry of IVF labs and surrogates, schools and orphanages will be set up.  For all those women who want to work, women will have to give up their ova and another woman will have to carry babies that the state will raise in order to achieve a birth rate higher than the Muslims.  Not only is it creepy and demented and cruel, but it gives the appearance of a false choice – have a family or see your society turn into a bad science fiction movie.  False choices are the hallmark of the feminist critic.  Women have been damned if we do and damned if we don’t since the beginning of time but never before have I seen the misogynist fallacy of choice played out so terribly.

The plagiarism

Of course Breivik’s plagiarism is not a motive to the shootings, but rather, I think his plagiarism shows a lot about his motives, hence including it here.

In a way, the plagiarism is not unexpected.  This is a 1518 page manifesto.  I can see how a source might not be cited here or there, or an article reproduced without due attention to including the name of the author.  But the wholesale plagiarism and reproduction of the works of others is puzzling when I think about Breivik’s nature.

In his own writing, he leaves no stone uncovered.  He is thorough and spares no details.  Consider his traitor list.  Consider the above section about artificial wombs.   They were exacting and precise.  He tightly controlled his image before the attacks and is controlling it now.  He set up his own lab, evidently experimented in various ways to commit mayhem.  He controlled his actions, his words and his demeanor to the point that he completely slipped under the radar in front of his family, his friends and even to those who knew of him online.  Does this sound like a man who would plagiarize the words of others?

In one respect, yes.  I can see it.  He is a cypher with little original philosophical thought of his own.   But even within that knowledge, it makes little sense that he would do it, that he would spend years organizing and working and then undermine himself by looking intellectually and academically lazy.

I assert that he plagiarized because the sections of this manifesto wherein he cut and pasted Fjordman’s body of work and he plagiarized William Lind and the Unibomber are the parts that mean the least to him.  The parts where he is angry at the modern world for making it impossible to be a 1950s family, the parts where he was creating his own bizarre little world with his game-like manual of rules for Breivik’s Europe, are what matter the most.  The places where he exerted the most mental and physical energy – creating the world and planning and testing his mayhem, meant the most because those were the parts that resonated with hurt child, narcissistic personality.  The passages about Islamification and cultural Marxism, while very important to him, did not require the extensive amount of work he put into his descriptions of how the Knights Templar are going to rebuild Europe and all the details of the fantasy world of his game.  Islamophobia and cultural Marxism were someone else’s ideas and as a result, did not glorify Breivik.

Of course, Islamophobia and cultural Marxism are a huge part of why he ran amok but I genuinely think that Breivik lives in a world of his own logic, wherein shooting “The Mother of the Nation” and teenagers was an act meaningful on an emotional level and a political level.  The politics are important but the emotional part, the fun part of creating his own world, his reactions to the world that deprived him of what he wanted, were the places where he put in his original thought.

Questions I have received and how the manifesto answers them

I’ve received e-mails from readers and have read others asking questions online and many of the questions, I think, are answered in the manifesto.

Did Breivik act alone?

People will disagree with me on this but I think he acted alone.  Not just as a single-cell in a larger, unorganized Knights Templar structure, but utterly alone.  He had contact with people, especially via Facebook.  By now it is no secret there are Nationalist, racist and bigoted sites all over the Internet, all espousing virulent ideology.  Some have even cheered on Breivik’s wholesale murder of children.  But I don’t think sharing the same beliefs and having the same moral deficits means he acted in concert with others.   I think the shallow connection to Paul Ray will be proven to be even shallower than some fear.  Yes, Ray himself has some nefarious activities going on, it would seem, but he can’teven control his contrary nature and keep his profile down low enough to prevent himself from being expelled from a church in Malta two weeks before the murders.  It seems unlikely a fiery man who is an exile even in the place where he was exiled would have been able to keep his nose clean well enough to prevent official scrutiny.  And Fjordman, had he been a part of this, would not have gone on record cheering it on before he realized his name was all over the manifesto.

But that aside, there is evidence in this manifesto that shows, to me at least, that Breivik was completely alone.  From the very beginning, I felt like he did this all on his own with nary a network to support him.  Take this from page 5:

I ask that you distribute this book to everyone you know. Please do not think that others will take care of it. Sorry to be blunt, but it does not work out that way. If we, the Western European Resistance, fail or become apathetic, then Western Europe will fall, and your freedom and our children’s freedom with it… It is essential and very important that everyone is at least presented with the truth before our systems come crashing down within 2 to 7 decades. So again, I humbly ask you to re-distribute the book to as many patriotic minded individuals as you can. I am 100% certain that the distribution of this compendium to a large portion of European patriots will contribute to ensure our victory in the end. Because within these three books lies the tools required to win the ongoing Western European cultural war.

Why would a man who is a part of an international re-creation of the Knights Templar be reduced to begging those who are reading his manifesto to distribute it to Nationalists?  This was sent out initially to Facebook members whose e-mails he had collected, but if even those people had known of what he planned, why would  there not be a system in place to disseminate this information.  A couple of proxy server e-mails and those who are a part of this cloak and dagger group could have sent this e-mail out to the members of the conspiracy and beyond.  But Breivik had to get his word out there on his own, and in fact, killing people was a method of marketing to him.  That is not really the mark of a man with the support of any sort of organized group.

I discuss in Part Three how it is that Breivik financed it.  He did some job for a year or two, saved money by living with his mother, ramped down his lifestyle (note the mention in one of the above quotes about how he was wearing his designer clothes from his previous life) and committed credit card fraud.  He details how he got the weapons, the ammunition, and all the supplies on his own.  He describes how he built the bomb on his own.  He details how he kept his spirits high working alone.  He makes it very clear no one else knew about what he wanted to do.  But that’s just what I have found in the manifesto and a few online news sources.  I would like to think that if there was a larger group behind Breivik it would be apparent by now but I also think that until the trial, even I with all my conviction cannot say for sure that he was utterly alone.  I just think that his need to be admired made him tell us all the details so we would know he indeed did all of this by himself.

Is Breivik a homosexual

I hit on this above, but it largely does not matter.  He mentions in the manifesto, even in parts I have quoted, that he dislikes that homosexuality is being shown as normal and he makes little digs at gays, but were we to weigh his negative comments against gays with everything else, it is like splashing a teaspoon of water from a bathtub and calling it a spill.  People make remarks about his appearance and vanity but plenty of heterosexual men are very appearance-oriented and vain.  He comments on what he considers the feminization of men in cultural Marxism but that is a whole other kettle of fish.  He is concerned about that not because he thinks it makes men gay but because he is convinced it makes men weak.  So ultimately I do not know if he is gay but it doesn’t matter.   All that matters is he is a delusional, strange, weird man who killed children.

Was Breivik a right-wing Christian or a Fundamentalist

I belong to a couple of fundamentalist Christian watch sites, and immediately after 7/22, snippets of the manifesto came out and the parts about essentially ending women’s rights as well as the Dominionist elements of Breivik’s ideas of reclaiming Europe under the banner of the Knights Templar rang a bit too close to some of the bizarre and harmful Dominionist ideas of American groups like the Vision Forum.  But as I read this document I never got the feeling that Breivik was a fundamentalist or even that he was engaging in excessive Christianity.

Take, for example, the word “Jesus.”  One would expect a 1518 page manifesto written by an American fundamentalist to contain the word so many times that one would need a program to count it.  I counted the use in Breivik’s manifesto 62 times, and many of those uses were in Koran-Bible comparisons and many were not in articles that Breivik himself wrote.  That in itself is interesting.

But most interesting is the idea that he really does have a William Lind idea of a Christendom, a unified white Europe that has a Christian identity rather than a strict Christian belief.  For example, you are Christian first, a Dutchman second in the eyes of Lind, which puts you in automatic opposition to pagans, Jews and Muslims.  Breivik has a wider net – he doesn’t mind Jews and pagans and even goes so far as to welcome Odinists into the Knights Templar.   I think this quote as to who can be a part of the Knights Templar will explain a lot, and all emphasis is in the originals.  From page 1361:

Q: Do I have to believe in God or Jesus in order to become a Justiciar Knight?
A: As this is a cultural war, our definition of being a Christian does not necessarily constitute that you are required to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus. Being a Christian can mean many things;

- That you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage.
The European cultural heritage, our norms (moral codes and social structures included), our traditions and our modern political systems are based on Christianity – Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and the legacy of the European enlightenment (reason is the primary source and legitimacy for authority).

It is not required that you have a personal relationship with God or Jesus in order to fight for our Christian cultural heritage and the European way. In many ways, our modern societies and European secularism is a result of European Christendom and the enlightenment. It is therefore essential to understand the difference between a “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” (everything we do not want) and a secular European society based on our Christian cultural heritage (what we do want).

This is Christianity as it applies to a European identity, not the sort of individualized relationship I was encouraged to have with Jesus when I was a Southern Baptist.  He is not a fundamentalist as we understand the word in the United State.  He is not  representative of the Tea Party, Christian-infused xenophobes we see in America.  He’s got some strange ideas about God and the purpose of a Christian but those who see him as being in the same vein as Pat Robertson, Doug Phillips, or even Fred Phelps need to know he is a completely different brand of Christian hate.

Moreover, Breivik, while he is indeed a Christian, is not a man who communicates with God, though he would like to take strength from God if he can.  He talks about this in his diary.  From page 1459:

I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail. He must ensure that I succeed with my mission and as such; contribute to inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservatives/nationalists; anti-Communists and anti-Islamists throughout the European world.

From page 1344:

I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie. I’ve always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment. In the past, I remember I used to think;

“Religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point in believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself!? Pathetic.”

Perhaps this is true for many cases. Religion is a crutch for many weak people and many embrace religion for self serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength (to feed their weak emotional state f example during illness, death, poverty etc.). Since I am not a hypocrite, I’ll say directly that this is my agenda as well. However, I have not yet felt the need to ask God for strength, yet… But I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing, with 100 armed system protectors pursuing me with the intention to stop and/or kill. I know there is a 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second , 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would.

So really it seems to me as if most of his beliefs are not the evangelical, fundamentalist beliefs people in American associate with Christians who seek a repressive society for women, seek to oust all non-believers and practice Dominionism.   While he mentions Christianity often as a counterpoint to all that he thinks is miserable with Islam, Breivik is not a Bible-thumper as many Americans have come to associate with fundamentalists.  But even on a gentler note, as I am not a women who can stand much in the way of religion, Breivik’s ideas also show no resemblance to the ideas of my beloved late grandfather, a Southern Baptist.  Breivik really did shape the invocation of religion around the beliefs of Lind and the notion of the Templars as a force for European, Christian identity.

Why did he take those ludicrous pictures

Well, they are ludicrous, I know, and given the e-mails I received, those pictures fuel about 90% of the belief that Breivik is gay.  But he took them because he wanted to be in control of his image.  He wanted to be perceived as a handsome, stylish man because otherwise he feared the media would use other images that would not reflect as well.  A high school picture of Breivik that made the rounds shows him with a decidedly different nose, and while he still is recognizable, that is not what he wanted to be the common image of him.  It goes hand in hand with what I consider to be his narcissism that he wanted to micromanage what others saw of him yet had no idea how those pictures might appear to others.  The military uniform has received a lot of criticism that a murderer with no military training would don such a uniform.  The picture of him holding the gun is chilling.  Yet everyone seems fixated on that picture of him with the bifurcated soul patch and his popped collar.

But those pictures were what he wanted.  He felt those pictures would help his image.  Here’s his rationale from pages 1064-1065:

It is essential for all cultural conservative resistance fighters to understand that we are in the middle of a war of perceptions. Our objective is to portray our enemies in the worst possible light – as cultural Marxist traitors who wishes to sell their own peoples into Muslim slavery. They, on the other hand, have the exact opposite objective. They are doing everything to tell the people that they have no political opposition whatsoever and that the occasional attack is only committed by backwater, brain damaged and inbred freaks. They are effectively “selling” the perception that we are nothing more than a bunch of pedophile and criminal scum of society, who has somehow escaped from the local insane asylum. They ALWAYS illustrate their definition of heroic icons of society using all factors to improve their looks and appeal. And they ALWAYS illustrate the nationalist resistance fighters in the worst possible light, without makeup, in bad lighting, without editing, and often in unfortunate postures. And these often appalling photos correlate with the above description. This is not coincidental but a deliberate aspect of their psychological warfare against us. They deliberately portray us as the anti-thesis of the ideal person so that we achieve a minimum of impact when it comes to appealing to the average European. We must counter this psychological warfare campaign by making it harder for them to use this weapon against us.

So he wants to look good, not like a lunatic, inbred scum when the media tears him apart for killing kids. How did he ensure none of the pre-nose job pics got leaked, or at least not too many?  He explains on page 1066:

It is essential that cell commanders and/or cell operatives budget at least a portion of their operational budget to photo sessions and remember to delete all other unfortunate photos from the past. This is to prevent the media/police from getting access to them and exploit them for their own propaganda. The police usually “leak” “retarded looking” photos to the press after raiding the cells apartment after an operation. By removing and deleting all “negative” photos, and by making available the professional, photo shopped photos prior to the operation; we make their job significantly harder.

So he probably scrubbed  the Internet of all pictures he thought unfortunate.  He then tells those who want to be a part of the Knights Templar how they should plan their photo shoots.  From pages 1066-1067, emphasis in original:

- Use professional makeup artists and use make up on both female and male models. Yes, this sounds gay, but looking “attractive” will significantly benefit the impact of our messageas it will act as a force multiplier
- Use professional editing (photoshop) on all digital photos (You can hire a programmer on f example:  www.scriptlance.com to photoshop your pictures for less than 50 Euro).

Preparations required before a photo shoot

As a Justiciar Knight you will go into history as one of the most influential individuals of your time. So you need to look your absolute best and ensure that you produce quality marketing material prior to operation.

Prepare for the photo session;
- Take a few hours in a solarium to look fresher.
- Train hard (work out) at least 7 days prior to photo session
- Cut your hair shave
- Visit a male salon if possible and apply light makeup. Yes, I know – this might sound repulsive to big badass warriors like us, but we must look our best for the shoot
- Use your best clothing – you can f example bring 3 different sets of clothing to the shot location – 1. Dress, tie etc. 2. Casual wear 3. Sporty wear 4. Militaristic wear (obviously, you can’t bring your guns or anything indicating that you are a resistance fighter). You should always order the photo session in a foreign country to avoid that the personnel alerts authorities. Always pay in cash and do not sign any receipt with your own name.

End note: Be very careful to have military shots lying around. Be very careful if you decide to use pictures with guns. People who see these photos might alert the authorities. Carefully consider the use of symbols as it might backfire. Cross of the martyrs is fine (St. George) but avoid any symbol associated with Nazism.

And it’s clear he took his own advice because we can see that he had a professional session with outfit changes, manscaping and make-up, as well as heavily photoshopped pictures of himself in the uniforms with the guns.

But yes, he thought this was a good idea, these strange glamor shots of him all over the web.

Was Breivik a Nazi

No, despite his decidedly fascist leanings that come out as one reads his manifesto, Breivik was not a Nazi nor did he have any sympathy for anti-Jewish causes.  Rather, he felt that anti-Jewish sentiments caused people to align themselves with Muslims and does not like the pro-Palestinian stance of the Norwegian government.  I think some people, when they read he was a rabid anti-Marxist and appalled by the Frankfurt school, jumped to the conclusion that he hated many of those involved because they were Jews.  This is not the case.  He is decidedly anti-Nazi.  Take this from page 1097:

The badge of the Justiciar Knight illustrates a white skull, marked with the symbols of communism, Islam and Nazism
on the forehead, impaled on the cross of the martyrs. The background is black. The badge of the Justiciar Knight
illustrates our patriotic struggle/ opposition against all three primary hate ideologies of our time: Islam,
Multiculturalism (Communism) and Nazism.

There is a picture that goes along with this that was shown on a couple of sites with no explanation that the Swastika was there as an emblem of one of the Knights Templars’ enemies.  I think fueled some of the Nazi identification. More from page 1163:

In any case; educate yourself and learn the difference. Today’s conservatives and want to-be Nazis are ignorant when they obsess so much over the Jews. There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800 000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem. But please learn the difference between a nation-wrecking multiculturalist Jew and a conservative Jew. Don’t make the same mistake that NSDAP did. Never target a Jew because he is a Jew, but rather because he is a category A or B traitor. And don’t forget that the bulk of the category A and B traitors are Christian Europeans. 90% of the category A and B traitors in my own country, Norway, are Nordic, Christian category A and B traitors.

There are many similar quotes in this manifesto.  Breivik is not a fan of Nazism nor does he hate Jews.  Though he makes a reference to the idea that race mixing is bad, I cannot recall the context and I lack the will to find it. Just rest assured he reserved most of his hate for cultural Marxists, Muslims, women and traitors.

Further muddying the waters, however, has been the reaction of actual Nazis, who claim Breivik was working for the Jews and that the events of 7/22 were a “false flag” operation meant to discredit Nazis and fascists, as well as further achieve the goals of Jews in their struggles with Muslims, especially the nation of Israel.

The conclusions I have reached

I began to read this manifesto because it was just another outre book, another look into a dark human soul, another chance for me to wallow in a strange, delusional mind.  It’s not an intellectual trait I am proud of but this tendency of mine is not mine alone – lots of people are drawn to the dark, the strange, the simply odd.

But it became something more than just one of my regular exercises.  In my 20s, I went down some interesting roads as I tried to find that which was truth for me and even as I tried on appalling mental hats, my inner ideology never changed.  I could never find it in myself to hate people.  I loathe religion but that is not the same as loathing a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew.   And as an American I could never wrap my mind around racism and Nationalism in a land of immigrants.   I just never could make that leap and because of it, I find those who made the leap more fascinating than I should.  I think I am searching for an answer to the question of what makes me different from them.  And I wonder sometimes why, as manifestly liberal and egalitarian as I am, I seldom take offense to mindsets I find horrifying.  I may react and even overreact to ideas I find terrible but I often find myself in a strange mental position of being able to like people whose ideologies I think are terrible and I wish I knew why.

I found this manifesto absorbing in places because I thought I might finally find an answer to many questions about Breivik and those that I have about myself.

So I wrote and wrote and wrote and after my first entry it really did become a wholly different exercise.  I met online a man who lost his cousin in Oslo, a woman who was just around the corner from where the bomb went off and is haunted by how close she came to severe injury if not death, and another woman whose daughter’s friend died on the island.  Countless other e-mails flowed in, comments were left, and at the end of it, Breivik stopped being a curiosity.   I needed answers.  Maybe I searched too hard and found strange links that mean something only to me.

But even as I make assertions, I don’t really kid myself. Even after the psychiatrists are done with him I don’t think we will know the real mind of a man like Breivik to any degree so that we can make sense of what happened.  Isn’t that why I read these horrible things?  To be drawn to the darkness is to want to understand it?  Possibly, but while I think reading this manifesto showed the strange contents and revealed some interesting things about Fjordman, I don’t think I really know that much about Breivik.  I just know what he said in the manifesto and as I mentioned in Part Three, Breivik is a liar.  I can piece all of this together with my knowledge of darkness, all the books I have read, all the psychology books, all the criminology books, all the books on intellectual racism, but all of that implies I had a place of firm ground when I was looking at Breivik’s words.  I didn’t.  His manifesto is a swamp and even though I engaged in this exercise knowing it was a swamp, I may have sunk into the mire even as I tried to avoid it.

So I have no answers, really.  Just my beliefs from reading this manifesto.  Hopefully the investigators and mental health workers will help everyone come to some understanding, but I fear that even if we understand Breivik, that means we just understand this one man after the fact.  If there is  a way to extrapolate this into a detection policy, a means of prevention, I cannot see it.  Breivik is a monster and one cannot make policy out of a monster.

I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to be finished with this for now.   This was an oppressive read, and discussing it at times was even more oppressive.  And while I like to think there are some answers we can reach about Breivik, if my conclusions are correct and he both acted alone and in terms of the motive mix is sui generis, what good did any of this reading and writing do any of us?

I mean, we know there are entire segments of the modern world who are unhappy, seething in hatred, willing to say all kinds of terrible things online against other races, religions and peoples.  We know there are swathes of the Internet devoted to discussing how it is they can deprive other people of their civil rights, citizenship and dignity.  Hell, a recent  series on AmericanProgress.org spells out how it is that Islamophobia has been permitted to spread its roots in America.  But I knew this before reading the manifesto and from my perspective, Breivik was among these people and organizations but he was different from them.

But can we really separate Breivik from organizations and political players who spread malicious hate?  Is it specious of me to look at Diana West and Fjordman and Robert Spencer and that entire ilk of Islamophobic Marxist haters and maintain that they were not part of this?  How about  the people who give organizations money to spread hate?  Did they play a role in the massacre on 7/22?  Even if not a single person knew of what Breivik planned and didn’t offer him one thin dime to finance these murders, do the people who have made hate their mission in life have blood on their hands, too?

My American love of free speech forces me to say that Fjordman and Diana West and Pamela Geller all should be permitted to say any damn fool thing they want as long as it does not violate the most minor limitations put on free speech.  A free and open society has to permit even the lousiest ideas to be expressed.   And if the demagogues refuse to take responsibility for inspiring men like Breivik, for giving purpose to empty-souled Little Men who long to destroy the future in order to avenge their own sorry pasts,  it should surprise no one.   I fear there is no way for us to ever ensure the world is truly safe, but limiting basic human rights to communicate even nasty ideas will be a net loss for a free world.

That does not mean we should not read and watch these people.  They don’t permit much opposition discussion on their sites, but we can watch and confront and make it clear that they stand alone, driving home to them that we know and the world knows their ideas will not stand up to even the mildest scrutiny.  For every person like Fjordman and Daniel Pipes, there are many more of us who do not believe in conspiracy theory and who do not hate.  Never forget that.  In the wake of 7/22, it seems like there is an Islamophobe on every corner because we have suddenly been forced to reckon with them.  That is what happened in the United States after the bombing in Oklahoma City.  Suddenly it appeared as if there was a vast network of inter-related, anti-American, racist hate groups seething under the radar, noticeable only because Tim McVeigh forced us to see people we would never have noticed before.

That is not to say these people are not there.  They are there and their rhetoric, to the right ears, can be fatal, though most racists and bigots never kill a single person.  They just hate people. But even so, we outnumber them.  And we can challenge them and make it clear that the protection they had as a result of our lack of awareness no longer exists.   That doesn’t mean another Breivik won’t slip under our radars again.  As I hope I have shown, a super-empowered person can and will slip under the radar.   But it can’t hurt Pamela Geller to know that she is no longer preaching to the same Islamophobic crowd, that we are now in her audience.  It would do her good to know the  world knows she praised the deaths of children and that we find her despicable.  It may feed her victim mentality but even in free speech there should be consequences and knowing you are under scrutiny that could leave you utterly marginalized just means that freedom of speech does not come without a price.  That price is one we all could end up paying for speaking our minds and if attentiveness drives some bigots to stop speaking because they dislike the social consequences of free speech, that is not repression.  It’s just cause and effect.

I’m sorry that I have no better answers, after expending so many words as I tried to understand this manifesto.  I fear there may never be better answers as we deal with monsters and the people who inspire monsters than to simply be aware of them.

I wish the people of Norway peace as their monster goes to trial and I wish them recovery when he finally goes to prison.  And if there are answers to be found, I hope they find them.

I am dreading writing about Anders Behring Breivik.   Whether I understood it consciously or not, I began discussing Fjordman because he was so much easier to write about.  His words, even as they appalled me, were words I knew he thought were true, plus there is the added benefit that he never killed anyone.  Fjordman’s passion indicated that he was emotionally connected to his dreadful topics.  At no time did I feel like I was reading the whole truth when I was reading Breivik’s own contributions to his manifesto.  Many times he read emotionally flat even as he was discussing war and executions.

I don’t think anyone will ever see the real face of Anders Behring Breivik and that is why I dread writing about him.  He wears many faces and in so doing, hides his real motives.  He is a man who carefully constructed an image before his rampage and is carefully maintaining that image even after his arrest.  I can make no assertions that I have nailed Breivik because I am not a psychologist.  All I can say is that as a person who has a vast interest in strange ideas and strange people, I have met many people who had or still have ideas I find anathema to a healthy world.  Some of these people were friendly, intelligent and affable and their strange beliefs took back stage to the whole of their personality.  Some were dark, dangerous people whom I never hope to see or correspond with again.  But every one of them was a real person, charming and glib, or earnest and odd, or determined and frightening but there was a core of humanity to them that could not be denied even as I was appalled with elements of their ideologies.  Even when I wanted to shake Fjordman, the reason I wanted to shake him was because he is real, someone whose words could create an honest, human reaction.

The same cannot be said of Breivik.  Even taking into account the number of articles he reproduced from Fjordman and other Islamophobic writers, there was not much of Breivik present in his manifesto.   That sense of no one being at home was not helped by the fact that he often reproduced chunks of text from other writers without attributing it, leading to the impression that those words were his.  He outright plagiarized Ted Kaczynski.  I swear at times I felt like I was reading slightly repackaged essays from William Lind.   Hundreds of pages of  Breivik’s interpretation of historical events, political actions and religious beliefs, all as absorbing as entries from supermarket encyclopedias.  And about as facile, too.  His criticism of political correctness/cultural Marxism showed about as much understanding of the Frankfurt School and reactions to the New Criticism as an answer to a high school essay question.  And one assume those high school essayists would know not to crib entire entries from Wikipedia.

All of the plagiarism accusations, all of them correct, popped up after the manifesto was discovered and bloggers ran it through software that detects unfair usage.  People seemed jubilant in a manner I could not understand because, on its face, who cares if a mass murderer of children plagiarized his brick of a manifesto?  There are far more moral issues to discuss when talking about Breivik.  The plagiarism, rather than being one more example of the criminal nature of Breivik needs to be looked at in terms of what it represents.  Plagiarism is a form of lying, a form of intellectual theft, and when one steals the ideas of others, it can point to the notion that the plagiarist is trying to either align himself with ideas he thinks are brilliant or he is trying to cover up a lack of confidence in his own writing.  I think Breivik’s plagiarism points to both but it also points to something else I will discuss Part Four.

There were moments when Breivik wrote in an extemporaneous, personal style, like in the sections where he reproduced his diary and discussed actions he truly performed.  But even when he was talking about himself, he often used trite devices to distance himself from his exposure.  It was as if he realized he was talking about himself too much and wanted to distract from it, but couldn’t stop writing about himself even if he tried.  For instance, he produces an “interview” called  “Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the PCCTS, Knights Templar” and for a few minutes, I thought that maybe, perhaps I was reading the words of a compatriot in Breivik’s scheme.  He makes references to having comrades in arms as well as ideology.  But no, it was an interview with himself (and whether or not I think the text proves he acted alone is something I will touch on in in depth my fourth article).

When someone who borrows ideology from others, when someone plagiarizes the key points of his manifesto, when he writes as if he has a book open in front of him, yet carries on an interview with himself that goes on for 64 pages, that is a clue of sorts.  That clue is that his personality is more important than his ideology.  I will later make the assertion that Breivik has a personality disorder, an armchair psychiatric diagnosis to be sure, but for now, Breivik to me is sui generis because he is so bland and so self-absorbed.  He is a media-age monster, grooming his image before and after his rampage.   It is almost as if how he is perceived is more important than how his actions are perceived, and that will be a key discussion in my part four.

As a woman who knows far more about mass murderers and sociopaths than I ever planned to discover, Breivik is a monster unto himself.  He lacks the simmering hatred with a catastrophic trigger that is associated with most mass murderers.  For a religious man, who discusses Catholicism as a means of conquering his greatest foes, he talks about it dispassionately and incorporates little of it in his daily life, the Knights Templar cover notwithstanding.  In fact, the only time I sensed Breivik was showing emotion was during the first pages of his manifesto when he discusses the utopia he feels like he lost out on because of cultural Marxism, and during some of the discussions of cultural Marxism itself.  When he expressed anger in the sections about Islam, the anger very much seemed borrowed from other writers.  I sensed none of Fjordman’s urgent paranoia.   In fact, I wonder if Fjordman was Breivik’s favorite writer because Fjordman had something Breivik lacks – a passionate identity.  Breivik’s utter lack of self outside of his interest in his appearance is remarkable.

Breivik, even in his manifesto, comes across as vain, isolated, and more of a Walter Mitty fantasist than a mass murderer driven by religious bigotry.  At times his manifesto read more like an RPG manual, casting a strange light over his use of video games to train.    I wonder if, in a narcissistic haze, he saw all of his victims as two-dimensional characters in the self-centered game going on in his head. He comes across more as a man trying on roles – Mason, Knight Templar, Eurabian theorist, chemist, marksman, international criminal and male model – than a man who was driven by hate for Islamic immigration or such deep love for his country he had to protect it at any cost.   And there is a reason for those disparities, one all too common.

The reason is that Breivik is a liar.  He lies to himself and he lies to us in his manifesto.  He hid a key motive for the murders behind hundreds of pages of vaguely relevant information. He isn’t crazy – people with personality disorders can be terribly deluded but they are not insane.  He is simply a fabulist, a man who hated the life he was born into and the life he had come to live and was willing to do anything to redefine himself.

Does this mean he was not influenced by Fjordman?  Of course he was.  I think I made my case for how it is Fjordman’s violent rhetoric influenced Breivik.  And in terms of common sense, you don’t reproduce article after article from another writer in your mass murder manifesto unless you are influenced or inspired by them in some way.   Even had Breivik never read a word of Fjordman’s work, it still would have been violent, bigoted and misogynistic.   It is just Fjordman’s great misfortune that his loaded mini-manifestos found a reader willing to take his words to heart.  But I think Fjordman may have influenced Breivik in a way that no one could have anticipated, a way no one can hold Fjordman responsible for.  I think Breivik, who already had distaste for Muslims and feminism, found Fjordman so intoxicating because he longed to have the influence that Fjordman had and probably still has.

Fjordman was a part of a tightly knit group of Islamophobes online.  People in that oeuvre looked up to Fjordman.  They found him to be a great thinker.  And Breivik even wanted to meet Fjordman but was rebuffed.   I cannot entirely make the case that Breivik had an ideological and sociological crush on Fjordman, but it sure seemed likely when I finished the manifesto.   And this is a stretch, but I also wonder how Breivik truly felt about Fjordman refusing to meet him.  In his manifesto, he makes little jabs at men who blog and do not act.    It is sheer speculation but it has a ring of truth to it that if Breivik could not meet his idol, if he could not become a part of the thinkers who fueled his ideology, he would best him in some manner.

But that’s just one of the theories floating in my head.  While Breivik was decidedly an Islamophobe, there definitely other motives that fueled his rampage.  The very way he begins his manifesto is a very good clue that he has mixed motives.  The beginning is not an overview of atrocities attributed to Muslims, but rather a discourse on how the family of the 1950s cannot exist in a politically correct world.  I intend to make the case in Part Four that Breivik was as equally motivated by twisted emotions about what he considers the destruction of his own family as he was the need to end Muslim immigration in Europe.  Though in his manifesto he gives a reason for why he did not shoot Muslims, the fact that he shot young people, teens, having fun at a summer camp, speaks to motives in addition to Islamophobia.  It is more in line with his loathing of cultural Marxism, but even that only goes so far.  By shooting teenagers, he violated even his own outline of the “traitors” who needed to die first.  He shot to death dozens of teenagers because he was striking out at a country he felt deprived him of the family and youth he thinks he deserved and missed out on.

So, in my estimation, Breivik is a liar both to himself and his audience, and his motives go further than just a look at his hatred discussed disjointedly and blandly in his manifesto.  Given that much of his manifesto is the work of others, either attributed or plagiarized, and that his pages and pages of historical revisionism and examples of Bad Things Muslims Have Done Over The Past 1400 Years are just regurgitated facts from Islamophobia sites, I don’t even see the point of discussing them.  Discussing Fjordman’s anti-Muslim beliefs is discussing Breivik’s anti-Muslim beliefs.  You can find analysis of those parts of his manifesto elsewhere, and in the comments on those sites you will find refutations that are then refuted and in turn there is more refutation but there is never a conclusion.  A True Believer in conspiracy theory cannot change his or her argument and non-believers are foolish even to try and convince them to see reason on an online venue.  So I am not going to examine all that minutia and those “facts” repackaged and filtered through Eurabia conspiracy theory.  It would just be my facts against their facts and it would be a colossal waste of time.

Instead, I intend to examine this manifesto in two ways.  In this article, Part Three, I want to discuss the framework Breivik set up for the massacre and the things he actually did to prepare.   I warn you – Part Three is the  least interesting part of my analysis and probably reads that way.  But it is worth looking at, I think.  Breivik  may be lying about some of the things he did, but that framework at least seems to have some authenticity to it.  The framework, in which he analyzed who should be killed, how to go about it, evasive maneuvers, etc. was clearer and seemed less copied and false than all the facts he vomited up.

There are some out there who seem to think this manifesto should not be discussed at all because parts of it read like The Anarchist Cookbook combined with some volumes from Paladin Press and to discuss it is to aid in the dissemination of such information. I find that laughable at best because there is nothing in this manifesto that the average teenager cannot find in several minutes using a Smart Phone.  Moreover, refusing to look at this section because it is deemed too dangerous to discuss just perpetuates the thought that Breivik had to have had help or financial backing, and feeds the fear that there is a sinister group of people training to kill Muslims and liberals in Europe.  If nothing else, this manifesto shows what the so-called super-empowered individual can accomplish on his own, which is cold comfort, I know.

All of that having been said, I don’t intend to reproduce any content that could prove a legal liability to this site or to my web hosting service.

In Part Four, which will hopefully come no later than early next week, I will discuss common questions the manifesto answers, Breivik’s emotional motives that fueled the murders, what I consider to be a personality disorder that is evident even to those who did not read 2083, and other inconsistencies and issues that cropped up as I read his “interview” and his diary.  That, I think, will be infinitely more interesting than this discussion.

But if you’re still here with me, let’s discuss Anders Behring Breivik.

Breivik (and Fjordman) declare war

Though Breivik quotes John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson as he makes his case for the moral justification for bloody “counter-jihad,” he writes out a case for a planned, tactical murder spree.  It was utterly unnerving to read the intricate plans he created, the experiments he ran, the way he set out methodically making lists of traitors to kill and the advice he gives.  As I have already warned, as he discusses the Muslim and cultural Marxist threat,  at no time did those words sound like they came from him.  He believed that both were a threat, he genuinely is an Islamophobe and a person who loathes what he considers to be cultural Marxism, but his personality never came out until about page 775, when Part Three of the manifesto begins. Entitled “A Declaration of pre-emptive War,” it is here that he begins to create what, as I referred to above, reads like  a manual for a role-playing game.

It was very interesting to me that I most felt the personality of Breivik when I read what seems like an exercise in unreality, or maybe alternate reality.   The part of him that read the most real was when he was descended into fantasy.  To give the devil his due, he warns us it is all fantasy.  From pages 766-767:

Book 3, “A Declaration of preemptive War” and certain chapters in book 2 in this compendium, titled “2083”, and all related research files describes a hypothetical response to a perceived threat (so called cultural  Marxist/multiculturalist atrocities and the threat of Islamisation). As such, it is a fictional description regarding how it could be like if Islam would be dominant in Europe. The concept of the story/plot is based on what it would be like if certain Christian/conservative/nationalist resistance groups/individuals chose to oppose these so called perceived threats and enemies. It describes in shocking detail how they would most likely rationalise/think/justify/argue and behave towards these perceived threats/enemies. This books chapter 3 describes how a “fictional” resistance group is emerging and how it would operate from the so called “Phase 1 through Phase 3” in order to prevent these perceived threats and atrocities from futher manifesting and to prevent an alleged future Muslim takeover. It also describes specifically how this hypothetical fictional group, “PCCTS, Knights Templar”, would choose to respond towards the so called ”enablers” or the so called “cultural Marxist/multiculturalist” elites that are allegedly allowing millions of Muslims to enter Europe.

Yeah, he puts words like fictional in quotes to give it the illusion that he is writing in a “wink-wink-nudge-nudge” manner, indicating that this is not, in fact, utter fiction. And I know others out there soundly disagree with me on this, but this is fiction. There are racist, bigoted, utterly offensive groups out there who echo his sentiments about Muslim immigration.  Fjordman’s beliefs are more or less Breivik’s beliefs. There are many who believe as he does and some even think it was quite a good idea that he shot all those young Socialists but not a single one of them backed him, financially or even in terms of overt moral support. He acted alone.

That is particularly hard for people in the United States to believe. We really like the ideas of vast conspiracies to commit the acts that one very motivated person could  do on his or her own. We also don’t like the idea that a person could have more than one motive to do the unthinkable. I am just a book blogger, meaning I have no credentials to my name other than an English degree and a stack of books in my brain, but if there is to be any understanding of Breivik, we will have to accept that he had more than one motive when he murdered 77 people. As I discuss the criteria he set up for those he considered traitors, all the experiments he engaged in, how he funded everything via sponging off his mother and credit card fraud, it will be tempting to think he killed all those people for one reason and one reason alone: because he loathed Muslims and feared the Socialist government would continue to let them immigrate unless they were stopped somehow. Even though I will discuss the other motives in depth in Part Four, keep them in mind as you read. In addition to being a violent religious bigot, I think that his bizarre, game-like interaction with the world and his extreme narcissism were also potent motives.

And this is why I feel so much pity for Fjordman. His ideas are repellent and it is a good thing they have been dragged out into the light. It is good for society that his unhealthy ideas are being confronted. But it was just his bad luck that Breivik chose him as his inspiration. Fjordman stands responsible for his violent rhetoric and is damn lucky no one took him seriously before Breivik but Breivik and his strange mind are solely responsible for what happened on 7/22. Fjordman simply inspired him and may be a dreadful person in other respects but he did not cause this. Had Fjordman not ever blogged a single word, Breivik would have found inspiration and justification for his war games. Of that I feel certain.

Breivik begins the third part of his manifesto by quoting Fjordman’s article, “A European Declaration of Independence,” wherein the citizens of Europe, almost amusingly and almost certainly impotently, demand on pain of refusing to pay taxes that the European governments stop Muslim immigration, withdraw from the EU, cease support of Palestine, no longer permit progressive curricula in schools, and generally stop acting like the 1950s ever ended. It ends with this sentence, on page 770, emphasis mine:

We will stop paying taxes and take the appropriate measures to protect our own security and ensure our national survival.

And that, dear readers, is why I don’t feel that much pity for Fjordman.

The Civil War Timeline

Breivik meticulously writes out the timeline for the civil war he insists he is ushering in. He includes events that led to his desire to see the legitimate governments of Europe overthrown and goes on until the last traitor is executed. I’ll discuss just the summaries. From page 803 he explains phase one:

Phase of Dialogue, 1955-1999
- From the creation of EU’s Eurabia project in combination with the implementation of cultural Marxism (European multiculturalism) in 1955 to the NATO bombing campaigns of Serbian forces in 1999 authorised by criminal Western European and US leaders.

Okay, phase one was Eurabia’s implementation, and dialogue with the traitors failed to achieve any change.

Also from page 803:

European Civil War, Phase 2 – 2030-2070
- Islam, 15-40% based on country
- Consolidation continues, more advanced forms of resistance groups.
- Preparation for pan-European coup d’états.

Muslims invade Europe, resistance groups form, localized revolutionaries gird their loins.

Still on page 803:

European Civil War, Phase 3 – 2070-2083
- Islam, 30-50% based on country
- Pan-European coup d’états. Cultural Communism/multiculturalism defeated in the first European country followed by the rest.
- The implementation of a Cultural Conservative political agenda begins.
- Execution of cultural Marxist/multiculturalist category A and B traitors initiated.
- Deportation of Muslims initiated.

Even more Muslims, the natives revolt, Marxists are wiped out culturally, traitors killed and Muslims sent away.

Observe the mind-numbing horror that is a mass murder manifesto with all the characteristics of a gaming manual. Not satisfied to put out his goals and the timelines, he also has to inform us of the potential outcomes of these theoretical timelines. He is a thorough game master. Still on page 803:

There are four potential outcomes of Phase 2 and 3
1. The Multiculturalist Alliance might attempt to create several “mini-Pakistan’s” within Europe (granting Muslims territory/autonomy). This must be stopped at all costs.
2. Reformation of Islam resulting in a secularised and impotent version who rejects larger parts of Sharia law, the concept of Quranic abrogation, Al-Taqiyya, Jihad and every “intolerant” sura and hadith. This scenario is very unlikely due to the fact that it would only be supported by the secular Muslims.
3. Coup – European Resistance Movements with the assistance of the national militaries will successfully overthrow the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe resulting in Muslim deportations (relatively few casualties). This scenario is the preferred outcome.
4. Civil war (cultural conservatives vs. cultural Marxists and Muslim forces) – resulting in atrocities committed by both sides (Lebanon/Serbia variants). Atrocities such as acts of genocide or unchecked pogroms might be a result in scenario 1. 2. 3. or 4. Many inhabitants will flee to the US, Russia, Australia or New Zealand. One of the above scenarios is likely to happen before the end of Phase 2 (2030-2070) or in Phase 3.

Okay, so now you know how the timeline could not go according to plan. This is a very micromanaging, fussy manifesto.

The Knights Templar

The idea of the Knights Templar enforcing a European identity via creating a new sort of Christendom caused a lot of people to rush to the judgement that Breivik had some sort of link to right-wing Christians.   It also caused some consternation because  the very idea of a cloaked, hidden group of warriors working behind the scenes to kill Socialists, in the wake of 7/22, had to be terrifying.

But it is all fantasy. It is all a part of the strange game Breivik was playing (and I hope I am not offending anyone by using the word game – nothing was funny or playful about what happened as a result of Breivik’s delusional thinking). I have been wrong before and will be wrong again but I assert there is no cadre of Knights waiting to repel the Muslims, following Breivik’s plans. There is some temptation to lump the Gates of Austria writers, Fjordman and similar into the idea of a hidden group dedicated to civil war in Europe, but I think it is best if everyone just accepts that Breivik acted alone. The human mind recoils at a human being so controlled, so precise and so planned that he could commit such murderous mayhem without any assistance, but after reading this manifesto, I truly believe that was the case.

Breivik begins this part of the manual by entitling it “A European Military Order re-emerges – In Praise of the New Knighthood.” He describes the history of the Knights Templar, which is not particularly interesting, but I do want to share this part, from page 812:

The Knights Templar, whose official name was: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici (PCCTS) (English: Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders.

This is important only because the acronym PCCTS comes up from time to time. Most of this largely bears no discussion because it is simply regurgitated from the Wikipedia entry on the Knights Templar, with parts that didn’t suit his purposes edited out. The only other part worth mentioning is from page 812:

The red cross that the Templar Knights wore on their robes was a symbol of martyrdom (the symbol was referred to as “cross of the martyr”), and to die in combat was considered a great honour that assured a place in heaven.

This is important because martyrdom will come up again. Many have wondered why Breivik did not take his life at the end of his rampage in order to achieve the martyrdom he feels is his reward. Well, a couple of reasons. He makes it clear later he is now a living martyr, suffering for his beliefs and serving as an example to us all. But really, I wonder if anyone can  really imagine the man who wrote out all of these controlling, finicky, excessively explained details and instructions ever removing himself from the story?

We begin to see more of his game manual writing again on page 816, and whenever you see a bunch of slashes, you can tell Breivik is making things up:

The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come. PCCTS, Knights Templar on behalf of the free peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war against the cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe. We acknowledge that Europe has been in a technical state of civil war
since 1999 when European and US cultural Marxists/multiculturalists, through NATO, decided to attack Christian Serb forces and thus disallowing them their right to repel Islam from their ancestral lands.

The war against the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes of Europe is a pre-emptive war, waged in order to repel, defeat or weaken an ongoing Islamic invasion/ colonisation, to gain a strategic advantage in an unavoidable war before that threat materialises. Thus, we consider this pre-emptive war as completely justifiable as it is a war of self-defence.
We cannot afford to wait around and re-act when it is too late. We have anticipated, identified and will act accordingly upon the refuse, volatile, national and international conditions before they become explosive, before they lead us to catastrophe.

And again, it bears repeating that there is no one but him. There is no army acting on behalf of anyone. It’s just a strange, deluded man killing people.

In a game manual, this would be in the background story section. Setting the scene, if you will. From page 817:

Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici – PCCTS (the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon), the Knights Templar was re-founded in London in 2002 by representatives from eight European countries, for the purpose of serving the interests of the free indigenous peoples of Europe and to fight against the ongoing European Jihad (referred to as the “third Jihad”). The Knights Templar was re-founded as a pan-European nationalist military order and a military/criminal tribunal with two primary objectives. The order is to serve as an armed Indigenous Rights Organisation and as a Crusader Movement (anti-Jihad movement).

The founding session (two meetings consisting of 4 founding members and host as a security precaution) was held in London, United Kingdom – Apr, 2002.

Founding (re-founding) members:
Anonymous 1 – Nationality: English Protestant (Host)
Anonymous 2 – Nationality: English Christian atheist
Anonymous 3 – Nationality: French Catholic
Anonymous 4 – Nationality: German Christian atheist
Anonymous 5 – Nationality: Dutch Christian agnostic
Anonymous 6 – Nationality: Greek Orthodox
Anonymous 7 – Nationality: Russian Christian atheist
Anonymous 8 – Nationality: Norwegian Protestant (member and proxy for 9)
Anonymous 9 – Nationality: Serbian Orthodox (by proxy, location: Monrovia, Liberia)

Unable to attend:
Anonymous 10 – Nationality: Swedish
Anonymous 11 – Nationality: Belgian
Anonymous 12 – Nationality: European-American

(Names will be kept classified indefinitely to avoid cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist persecution but each individual may reveal his own name during the three phases at his own convenience).

Remember, even though he put “fictional” in quotes, this is fiction. These are the utterings of a narcissist. Of course, of all the people in Norway who find Islamic immigration objectionable, this man, with very little online presence and whose sole military experience may or may not have been during some boot-camps for pay in Eastern Europe, would be the first choice of a resurrected chivalric order to represent Norway in the secret meeting that planned a counter-jihad. Or he’s a narcissist with no accomplishments who needs to give the illusion that beyond the horrific murders of innocents, he is a man of power and prestige. I think the “by proxy” part is the best detail. You know how it is when people are lying and they create all kinds of extraneous details to make their tale sound more real? “By proxy” is just such a detail. Meaningless but hopefully gives a sense of greater reality.

At any rate, at this meeting, these national representatives decided that their unified purpose included the following, from page 818:

· Oppose all hate-ideologies; communism (anti-individualistic), cultural Marxism/multiculturalism (anti-European), Islam (anti-kafr) and national socialism (anti-Jewish).
· 100 year plan to contribute to seize political power in Western European countries currently controlled by anti-nationalists (cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes). Bring freedom and cultural and demographical sustainability to all Europeans
· Serve and protect the indigenous peoples of Europe and all other loyal and patriotic European individuals
· Preserve European culture, traditions and heritage
· Stop the ongoing European cultural and demographical genocide facilitated by the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists, suicidal humanists, and capitalist globalist elites
· Prevent the deconstruction of Christendom in Europe
· Prevent further Islamic demographic warfare – disallow the Muslim invasion/colonisation of Europe
· Repulse Islam from Europe by the initiation of future deportation campaigns
· Effectuate punishment for Western European cultural Marxist/multiculturalist/globalist perpetrators for crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of Europe
· Oppose and defeat the Multiculturalist Alliance (MA 100) in Europe using any and all means necessary
· Support Israel’s fight against Jihad
· Liberation of the Middle East Christians from Islamic rule
· Virtues such as the willingness to martyr oneself for the cause, the exercise of discretion, voluntary poverty and devoted obedience to the principles are mandatory for all Justiciar Knights
· Honour the wishes and memories of our forefathers, who secured European security and prosperity in the past
· Follow the PCCTS’s mantra – “Martyrdom before Dhimmitude”.

Okay, so that’s the mission statement of the new Knights Templar.

After this he goes into pure game manual writing again, discussing in depth the phases and ranks of the Knights Templar and explains who can join. It may or may not surprise you that basically anyone can join. From page 820:

Any self appointed Justiciar Knight has been given the authority, by PCCTS on behalf of;
1. The free indigenous peoples of Europe
2. Those Europeans not yet born
3. The legacy of our forefathers and fallen martyrs
- to act as a judge, jury and executioner until the free, indigenous peoples of Europe are no longer threatened by cultural genocide, subject to cultural Marxist/Islamic tyranny or territorial or existential threats through Islamic demographic warfare. It is therefore within any- and every-ones right to act in accordance with the given guidelines.

So you can appoint yourself in the name of the unborn and every natural-born European citizen whether they want you to or not. I know he is trying to be mystical in an Arthurian vein but I often found myself wanting to laugh. Then I remembered this is the blueprint of a man who killed teenagers in the name of a non-existent organization and the urge to laugh faded. Breivik continues to discuss the new Templars and their objectives, from pages 822-823:

Creating awareness of specifically defined topics is the essence of our phase 1 struggle. We will launch information campaigns and create awareness by using any means necessary, including distribution of our messages by
using lethal shock attacks against concentrations of class A and B traitors in a pan-European context. The primary goal of the shock attacks is not the immediate physical manifestation of the attack (destroying a few buildings, killing a few hundred traitors) but rather the indirect effects. Shock attacks will have the potency to penetrate the strict
censorship regime of the cultural Marxists/multiculturalists. Any substantial shock attack will therefore have the potential to do massive ideological damage on the multicultural ideology (as the multicultural dream will become ever so distant) and its propagators in various ways;
- Education of the European peoples – people will be interested to know why buildings around them are falling down and will seek information themselves and/or learn what the media presents
- Moral effect/recruitment – encouraging thousands of brothers and sisters
- Creating important military and ideological reference points
- Increasing and developing the level of innovation/sophistication of methods applied
- Contribution to increase the acceptance level of new methods applied
- Discouraging our enemies which may lead to direct/indirect “defection”, or fear/reservations against criticising right wingers etc.
- Contribution to force many Europeans out of their self-induced coma
- Many individuals (especially category A, B and C traitors who until now has just “gone with the flow”) will re-evaluate the premises for their support to multiculturalism (destruction of our European cultures) or at least the premises for allowing mass-Muslim immigration/the ongoing Islamisation and will re-consider if it is really worth the trouble
- Contribution for creating a broader acceptance for defending and support European culture without being target of EUSSR labelling techniques (bigot, fascist, Nazi, racist).
- Marketing the resistance movement
- Making moderate cultural conservatives more approachable, by the establishment, by broadening or expanding the very definition of extreme right wing axis etc.
- Many individuals (politically neutral) may start to have reservations against working in government buildings (near concentrations of category A or B traitors) which will help polarise the left and right.

This was hard to read because the events of 7/22 were shock attacks.  It’s numbing to see them referred to so impassively. Given how quickly even a man like Fjordman disavowed Breivik, how calmly and without grandstanding the people of Norway dealt with this horror, it would appear that the only thing Breivik accomplished was forcing Fjordman into hiding and encouraging disgust for people like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer.

In the midst of pages and pages about what the Knights are going to do, Breivik comes out with this, and fabulist that he is, this is where he is is trying to make people believe that even though he obviously acted alone, as his manifesto bears out, he was also a part of a larger agency. From page 827:

As a Justiciar Knight, you are a part of an indestructible network of cells, spread all around Europe that functions without a central command.

No dormant cell can remain inactive waiting for orders from above. Your obligation as a Justiciar Knight/a cell commander is to act on your own initiative. Any single patriot who wants to establish a cell and begin action can do so, and thus becomes a part of the organisation.

The initial advantages of our clandestine cells are:
1. We take the enemy by surprise.
2. We know the terrain of the encounter.
3. We have greater mobility and speed than the police.
4. We are in command of the situation, and demonstrate great decisiveness, which on
the other hand will result in our enemy being stunned and incapable of acting.
5. We are prepared to die in order to complete our objectives.

Interesting. But rest assured, there is no indestructible network of cells around Europe. There are just bigots on the Internet and the occasional man like Breivik, who is building his own delusional legend on the backs of innocent people.

There’s a lot more about the cell structures, organizational structure, mistakes to avoid, and the philosophical and actual use of terror as the Knights Templar intend to use it against European citizens. He runs true to type and he mentions the movie The Matrix. But it was not until his discourse on how he didn’t want to have to kill but had to for reasons of patriotism that he mentioned anything worth discussing in all those pages. From page 837:

As a Justiciar Knight you are operating as a jury, judge and executioner on behalf of all free Europeans. Never forget that it is not only your right to act against the tyranny of the cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Europe, it is your duty to do so.

There are situations in which cruelty is necessary, and refusing to apply necessary cruelty is a betrayal of the people whom you wish to protect.

At times, in all these details, I wondered if he really was trying to explain himself to us. He employs a strange logic here, wherein he must kill the very people he wants to save. He later explains that to kill Muslims would have even worse results as it would give the Muslims more of a sense of martyrdom and would result in Muslim and EU retaliation against Westerners.  But even so, this is strange – he must kill his countrymen with cruelty to save them.

Martyrdom
Breivik discusses martyrdom a lot in the section on the Justiciar Knights. Here’s his take on what happens to a dead Justiciar Knight, from page 940:

They may physically kill a Justiciar Knight, but your name will be remembered for centuries. Your story will be told to future generations which will significantly contribute to the morale in the emerging Western European conservative resistance movement.

Possibly, but generally mass murderers of children are remembered poorly. As a rule, it is safe to assume that if you kill kids, people will curse your name. I’m pretty certain of that. I can’t tell if he is being delusion or disingenuous.

Also from page 940:

This is the critical and essential mission we, the Justiciar Knights, have been tasked with. This is why we are willing to martyr ourselves for the cause, for the greater good of our people. Do not mourn us but celebrate us instead; and celebrate all European patriotic martyrs who HAS fought and ARE still fighting for you and for your family. Because after all; we are fighting for the freedom of all Europeans. We must fight on behalf of our brothers and sisters because the great majority of our women, the ignorant, the weak, the impaired, the cowardly and the selfish are either unable or unwilling to fight.

At some point in this I also had to ask if Breivik was writing delusions or if he was just throwing out wishful thinking. Was he a man trapped in a video game of his own making, lashed to it by the tendrils of his narcissism that required him to kill in order to overcome a personality reads like Reich’s Little Man?  Or was he just a murderous, sick man who created an elaborate cover story to conceal his nasty motives? Though I have my theories, I have to admit that I don’t know if anyone will ever know what made Breivik murder people. Fjordman’s rhetoric of violence was no help, to be sure, but there was a killer in Breivik before he ever read a word of Fjordman’s.

Breivik discusses the crimes against Europe

Breivik lays out in excruciating details all of the things considered crimes to his imaginary Knights Templar reincarnation.  The crimes  resemble nothing so much as the rules for people playing an adversarial role-playing game. If you have ever read the background set-up and rules for such a game, you will understand what I mean, except instead of power levels for trolls and elves, you have criminal rankings for traitors to white, Christian Europeans and an enumeration for what is considered a crime.

It really does read like a game. It’s sickening and eerie. I felt a sense of complete unreality as I read it. I kept thinking, “I am looking into the mind of a man who killed teenagers, shot them to death while dressed up in a uniform, while playing a role.” Bat Ye’or’s conspiracy theory and Fjordman’s violent rhetoric and misogyny blended together with Breivik’s own neuroses and a possible personality disorder and the end result was a detailed game of murder with the roles of game master and player both assigned to one man.

These traitors Breivik discusses can be accused and found guilty for permitting Muslims to murder, rape and assault Europeans, commit financial crimes and property crimes like arson. Aiding any Muslim cause is grounds for treason. But so is brainwashing the native Europeans. From page 777:

Contributing to systematical ideological coercing and brainwashing (also known as thought reform or re-education) of the indigenous peoples of Western Europe in the attempt to modify people’s social and political philosophy and instilling certain attitudes. These indoctrination efforts are aimed towards all Europeans in order to form certain beliefs in a person with the aim of affecting individual value systems and subsequent thought-patterns and behaviours. This has been done by designing multiculturalist school curriculums with the intention of indoctrinating all individuals. Falsified and biased representations, falsified or biased statistics, falsified or biased sources, biased/unbalanced coverage and labelling certain opponents/groups as bigots/racists/Nazis is common. Furthermore, propaganda, direct or indirect manipulation and other forms of trickery is prevalent with the intention of creating a foundation for a new society based on multiculturalism and emotionalism/extreme egalitarianism. Other motives include the goal of limiting opposition/resistance towards mass-Muslim immigration/Islamic demographic warfare.

Of course, the Knights Templar will be determining what facts are correct and unbiased, but there is no Knights Templars so it is just Breivik, setting himself up as judge, jury and executioner, arbiter of what is true, what is factual and what is balanced. He is the King of his game.

Breivik describes the victims of the crimes

Breivik outlines the many crimes of cultural Marxists that require redress,crimes against the conservative victims he seeks to save in Europe. From page 778, emphasis in original:

The following institutions, norms, principles, and traditions have been systematically criticised/ ridiculed/ opposed/ undermined/ weakened/ partly dismantled:
The cultural Marxist/multiculturalist aim is to destroy all ties to history, culture, family,community, and one’s people as a whole:
· Traditional family structure (the nuclear family) through glorifying non-marital relationships, emphasis on sex education from young age, casual sex etc.
· European national states and national borders
· European/national cultural heritage and traditions
· European Christian traditions
· The Church’s influence in society (social and political influence). Conservative Church leaders are undermined/ridiculed/silenced.
· Discipline and disciplinary measures in educational institutions, at home and in society in general (by opposing/criticising/disallowing mental and physical disciplinary measures)
· The political mechanisms based on rationality and logic (death penalty, strict sentencing)
· The police/military role and influence in society by limiting their influence and rights (law and order)
· Men’s right to equal child care/custody.
· Conservative organisations or individuals opposing mass-Muslim immigration and/or multiculturalism/feminism/extreme egalitarianism/emotionalism are systematically criticised, undermined, silenced, ridiculed and labelled as bigots/racists/Nazis/fascists. Examples are Christian newspapers/magazines and other cultural conservative publications who are being discriminated against through various means.

And this is just part of the crimes he feels have been committed by the cultural Marxists. He goes on to discuss in depth all of the crimes he felt were committed against conservative ideals  in the liberal media coverage of  ecological issues (like touting zero population while refusing to call for third world contraceptive usage), the Iraq War, the Balkan War, Southern Thailand, Russophobic coverage of Chechnya, and many others, as well as failure to cover topics he deems of importance, like what he considers the ongoing Muslim jihad against the West. Just the media failures of the cultural Marxists take up three pages. His obsession with what he thinks is a dystopia shows that Breivik’s motives transcend simply wanting to make sure Europe is Muslim and Marxist-free. He has micromanaged his revolution down to the last fussy detail of what is a crime and what is not a crime and what portion of his utopia was affected. This is not The Declaration of the Rights of Man as filtered through a Norwegian Nationalist. It is a childish attempt to control every detail of a fantasy world wherein all of Breivik’s opposition are silenced and killed. Any idea acted out against his solo campaign of terror must be crushed. Again, he is the master of his own game.

Breivik’s description of the traitors and what is to be done about them

What to do about them? Well, execute them, of course, but Breivik has classes of traitors, some more traitorous than others. He says on page 805 with this utterly strange statement:

How shall we differentiate between hardcore Marxists, cultural Marxists, suicidal humanists/career cynicists and the capitalist globalists? The common factor here is that they all believe they are doing the right thing, so they all have good intentions, at least according to themselves. But this can also be said about Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. They
were all idealists in their own twisted way. Regardless of their twisted intentions they are all mass murderers and must be treated as such.

The only thing that separates Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot with today’s cultural Marxists, suicidal humanists, career cynicists and capitalist globalists (multiculturalists) is that the tyrants of today are all directly responsible for the extermination of THEIR OWN people and intend to sell the rest into Islamic slavery. Never in the history of man has an ideology revolved around the concept of exterminating its own people. As such, multiculturalism is truly unique in human history.

Yes, this is Breivik taking to task multiculturalists for killing their own people via their immigration policies. This is instructive for setting the terms for whom he will mark as a traitor, but it also is interesting that he, a man who killed his own people, is seemingly unaware that he is also a mass murderer who slayed his own in the pursuit of a demented goal.

He gives an estimate of how the enemy numbers break down, with no explanation of how he got there, but as game master, does he really need to justify himself? From page 805-806:

- Hardcore Marxists: 10% (hateful intentions)
- Cultural Marxists: 20% (semi hateful intentions)
- Suicidal Humanists/career cynicists: 65% (suicidally naive/egotistical)
- Capitalist globalists: 5% (greed)
100% of the above support and propagate multiculturalism.

So just to make sure we all are on the same page, he considers moderate and fervent Marxists, humanists, and globalist capitalists to be European traitors.  He also lists by country the political parties he feels should be targets in all EU countries, mostly those that he thinks have supported multiculturalism. It’s a long list.

Finally, he discusses the classification system for determining traitors.   I think this is important to reproduce just in the interests of conveying the information but also because by his own classification system, he killed innocent people. From page 930:

Category A traitor
- Political leaders (NGO leaders included)
- Media leaders (chief editors)
- Cultural leaders
- Industry leaders

Category A traitors are usually any current Heads of State, ministers/senators, directors and leaders of certain organisations/boards etc. who are guilty of charges 1-8. Category A traitors consist of the most influential and highest profile traitors.
10 per 1 million citizens.
Punishment: death penalty and expropriation of property/funds

From page 930-931:

Category B traitors are cultural Marxist/multiculturalist politicians, primarily from the alliance of European political parties known as ”the MA 100” (parties who support multiculturalism) and EU parliamentarians. They can be elected and non-elected parliamentarians, their advisors and any public and/or corporate servant who has been and still are indirectly or directly implicated in committing the following acts.

Category B traitors can also be individuals from various professional groups (but not limited to): journalists, editors, teachers, lecturers, university professors, various school/university board members, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists/celebrities etc. They can also be individuals from other professional groups such as: technicians, scientists, doctors and even Church leaders. In addition, individuals (investors etc) who have directly or indirectly funded related activities. It’s important to note that the stereotypical ”socialists”, collectivists, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists, environmentalists etc are to be considered on an individual basis only. Not everyone who are associated with one of these groups or movements is to be considered as a cultural Marxist/multiculturalist.

Former category A traitors; Heads of State, Ministers/Senators etc., directors and leaders of certain organisations/boards etc. can be re-classified as category B traitors for practical targeting reasons (they have lost influence and will not yield the same target value/effect as current category A traitors).

Certain ANTIFA leaders or organisers related to ANTIFA movements (and other dedicated members) are considered category B traitors. Non-essential members are considered category C traitors. Many professionals such as f. example journalists, influential sociologists or university professors etc. are considered and categorized as category B traitors as we consider them political activists and not merely professionals. They will of course claim ignorance and state that they are a-political. This strategy might work for them until the day where they are visited by a Justiciar Knight – their judge, jury and executioner.
1000 per 1 million citizens.
Punishment: death penalty and expropriation of property/funds. Punishment can be reduced under certain circumstances.

Yeah, that’s a lot of detail, and again, it reads like a gaming manual. On one hand, this manifesto is both a disorganized mess and a creepy look at a control-freak who has to nail down every element of his fantasy murder league.

On page 931, emphasis in original:

Category C traitor
Category C traitors are less influential and lower priority targets (often individuals who have facilitated category A and B traitors) but who are still guilty of charges 1-8.
10 000 per 1 million citizens.

Punishment: fines, incarceration, expropriation (considered as acceptable indirect casualties in larger operations where WMDs are involved).

Category D individuals
Category D individuals have little or no political influence but are facilitating category B and C traitors and/or MA100 political parties/media companies through various means. They are not guilty of charges 1-8 but work with or for individuals who are. The classification is of relevance when calculating/estimating indirect casualties concerning
larger operations where WMDs are involved, as any category D individuals is not considered an innocent “civilian” but rather as a secondary servant/facilitator.
20 000-30 000 per 1 million citizens
Punishment: none (not considered civilian)

I know it is sheer folly to discuss this as if it is a rational document but nowhere in there is a mention of high school students or college students. I also know the Prime Minister was supposed to be on the island that day and was a target for Breivik but even if one can consider students Class C traitors, they are only to be killed as collateral damage in WMD attacks, like when car bombs are deployed. By his own criteria he has violated the code of the Knights Templar. I think this is important because as much as he talks about smoke screens in this manifesto, the biggest smoke screen I think is the manifesto itself, offering so many details to cloud the truths. I will discuss this in depth in Part Four but I have to say killers are seldom as cut and dried as they are in the movies – I think several motives compelled Breivik and his choice of victims shows a lot about those motives.

One last very creepy detail from his discussion on killing traitors, from page 933:

Being a Justiciar Knight will involve killing our targets, or any system protector trying to stop us, indiscriminately. You will face women in battle and they will not hesitate to kill you. To them, you are just another armed criminal nut case as they will not know your true political agenda until after you have been slain or are apprehended. If you hesitate as much as a second due to the fact that your opponent is female you will fail. You must therefore embrace and familiarise yourself with the concept of killing women, even very attractive women.

It is not a secret that the average cultural conservative is a lot more chivalrous than the average person. After all, extreme feminism is a Marxist concept. As such, anti-Marxists usually have more traditional values and have been taught to revere women as they are the ones who will carry our offspring, the next generations. While being chivalrous is a good thing in ordinary day-to-day life, it will undoubtfully be fatal in any armed confrontation.

See, he’s suffering in this battle. As a chivalrous male, he will have to kill women. Even the pretty ones. At times I wondered if I were going a bit mad reading this. At times I could not believe the dedication to the irrational, to minutia and details that in light of all those people dying seem even more trivial.  What does it matter is a woman is lovely if you plan to shoot her unless one is an image-conscious, shallow criminal?  What a piddling human being Breivik is. What a tiny little man he reveals himself to be in his relentless need to define, to discuss and to worry every detail like a dog with a bone.

It should also be mentioned that Breivik describes how the traitors can “capitulate” to his demands. Breivik magnanimously offers these traitors a full pardon if they surrender to his Knights Templar government by January 1, 2020.

Muslim Assimilation Plan

Continuing in the vein of micromanaging every detail of his civil war, Breivik also sets out standards that Muslims can follow if they want to become Europeans. Muslims must hurry, however, as the offer to extend assimilation to them also expires on January 1, 2020. These are some onerous restrictions and seem perfectly in keeping with a man who is terrified of having different people around him. I am going to reproduce the whole thing not only because, for some reason, it disturbed me deeply imagining Breivik sitting down and coming up with this criteria, but because it also shows the level of controlling detail this man thinks is needed in order to bring about a new Europe. Beginning on page 809:

1. Convert to Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant).
Every individual is to accept baptism, the ritual act by which one is admitted to membership of the Christian Church, as a member of the particular Church in which the baptism is administered.

Attempt of al-taqiyya (Islamic deceit) for shorter or longer periods in order to try to wait for a regime change will not be tolerated. The convert will celebrate Christian holidays and adopt mainstream Christian customs and has to attend Church at least once a year during the full duration of the assimilation period (50) before he or any member of his family is allowed to follow a purely secular lifestyle. Secular Muslims are considered fully Muslim as long as they have not converted. The reason is because even secular Muslims celebrate Islamic holidays and perform certain Islamic religious or political rituals.

By the way, the assimilation period is two generations, not to be a time length shorter than 50 years. But it shows his tolerance that as man who prefers Catholicism, he permits the Protestant Church as an option for shedding all those Muslim ways.

The following are all from page 809:

2. Name change
During the required baptism the individual is to be given a Christian/European traditional name (first, middle and last name). No Arab/Asian/Islamic name is allowed (including The 99 Names of Allah).

3. Not allowed to practice your ”mother tongue” or Arabic
It is strictly prohibited to practice the individuals ”mother tongue” – Farsi, Urdu, Arabic, Somali etc. in any way – both in writing or vocally (this applies in all areas of society – home and elsewhere). Obviously this does not apply to Muslims living in Europe who are practising a European language (Bosniaks etc.).

4. All mosques and Islamic centers will be demolished or converted
All mosques which were built for the purpose of being a mosque will be demolished. All other buildings which were previously converted will be re-converted to their former use.

5. All Islamic and/or Arab-style or equivalent buildings/artwork will be demolished or modified
All traces of Islamic culture in Europe will be eradicated, even locations considered historical.

One wonders how it is that those Muslims who are not yet fluent in a European language will be able to comply with the language restrictions. Believe me, Breivik does not offer many chances to find holes in the entirety of his instructions (which is not to say the logic, decency or honesty of them).

He’s not finished yet. It continues on page 810:

6. Attempts to celebrate Islamic holidays, exercise or portray Sharia/Islamic codes/markers is strictly prohibited
An attempt of celebrating Ramadan, Eid or any Islamic holiday is strictly prohibited. This includes all cultural related rituals, dress codes, Islamic religious or cultural circumcisions, Islamic preparation of food, the use of any Muslim flag or identification (crescent moon), religious or cultural markings.

7. Measures taken against attempts of demographic warfare
All “ex-Muslim couples” (where both parents were/are Muslims) will not be allowed to exceed a birth rate of 2. Any breach of this policy will be considered a breach of the assimilation policies.

8. Correspondence with other Muslims abroad is strictly prohibited
All forms of correspondence (electronically, telephonic etc.) with Muslims living abroad is strictly forbidden. This includes contact with Muslim family in the country you originated from.

9. All travel to Muslim countries/territories or to any country where Muslims make out more than 20% of the population is strictly prohibited

So, in order to live in Europe, Muslim families who may have been there for a couple of generations will have to give up their right to reproductive determination and agree never to see, write or speak to any friends or family from their countries of origin. Of course, this also presupposes that Breivik will be able to force Europe to cut off all trade ties with Muslim nations, but I’m sure that will be just as simple and inevitable as the rest of his ideas in this game manual manifesto.

Breivik describes the legitimacy of his actions

Amongst all his other plans, Breivik states that the military must stop any actions that support and protect Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists. Country constitutions will be suspended, new “tribunals” selected, and new armies will be set up before new constitutions drawn up by Templars will be implemented. He explains why this is not an illegal, treasonous act in its own right on page 786:

We can say the following to those who are screaming; “fascist coup!”:

The current multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe are not at all democratic, this country is not democratic. They haven’t been democratic since the 1950s. There is no basis for democracy when all state institutions including schools/universities deliberately use advanced brainwashing techniques (as has been described thoroughly) to condition the people from resisting their own persecution and annihilation through the manifestations of cultural Marxism/multiculturalist doctrines. Furthermore, there is no basis for democracy when 99% of all journalists support and propagate multiculturalism and thus collaborate with the political elites in their quest to indoctrinate the people. There is no basis for democracy when all patriots and nationalists are ignored, ridiculed or persecuted. Factors such as these and many more have resulted in the Marxist tyranny we live under today. The political and cultural elites are deliberately selling their own people into Islamic slavery by allowing Islamic demographical warfare and by their reluctance to ensure a national indigenous fertility rate of 2,1.

There is no way to interpret the above as anything but the output from the misfiring brain of a man who believes conspiracy theory. Evidently, he was in contact with Bat Ye’or at some point because he quotes in the manifesto that she sent him some materials. As much of a connection as he has with Fjordman intellectually and emotionally, it doesn’t hurt to remember that the ravings of Bat Ye’or fuel both men’s delusional thinking (and again, delusion is not necessarily a sign anyone is insane or mentally ill).

It continues on, as he discusses the interim European governments and how they will control the borders and conduct deportations; the reparations that will be offered to people who were harmed by cultural Marxists and Muslims; grant pardons for those traitors who cooperate; remove cultural Marxism from the countries and schools; implement Nationalist policies that cover everything from improving birth rates to creating “liberal zones” so those who committed no crimes but still think too leftist for his tastes can exist but not infect the decent folk; media reform to conform to his beliefs; and instructions on how the new government will be set up. He then goes on to make demands from “the people” to enable them to practice their beliefs and religions, as if such things are not already in place throughout most of Europe.  Imploring the people to do that which they already had freedom to do somehow, in his mind, gives his revolution legitimacy.

So many strange details.  So many elements that just seem extraneous to any common way of thinking.  I suspect the reason most people could not stomach reading this, aside from its length and the fact that most decent people find it hard to read the words of a mass murderer, is because it is like reading a game you have no interest in. A game of rules so intricate only one man can play it.

And as a long aside that has nothing to do with this passage on legitimacy, one of the reasons Fjordman was so much more interesting was because as recursive as he could often be, his essays were an example of brevity and organized minimalism compared to Breivik’s sections.  Like many megalomaniacs before him, Breivik loves repeating himself and he often repeats himself in sequences that make no sense.  He sets up an outline for the discussions.  He sometimes sets up an outline of an outline. He offers four point conclusions for three paragraph sections and continues to throw in article after article to “prove” the need for his interventions hundreds of pages after he first threw in article after article to prove his case. It was maddening to reach one of those “in summary” sections and think, “Oh praise heaven, this section has ended!” only to realize that it was, in fact, not done by a long shot.

How Breivik managed to work as a “single cell”

The only dangerous part of this book, if you can ever call a book dangerous, is that Breivik does show what the super-empowered individual is capable of doing and gives an outline of what he did. From page 829:

The revolutionary method of carrying out actions is strongly and forcefully based on the knowledge and use of the following elements;
1. Financing your operation
2. Safe research and intelligence gathering
3. Acquirement of weapons, body armour and other equipment
4. Transportation (having a car/scooter available or rely on expropriation)
5. Safe storage in remote caches (The elimination of evidence)
6. Reconnaissance or exploration of the terrain
7. Study and timing of routes
8. Simulate the operation again and again (study and practice)
9. Success

It makes me wonder if some of the repetitiveness in writing and restatement of evidence was a part of his study and practice. It’s as good a theory as any.

Breivik’s section on planning an operation was actually interesting because it had a ring of truth to it. Again, people are afraid that reading this could give people ideas, it could lead to copycat murders, it could inspire madmen. I’m sure the visual media coverage of the killings would be of more worry, but even if someone read this with an eye to emulation, I can’t see them following through. The average person who loathes Islam is not going to live under the radar for years, live with his mother to save money, spend years testing out various means of mayhem, travel to meet biker gangs for guns (I honestly don’t believe that part happened), sew his armor and abuse drugs in order to kill teenagers. And more to the point, as Breivik points out in the manifesto, he easily obtained the information he used. If a person wants to blow up a city block, then kill people on an island, the information was out there to instruct Breivik, it is still out there, and if nothing else, perhaps knowing what he discusses can help ease the minds of those who are still worried that there is an anti-Islam group of single cell operatives loosely aligned under a red cross plotting to kill them. Breivik shows how easily he managed, with a patient mother, a freakishly controlling and precise nature, and a willingness to commit many acts of fraud.

On the section called “On How to Fund Your Operation” he says, on page 839:

Certain individuals will already have enough capital to fund an operation. 10 000–20 000 Euro would be sufficient for assassinations/executions of key category A or B traitors. The range of funds needed varies from 10 000 – 200 000 Euro (depending on the nature of the operation). Here are a few guidelines if you are completely broke or even indebted:

12 months of hard work (sales and marketing) would allow you to save approximately 30 000-50 000 Euro in many Western European countries. Furthermore, you will be able to apply for various credit and loan arrangements (credit cards or other long term/short term credit solutions) netting you from 20 000-100 000 Euro. This should be sufficient for any low to medium scale operation. Keep in mind that additional funds would give you more leeway and allow for more operational flexibility.

For those who are certain Breivik had to have had a financial backer, this section is important. He was broke and this is how he managed to get the funds he needed to spend a couple of years writing, researching, sewing and defrauding.

From page 839:

You can also attempt to get funding from financially privileged sympathisers in your country. Present related projects (a book project or your plan to create a youth movement related to Cultural Conservatism, anti-Jihad movement). Create a business plan. Be very clear about your non-violent means while at the same time sending the necessary signals. An alternative would be to organise a fund raiser against global Jihad (to the victims of Jihad etc). The point of this façade is to have proper justification to collect funds from sympathisers and at the same time send the correct signals (we want your financial aid to the resistance movement) without incriminating him/her/them in any way by revealing too much.

If he did have backers, he makes it clear they had no idea they were backing a mass murder. If he had any backers, he lied to get their money. And if he had backers, why would he risk constant discovery by living with his mother during much of this time he spent preparing?

I know, I am violating one of the premises I set above – believe nothing Breivik says because he is a liar. At some point, however, I had to just accept in some parts, like this, where he appears to be writing more extemporaneously than he does in previous sections, that there were likely parts where he was gloating, wherein he wanted to show how clever he was above and beyond the ideology he swallowed and his puerile worship of the Knights Templar. I think this is the place where he is being the most honest. But of course, even as we believe anything he tells us, we need to keep it in our minds that a skilled manipulator may be lying to us.

But I can also see how he put his manipulative skills to work in the following method of raising cash: credit card fraud. From page 840:

I must admit I was quite concerned when starting on this aspect of the planning phase. How can I apply for various credit cards if I have spent the last three years writing a book with no steady income whatsoever?

After some research into this issue I concluded that getting normal loans was out of the question as I did not fulfil the minimum required demands (official tax records from previous year indicating a high income, real estate etc). This would be an option for individuals who have real estate or people who can document at least a stable income. Getting credit cards seemed to be the only alternative for me and I would have to be creative as these requirements are also quite strict. I had 60 000 Euro but wanted an additional reserve credit of at least 20 000 Euro as a safety buffer. On May 2009 I started a company and transferred the first “salary to myself” and created documentation on behalf of the company supporting this. My intention was to create the necessary documentation to get at least a minimum of credit.

Rather than reproduce the methods necessary to commit credit card fraud, here’s the summary of what Breivik did: He created a foundation and “paid” himself from his own money for several months, creating a verifiable payment stream that he used to show a false income. He then applied for 16 credit cards, was denied seven but obtained nine with 26,000 Euros available to him. He then had enough credit to give him a financial buffer if he needed it.

How did he plan all of this without anyone catching on? Well, he lied and lied in a manner that would seem so embarrassing that no one would bring such shame on themselves unless it was the truth. From page 841, he presents one of the less embarrassing lies:

Present a ”credible project/alibi” to your friends, co-workers and family. Announce to your closest friends, co-workers and family that you are pursuing a ”project” that can at least partly justify your ”new pattern of activities” (isolation/travel) while in the planning phase.

F example, tell them that you have started to play World of Warcraft or any other online MMO game and that you wish to focus on this for the next months/year. This ”new project” can justify isolation and people will understand somewhat why you are not answering your phone over long periods. Tell them that you are completely hooked on the game (raiding dungeons etc). Emphasise to them that this is a dream you have had since you were a kid. If they stress you, insist and ask them to respect your decision. You will be amazed on how much you can do undetected while blaming this game. If your planning requires you to travel, say that you are visiting one of your WoW friends, or better yet, a girl from your ”guild” (who lives in another country). No further questions will be raised if you present these arguments.

He states, with some authority, that no one will ask questions,and given that he trained for his mission using such games gives this a ring of truth about it. A sinister ring, because as I have stated many times, this manifesto often felt like a gaming manual.

Play up the addictive process of gaming if need be, from page 842:

Blaming WoW is also quite strategic due to another factor. It is usually considered ”tabu” or even shameful in our society today to be hooked on an MMO. By revealing ”this secret” to your close ones you are therefore (to them at least) entrusting them with your innermost secret. Usually they will ”contribute” to keeping this secret for you which can
be very beneficial. (If people from your ”secondary” social circle ask them they will even usually ”lie” on your behalf (giving you alibi), in order to keep your MMO project a secret.

But if those nosy friends and family members won’t give up, play the final card of shame, from page 842:

Using social taboos is an extremely effective method from preventing people who know you well from digging too much or ask too many questions about your activities that weekend or that year. It is also an extremely effective method for manipulating them into protecting your cover.

In addition to being a hopeless gaming addict, what might be another taboo one could use? Also from page 842:

Say you think you are gay and are in the process of discovering your new self and that you don’t want to talk any more about this issue. Tell them that you are ashamed of it and you don’t want to talk any more about it. Make them swear to not tell anyone! (your ego is likely to take a dent unless you are secure in your own heterosexuality, because they will actually believe you are gay. However, it’s an extremely effective strategy for stopping questions and prevent people from digging in your life when you don’t want them to.

Here’s another taboo from page 842, useful for when you are traveling, and meeting a girl from your WoW guild just isn’t working as an excuse:

If you need a credible cover, when going abroad for a weekend etc. and the individuals you are trying to convince are too closely related to you to buy into any BS about a “conference cover etc); say you are going to a massage parlour or brothel abroad. Tell them that you are ashamed of it and you don’t want to talk any more about it. Make them swear to not tell anyone!

This one is especially interesting given some of the accusations he levels against his step-father, which I will discuss in Part Four.  Also, note how well his language flows in these sections where he discusses what he claims he actually did.  You see none of the slashes, none of the stilted language.  It flows like truth.

This section also contains information for the professional paranoiac as well as the man who wants to shoot children. He gives advice on how to stay off watch lists, how to avoid any sort of professional and technical monitoring. It is here that he definitely seems to be speaking from experience. The ridiculous, game-like nature of his previous writing is gone here. I won’t reproduce details, but he speaks of how one should and should not go about obtaining the materials for a WMD, which items should be bought in what sequence in order to avoid detection. He also set up a false agricultural business in order to have a cover for buying fertilizer, and to prevent further detection, he bought three tons of fertilizer used in the bombs and three tons that were not suitable for bombs.

He also discusses the ways a single cell can remain motivated. Daily checks will help the Justiciar Knight remain focused on what he has to do. From page 845:

This is a factor that a majority of resistance fighters ignore and is why a majority of novices become de-motivated after a certain period. They are not doing what is required of them due to lack of training, knowledge and eventually lose the will to fight due to lack of motivation. I do a mental check almost every day through meditation and philosophising. I simulate/meditate while I go for a walk, playing my Ipod in my neighbourhood. This consists of a daily 40 minute walk while at the same time philosophising ideologically/performing self indoctrination and the mental simulation of
the operation while listening to motivational and inspiring music.

Note the brand name reference. That will be important later. And the music he listens to on his walks? The Swedish racist singer Saga and inspiring music from video games, of course!

This is followed by a segment about purchasing weapons so one has the correct equipment and while this has a ring of truth to it, the lists of equipment, ranked by use and effectiveness, again reminds me of a gaming manual. I know I am emphasizing this to the point of harping on it, but it is important because I think it needs to be understood that even though these are the words of a killer, these are words that reek of fantasy, or at the very least a disconnection from basic reality. Not a disconnection from reality in the sense that Breivik was insane – far from it. The existence of this document effectively rules out insanity, and he himself states several times in this that he is not insane and that we should dismiss attempts to paint him as such. Let’s take his word on that, at least.

None of this is particularly interesting either, until he gets to the part where he sews his own armor. Evidently, he was forced to take sewing in school as a boy, from page 854:

It is quite ironic and even hilarious when reflecting on the fact that a skill which was intended to feminize European boys can and will in fact be used to re-implement the patriarchy by overthrowing the Western European cultural
Marxist/multiculturalist regimes.

He wasn’t able to get the armor he wanted, from page 855:

I first started my “armour research and acquisition phase” three months ago I found out the hard way
that you need special permits to buy military grade armour from EU stores. Certain vests were indeed available but not the vests I wanted. Secondly, I wanted to be very careful and avoid ordering products from my own country as my national intelligence agency can easily check and cross reference purchase orders from the limited number of vendors selling ballistic armour. Secondly, buying from US stores proved to be futile as all ballistic armour is restricted for export. The stores will simply refuse to ship to Europe as they are prohibited by US law.

So he sewed it himself, also from page 855:

I will now show you exactly how to bypass the restrictions by basically setting up your own little one man-factory with the capability of constructing a superior set of body armour which offers up to 90% frontal coverage (level IIIA to IV protection) and 60-70% backside coverage.

I will present a guide to the medium weight version (15 kg gear all included) and to the heavy weight version (30 kg gear all included), depending on strength, agility and your general physical condition and the mission specific requirement.

This section after this he discusses how he achieved a stronger physical state via the  combination of pills he calls “stacks.”  He discusses the amount of weight a soldier can carry and still be an effective killing machine. Evidently the key is not to have any comfort items, as discussed on pages 860-861, emphasis in original:

Most people have seen the movie Platoon, where the squad leader in Vietnam reached into new guy Charlie Sheen’s rucksack and dumped unnecessary equipment. Justiciar Knights need to do the same thing: performing good pre-combat inspections (PCIs). The packing list should be tailored to the mission at hand, with all the extras and “nice-tohave” items eliminated.

Determing a Justiciar Knights load is a critical task. The Knight cannot afford to carry unnecessary equipment into the battle. Every contingency cannot be covered. The primary consideration is not how much a soldier can carry, but how much he can carry without impaired combat effectiveness.

He discusses how much ammo a Justiciar Knight will need, then launches another very long discussion about ballistics armor. Very long. In much detail he explains how one can keep one’s self protected in times when bullets are flying, from head to toe, from butt to groin. In a later section he discusses all the equipment one would need, from car magnets to smoke grenades. There is a huge section in part three that will be of interest only to those who find detailed military equipment descriptions engaging.

This whole section of how he pulled off his murder spree is a litany of illegal activities, from using illegal body-enhancement drugs to smuggling guns across European borders in cars. The section on the black market gun sales in Europe was… not as convincing as other sections. He discusses how one can use the criminal and terrorist elements of Europe to get guns, and he later in his diary discusses going to Prague to meet with some Hell’s Angels but evidently the deal didn’t go well. Perhaps it is because I am an American and live in a completely different culture when it comes to guns and their acquisition but I suppose this would be a good way to purchase guns in a society where semi-automatics are not thick on the ground. But I cannot help but wonder what those Hell’s Angels thought of the pampered Breivik as he tried to purchase weapons.

He also has a breakdown on how to train one’s body and the protein ratios one needs to eat in order to be strong enough to have the stamina to kill people. That was instructive.

The experiments, or BUCKET. OF. COLD. WATER

Breivik says he spent three years working on 2083. At first I could not, for the life of me, determine how it took that long. Given how much of the content consists of reproductions of other people’s works, and given how much of this document has work that has been plagiarized, it seemed daft that he spent that long. Especially since he didn’t have a job! That is, until I found the sections about his experimentation with all kinds of very dangerous things, and the research he put into it all. He has a section on atypical weapons and biological warfare that begins on page 953.

He discusses anthrax, and given the work he puts into later efforts, I wonder if he tried to obtain anthrax spores. From 954:

Theoretically, anthrax spores can be cultivated with minimal special equipment and less than a first-year collegiate microbiological education, but in practice the procedure is difficult and dangerous. To make large amounts of an aerosol form of anthrax suitable for biological warfare requires extensive practical knowledge, training, and highly advanced equipment.

Even with a good lab (isolation chamber and harvest equipment) and a few staff workers it might take a year to come up with a product of superb quality.

I just don’t think he wanted to spend up to a year working on such a bio-weapon. (And for the record, it is not easy to obtain anthrax. I haven’t tried but I’ve read enough Richard Preston to disabuse anyone of the notion that there are flourishing anthrax markets out there.) However, he puts so much thought into how an attack could be managed, down to the letters a terrorist would send to a target before releasing spores, that he had to have given this some thought. His analysis of spore size needed to infect is chilling.

He discusses nuclear weapons and how one can use them (seizing control of a nuclear facility) versus not using them (seizing control of a nuclear facility is not going to be easy). But he also states that if obtained, the threat of nuclear weapons is stronger than actually using them. So I guess we can sleep easy knowing that.

He goes into some discussions about destroying location targets that reads like a cross between a Tom Clancy novel and the Jason Bourne movies, but then he jumps in his typical manner into a discussion of what he obtained and did in the chemistry lab he set up. On page 978, he says, matter-of-factly:

Despite what others might say; you don’t need any formal training in order to manufacture explosives. I have studied hundreds of various guides, recipes and instructions and can honestly say that it is a relatively safe venture as long as you take the necessary precautions and avoid the most volatile explosives.

Still, he recommends the following safety equipment. From page 979:

Safety equipment recommended:
· Bucket of cold water: 5 € (any kitchen store)
· Fire extinguisher: 100 € (various stores)
· Hazmat suit: F example: Lakeland DuPont HazMat Suit Tychem: 11-50 USD (Ebay). A hazmat suit with boots and hood isn’t necessarily needed for making explosives. It is however needed for handling pure nicotine and ricin. Considering how inexpensive it is, you might as well use one while creating explosives.
· 3M 6800 full face respirator with appropriate filters (choose Organic Vapor/Organic Vapor-Acid/Organic Vapor-Acid-Gas filters) depending on the chemicals you will be working with. You can buy this facemask with filters from Ebay for as low as 100 USD.

Bucket. Of. Cold. Water.  He lists the electrical equipment one would need to set up a lab, a detailed and reasonably expensive list for the unemployed revolutionary who lives with his mother, but he also spells out how he managed to get away with much of what did, from page 980:

Many individuals make the mistake of using their urban apartment as a lab. Firstly; if anyone (neighbours, friends, family) sees you wearing a respirator face mask/hazmat suit they will notify the system protectors. If they accidentally find any of your equipment they may notify the system protectors. If anyone smells chemical odors in your block they will also notify the system protectors. Don’t be an idiot and take unnecessary risks. Rent a small cottage/farm in an isolated place. If you can’t afford to, then you shouldn’t be working with explosives anyway and should consider limiting your operation to one which only requires guns.

· Rent a cottage in the rural parts of your country for this purpose. The cottage needs to
have electricity and running water. Cost: 100-500 € per month. You probably need the
place for at least 3 but up to 6 months depending on the quantity of explosives you intend
to manufacture.

· Camouflaging your lab: invest in “fog stickers” to temporarily put on all windows, or use
curtains. You may have to open 1-2 windows to ensure proper ventilation so make sure no
one can look directly in by placing panels or something else to cover the lines of sight.
Cost: 20-50 €.

Then he bounces back to more equipment one would need, and I am reproducing this list in full because I just marvel at the level of unnecessary detail this man engages in. But at least it explains how it took him three years to write this up. If he engaged in the same level of dedicated pedantry in that lab as he shows in 2083, it is a horrific surprise he ever managed to reach any conclusions. From pages 980-981:

Glass ware and other basic lab equipment
1 x Funnel, glass 70 mm: 5 €
1 x Funnel, glass 50 mm: 4 €
4 x Funnel, plastic 100 mm: 8 € (purification through coffee filter x 4)
1 x Trakt i plast PP 45 mm: 2 €
1 x Thermometer -40-+110: 4 € (for oven)
2 x Thermometer -10-+110: 4 € (20 cm long glass variant)
1 x Graduated Cylinder 500 ml: 18 € (for measuring liquids)
1 x Crystallization cup 140-400 mm: 14-50 (a lasagna glass dish is a cheaper alt)
2 x Glass Beaker 2000 ml: 47 €
2 x Glass Beaker 1000 ml: 27 €
4 x Glass Beaker 600 ml: 24 €
2 x Glass Beaker 250 ml: 12 €
1 x Beakertongs: 7 (tongs to grab boiling hot beakers)
1 x Conical Flask (Erlenmeyer Flask) 1000 ml: 14 €
1 x Conical Flask 500 ml NN (narrow neck): 8 €
1 x Conical Flask 500 ml WN (wide neck): 8 €
6 x Pharmaceutical Bottle, glass (dark brown) 200 ml: 8 € (storage of detonator charge/primary
expl. underwater)
2 x Pharmaceutical Bottle, glass (dark brown) 500 ml: 4 € (storage of primary expl)
3 x Pharmaceutical Bottle, glass (dark brown) 1000 ml: 7 € (storage of primary expl)
1 x pH-paper 0-14, 100 strips: 11 €
1 x Porcelain Dish 80 mm: 2 € (for boiling on top of conical flask)
2 x Glass rod, stirring rod 6 x 200 mm: 2 €
5 x Drop counter: 5 €
1 x Acid resistant gloves: 6 €
100 x Latex Gloves: 11 €
1 x Lab-apron: 9 €
1 x Mortar w. Pestle 100 mm: 11 €
2 x Pipette bottle, plastic 100 ml: 2 €
2 x Plastic box, storage, square 500 ml: 6 €
1 x Plastic box, storage, square 250 ml: 2 €
1 x Plastic box, storage, square 100 ml: 2 €
1 x Spoon with spatulas, 150 mm: 2 €
1 x Spatulas 21 cm: 049610 – 14 – 2 €
1 x Cleaning brush: 4 €
1 x Beaker brush 21 cm: 3 €
1 x Tube brush 400 mm: 5 €
2 x Plastic container 31 x 43 x 15: 19 € (for evaporation of liquids)
25 x Syringe and needle, 1 ml: 6 € (for injecting pure nicotine into hollow bullets)
100 x Filter paper 125-200 mm: 3 € (fits into large funnels)
1 x Single electrical cooking plate: 23 € (in case you need an extra)
Note: There was a minimum order of 10 for certain items from the supplier I selected. Therefore, I had to buy more glass beakers and conical flasks than needed. Still, I have only listed the required amount of equipment and not the surplus amount I bought. Conical flasks are often better than beakers due to the ease of using funnels etc. in them, + the liquid inside doesn’t evaporate as quickly due to the narrow neck of the conical flask.

Then Breivik goes into lots of detail about how to handle certain chemicals, how to make a detonator, and all kinds of details that I don’t want to convey in my blog. But it was very interesting to realize that the level of speculative detail he engages in – the role-playing game style of writing – was borne out in the things he physically did as well. He is a meticulous, exacting person.

I also want to add that some people think that he had to have had help building his fertilizer bomb. He utterly refutes that in this section. Moreover, Timothy McVeigh only needed help because he made a bomb so large it required a moving van to relocate it. One man could have made the bomb Breivik made. This is both a comfort and a horror as it shows he could easily have worked alone, as he says he did, but then again, it also means one person can cause this much mayhem, murder and sorrow.

I will conclude this section with this quote from 989:

CAUTION! THIS COMPOUND MAY EXPLODE INSTANTLY WHEN TOUCHED WITH METAL

All caps, in red in original. I really would like to know if he learned this information the hard way.

So here you are.  A very long, and not particularly interesting in my view,  synopsis of a painfully long combo of a game manual, how-to-book and compendium of interminable lists.  It shows a lot about the man who wrote if you are willing to slog through it.  While it’s difficult to tell what is true and what is a lie, what is cribbed and what is original, I think Breivik shows himself clearly at times.  What he shows is a man in a fantasy game, a pedant dedicated to meaningless detail, a fussy control freak and a remorseless murderer.  Please be sure to come back early next week as I will post my final analysis of what Breivik showed of himself in his writing.  That will include my armchair psychoanalysis, a look at his puritanical and punitive misogyny, his petulance and the overall confounding nature of his strange and often blank personality.  Part Four will be when I discuss Breivik’s diary and faux-interview, as well. If you’ve managed to read this far, I appreciate it.  Thank you to all the readers who have been following my analysis.

It would appear that my discussion of 2083 went a little viral, so welcome new readers!  I also welcome all comments, even those that may disagree with me entirely.  I encourage people to stick to reactions to the text but, of course, I understand political discussions will be inevitable where such a document is concerned.

It should also be mentioned that yes, I am verbose as a rule. Sorry about that but if length bothers you, you likely were not going to be interested in a quote-laden discussion of a 1500 page manifesto anyway. Also, please bear in mind this is a discussion of the book, not a review as such. I’m not judging the literary merit of the manifesto as much as I am just trying to reveal what the manifesto really contains and the minds of the people involved. I mean, I guess someone could review Mein Kampf or The New Libertarian Manifesto with an eye to the quality of the prose, but I really don’t recommend it.

2083: A European Declaration of Independence was so much more than a look at anti-Islam viewpoints that led to murder.  It contains a number of critiques, from how hip hop music is destroying black culture in the United States to misogynistic rants that contained rape apology.  It has reproductive ideas that sound like science fiction and instructions on how to make poison bullets.  It is all over the map. In many ways, I am glad I read this because it is a mistake to think that ABB was a lunatic who was just gunning for socialists whom he considered responsible for Muslim immigration.  His master plan, derived from the ideas of other thinkers, had something unsettling in store for almost everyone who wasn’t a white man. As progressive as we like to think we are, many of the more virulent ideas present in 2083 are rampant in political and social elements in the United States.

ABB is only a monster to us because he took his ideology to heart and shot people instead of blogging about it.  But he is only unique in how he displayed his hate.  And he is even less unique when you realize that all of his ideas came from other people.  As I said in my first article, in so many ways, Fjordman is more interesting to me than ABB, because Fjordman’s brain is on display here far more than ABB’s.  ABB is violently derivative.

This second part of my look at Fjordman will be when I show my snark teeth a bit more because it is going to cover  his misogyny that at times gives lie to his nationalist leanings, the messy contradictions present in Fjordman’s theories, his misuse of pop culture and literature, and some of the utterly bizarre things present in his writing.   Yeah, there will be snark.  I won’t be able to help it. Also, part two is mostly just a reaction to some of the more bizarre elements of Fjordman’s thought processes and misinterpretations. Mostly, this will be a look at the mind of a man who really is driven by hate to the point that he is rabid, inconsistent and just flat out weird.

Though I also mentioned in Part One that I find Fjordman infinitely more interesting than the murderer who cloaked himself in his ideas, Fjordman did not ask for any of this.  I did try to make a case that Fjordman engaged in rhetoric that seemed fated to send a True Believer on a violent rampage, but the fact is is that Fjordman was writing in that false, protective cloud that seems to envelop so many bloggers.  We write and write and write and it never seems possible that we could, without overtly meaning to, inspire someone to shoot up teenagers on an island.  Blogging is a new weapon in the arsenal of using the written word to change the world and Fjordman has, for me at least, become a cautionary tale.   And as I said before, Fjordman is not pitiful, but he is definitely pitiable.  That is, he is pitiable when he isn’t actively pissing me off.  There are some things that no woman outside of the stay-at-home-daughters in the Vision Forum can read and not be filled with disgust.

So let’s begin Fjordman: Part Two.

Fjordman is a misogynist

A shocking level of hatred for women runs through Fjordman’s articles. Of course, because he hates Marxism and the political correctness he believes it has ushered in, he must denigrate women as he denigrates Muslims because he sees feminism as a largely Marxist entity. He feels women are, in fact, responsible for the Muslim immigration in Norway and makes his case in a very demeaning way. We begin with this referendum on female intelligence from pages 58-59:

Writer Charlotte Allen commented[25] on how Harvard University President Lawrence Summers caused a storm by giving a speech speculating that innate differences between the sexes may have something to do with the fact that proportionately fewer women than men hold top positions in science. Summers in 2006 announced his intention to step down at the end of the school year, in part due to pressure caused by this speech. “Even if you’re not up on the scientific research – a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius – common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right. Recently, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Mr. Summers. Wouldn’t it be preferable to talk openly about men’s and women’s strengths and weaknesses?”

Yes, Ms. Allen, it would. Summers may have been wrong, but it’s dangerous once we embark on a road where important issues are not debated at all.

I wonder if Fjordman understands that these ideas have been debated for centuries? The “proof” that shows that women are stupider than men because of innate differences between the sexes is nothing new. And then there’s Charlotte Allen, pandering to these outdated notions, though one presumes she does not think such common sense applies to her. She seemingly has no clue she’s a parody in her jaded, time-worn attempt to become one of the boys by demeaning women to show she isn’t like the rest of us. And now she’s quoted admiringly by Fjordman in a manifesto by one of the worst mass murderers in European history. It’s hard to be angry at her knowing that is her reward for pandering to loathsome ideas. But worse than Allen, there is something particularly galling about the idea that a man who is younger than me seems to think that the discussions of female intellect didn’t happen until he was on the scene and that all these variables that men like him use to bash women are not shoved in our faces on a daily basis just because he is not there to witness the shoving. Oh yes, let us not skirt these issues that even the most ardent third wave feminist still has to stomach every time she asserts her intelligence because Fjordman thinks we aren’t discussing the prejudice used against us to his anti-cultural-Marxist satisfaction.

Yeah, that sucked. But it gets worse. So much worse. I am going to say without equivocation that if one were to try to know Fjordman from just the text he has written, it would be safe to say that he hates women. I know there is more to him than that, that this is hopefully ill-conceived rhetoric, but after reading many of his words I think he is a rape apologist. Having met many Nationalists of all stripes, some of whom I consider friends, not until I read Fjordman’s anti-woman rantings had I known a Nationalist to take such glee in what he considers to be the debasement of his countrywomen. Indeed, Fjordman seems very happy all those Labor Party women got what was coming to them – violent rape. From page 343, emphasis mine:

I have written several essays before on the damaging effects of Western feminism. The massive wave of violence and especially rapes in Western cities now is a form of warfare against whites, and it’s about time it is recognised as such. As this post from Gallia Watch[1] puts it:

“As in war, the winners seize the indigenous women all the while protecting their own. The whole rhetoric that aims to debase the European woman or France (‘I screw France like a whore’ says rap group Sniper) is a part of the feminisation of Europeans, of the idea that Europe is a land to be conquered, a habitat open to all forms of pillage. Are not the notorious ‘gang rapes’ another example of collective violence to European women, just as Russian soldiers did when they seized German women in a devastated Berlin in 1945. It all holds together. A tribe that does not protect its women is behaving as if they have already lost the war. Many of us don’t know this. But our enemies do.”

As a Western man, I would be tempted to say that Western women have to some extent brought this upon themselves. They have been waging an ideological, psychological and economic war against European men for several generations now, believing that this would make you “free.” The actual result is that you have less freedom of movement and security than ever, as a direct result of the immigrant policies supported by you and your buddies.

Okay, he starts off recognizing that rape is often used in war, a neutral enough statement. But then he gives in to some really base ideas. European women have brought rape on themselves because they demean the poor Western men and because they and their buddies, their chums, their bosom pals, invited all those big, Islamic rapists in. Too bad, too sad, Western Bitches is the tone of this passage. Rape apology is ugly, ugly, ugly, but strangely even more perverse when you are gloating over the rapes of the very women you hope to save from those Muslims.

Wallow in this bit of nastiness from page 343:

The truth is that any nation is always protected from external aggression by the men. The women can play a supporting role in this, but never more than that. For all the talk about “girl power” and “women kicking ass” which you see on movies these days, if the men of your “tribe” are too weak or demoralised to protect you, you will be enslaved and crushed by the men from other “tribes” before you can say “Vagina Monologues”.

Ah, I see! Fjordman’s version of feminism is a caricature of the women who own the book shop Women and Women First on the show Portlandia. Are there ardent feminists who approach being caricatures? Of course. Is it a good idea to state outright that those few women are the basis of the feminist movement and therefore have brought rape and enslavement upon themselves? No. It would be the same if I looked at every Norwegian man on the basis of Fjordman’s fallacious rhetoric and determined they must be exactly like this one extremist. Also, it’s seldom a good idea to base one’s philosophical views on how men or women are portrayed in the movies. Almost all mainstream movie characters are stereotypes.

Also, too bad I can’t file this under Fjordman’s victim mentality, which I will discuss later. Yep, that’s right folks. Fjordman is too demoralized to help a woman who is being raped or enslaved because some of us don’t want to be called “lady” and can open our own doors.

More of the same, also from page 343, and bear with me because this one really pissed me off:

Which means that if you break down men’s masculinity, their willingness and ability to defend themselves and their families, you destroy the country. That’s exactly what Western women have done for the last forty years. So why are you surprised about the results? As you said, you can’t fool Mother Nature. Well, you have tried to fool her for a long time, and you are now paying the price for this.

I am a feminist. A pretty ardent one. I asked Mr Oddbooks just now if my beliefs have broken down his masculinity. He said no. I asked if the women he works with and knows socially who are feminists have broken down his masculinity. He said no. I asked him if he was unlikely to defend a woman, a child, or even an animal from a vicious attack after years of living with a feminist. He said no. More or less, he just goes about his life and if a woman gets cheesed when he opens a door for her, he just figures that woman didn’t want him to open the door, not that all women are castrating harpies. So I guess I really am surprised by the results, that a man who was born during the time of the feminist revolution in socially liberal society has kept his masculinity about him. Perhaps it is because as a feminist who isn’t a caricature, I forgot to cut off his balls and keep them in my purse next to my copy of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto? My bad.

And what’s this about fooling Mother Nature? What the hell does he even mean by this? That women are too weak to defend themselves and should have eschewed the feminist movement on the grounds that having self-determination was going to demoralize all the men? Does he mean that birth control and abortion have enabled women to prevent and end unwanted pregnancies, thus rejecting the dogma that we exist solely as a function of our natural reproductive capacities? I sense he meant the former but maybe he really means both.

But don’t worry, he forgives us for being so deluded, from page 344:

Western women have been subjected to systematic Marxist indoctrination meant to turn you into a weapon of mass destruction against your own civilisation, a strategy that has been remarkably successful.

You see, we women are just too dumb to see how we have been manipulated by the cultural Marxists. Oh dear, did we accidentally destroy civilization with our desire to control our fertility and our wish to be educated and have jobs if we want? Then he goes on to quote Robert Spencer, who tells a tale of a college student who sees no value to her white culture and worships Native Americans, and Lee Harris, who insists the Muslims are teaching their boys to be brutes while Western boys are taught to be wimps. In the face of all this rock-solid anecdata, I am clearly under the influence of Marxist ideology when I think its all pants.

But all this whining starts to take a sinister turn on page 345:

The only major political party in Norway that has voiced any serious opposition to the madness of Muslim immigration is the rightwing Progress Party. This is a party which receives about two thirds or even 70% male votes. At the opposite end of the scale we have the Socialist Left party, with two thirds or 70% female votes. The parties most critical of the current immigration are typically male parties, while those who praise the Multicultural society are dominated by  feminists. And across the Atlantic, if only American women voted, the US President during 9/11 would be called Al Gore, not George Bush.

So I guess Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Das Kapital.  Interesting. It would almost seem here as if Fjordman is saying that this massive, country-crushing Islam invasion is the fault of women. Women who are tools of cultural Marxism. Surely he isn’t saying it’s all women’s fault, is he? Yes, yes he is and it shines a sinister light on why ABB shot up the Labor Party camp.  Oh, and heaven FORBID that Gore had been President during 9/11. Whew! Thank god we avoided that national nightmare, am I right?

In the event that anyone sees wiggle room in the above, please read this from page 351:

To sum it up, it must be said that radical feminism has been one of the most important causes of the current weakness of Western civilisation, both culturally and demographically. Feminists, often with a Marxist world view, have been a crucial component in establishing the suffocating public censorship of Political Correctness in Western nations. They have also severely weakened the Western family structure, and contributed to making the West too soft and  self-loathing to deal with aggression from Muslims.

An inordinate amount of blame has been put on women in Fjordman’s odd conspiracy. Women deserve rape, women were duped by the Marxists, women led to the Islamification of Europe. In a way, it’s interesting that ABB didn’t target women exclusively, but more on how he picked his victims when I discuss him next week.

Fjordman is just about as offensive toward women as one man can be on his own. If he wants to up his game, he’s going to have to clone himself, as he shows on page 347:

It is correct, as feminists claim, that a hyper-feminine society is not as destructive as a hyper-masculine society. The catch with a too soft society is that it is unsustainable. It will get squashed as soon as it is confronted by more  traditional, aggressive ones. Instead of “having it all,” Western women risk losing everything. What are liberal feminists going to do when faced with aggressive gang of Muslim youngsters? Burn their bras and throw the pocket edition of the Vagina Monologues at them?

As a feminist I have never heard anyone say that a hyper-feminine society is the way to go. In fact, it’s a symbol of facile under-thinking, the old saw that a matriarchy is less violent than a patriarchy. History doesn’t bear it out and it’s a tired, sad argument.

Fjordman’s obsession with The Vagina Monologues is weird. Just weird. If attacked women, will do what we always have done, feminist movement or not. We will do our best to fight back and avoid rape or we will acquiesce however we must in order to survive. It may surprise misogynists cut like Fjordman, but even before feminists made men so soft that they cannot help victimized women, there was a long history of women getting raped, even by their own countrymen. Women to this day still get blamed for their rapes, though most rape apologists don’t often take this particular tack – rather, they blame the way the woman dressed or call her a slut who was asking for it. Women were raped long before Fjordman’s repellent theories came to light and somehow managed to cope, and we will be raped long after no one remembers Fjordman’s name, despite his outrageous trivialization of our assaults.

Less inflammatory but equally as bizarre is this, from page 348:

Are some feminists simply testing out men’s limits in the hope of finding some new balance between the sexes, or are they testing men to find our which men are strong enough to stand up to their demands, and thus which men can stand up to other men on their behalf?

Well, actually, this isn’t that bizarre. It’s the remark of a baffled man. And to be fair, women are baffled, too. I know some men like to mock us because some really do try to have it all – career, hobbies, many friends, family – and find the balance difficult and wear themselves out trying to make sense of their lives. But when your kind has spent hundreds of years with very few choices at your disposal and suddenly you are told you can indeed have it all, it seems like you should at least try. But none of this is a test, a universal exercise of the will of women to see if men will put us in our places. For a few maybe, but not the mass of women. This is our life, not some psycho-sexual experiment.

But even amongst the outrageous rape apology, I somehow took most offense to the trivialization that Fjordman assigns to the feminist movement, a movement that for all of its current extremist excesses began as a human rights movement for women. And I just get pissed off imagining him speaking these words to me or to any woman. From page 348, emphasis mine:

Strangely enough, after decades of feminism, many Western women are now lamenting the fact that Western men hesitate to get married. Here is columnist Molly Watson[12]:

We’re also pretty clued up about why our generation is delaying having children — and it has nothing to do with being failed by employers or health planners. Nor, despite endless newspaper features on the subject, does it have much to do with business women putting careers before babies. In my experience, the root cause of the epidemic lies with a
collective failure of nerve among men our age. […] I don’t know a woman of my age whose version of living happily ever after fundamentally hinges on becoming editor, or senior partner, or surgeon, or leading counsel. But faced with a generation of emotionally immature men who seem to view marriage as the last thing they’ll do before they die, we have little option but to wait.

What happened to the slogan “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”? I’d just like to remind Ms. Watson that it was in fact the women who started this whole “single is best” culture that now permeates much of the West. Since women initiate most divorces and a divorce can potentially mean financial ruin for a man, it shouldn’t really be too surprising that many men hesitate to get involved at all. As one man put it: “I don’t think I’ll get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.” At the same time, women  during the past few decades have made it a lot easier to have a girlfriend without getting married. So  women make it riskier to get married and easier to stay unmarried, and then they wonder why men “won’t commit?” Maybe too many women didn’t think all this feminism stuff quite through before jumping on the bandwagon?

I have no idea who Molly Watson is, but I will say that this us-against-them bullshit is wearing thin on both sides. Seriously. Despite Watson’s complaints and Fjordman’s accusations, all across the Marxist-infested West men and women are meeting and marrying, some divorcing, some not, many very happy. Funny, that…

But I’m mostly just annoyed at how little Fjordman thinks of women because his tone is not one of a man who even seems to like women. Had he the grace even to limit this nastiness to feminists, I could sort of understand it, but he speaks to all women, and he does it with a demeaning nastiness that exposes his deep-seated misogyny. I am not a young woman anymore. I was born during the second wave of feminism, just as the third wave really began. In my entire life I have never heard any feminist recite the old saw about fish and bicycles. Not once. Not even in college when I knew actual radical feminists. Using that line against single women who lament their singleness has zero relevance and makes Fjordman sound even older than me.

Who, other than Fjordman, says that women started this whole single is best idea? Who actually thinks single is best and made it into a cultural movement that negatively affects Fjordman? Almost every feminist I know is married or is in an exclusive long-term relationship. Those who are single are single for reasons that I assure you have little to do with Marxist dialectic.  And who says women initiate most divorces and if that is true, what are the reasons? Are these women abused, did their husbands cheat, did they simply fall out of love as they got older. Though I don’t know it is true, even if women do initiate most divorces that is not necessarily a referendum on men or even on marriage.

Oh, and how dumb were we girls to “jump on the bandwagon” of feminism before we thought through the terrible ramifications of being able to vote, own property, have access to education and the right to choose what work we prefer! Seriously, the feminist movement, whether dude-bros want to admit it or not, is about more than just destroying the Western family and cock-blocking innocent men who just want to get married.

Here he uses the most extreme examples possible to prove that feminism is destroying the world. From page 346:

Swedish Marxist politician Gudrun Schyman has suggested a bill[6] that would collectively tax Swedish men for violence against women. In a 2002 speech, the same Schyman famously posited that Swedish men were just like the Taliban. A male columnist in newspaper Aftonbladet responded by saying that Schyman was right[7]: All men are like the Taliban.

Admittedly I do not speak Swedish, but I’m pretty sure this is an accurate translation of the reaction of 99% of Swedish citizens to such offensive, bombastic statements: “Oh my god, what a stupid and terrible thing to say. That woman is an idiot. Let’s make sure Schyman’s new party, Feminist Initiative, never gets more than 2% of the vote, and most of the time not even 1%.” Hmm… Could it be that she said something really outrageous, like Pamela Geller does, in order to get attention? Is that a trick only the Right can use? Does Fjordman think she really must believe that all the men in Sweden are like the Taliban and that a newspaper agreed with her means everyone must agree with that chauvinistic, hateful statement? Fjordman is like cafeteria Christians – he cherry-picks whatever proves his point, even if the point, when looked at with any depth, proves that fewer than 2% of Sweden on a good day has any faith in Gudrun Schyman.

More of the same from page 346:

In the year 2000, Swedish feminist Joanna Rytel and the action group Unf**ked Pussy entered the stage during the live broadcast of the Miss Sweden contest. She also wrote an article called “I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man[8],” for a major Swedish daily, Aftonbladet, in 2004. Rytel explained why she hates white men — they are selfish, exploitative, vain, and sex-crazed — and just to make things clear, she added, “no white men, please… I just puke on them, thank you very much.”

Using Joanna Rytel as an example of what the average Swedish woman feels about men is like taking John Lyden, circa 1977, and claiming the average Brit longed for anarchy. This analysis of the depravity of women is clownish at best.

Why discuss all of this? What relevance does it have in discussing the Norway murderer’s manifesto? Well, as I will explain later when I discuss ABB, there is a misogynistic undertone to everything that ABB did. Hatred of women is strong in his philosophy. He, like Fjordman, blames women for permitting Muslim immigration. He sees the entire feminist movement as dupes for the cultural Marxists whom he thinks have ruined the world. More personally, ABB loathed being raised by a single mother and took a shocking amount of glee in discussing what one can only assume he thought were his mother’s sexual habits. His sister’s too.

This hatred of women in the political, the philosophical and the theoretical is why violence against women is so common. There are men on this planet who genuinely think that any bit of progress women and people of color achieve is a net loss of their freedom. And those men are present in American politics. They are present in American religion. That again is why this is so fascinating to me. I may not have known Fjordman’s name, but the face of his hate for women was certainly a face I recognize. I cannot say it enough – we sweep these mentalities under the rug at our own risk. Each time we assume a man with a gun is a monster or that the man who inspired the killer is an aberration, we fail to understand how common monsters are, and how seldom an aberration is really that atypical. If we refuse to look at the whole of ABB, it makes it easy not to look at the whole of those who are lurking in our own stomping grounds.

Fjordman has some weird, but not entirely unpredictable ideas

There are not enough ellipses in the world to express how truly strange some of Fjordman’s beliefs are. Take this from page 59:

“When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish ‘n’ chips and  cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of  “re-primitivised man” has been successfully exported around the planet. It’s reverse globalisation: The pathologies of theremotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city.”

It is possible to see a connection here. While multiculturalism is spreading ideological tribalism in our universities, it is spreading physical tribalism in our major cities. Since all cultures are equal, there is no need to preserve Western civilisation, nor to uphold our laws.

Base impulses are human traits, not proof of globalism creating “re-primitivised man,” whatever the hell that means. Bullshit theories abound about why it is human beings are violent, enjoy violence and generally shed their civility at the slightest provocation but I’m just gonna go ahead and put it out there that human beings were violent long before “multiculturalism” exposed the cultured Torontonian and Yorkshireman to the primitive rage of all those non-whites who just ruin it for civilization.

Take this antiquated idea from page 59:

While Chinese, Indian, Korean and other Asian Universities are graduating millions of motivated engineers and scientists every year, Western Universities have been reduced to little hippie factories, teaching about the wickedness of the West and the blessings of barbarism.

Oh god, Fjordman thinks all colleges are Berkeley in 1969. In college I myself read plenty of Shakespeare and plenty of Locke and Rousseau between learning about the blessings of barbarism, which mainly came in the form of keg parties instead of an actual course curriculum.  This is also strange coming from a man who is only 36. This is what I expect people hear from their elderly relatives around the Sunday dinner table. It’s just the same crap that threatened Little Men utter every time their gilded cages get rattled. It would be laughable if Fjordman’s strange take on life didn’t somehow inspire a man to kill 77 people.

File this under, “Oh god, not this again” from 738:

Less than eight years after the Jihadist attacks on the USA, a President raised as a Muslim with the middle name “Hussein” hails Islam’s great contributions to American and Western culture. The USA currently looks more like a defeated nation than the world’s sole remaining superpower. It’s the only nation in history where the majority of the population has elected a member of an organisation known for hating the majority population of that country.

In the event that anyone reading this does not understand these facts, please note that Obama was not raised as a Muslim. He attended Muslim-run schools, but also attended Catholic-run schools and no one is saying he is a Catholic. He was born in America, was raised with American ideals, and even if he were a Muslim, that in no way is incompatible with with being a good American. The rhetoric that sprang up around Obama has shown the frightening racist underbelly of this country. I am still shocked when I read things like this and they are one of the best examples I can find for how fuzzy thinking (the name Hussein indicates religious preference, attending a school equals lifelong beliefs) negatively affects the world. It’s a few steps from feeling uncomfortable that a man of color is running the United States to developing an intricate web of lies to conceal your racism. It’s not that he’s black – it’s that he’s a Muslim, he’s not a citizen, he lied about his education, etc. Again, the ideas that led ABB to killing 77 people, the ideas that are included in the manifesto of a mass murderer, are running strong in America.

And then we have this from page 737:

I remember when the Iranian ex-Muslim Ali Sina, author of Understanding Muhammad, compared the personality cult surrounding Barack Obama to that of Fascist leaders. This might seem exaggerated, but there is definitely a personality cult surrounding Obama which is unprecedented and deeply unhealthy.

Yes, Obama has a personality cult built around him, what with all those pageants he holds as he expounds in a mighty manner, flanked with the symbols to represent him and him alone. Statues of him have replaced those of beloved statesmen and heroes, the press is banned from making disparaging remarks, citizens are required to have his pictures up in their homes… Yeah, all of that is happening with Obama. If you think that he is assailed at every turn by Birthers, racists, and Tea Baggers, you are sorely mistaken.

It’s interesting to me how diverse, though paranoid and strange, Fjordman’s writings were, how his mind bounced from one idea in an article to the next. He has a hyperactive mind and one that makes large leaps without looking at the logical ground below him. More of this will be evident as I discuss some of his inconsistencies and errors.

Fjordman’s words are full of strange contradictions and odd reasoning

Actually, finding all of these contradictions made me like Fjordman a little because inconsistency, to me at least, means he hasn’t set his beliefs in stone. I see contradiction as openings through which he can reapproach his repellent ideas and come to different conclusions. But I’ve been wrong before… It’s probably more likely that a brain that settles on the uneasy logic of conspiracy theory may become so unfocused that continual reason is difficult.

Here we have some contradictory thinking from page 347:

Are women more stupid and less enlightened than men, since they in such great numbers are paving the way for their own submission? He comes up with an equally provocative answer: “When women are paving the way for sharia, this is presumably because women want sharia.” They don’t want freedom because they feel attracted to subservience and subjugation.

Perhaps the question Fjordman needs to ask is why white men suck so much because he can’t have it both ways. He makes the case that women stupidly rejected patriarchy and have demeaned white men to the point that they are feminized. But then he states that women are attracted to strong, brutal men who will dominate them. Then why did they shake off the yoke of the Western patriarchy? If this was all about submission one assumes any woman would be pleased to submit to a manly Norseman. Is it really the case that Fjordman feels inadequate and subconsciously thinks he is being thrown over for strong, manly, Muslim men? Or is he just a really bad theorist and is throwing every accusation against women he can make to see what sticks, contradictions be damned? I have no idea. But it is interesting to contemplate…

This is a total WTF moment from page 355-356:

And it has no in any way eradicated the basic sexual attraction between feminine women and masculine men. If people do not find this in their own country, they travel to another country to find it, which is now easier than ever. A striking number of Scandinavian men find their wives in East Asia, Latin America or other nations with a more traditional view of femininity, and a number of women find partners from more conservative countries, too. Not everyone, of course, but the trend is unmistakable. Scandinavians celebrate “gender equality” and travel to the other side of the world to find somebody actually worth marrying.

This manly-man, feminine-woman stuff veers very close to the sort of idiocy espoused (often hilariously) by Christian fundamentalist organizations like Vision Forum. Women need to be in skirts, long haired and with cute little voices and men must be manly men, doing manly things because if women cut their hair they evidently grow testicles and if men don’t stand with a wide stance, arms crossed, they evidently become homosexuals. But Fjordman is not a Christian and he doesn’t explain himself. Would he reject a woman with short hair in pants? Who knows because it’s a strange statement. Then add that I don’t think I have ever seen a Nationalist insist that feminine women and masculine men can only be found in other cultures. This whole paragraph was bizarre, creating unanswered questions and making one wonder how it is that Fjordman can see the logic in leaving one’s culture for love when he loathes the ideas of immigration. Would he see the logic in a manly-Norseman marrying a submissive, feminine Muslim woman?

Another “yeah, right” moment from page 409:

Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm, who has investigated violent crimes in one court, found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents. Swedish politicians want to continue Muslim immigration because it boosts the economy, yet the evidence so far indicates that it mainly boosts the number of gang rapes. Meanwhile, research shows that fear of honour killings is a very real issue for many immigrant girls in Sweden. 100.000 young Swedish girls[4] live as virtual prisoners of their own families.

Let’s ask some questions. I can’t address the number of rapes committed by immigrants in Sweden. But I can ask this: What does Fjordman care about all the daughters of Muslim extremists living in Europe? He wants their parents deported, expelled, sent back to their country of origin. If he gives a crap about these suffering girls, how is sending them away going to help them. Why does he bring it up when it makes no difference to him at all? And does he really care for the suffering of these girls when he seems to gloat over the rapes of his countrywomen? It is baffling.

Whawhawhat! This is from an article about feminism, on page 350:

In Europe, Newsweek writes about[15] how packs of wolves are now making a comeback in regions of Central Europe: “A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany’s wolves.” “Our postcard view of Europe, after all, is of a continent where every scrap of land has long been farmed, fenced off and settled. But the continent of the future may look rather different. “Big parts of Europe will renaturalise,” says Reiner Klingholz, head of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. Bears are back in Austria. In Swiss alpine valleys, farms have been receding and forests are growing back in. In parts of France and Germany, wildcats and ospreys have re-established their range.”

“In Italy, more than 60 percent of the country’s 2.6 million farmers are at least 65 years old. Once they die out, many of their farms will join the 6 million hectares (one third of Italian farmland) that has already been abandoned.” “With the EU alone needing about 1.6 million immigrants a year above its current level to keep the working-age population stable between now and 2050, a much more likely source of migrants would be Europe’s Muslim neighbours, whose young populations are set to almost double in that same time.” It is numbers like these that have induced Phillip Longman to foresee “the Return of Patriarchy[16]” and proclaim that “conservatives will inherit the Earth:”

So the return of native animals to Europe is a corollary to the influx of Muslims and both indicate a return to the Patriarchy. This is some strange reasoning. Very strange.

Why does all of this matter when discussing a mass murderer’s manifesto? Well, you see, when people cannot exercise the mental clarity to reject conspiracy theory, it can lead to other problems with thinking. I don’t like slippery slope arguments in this case because who can possibly know what goes on in the human mind? It’s hard to make judgement calls like this, but in Fjordman’s case, his fuzzy and strange reasoning in accepting conspiracy theory as truth point to even fuzzier logic in other areas. And while I don’t know entirely what good it does anyone to know this, it certainly does no one any harm knowing it. At the very least, it is an interesting look into an unsteady mind. (And unsteady does not mean insane or crazy – just lacking in logic.)

Fjordman’s capacity to judge a good source is questionable at best

I often wonder if the capacity to believe in conspiracy theory is also a sign of a complete inability to weigh the validity and believability of sources. It appears at times as if the True Believer is willing to take whatever proves their belief, accepting the worst “proof” that comes their way. From pages 51-52:

Kari Vogt, historian of religion at the University of Oslo, has stated that Ibn Warraq’s book “Why I am Not a Muslim” is just as irrelevant to the study of Islam as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are to the study of Judaism. She is widely considered as one of the leading expert on Islam in Norway, and is frequently quoted in national media on matters related to Islam and Muslim immigration. People who get most of their information from the mainstream  media, which goes for the majority of the population, will thus be systematically fed biased information and half-truths about Islam from our universities, which have largely failed to uphold the ideal of free inquiry. Unfortunately, this situation is pretty similar at universities[1] and colleges[2] throughout the West[3].

You see, Ibn Warraq is an anti-Islam polemicist. Using his works as an accurate look at Islam is indeed akin to looking at Henry Ford for an accurate representation of Judaism. This is important, a common problem one will encounter time and time again with Fjordman. His willingness to accept as fact the worst sort of evidence and conspiracy theory is troubling and gives lie to all those who commend his intellectual acuity and honesty.

More willingness to accept bad evidence, from page 57:

According to Robert Spencer[23], “Shakespeare is just the latest paradigmatic figure of Western Christian culture to be remade in a Muslim-friendly manner.” Recently the [US] State Department asserted, without a shred of evidence, that Christopher Columbus (who in fact praised Ferdinand and Isabella for driving the Muslims out of Spain in 1492, the same year as his first visit to the Americas) was aided on his voyages by a Muslim navigator. “The state of American education is so dismal today that teachers themselves are ill-equipped to counter these historical fantasies.”

Go ahead and Google “Christopher Columbus Muslim Navigator” and see what happens. Maybe the first site offered will be a Robert Spencer pile of crap overreacting wildly to the fact that Muslims learned how to navigate the seas using astronomy?  His bombastic reaction to it takes up more intellectual space than the idea itself.  People managed celestial navigation across many cultures but Robert Spencer needs for there to be a large conspiracy to lie about Muslim contributions to science in order to fuel his conspiracy that Marxists are attempting to destroy the Western world by creating myths about Muslim accomplishments. For the mass of humanity, there is really no better way to understand that a fact may be bad than to know that a bigot is behind it. Taking Robert Spencer’s word on anything to do with Muslims is like asking the Grand Wizard of the KKK to explain why blacks are inferior.

You sleep with dogs, you wake with a burning hatred for Muslims, it would seem. Fjordman’s ideas are hardly unique to him and were shaped by some really crappy thinkers, whom he admires and cites in the face of all reason. From page 334:

As columnist Diana West of the Washington Times points out, we should shift from a prodemocracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive. Calling this the War on Terror was a mistake. Baron Bodissey of the Gates of Vienna blog suggests the slogan “Take Back the Culture,” thus focusing on our internal struggle for Western culture.

I think I’ve made my utter disgust for Diana West clear by this point. Baron Bodissey is new to me but how could one not put their utter faith in a person writing with a pseudonym, or maybe he or she thinks it is a nom de guerre. Regardless, the good Baron writes for Gates of Vienna, a repellent site with an interesting tag line: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.” Yeah, more of that siege and war language, too.

Fjordman writes an entire article praising Diana West’s ridiculous book, The Death of the Grown-Up, beginning on page 359:

According to Diana West[1], the organising thesis of her book “is that the unprecedented transfer of cultural authority from adults to adolescents over the past half century or so has dire implications for the survival of the Western world.” Having redirected our natural development away from adulthood and maturity in order to strike the pop-influenced
pose of eternally cool youth – ever-open, non-judgmental, self-absorbed, searching for (or just plain lacking) identity – we have fostered a society marked by these same traits. In short: Westerners live in a state of perpetual adolescence, but also with a corresponding perpetual identity crisis. West thinks maturity went out of style in the rebellious 1960s, “the biggest temper tantrum in the history of the world,” which flouted authority figures of any kind.

Diana West is a terrible thinker. Yes folks, the “rebellious 1960s” that brought the Civil Rights movement in the United States, a challenge to the status quo that finally provided women with unprecedented freedoms and minorities with the hope of safety and access, created an identity crisis resulting in a temper tantrum. Such a trivialization of the accomplishments of the 1960s is a greater indictment against her than I could levy with a million critiques. Clearly, the obvious answer to such a crisis would have been to remain in the stasis of the 1950s when dad wore a double-breasted suit to the office, mom vacuumed in heels and the kids spat on black children who wanted to come to their schools. Westerners don’t live in a state of perpetual adolescence. Rather, people like Diana West misinterpret attempts at egalitarianism with immaturity. And her vision of what the world should look like, how we should behave, deeply influenced ABB as well.

From page 334:

As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch says, we should explain why Islam encourages despotism (because allegiance is owed the ruler as long as he is a Muslim), economic paralysis, intellectual failure (the cult of authority, the hostility to free and skeptical inquiry) in Islamic countries.

I hate to paint with such a broad brush but if you are willing to throw your beliefs in with a bigot like Robert Spencer and Jihad Watch, it’s going to be hard to take you seriously as an authority on anything but hate.

From page 625:

I have watched, for the better part of a year, a number of decent human beings including, but not limited to, Pamela Geller, Paul Belien, Diana West, the Baron and Dymphna from the Gates of Vienna blog and many others, being at the receiving end of a vicious smear campaign from Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs which is unlike anything I have seen in my life. After engaging in an insane witch-hunt on imaginary Fascists, whose ranks seem to grow every month, Mr. Johnson now suddenly chooses to look the other way in silence when very real Fascists use violence to silence their critics in a major Western city. I admit that makes me angry, and I think I have the right to be so.

Aha! AHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I don’t mean to mock excessively but if I had been on the fence about whether or not Charles Johnson has turned over a new leaf, separating himself from all of those “decent human beings” helped me make up my mind. Any side of the fence that permits Pamela Geller to dwell is the opposite of where I want to be morally, socially and intellectually.

Fjordman’s disgust for the modern world makes him sound like a crank

Fjordman is younger than me by a few years and yet he still sounds like a fatuous old man, harking back on the great accomplishments of old. From page 340:

Churchill’s speeches were a great inspiration to the British during WW2, but also promised that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Before the Battle of Britain, he delivered the immortal line, “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” How would today’s decadent and pleasure-loving Westerners react to a similar speech? I think Winston would have to re-write it to something along these lines: “We shall defend our continent, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the ice cream trucks, we shall fight on the cable TV cars, we shall fight in the Jacuzzis and the spas, we shall fight in the nail salons; we shall never surrender.”

So, Fjordman thinks that the comforts of a peaceful society have made everyone weak, decadent and just plain worthless. I believe this was written in 2007, which means Fjordman would have been in his early 30s when he typed these words. It should always be a warning when people who are this young hark back to a time when people were hungry, desperate and dying in wars as his or her inspiration for the future. But the best part of this bizarre tendency is that Fjordman does not see how he himself is a part of that which he considers craven. “We shall fight to defend our anti-Muslim websites, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the group blogs, we shall fight on our wireless routers, we shall fight with our message boards and PDF files turned into poorly selling books on Amazon, we shall fight safely knowing that most of us will write using pseudonyms, we shall never surrender.”

Take this from page 351:

“In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage.” “People will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating
traditional religious values.”

It’s a bit terrifying, this idea that people may begin to have children as a means of ensuring they are taken care of when they are old. For those of us not in love with the idea of producing children in numbers that would make a Quiverfull adherent proud, it is an indicator of an unstable culture wherein times will be too tight to save and pensions will be unreliable. I also wonder how having to care for aging parents will affect the kids who have to house and support them. Will they have the time and financial means to have their own children? No welfare state means no health care from the government. How many kids will it take to ensure mom and dad live comfortably into their 80s and 90s and what impact will it have on their own families and financial well-being? As is stated in this manifesto, there is a dark side to every idea of utopia and this one is no different. It is not a bad idea to take care of one’s parents but it is a bad idea to toss this out there without thinking of the implications of turning the clock back 200 years.

Fjordman is completely lacking self-awareness

Let’s look at how Fjordman can see errors everywhere but never in his own mind, from 56:

It became normal to view culture from the outside, not as a mode of thought which defines our moral inheritance, but as an elaborate disguise, through which artificial powers represent themselves as natural rights. Thanks to Marx, debunking theories of culture have become a part of culture. And these theories have the structure pioneered by Marx: they identify power as the reality, and culture as the mask; they also foretell some future ‘liberation’ from the lies that have been spun by our oppressors.”

It is striking to notice that this is exactly the theme of author Dan Brown’s massive international hit The Da Vinci Code from 2003, thought to be one of the ten best-selling books of all time. In addition to being a straightforward thriller, the novel claims that the entire modern history of Christianity is a conspiracy of the Church to cover up the truth about Jesus and his marriage to Mary Magdalene.

Forgive me for being crude, but who gives a shit? What does Dan Brown’s thriller about a Christian conspiracy have to do with any of this except demonstrate that fiction often employs conspiracies as plot points? If one were to be really uncharitable, one would wonder how it is that Fjordman recognized that Dan Brown was writing conspiracy and yet failed to understand that fear of all those rabid Marxists and their horrible political correctness and those Muslims and their agenda to enslave non-Muslims is equal fodder for fictional conspiracies.

Take this page 618, as Fjordman discusses liberals:

Apparently, your worth as an intellectual is measured in how grandiose your ideas are. The greater your visions, the more dazzling your intellect is and thus the greater prestige should be awarded to you. Whether those visions actually correspond to reality and human nature is of secondary importance. In fact, many a self-proclaimed intellectual will be downright offended by the petty considerations of his more pedestrian fellow citizens, concerned with what effects his ideas will have in real life. The fact that some people could get hurt from his ideas doesn’t discourage him.

This is tragic-comic. Fjordman is criticizing those who encourage multiculturalism and has no idea he is describing himself.

More of the same from page 625, an article describing a pissing contest Fjordman had with Charles Johnson from Little Green Footballs, wherein again he fails utterly to see the irony in what he is saying, emphasis mine:

One of the reasons why hardcore anti-Semites (David Duke[21] would be a case in point) are unreliable allies is that they hate Jews so much that it shuts down the rational parts of their brain and they end up making common cause with Muslims, based on mutual hatred. The same logic applies to hardcore anti-Europeans, of which there are many even at “conservative” websites such as LGF. They have an irrational hatred, a dark cloud in their minds which prevents them from seeing the world clearly. In a way, some LGF-ers thus have more in common with David Duke than they’d like to admit. If mindless anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism should be considered a problem then so should mindless anti-Europeanism.

Yeah, none of this could be used to describe Fjordman.

From page 675:

These days we hear so many arguments against Christianity, such as from the ‘proselytising atheists’ like Dawkins and Hitchens, and then we hear the arguments from the secular right which attack Christianity for being too pacifistic. The atheists claim that Christianity fomented violence, and that it is as militant and bloodthirsty as Islam, or in fact worse, and on the other side, we hear that Christianity is a religion of slaves, which weakens and emasculates the West. So Christianity gets it from both sides; it’s too militant, it causes wars and persecutions, and at the same time, it’s a religion that turns men into milquetoast pacifists. Does this make any sense?

Yes, it does, it is called interpretation. Neither assessment is wholly correct. Pity he could not see this where his own interpretations were concerned

Fjordman has a ridiculous victim mentality

From the chapter wherein Fjordman was explaining to women why they deserve all the rapes they brought upon themselves, on page 343:

In the big scheme of things, the truth is that European men have treated women with greater respect than the men of almost any other major civilisation on earth. And I don’t mean just in the modern age, I mean for many centuries. Yet we are the one group of men who are most demonised and attacked, whereas non-white men get treated with much greater respect. What white men see from this is that white Western women prefer men who treat them like crap, and disrespect men who treat them with respect. This isn’t exactly a smart way to behave if you want to be treated with dignity.

Oh, for the love of sanity. Is this not one of the best Nice Guy rants you’ve read in a while. Oh, the poor white men like Fjordman who just want to love and cherish the white women but they reject his niceness! They want men who treat them terribly. And all us women who are married to nice men, caring men, wonderful men look at Fjordman, this seeming twerp-man who is assigning a political motive for romantic failure with women, and know all too well what is happening.  Ugh. I mean, really. Does any man with any self-awareness assign the motives of the handful of women who didn’t want to be his girlfriend to all the women around them? Can this mopey, college-aged sentiment that girls like bastards and boys like doormats or sluts really be a part of any sort of adult social discourse? Haven’t we all agreed that some men and some women are not nice people and move on to find the ones who are genuinely nice? If not, may I suggest that we all do that now. This very minute. Please?

Fjordman is unintentionally hilarious while being utterly inconsistent as he denounces all victimhood but his own. From page 346:

Western feminists have cultivated a culture of victimhood in the West, where you gain political power through your status in the victim hierarchy. In many ways, this is what Political Correctness is all about. They have also demanded, and largely got, a re-writing of the history books to address an alleged historic bias; their world view has entered the school curriculum, gained a virtual hegemony in the media and managed to portray their critics as “bigots.” They have even succeeded in changing the very language we use, to make it less offensive. Radical feminists are the vanguard of PC.

Fjordman makes it very clear that women have obtained enough power that we are able to completely diminish Western men. We demand that men stop opening doors for us and demand that men stop patting our asses, and BOOM! The Western man was so diminished he could not even act if he saw a woman being raped by a Muslim. But then in the same article he says that women are cultivating a sense of victimhood through a victim hierarchy that gives them political power. How do these two ideas fit together, that women have demeaned men through our place on the victim hierarchy? And if he is correct and white men are the victims of Islam and feminists, how come they are not ranked on the victim hierarchy? Rhetorical questions because the answer is clear – Western men are excluded from everything, lonely in their victimhood.

Also, it is curious that he finds anything wrong with changing language we use to make it less offensive. At times it seems like many people who are overreacting to things like using polite language are indeed Western men who feel that “political correctness” threatens their previously unassailable status as arbiters of social action and reaction. As an online friend once told me, “To many white men there is no greater mental blow than to know they can no longer call a black man a n****r with impunity.” It’s almost comical to consider that anyone ever would be upset because they can no longer use offensive language to whomever they want with no consequences. It’s horrifying to think that any man would feel victimized by being unable to use words that demean others.

Fjordman misuses pop culture and literature to his own strange ends

It was shocking to see many forms of media that I love filtered through his brain. The first such shock occurred when he used Josh Whedon’s Serenity to explain a point he was making about the people behind the Eurabia conspiracy. From pages 304-305:

On the little-known planet Miranda, a gas called Pax was added to the air processors. It was intended to calm the population, weed out aggression. It worked. The people stopped fighting. They also stopped doing everything else, including breeding and physical self-preservation. A small minority of the population had the opposite reaction to this pacification. Their aggression increased beyond madness, and they killed most of the others. Tens of millions of people quietly let themselves be wiped out.

Movie director Joss Whedon is careful to point out that the Alliance isn’t some evil empire, but rather a force that is largely benevolent. They meant it for the best, to create a better world, a world without sin. However, according to Whedon, “Whenever you create Utopia, you find something ugly working underneath it.”

So I guess in Fjordman’s mind he and Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Pamela Geller, Diana West, and Daniel Pipes are all browncoats? Is Fjordman Captain Tightpants? Of the bunch of them, he’s the best suited for the role. At least he compared his own fiction to another fiction. It may have been done without an ounce of self-awareness, but it’s a start.

From page 523:

I have compared Islam to the movie “The Matrix,” where people are turned into slaves by living in a make-believe reality designed to keep them in chains. In the movie, everybody who hasn’t been completely unplugged from this artificial reality is potentially an agent for the system. I have gradually come to the conclusion that this is the sanest way to view Muslims, too.

Pro-tip: This is how every person who has stumbled upon a great conspiratorial truth feels. They feel like they are in a real life version of The Matrix. This is so common that it should be seen as a clue. If you feel as if you have stumbled across a great truth that the sleeping, masses of humans are unaware of, then chances are you are dabbling in conspiracy theory. Those who discovered that the aliens shaped the Earth and enslaved humans compare their awakening to The Matrix. Those who discovered that the Jews have a plan to conquer the planet and enslave non-Jews compare their awakening to The Matrix. And on and on and on.

From page 337:

As the quote goes in the Hollywood classic “The Third Man”:

”…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Some would say that’s a tad unfair to the Swiss. Switzerland has been at the forefront of many technological developments for a long time, and we could probably learn from their example with frequent referendums and direct democracy. But it’s true that European renewals can be messy stuff.

Muslims always claim that Islamic influences triggered the Renaissance. That’s not true. But maybe it will be this time. Perhaps this life-and-death struggle with Islam is precisely the slap in the face that we need to regroup and revitalise our civilisation.

Well, if that isn’t the best reason I have ever read to battle the Muslims – Europe needs to invent something better than a cuckoo clock. In this strange attempt to sell bigoted war against Muslims he needs something more than his perception that Islam is the worst thing ever to happen to Europe. He also needs to see the upside. “Hey, we engaged in a massive, pointless war based on religious bigotry but at least we can now say we are poised for another Renaissance once we regain our moral legitimacy and faith in ourselves as decent people.” Also note the hyperbolic language: “life-and-death struggle with Islam”. War, urgency. At some point Fjordman is going to have to own the nature of the language he used.

Fjordman invokes Beckett, finding parallels between the play and Europe’s current inability to find a great leader, from page 339:

I once had the pleasure of watching the absurdist theatre play called “Waiting for Godot,” by Samuel Beckett. Two men called Vladimir and Estragon sit around waiting for a man named Godot. Mr. Godot never shows up, of course. It is years ago now, but for some reason, I remembered it recently when watching the political situation in Europe.

He goes on to say, on page 340:

We complain about weak leaders, but maybe we keep producing weak leaders because we, as a people, are weak? And if we finally find a Churchill, will the press rip him apart for whatever flaw they can find? Could the real Churchill have been elected today, or would the media eat him alive because of his heavy drinking and replace him with a slick boy scout? And if a strong leader steps forward, will he have a democratic mindset or will he have a darker agenda? Churchill certainly understood Islam.

And he goes on to quote some of Churchill’s most virulent objections to Islam. Would it have been horrible had Churchill not been elected as Prime Minister decades ago? You bet. The world was an utterly different place then, socially, culturally and technologically. But the fact is the world is different now, much to the consternation of men like Fjordman and no, the world does not now need a drunk religious bigot running the UK. Full stop. Yes, Churchill would be ripped apart were he running for office today and we can all debate whether or not that is a good thing.  He was the man his country needed the moment they needed him but that does not extrapolate into him being the leader we need now unless you are person yearning to return to the past.

But this Beckett play does not illustrate that point, that we get the leaders we deserve. Get ten people who have read Beckett in a room and you will have at least nine opinions about what the play is about . The situation in Europe is not an existentialist play wherein people are blinded by the banality of their lives to the point that all activity is a passive, recursive search for that which they cannot recognize.  Europe is a place that has made its needs known, regardless of how much Fjordman wants to believe the Eurabia theory and how he thinks everyone is deluded but him and his cadre of the Chosen Ones in the Know. Rather, Europeans protest, they react, they riot and given the multi-party systems in some countries, have a very malleable government that changes according to the will of the people. Europe is not Vladimir and Estragon made large, a passive, stupid group of people awaiting a salvation they would not be able to recognize were it to come. The European people have chosen the government they want. Beckett’s blank slate of a play can be used to represent almost any idea, but I have to say it cannot be used as an allegory for a continent that does, in fact, react politically.

It’s just that all those people who are reacting politically are doing it wrong, in Fjordman’s eyes. Not to diminish Churchill, for he was far more than the sum of his moral and physical failures, but rest assured, if the Europeans wanted a drunk Islamaphobe running their respective countries, they are not in such an existential quagmire that they could not find the man or woman who suited their needs.

And now I get to be all kinds of pissed off. Shit just got real. Fjordman invoked Wilfred Owen. For those who are new readers, I am not a woman given to much love for poetry. Rather, there are a few poets whom I absolutely love. Cummings, Tennyson, Hopkins and others, but I truly adore poor, doomed, brilliant Wilfred Owen. From the poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” a line will stay with me until I die: “As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.” This image haunts me.  Fjordman quotes from the poem “Anthem for a Doomed Youth” on page 341:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

I can understand why Wilfred Owen felt that war was futile, rotting away in the trenches for some cause he didn’t even understand. But it isn’t true that war is worse than everything. Sharia is worse than war.

How can anyone read a poem like this and not quail from war? How can a man, who by his own admission lived under the “Pax Americana,” know a thing about war? How can he know a thing about living under sharia? How can he, from his perspective as a man who has lived a life of comfort and peace, say that something he hasn’t even experienced is worse than war, which he also has not experienced? How can he think he knows better than a man whose words survived his wretched death in the trenches.

My disgust at invoking the name of Wilfred Owen in this wretched mess is only matched by my disgust for those who, after reading the above, wherein Fjordman says there are worse things than war, that sharia is worse than war, will still maintain he never once used violent rhetoric. This passage is a call to arms, full stop. It is not a call to political action. It is a refutation of the idea that war is horrible, an urging to see sharia, which does not exist in Norway, as something to go to war over. The idea is as clear as the words he uses to express the idea and to claim this is not a direct exhortation for war is a refusal to read and comprehend. I just wish he had found a jingoistic poet to back his war-lust.

And just when I thought he couldn’t make me any angrier, Fjordman proves me wrong on page 347:

The English author Fay Weldon has noted that “For women, there is something sexually very alluring about submission.” And as Hedegaard dryly notes, if submission is what many women seek, the feminised Danish men are boring compared to desert sheikhs who won’t allow you to go outside without permission. Muslims like to point out that there are more women than men in the West who convert to Islam, and this is in fact partly true. Islam means “submission.” Is there something about submission that is more appealing to some women than it is to most men? Do women yield more easily to power?

Oh man, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: I know a lot more about Fay Weldon and what she thinks about sexual submission than Fjordman does. Fay Weldon writes about the complexities of human relationships and some of her characters are submissive to brutal men. Some are not. Some are ardent feminists. Some are not. And it’s hard to know where Weldon stands herself in these matters, as she has not lived a life that can be easily summed up by assigning social and sexual labels to it. But in her writings, the female characters live varied lives. Older women look back at the feminist struggles and wince at some of the thing, they did. Some don’t. Younger characters who have always known freedom never hark back. But the context is and always has been that women’s lives are their own, regardless of how they relate to men.

I cannot even determine what book or interview Fjordman took this quote from. I don’t have Weldon’s books memorized and a Google shows me that the only place this quote evidently appears online is in Fjordman’s rant, reproduced over and over across the web. Google the quote yourself if you doubt me. This is more evidence of Fjordman’s cherry-picking because while I have no doubt Weldon said what he attributes to her, Weldon has also said things like, “Men are irrelevant.” She also said, “We shelter children for a time; we live side by side with men; and that is all. We owe them nothing, and are owed nothing. I think we owe our friends more, especially our female friends.” Pity Fjordman has clearly never read her books. She could have taught him a lot.

Moreover, as anyone who has any knowledge of human sexuality will tell you, don’t confuse sexual submission with social submission. It’s a childish mistake Fjordman is making, conflating the two. And finally, Islam means “voluntary submission to Allah.” The religion’s name has nothing to do with female sexual submission. But that aside, I implore Fjordman to never again invoke the name of any author in an attempt to subvert their meaning, as he did with Owen, or without understanding their body of work, as he did with Weldon.

Then, as if invoking the name of Fay Weldon was not enough to irritate me into a near-tiger like ferocity, he utterly misses the point of Virginia Woolf. From page 348-9:

Virginia Woolf in her book A Room of One’s Own praises the genius of William Shakespeare[10]: “If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind.” “Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” “His extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil.” She “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross–roads where the omnibuses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.”

Feminists claim that the reason why women haven’t been as numerous in politics and science as men is due to male oppression of women. Some of this is true. But it is not the whole story. Being male means having to prove something, to achieve something, in a greater way than it does for women. In addition to this, the responsibility for child rearing will always fall more heavily on women than on men. A modern society may lessen these restraints, but it will never remove them completely. For these practical reasons, it is unlikely that women will ever be as numerous as men in politics or in the highest level in business.

On this one, I am going to give Fjordman some leeway because he is not being wholly repellent. But the tragedy of Shakepeare’s sister is not that she simply had children to raise or dithered about, trying to be some Superwoman. Rather, the point Woolf is making is that women are indeed the equals of men but have for centuries faced an impenetrable stonewall preventing access. Much happened to Judith before she killed herself as she tried so hard to have the benefits of a life men took as their right from birth. Women want the right to achieve something, to prove themselves and indeed it was male oppression of women that prevented that from happening for Judith. Whether or not it is unlikely that women will ever be as numerous as men in business and politics, it still remains a sad fact that unless one has access to the things that many men have had – education, quiet to think, money to support one’s self independent of marriage or inheritance – women won’t even have a chance to try. (And interestingly, if Fjordman wants another viewpoint, Fay Weldon’s protagonist says in her novel Chalcot Crescent that women don’t need a room of one’s own to write – she needs the pressure of the bills coming through the mailbox. So her narrator writes successful novels, pen on paper, perched on the staircase as her family rushes about her. In the middle of chaos, she creates and makes more money than the men who sponge off her and condemn her for not creating art that achieves the lofty standards men have set. The subtext is, of course, that even if a woman accomplishes great feats while still maintaining the status quo, while following the rules, men will still find a way to rebuke her.)

Just some miscellaneous things I want to mention

Next are some passages that are freaky in retrospect, like this statement that sort of smacks the reader in the face now that we know more about the attacks and ABB’s frame of mind. From page 517:

Muhammad Atta was named by the FBI as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. He was also a student in Germany, where he was described as quiet, polite and inconspicuous. This strategy of using religious deception, smiling to the infidels while plotting to kill them, has become a common feature of many would-be Jihadists in the West.

If this doesn’t describe ABB perfectly… Polite, inconspicuous, smiling at the people he planned to kill.

Also a relatively innocuous passage that I think needs to be discussed because it influenced ABB. From page 361:

I sometimes wonder whether the modern West, and Western Europe in particular, should be dubbed the Fatherless Civilisation. Fathers have been turned into a caricature and there is a striking demonisation of traditional male values. Any person attempting to enforce rules and authority, a traditional male preserve, is seen as a Fascist and ridiculed, starting with God the Father. We end up with a society of vague fathers who can be replaced at the whim of the mothers at any given moment. Even the mothers have largely abdicated, leaving the upbringing of children to schools, kindergartens and television. In fashion and lifestyle, mothers imitate their daughters, not vice versa.

ABB’s daddy issues permeate his part of his manifesto. And again, Fjordman was just postulating and could have had no idea how directly his words would relate to ABB’s mind. But Fjordman’s negative opinions about women (who file for divorces) and his desire to hark back to Diana West’s starched white petticoat of a past had to have resonated deeply with ABB. It almost makes me wonder if Fjordman’s misogyny and a desire to go back 60 years in the past played a role in ABB  declaring him one of the most important writers in the blogosphere. While anti-Islamic thought played a large role in ABB’s rampage, misogyny also played a large role. More on that when I post about Anders Behring Breivik next week.

At this point, all I am doing is sharing with people who don’t have the time (and some may say masochism) to slog through 1500+ pages of murderous manifesto the ideas that can only be pulled out if one reads every word. In a strange way, I think reading this humanized Fjordman because he is really no different than anyone else who believes a conspiracy theory. He’s no different than many white Nice Guys who are so blinded by hate and sadness that he cannot make sense sometimes. He’s full of the same beliefs and prejudices that are common to the American Tea Party. And while he talked a big game online, he didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Is this a referendum on the use of overblown, violent rhetoric? Is it an attempt to pull virulent ideas out into the disinfecting sunlight? I don’t really know. I just like writing about strange books, strange people, strange ideas. The only end result I see from all of this writing is that Fjordman is so very, very common and so very, very human.

Next week, Tuesday probably, I will post my first of two discussions about Anders Behring Breivik. The first will discuss his plans both for the attack and for Europe post-Islam-expulsion. The second will just be a look the portrait his words paint of him. Hopefully my slog through 2083 will provide some looks at the face of political violence and domestic terrorism that the media missed in their rush to call him a Nazi, right-wing Christian.

Author: Andrew Berwick, real name Anders Behring Breivik

Type of Book: Paranoid manifesto, conspiracy theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Sigh…

Availability: It’s all over the Internet.

Comments: (edited to add: I mistakenly refer to the site Gates of Vienna as Gates of Brussels several times in this discussion. Mea culpa and I would change it but this article has been reproduced several places and the mistake is sort of cast in e-stone. Just know that the site is Gates of Vienna.) When I learned that the Norway mass murderer had salted his manifesto all over the Internet shortly before he went on his rampage, I knew I was going to have to read it. After all, I read odd books. And more to the point, I have an unapologetic interest in the aberrant mind. From all the commentary I read online and from news reports, Anders Behring Breivik was a fundamentalist Christian, he was a fascist, he was a racist, he was an Aryan supremacist, he hated Muslims, he was a loner, he was a part of a larger anti-Islam group, he was a lunatic, he was a mastermind – he was all kinds of inconsistent things and I wondered what was correct and what was the typical media rush to judgment.  I wondered if the people who were postulating about him and his sources had actually read the manifesto.

So I read it. Every last word. I will admit that at about page 1200 things at times got a little vague for me. Reading every word of this disjointed, strange monster of a manuscript would make even an Adderall addict bleary. I also admit that after a while, all the articles explaining the horrors of Islam and all the terrible things Muslims have done wore a bit thin. I have a feeling that were I forced to read some of them again, it would be like I was reading them for the first time. That’s okay  because all that “evidence” was not likely to be of much interest to me anyway. It’s largely unimportant because I examined this manifesto from the perspective of a person interested in strange minds and conspiracy theory. On both fronts, this manifesto was quite interesting.

Strangely, Anders Behring Breivik (to be called ABB from here on out) is not the most interesting part of this manifesto. Rather, it was the cast of characters who led him to the conclusions he reached and provided confirmation for his strange ideas. Most notable is Fjordman. So notable is Fjordman that I intend to devote two entries to discussing him. Initially, I declared Fjordman to be a complete asshole, and parts of that assessment still seem true, but as I reread and wrote my discussion, I began to find him pitiable. Not pitiful, but definitely pitiable.

Fjordman, who revealed his identity recently as Peder Jensen, a 36-year-old man who seems largely unremarkable, greatly inspired ABB’s thoughts and the terrible rampage that killed 77 people. Because Fjordman influenced many of ABB’s ideas, it seems logical to me to discuss him first. You see, though much of this manifesto consists of articles from other writers, the bulk of the articles came from Fjordman. If you have not read or browsed the manifesto, many articles from anti-Islamists are reproduced in full in the manifesto. Part two of this three-part manifesto was almost a static wiki of articles from other people. Though my eyes admittedly glazed over at times, I believe I counted 40 articles from Fjordman reproduced throughout the 1500 pages. Though there are articles from other writers (one of them a hilarious pearl-clutching treatise on the horrors of rap music), Fjordman’s words take up the most space and show a very clear path of how his words affected ABB. Though there are theories about a Brit in Malta who may have influenced ABB’s rampage, the fact is Fjordman’s paranoiac and violent rhetoric influenced ABB’s mindset and his plans more than any other writer or thinker. In fact, the subtitle of this manifesto comes from the title of one of Fjordman’s articles, and the date of 2083 seems very much influenced by estimates that Fjordman posits about the decline of Europe if Muslim immigration is not stopped soon. So logically, for me at any rate, to understand ABB, we first must talk about Fjordman’s articles and the part they played in ABB’s anti-Muslim fears.

Before you read part one of my discussion about Fjordman, there are some things I would like to share with you, gentle reader. Unpleasant things. Of course, I will never not be a little shocked when I discover a whole mess of people willing to accept conspiracy theory as irrevocable fact. I may devote my life to reading books about conspiracy theory, but it is unsettling when it hits home how deeply people can believe in it. It was shocking to realize that there are people who take the word of Bat Ye’or, the woman responsible for creating what I like to call The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca, as historical truth. It was horrifying to realize that people like Diana West (ahahahaha!), Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer are not laughed out of every quarter of contemporary political thought. It was disgusting to realize that there are no depths too low for the likes of Glenn Beck, Pamela Geller and Debbie Schlussel to sink as they try desperately to keep their names and ideas relevant in the minds of those who live and breathe race hate and bigotry.

But as unpleasant as all of this is, it is important that we understand how common conspiracy theory is in some form or other for a good many people in this world. For many the natural impulse is to dismiss ABB as a crazy man, and we dismiss him as a lunatic at our own risk because if he is a lunatic, so are many, many others. It is hardwired into the human brain to believe strange things, I think, and it’s hard to look at a man like ABB and realize that he is just one of many, a man who is different solely because he took things just one step further. That is why I ultimately feel pity for Fjordman. Fjordman, a True Believer in Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia conspiracy theory was building castles in the air via his online essays, never once thinking that his words, taken at face value, could have been seen as a call to arms.

We have a vested interest in dismissing all violence as crazy, labeling people like ABB as The Other, but his views are derived from other people and are influencing other people even after anyone with common decency would dismiss him. Killing innocent teenagers for a bizarre political and social agenda should have rendered ABB’s ideas untouchable for anyone with sense and a conscience – Fjordman is appalled by what happened on Utøya – but there is a fringe element who see what ABB did as being the work of a patriot. Think I’m exaggerating? I don’t recommend visiting Pamela Geller or Debbie Schlussel’s sites because if you do, you are rewarding their dreadful antics to draw attention to themselves. Rather, check out the analysis of some of these people on sites like Loon Watch, Spencer Watch, and, interestingly enough, Little Green Footballs. (It had been years since I had visited Little Green Footballs. Last time I visited the site, it was a hive of scum and villainy. Discovering the site is no longer devoted to race hate and biogtry was perhaps the sole pleasant element to come from reading 2083.)

Before I begin my discussion of 2083, I need to make it clear, very clear, that I am not discussing any specifics of the immigration situations in other countries or the specifics of Muslim immigration in Europe. I am not qualified to discuss it and I have no interest running to ground all of the statistics, determining what information is sound and what information is not. But even though the sites I have read that discussed some elements of 2083 focus solely on the question of Islamic immigration, there is so much more than that to be found in 2083. So much, in fact, that what began as just another of my long-winded looks at strange writings turned into what I think will be a four part series: two entries about Fjordman and two entries about ABB.

But being who I am, only part of the manifesto interested me. If you want a hard political look at Muslim immigration and the social implications of it, there are plenty of political sites on both sides of the issue to accommodate you. My examination of Fjordman will look at his beliefs and an analysis of his writing. My examination of ABB will be to look at his plans and his theories, and some postulation about his brain because I cannot resist the urge to armchair psychoanalyze him. And it should be mentioned that I am not going to stray from the text. Everything I discuss about either man comes directly from 2083, and to make it clear, every word from Fjordman comes from articles that ABB found so important that he reproduced them in full in 2083. I also will end up snarking some because, given the text we are discussing, how can I not? Some ideas, even those that lead to tragedy, have an arrogant comedy in them that cannot be ignored by a woman who has a black belt in sarcasm.

So begins Part One: Fjordman.

2083, though categorized into three sections, is a mess in terms of coherence. So discussing the book chronologically is impossible for me. Instead, I am going to write in categories, first about the elements of the book that are most important in understanding the Eurabia conspiracy theory, Fjordman’s distaste for Muslims, and understanding how Fjordman’s words, however unintentionally on his part, could have inspired violence.

It’s also important to note two things before I begin. Fjordman and ABB are not native English speakers, so I will not be noting any usage errors in their writing. To include the traditional [sic] would have been time-consuming and more than a little pedantic had I been consistent. Second, if there are any errors in the way book names are presented or any other formatting differences between the original text and my quotes, assume those errors are mine. I copied from a PDF into Word then into WordPress and I can imagine some things got lost in the transfers.

So let’s begin and have a look at Fjordman, the man who influenced a mass murderer.

The Eurabia Conspiracy Theory
I want to start with the whole Eurabia theory because if we really want to assign blame for what happened in Norway, the blame begins and ends with ABB. Full stop. Non-negotiable. But at the same time, it is not hard to see how it is that conspiracy theory can lead a mind utterly astray. If Fjordman is the man who influenced ABB, then Bat Ye’or is the woman who influenced all of those who believe that there is a master plan to sell out Europe wholesale to the Muslims.

Fjordman is a true believer in Bat Ye’or’s theory of Eurabia, wherein Marxism, political correctness, cultural relativism (routinely called multiculturalism), traitor governments and the EU have collided and colluded to permit an Islamic invasion that will wipe out Western civilization. Here’s a small sample of what Bat Ye’or believes and has written about, as described by Fjordman on page 281:

In an interview with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Bat Ye’or explained how French President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as with France’s waning influence in the international arena, decided in the 1960′s to create a strategic alliance with the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union.

“This is a matter of a total transformation of Europe, which is the result of an intentional policy,” said Bat Ye’or. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world. The European leaders have decided on an alliance with the Arab world, through which they have committed to accept the Arab and Muslim approach toward the United States and Israel. This is not only with respect to foreign policy, but also on issues engaging European society from within, such as immigration, the integration of the immigrants and the idea that Islam is part of Europe.”

To sum up, France tried to ally themselves with the Muslims as a counter-balance to the Soviets and now, as a result, all European leaders have an alliance with the Muslim world that affects policies toward the USA and Israel and will result in the West becoming Islamic satellite nations.

From page 283, we get the following two quotes:

A wide-ranging policy was sketched out. It entailed a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries that would endow Europe – and especially France, the project’s prime mover – with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States. This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, and well outside of official treaties, using the innocent sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The organisation functioned under the auspices of European government ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission and the Arab League. The goal was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods.

European leaders went behind their citizens’ backs in order to sell their countries out to the Muslims.

On the cultural front there began a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to “The Contribution of the Islamic Civilisation to European culture.” It was reaffirmed by French President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the powerful European Commission, the EU’s “government,” and later Italian Prime Minister, through the creation of a Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilisations. This foundation was to control everything said, written and taught about Islam in Europe.

There is a movement to control information about Islam, including what is taught in schools, all under the auspices of European leaders working behind the scenes to give their countries over to Islam.

More from page 284:

Eurabia is a novel new entity. It possesses political, economic, religious, cultural, and media components, which are imposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies. While Europeans live within Eurabia’s constraints, outside of a somewhat confused awareness, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis.

This Eurabian policy, expressed in obscure wording, is conducted at the highest political levels and coordinated over the whole of the European Union. It spreads an anti-American and anti-Semitic Euro-Arab sub-culture into the fiber of every social, media and cultural sector. Dissidents are silenced or boycotted. Sometimes they are fired from their jobs, victims of a totalitarian “correctness” imposed mainly by the academic, media and political sectors.

Okay, this is important because the reason those kids were targeted on that island is because they were attending a Labor Party summer camp. ABB makes this clear in the beginning of the manifesto, but key to the Eurabia conspiracy is the idea that cultural Marxists, the people responsible for political correctness, are the ones permitting Muslim immigration into Norway. By taking out future Socialists whom he thought would continue to harm his country, ABB was trying to stem the tide of immigration that Bat Ye’or insists comes from this conspiracy of European leaders.

And it goes on and on. To save the reader from having to read more long quotes on this matter, here is the summary: Europe’s leaders have sold out Europeans to the Muslims, who are evil and seek to destroy a Western identity. All non-Muslims will be forced into a state of “dhimmitude,” a neologism coined by Ye’or to express the perpetual second-class citizenship and a state of near-slavery that she believes Muslims will inflict on non-Muslims. Fjordman believes Bat Ye’or’s conspiracy theory and therefore so does ABB.

What I later found so interesting about Fjordman’s belief in this conspiracy theory is that there are glimpses of a reasonable mind (and note I did not say rational – conspiracy theorists are some of the most rational people on the planet but they are seldom reasonable). There are moments when, as I read, I could see the wheels turning in his mind and if he had just let them turn a bit more, he might have come out on the other side of the machine. But alas, he got stuck. For instance, Fjordman is strangely aware of how dumb his particular brand of conspiracy sounds but is unaware that he is just like every other True Believer out there in how he rationalizes his ideas. From page 280:

I decided to write this essay after a comment from a journalist, not a Leftist by my country’s standards, who dismissed Eurabia as merely a conspiracy theory, one on a par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I do not disagree with the fact that conspiracy theories exist, nor that they can be dangerous. After all, the Protocols and the
Dolchstosslegende, or “stab in the back myth” – the idea that Germany didn’t lose WW1 but was betrayed by Socialists, intellectuals and Jews – helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before WW2.

So he’s aware of conspiracy theories. He understands that they exist and that others look at the Eurabia conspiracy and dismiss it along with other conspiracies. But like all True Believers, his conspiracy is different, somehow, than all the other conspiracy theories. As much as I loathe his ideology and as much as I mock and deride his beliefs, I also know that there is a critical mind in there somewhere that has been corrupted by hate because there is no way anyone could know the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a load of pants but not be able to see how Eurabia is the same unless one is deliberately shutting down the part of one’s mind that permits reasonable comparisons.

We continue seeing how strangely his mind works on page 280:

However, what puzzles me is that it is a widely-held belief of many (not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and even in the United States) that the terror attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11th 2001 were really a controlled demolition staged by the American government and then blamed on Muslims. I have seen this thesis talked about many times in Western media. While it is frequently (though not always) dismissed and mocked, it is least mentioned.

In contrast, Eurabia – which asserts that the Islamisation of Europe didn’t happen merely by accident but with the active participation of European political leaders – is hardly ever referred to at all, despite the fact that it is easier to document. Does the notion of Eurabia hit too close to home? Perhaps it doesn’t fit with the anti-American disposition of many journalists? Curiously enough, even those left-leaning journalists who are otherwise critical of the European Union because of its free market elements never write about Eurabia.

Fjordman doesn’t seem to understand that only a small number of people believe that 9/11 was an inside job, and that when it comes up, it is being brought up and discussed by the self-same people who believe in it. Aside from Charlie Sheen and the whole “Loose Change” crowd, people feel no need to deflect blame for the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center from the Muslim terrorists responsible for it. Therefore it is not that unusual that Eurabia seldom comes up either. The reason no one reputable mentions Eurabia as truth is because it is, as I said already, The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca. Even though there are some news outlets willing to let Glenn Beck shit up the place and therefore may have an open-door lunatic policy,  most of them are not, in fact, run by anti-Western freedom haters who want to see the entire world taken over by political correctness so that the Muslims can enslave us all. Rather, people don’t discuss it outside of Jihad Watch and The Gates of Brussels because most people are not bigoted paranoiacs. Even better, they aren’t saying it because Islam is not trying to take over the world. The reason it is “hardly ever referred to at all” is because it does not exist

Fjordman has really swallowed Bat Ye’or’s conspiracy theory hook, line, and sinker, to the point that he simply cannot see that this belief set is really a different side of the same coin used as currency in race hate and bigotry directed at Jews. From page 296:

According to Bat Ye’or, fear of awakening opposition to EU policy toward the Arab Mediterranean countries led to the repression of all discussion of the economic problems and difficulties of integration caused by massive immigration. Any criticism of Muslim immigration is basically brushed off as being “just like the Jews were talked about in Nazi Germany,” a ridiculous but effective statement.

It’s not ridiculous. It’s the same goddamned hate that has plagued mankind since we evolved into differing tribes. The arguments are the same – the Muslims want their own law system derived from their beliefs, they won’t assimilate, they commit crimes against native Europeans, etc. Just replace the world Muslim with Jew and we can reenact those same accusations of 70 years ago.

Bat Ye’or’s acolytes are no different than anyone else who bases their life around bizarre conspiracy. From page 296 we see the victim mentality that all these True Believers seem to possess:

Professional harassment, boycott and defamation punish those who dare to openly challenge the Politically Correct discourse. According to Bat Ye’or, this has led to the development of a type of “resistance press” as if Europe were under the “occupation” of its own elected governments.

What harm has befallen Bat Ye’or, or the people at Gates of Brussels, or Robert Spencer, or anyone else for speaking this nonsense other than earning the censure of their peers? If you say stupid things that have no basis in reality, people mock you. That’s life, not persecution for your beliefs. Moreover, I find it amusing that these folk consider themselves as equivalent to “resistance press.” They are tilting at windmills and are trying to give their bigoted conspiracy a patina of respectability, harking back to the real resistances that fought against actual occupying armies, like the French during WWII. This is not a resistance press that requires pseudonyms for personal safety – it’s a bunch of miserable people publishing bigotry as history, many of whom don’t want to eat the shit sandwich that being bigots would earn them. Bat Ye’or is no Lucie Aubrac. It is offensive that anyone would even try to associate this mess of hate with movements that genuinely did fight against occupying armies. But they must adopt this guise of being the voice for freedom, persecuted for their beliefs, lest they have to face the fact that their base beliefs are rejected because they are stupid and because they are wrong.

It’s all very sad, in a way, how such beliefs, so strange on their face, would influence anyone to believe. But they do believe. And a man killed 77 people because of the perpetuation of conspiracy theory as fact. Never forget this. ABB believed this conspiracy theory, but so do many others. The basis of the belief behind his rampage is shared by many other people.

Fjordman is a religious bigot
The force behind the Eurabia conspiracy theory is hate – bigotry aimed at a religion. Saying this in no way lessens the impact of any Muslim atrocity that may have happened. Religion is, in my atheist opinion, a shield behind which many terrible people have done terrible things. Bat Ye’or suffered a shattering upheaval because of political machinations in Egypt and calling her and those who believe her conspiracy bigots should not reduce the perception of the impact bad politics had on her life. But regardless of how she came to have the ideas she does, the basis of this conspiracy theory is hate and Fjordman definitely has the hate.

Hate makes it impossible to see any blood except that which is on your enemy’s hands. Fjordman has some odd ideas about the sanctity of other religions in comparison to Islam. From page 58:

Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Koran for fighting against people of other faiths. “If it is correct that many Muslims view the Koran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence. Consequently, it must be reasonable to ask
Muslims themselves how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is,” says Magaard.

Fjordman cops to the fact that he is not a Christian, though he thinks Christian Identity could play some role in ending Muslim immigration, so perhaps he has no idea the hilarity that ensues when one engages in comparative religious examinations of the horrors religions espouse. But suffice it to say that for every line from the Koran one uses to damn the Muslims, I can find find an equally appalling line from the Bible and/or Torah to damn the Christians and/or Jews. Let us ask all the Christians and Jews how they relate to the text, if they read it as it is. That should be fun and illuminating.

More of the same, plus some bizarre rhetoric from page 337:

Muslims are stuck with their problems and their corrupt leaders and blame everybody else for their own failures because they can never admit they are caused by deep flaws in their culture. We shouldn’t make the same mistake. Europeans export wine; Arabs export whine. That’s the way it should be.

This comes from a section wherein Fjordman is postulating that the Europeans have been too weak and have the weak government they deserve. The part I am focusing on here is the statement that Muslims never admit they cause problems and that throwaway line about wine and whine. Ugh. This is ridiculous stereo-typing (based on what – I had no idea that Muslim are considered whiny – none that I know are whiny…) and really helps the case that Fjordman is just a bigoted, strange little man willing to say outrageous things because he hates. And if all Arabs exported was whine then why all the fear? What does it say about Fjordman that he has such hate for a group that is evidently so weak he uses words like “whine” to describe them?  Of course, that was a rhetorical throwaway line, but still, it is quite grating.

Then Fjordman goes on to quote a commenter from some anti-Islam sites:

Thus, from a purely economic point of view, Islam seems to be a collective of people who live by the ethos of “beg, borrow or steal.” So why do we, the capitalist countries, who do not believe in offering anyone a free lunch, subsidise the most lazy yet aggressive bunch of people on God’s planet, who are bent on subverting our democratic system? The nub is, how has it come about, that the natural progression of the most advanced civilisation on earth is towards stupidity?

Yep, from the entirety of all the Muslims on this Earth we can safely say that every single one of them is a beggar, a moocher or a thief. This is very sound reasoning and no one should ever question when anyone makes huge, sweeping, bigoted statements like this.

But Fjordman and those he quotes don’t let anything like facts get in their way of Islamic demonization. From page 414:

Former Muslim Ali Sina[51] claims that even in the USA, which has a smaller Muslim population and less social security benefits than Western Europe, Muslims are a huge drain on the economy: “Because about 2 million Muslims live in America and among them there are some who are terrorists, Americans are forced to expend hundreds of billions of
dollars on homeland security. I have no idea how much is the actual cost. Let us be conservative and say it costs only $200 billion dollars per year. In reality it could be many times more. Does anyone have any idea? With just $200 billion dollars, every Muslim, including their children cost the taxpayers $100,000 dollars per year. This is the real “contribution” of Muslims to America Mr. President. Once you add the cost of the real damage caused in terrorist attacks, such as to planes, buildings, etc. this cost will be much higher.

Just for the record, power needs no excuse to crawl up people’s asses. Seriously, if the TSA had not been the agency that more or less destroyed the Bill of Rights, some other government agency would have. I know, I know, I am totally sounding like Alex Jones. We all have our weaknesses. But back to this quote. It is a quote that assumes there are Muslim terrorists living in America and that is why the Department of Homeland Security is doing all that it does. It assumes the number of terrorists in the USA is the sum total of Muslims in the USA, because it breaks down the amount spent by the DHS per Muslim. And then the number spent by the DHS is also speculative. Fact, schmacts! Let’s yell about terror and money and stuff because who cares about real numbers and accurate statistics?

From page 523:

As I have demonstrated above, it is perfectly accepted, and widely practiced, by Jihadist Muslims to lie to non-Muslims about their true agenda. I have also demonstrated that the relationship between radicals and so-called moderates is a lot closer than we would like to think. At best, they share the goals of establishing sharia around the world, and differ only over the means to achieve this goal. At worst, they are allies in a good cop, bad cop game to extort concession after concession from the infidels. Moreover, even those who genuinely are moderate and secular in their approach may later change, or their children may change. This can be triggered by almost anything, either something in the news or a crisis in their personal lives, which will create a desire to become a better, more pious Muslim. The few remaining moderates can easily be silenced by violence from their more ruthless, radical counterparts.

So, even the moderate Muslims are scary because they are some sort of religious Manchurian Candidate wherein they can be triggered into extremism and violence. We have to fear them even if they are not fearsome because they may become fearsome. I don’t know how anyone could look at this and not see that this is nothing but religious bigotry.

Fjordman sees the Muslims as relentless baby-making machines, echoing language that I have read condemning Italian and Irish immigrants in the United States 100 years ago, and Hispanics today. From page 286:

The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is a Muslim. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos already de facto follow sharia, not French law. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, while others are predicting a civil war in the near future.

I am unsure how Fjordman comes by these statistics and lack the will to find out. As far as I know, France does not collect birth information using  religion statistics. However, given that Muslims make up 9% of the French population, it is hard to see how the Muslim women included in that 9% can possibly have so many children each year that they make up 33% of the total births in any given year. Oh yes, of course, the French must be deliberately misrepresenting the number of Muslims because they are a part of the Eurabia conspiracy. Or the Muslims have babies in litters like cats. Either way, this is irrational bigotry.

Fjordman also has a hard time explaining why some religions pass inspection with him and why some don’t. From page 295:

What the European Union does, however, is to treat Islam as a traditional, European religion on par with Christianity and Judaism. This is a crucial component of Eurabian thinking and practice.

At what point does a religion’s presence obtain a traditional status. Though Muslims were expelled from Spain, there was a significant Muslim presence left behind. How long does it take to become a tradition? Christians invaded Scandinavia, replacing pagan and heathen ideals with Christian ideals in some quarters and Scandinavia has only been “Christian” for 800-1200 years. If Christianity is considered a traditional religion for all of Europe, then why not Islam? Well, because Bat Ye’or’s conspiracy theory has led Fjordman to conclude that Muslims are evil.  (And while I am aware of some of Fjordman’s story that he told when he revealed his real name, I am doing my best to stick to the manifesto. However, I will say that while Fjordman has lived in Egypt and studied there, and was appalled by some Muslim reaction to the 9/11 attacks, such ideas are worthless in determining a unified outlook in the world. Taking the specific and making it the general for all people within an entire faith is a bad way of forming ideas.)

I’ll end this section on Fjordman’s religious bigotry with this quote from page 335:

There is, however, a big difference: The Islamic world always has been our enemy and always will be. China and Russia do not have to be our enemies, although our relations will be complicated because of their size and their own Great Power ambitions. We can, at best, persuade them that directly opposing us isn’t going to pay off.

So, we can reason with the Chinese and the Russians so they will not stand in the West’s way as they contain the Muslim Menace, but we can’t reason with the Muslims. Interesting… But even more interesting is the notion that the Islamic world was, is and always will be our enemy. See, this is why this is nothing but hate. This mindset is no different than those who insist that the beliefs of the Jews mean they will always be the enemy of civilization. But when you are in the depths of such beliefs you can’t see how they are the same hatred perpetuating itself over and over and over.

I don’t even have the time or desire to discuss all the various Muslim fears that Fjordman has, but he thinks the Muslim Brotherhood has a multi-point plan to take over Europe. Investments in Europe evidently mean they are setting the stage to have a strong financial foothold once they kill off or enslave whitey. At any rate, this is perilously close to New World Order bullshit because at this point, international trade and foreign investments are a part of the world economy. Get over it. There were many times I wanted to tell Fjordman to pull up his socks and get over it – the world has changed, and as much as he demeans the tribalism of Islamic adherents, he sure cloaks himself in his own tribal identity. But seeing conflicts in thinking are not the strong point of any conspiracy theorist. I will touch more on some of Fjordman’s inconsistencies in the second part of my look at his words.

Fjordman’s bleak, urgent and violent rhetoric is alarming
I have to state pretty clearly that Fjordman was pulled into this against his will. Evidently he never exchanged ideas directly with ABB and declined to meet him. In a way he didn’t ask for this. But in a way, he did. Information placed on the Internet reaches all kinds of readers and in writing in such a vehement, angry manner, using terminology for war, battle, and siege, as well as stating the urgency of the dire situation in Europe, it is not unreasonable to look at his words, note their inclusion in the manifesto, and understand the role his rhetoric played in ABB’s rampage. I don’t agree with some bloggers that Fjordman bears a criminal culpability, and he may not even bear a moral culpability. But there is no way to look objectively at his words and not come to the conclusion that they could have been read by a fellow True Believer as a call to arms.

I have seen some pundits say that if Fjordman is to bear any responsibility then the Beatles must be held responsible for the actions of the Manson family or that Salinger must be responsible for the murder of John Lennon since Mark David Chapman was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he shot him. That is all nonsense. Paul McCartney did indeed write a song about the fall of a civilization but at no point did he say that there was to be a race war and that someone needed to start it off by killing a pregnant starlet. And god only knows what Chapman extrapolated from a book about a kid who hated phonies but at no point did Salinger indicate that perhaps the way to rid the world of phonies was to shoot a politically active rock star. However, Fjordman does, in fact, indicate that there needs to be some drastic action to stop Muslim immigration, which he sees as a part of a larger scheme to create a Eurabia wherein white Europeans are enslaved by Muslims, and he uses violent language as he shares his ideas. More importantly, he made a very convincing case that there is no hope for change via the political process or even peaceful demonstrations, which would lead some True Believers to think that the only method by which change could be achieved is the individual acting against the state.

At some point, the blogging world is going to have to understand that our words mean something, that they have overt meaning plus subtext, and that when information is so easily disseminated, words laden with subtext may reach an audience that may not know you were writing hypothetically. I can understand why Fjordman went into hiding. The horror of this situation alone has to be killing him.

But none of that changes the fact that the proof for his exhortations for urgent action, possibly violent, are clear as day in his words. Though he did not state outright that one should kill members of the Labor Party in Norway (cultural Marxists) in order to stem the tide of Islamification, he engages in fear-mongering, uses violent language that gives lie to the idea that he did not tacitly encourage violence, and proves his case that things are beyond hope. Did he mean to set off ABB? Of course not. This is less an insinuation about Fjordman’s role inspiring the Norway murders than it is an attempt to show those who still have not made up their mind about the text that there is a strong sense of urgency and a call to violence that cannot be denied simply with good intentions.

I want to begin with some quotes, offered with no commentary. In this entire section, for all quotes that have words in bold, the emphasis is mine. We start on page 322:

I know many Americans, and Europeans, too, have more or less written off Western Europe as lost to Islam already. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t think this too sometimes, but I do see encouraging signs of a real shift of public opinion beneath the surface. Judging from information such as the extremely high number of Germans hostile to Islam, I still believe, or at least hope, that Europe can be saved.

But this hope hinges on the complete and utter destruction of the European Union The EU must die, or Europe will die. It’s that simple.

From page 331:

It is conceivable that Islam in some generations will cease to be a global force of any significance, but in the meantime it will be a constant source of danger to its neighbours, from Europe through India to Southeast Asia. The good news is that Islam may not be able to achieve the world dominance it desires. The bad news is that it may be able to achieve a world war. We can only cage it as much as possible and try to prevent this from happening.

More dire language from page 378:

I’ve suggested before that native Europeans face three enemies simultaneously when fighting against the Islamisation of their lands: Enemy 1 is the anti-Western bias of our media and academia, which is a common theme throughout the Western world. Enemy 2 are Eurabians and EU-federalists, who deliberately break down established nation states in favor of a pan-European superstate. Enemy 3 are Muslims. The Netherlands from 2001 to 2007 is a clear case in point where enemies 1, 2 and 3 have successfully cooperated on breaking down the spirit of the native population through intimidation and censorship and by squashing any opposition to continued mass immigration.

From page 613:

Scandinavia is a Utopia lost. Previously quiet Scandinavian nations now suffer Islamic terror threats and death threats[28] against people criticising Islam. Norway celebrates 100 years as an independent state[29] this year. Judging from this new discrimination act and the runaway Muslim immigration, perhaps the anniversary should be called “From independence to colonisation”. At the same time as their women are no longer safe in the streets because of immigrant gangs, the authorities respond by making Norwegians defacto second-rate citizens in their own country. They use their own people as stepping stones for their personal careers in the UN bureaucracy.

From page 520:

Centre Democrat Ben Haddou[27], a member of Copenhagen’s City Council, has stated: “It’s impossible to condemn sharia. And any secular Muslim who claims he can is lying. Sharia also encompasses lifestyle, inheritance law, fasting and bathing. Demanding that Muslims swear off sharia is a form of warfare against them.”

Read that statement again, and read it carefully. Muslims in the West consider it “a form of warfare against them” if they have to live by our secular laws, not their religious laws. Will they then also react in violent ways to this “warfare” if they don’t get their will? Moreover, since sharia laws ultimately require the subjugation of non-Muslims, doesn’t “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially entail the freedom to make non-Muslims second-rate citizens in their own countries?

It goes on and on and on. From page 342:

This war by Islam against Europe, the West and indeed mankind has been going on for more than 1300 years. This is the third major Jihad, the third Islamic attempt to subdue the heartland of the West. Although I cannot prove this, I have a very strong feeling that this will also be the last attempt. There will be no fourth Jihad. Either Muslims will win this time, or Islam itself will be handed a defeat and a blow so powerful that it may never recover from it. This is perhaps the longest, continuous war in human history. And it’s about to be decided within the coming decades. I’m not sure how all of this will play out. What I do know is that it could all be decided on my watch, and I don’t want to be the weak link in something my ancestors kept intact for 1300 years.

Fjordman is making his case about the Eurabia theory – Islam is coming to get Europe. In this one passage he spells out that the time to fight is at hand, giving urgency to the situation. He calls it a war, one of the longest in human history. He says that if Islam is not crushed this time there will be no second chance. He says he does not want to be part of the reason the West succumbs to Islam. There is no way for anyone but a Fjordman apologist not to see the implications in his ideas and his loaded word choice.

Just some more examples of the descriptive language Fjordman uses as he discusses his conspiracy theory. From page 603:

Since its inception, Islam has been waging an aggressive war against the rest of mankind, with the stated purpose of bringing every single human being on earth under Islamic rule. Infidels have been presented with only three options: Convert to Islam, die, or submit under Islamic rule as a dhimmi, a second-rate citizen in your own country subject to serious financial pressure, constant verbal humiliations and frequent physical abuse. Islam hasn’t changed in the last 1400 years.

This entire quote is incendiary in the mind of anyone who believes in Eurabia conspiracy, and ABB was definitely a True Believer.

How about this from page 636:

According to Politikerbloggen[9], AFA have produced a manual about how to use violence in order to paralyze and hurt their opponents, and they encourage their members to study it closely. Meanwhile, senior members of law enforcement are too busy waving plastic penises to care. It’s all for tolerance, and then there is this small group at the back, behind the police, the media and the cultural and political establishment, ready to assault, beat up and hospitalise anybody deemed to be insufficiently tolerant.

The people who want tolerance will beat people to a pulp to get it. With incendiary words like this one wonders if ABB decided to fight Fjordman’s fire with fire.

The urgency that Fjordman brings to making the case for Eurabia is also strong and persuasive to a True Believer. From page 677:

Several recent incidents have demonstrated that Muslims are now trying to apply these dhimmi rules to the entire Western world. The most important one was the burning of churches and embassies triggered by the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. This was, down to the last comma, exactly the way Muslims would treat the persecuted non-Muslims in their own countries. The cartoon Jihad indicated that Muslims now felt strong enough to apply sharia rules to Denmark, and by extension NATO. Hardly anybody in the mainstream Western media made any attempts to explain this to the public.

We are hurtling toward slave status now, this very minute. The Denmark cartoon incident proves it, in Fjordman’s eyes.

More about the cartoon situation in Denmark. From page 593:

The status given to non-Muslims who accept being second-rate citizens, dhimmis, under Islamic rule is technically referred to as “protected.” During the Cartoon Jihad, the leftwing coalition government demonstrated in public that Norwegian authorities did not control the security of their citizens, and thus had to accept Muslim intervention to secure their safety. This amounted to the acceptance of Islamic rule according to sharia law, a view which was subsequently strengthened by payments to Muslims at home and abroad. Undoubtedly these payments offered by Mr. Giske on behalf of the government were viewed by Muslims as jizya, the “protection money” non-Muslims are required to pay in willing submission (Koran, 9:29) as a sign of their inferior status vis-a-vis Islam, as a compensation for not being slain.

When the government in Norway failed to protect its citizens from Islamic backlash, they effectively sold out Norwegians into a state of protected, Islamic slavery and tacitly accepted Sharia law. This is clearly making the case that urgent action is needed, right here and right now, because the government has already made Norwegian citizens Islamic slaves.  Christ, as I reread this, I sort of think that Fjordman should kiss the ground that this did not turn out worse than it did.

Here’s some more urgency from page 600:

My bet is still on Britain, or possibly Denmark, as the first Western country to face a civil war due to Muslim immigration, but the Netherlands is a potential candidate as well.

Muslim immigration will cause civil war in Europe. A True Believer and a patriot would want to avoid civil war, using any means to prevent it.

And for the love of sanity, bear in mind that I am only culling a small percentage of the alarmist quotes from Fjordman available to me. From page 586:

Sweden was presented during the Cold War as a middle way between capitalism and Communism. When this model of a society collapses — and it will collapse, under the combined forces of Islamic Jihad, the European Union, multiculturalism and ideological overstretch — it is thus not just the Swedish state that will collapse but the symbol of Sweden, the showcase of an entire ideological world view. I wrote two years ago[3] that if the trend isn’t stopped, the Swedish nation will simply cease to exist in any meaningful way during the first half of this century. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe, and the “Swedish model” will be one of warning against ideological madness, not one of admiration. I still fear I was right in that assessment.

Ignore the trivialization of centuries of Swedish society summed up in “Bergman, Abba and Volvo.” Were those things not to have existed, I am sure the world and Sweden would have been just fine. Just pay attention to the panic implicit in the idea that Sweden is near collapse and may cease to exist unless something is done.

Some more panicky information for the True Believer, from page 521:

It is true that Jihad is not exclusively about violence, but it is very much about the constant threat of violence. Just like you don’t need to beat a donkey all the time to make it go where you want it to, Muslims don’t have to hit non-Muslims continuously. They bomb or kill every now and then, to make sure that the infidels are always properly submissive and know who’s boss.

We are becoming donkeys who will continue to be trained by violence until we are overcome. Something needs to interrupt this training process before it is too late.

Here Fjordman is discussing the imminent fall of France to Muslims, on page 287:

The impending downfall of France is bad news for the rest of the West. What will happen to French financial resources? Above all, who will inherit hundreds of nuclear warheads? Will these weapons fall into the hands of Jihadist Muslims, too?

This is clearly setting up the idea that the world is going to be in danger of a nuclear event if something does not stop Eurabia from becoming a reality. Nuclear warheads in the hands of terrorists would make the average person jittery. Imagine how such an idea can create a sense of utter urgency in the mind of a Eurabia believer.

More of Fjordman’s charged urgency from page 326:

New anti-discrimination laws to combat Islamophobia are to be enacted, as they already have been in Norway, where Norwegians need to mount proof of their own innocence[15] if Muslim immigrants accuse them of discrimination in any form, including discriminatory speech. The EU also wants to promote an official lexicon[16] shunning offensive and culturally insensitive terms such as “Islamic terrorism.”

Ah, so now Norwegians will have to prove their innocence much like those accused of witchcraft in the 17th century, in anti-Democratic attempts to label all Norwegians Islamophobics. Again, note the urgency and overblown horror, words meant to instill fear and a need to act in the reader.

Fjordman’s sense of impending doom includes all Europeans being put to death for Islamic blasphemies:

Remember that blasphemy against Islam carries the death penalty according to sharia. Multiculturalism in Europe is about to reach its openly totalitarian phase. Those who think this is a joke can look at the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot[13] who was arrested in 2008 for cartoons that “insulted” Muslims. Several documents that are publicly available (but little known by the general public because they are never referred to by the mainstream media) state that the EU should “harmonise” the education and legal systems with the Arab “partner countries” within the coming decade. This is being negotiated as we speak, behind our backs.

So, Europeans will one day face the death penalty for criticizing Islam. Act now or we will all face the sword for criticizing Islam. According to Fjordman, the details are being decided now behind everyone’s backs.  Can we all agree that this would create a sense of urgency to act now in a True Believer?

Now here’s where things get sticky and ugly for anyone who really wants to maintain that Fjordman’s intent was never to inspire anyone to commit acts of the sort ABB committed. It is true that Fjordman describes a plan to defeat cultural Marxists and stop Muslim immigration. From page 330:

The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.

Okay, within the confines of his irrational, bigoted hated for Islam, this is not that incendiary. Changing laws sounds like a pretty middle of the road option. This would still be a bit iffy given the Eurabia theory that is behind it but overall one does not want to shake Fjordman by his shoulders until he sees reason.

Well, it would be somewhat acceptable if he did not go on at length, detailing in depth the fact that changing laws is impossible, that every reasonable move the Islamophobe in Europe can make is not only doomed to failure, but could in fact, be criminalized. Fjordman unfortunately makes his case about the dire, irrevocable situation Europe is in, being at the mercy of governments in collusion with Muslims. In the face of all that he writes, it is impossible for a True Believer in Eurabia to walk away with the sense that anything legal or sensible will end the plight of the native Europeans.

Here’s an example of this, from page 599:

In March 2007, native Dutch residents of the city of Utrecht rioted to protest against harassment by Muslim youths and government inaction to stop this. The authorities immediately suppressed the riots by sealing off the area and installing surveillance cameras to control Dutch non-Muslims, but they have done virtually nothing to address the underlying problem of violence from immigrant gangs. The case is far from unique.

Such incidents demonstrate that the authorities throughout Western Europe are now dedicated to implementing continued mass immigration and multiculturalism no matter what the natives think. If they object, they will be silenced. The Dutch voted “no” by a very large margin to the proposed EU Constitution that will formally dismantle their country, as did Irish and French voters, but they are simply ignored. At the same time, the EU elites obediently respond to calls from Islamic countries to ban “stereotypes and prejudice” targeting Islam. European political elites implement the agendas of our enemies and ignore the interests of their own people. They are thus collaborators and traitors and should be treated accordingly.

So from this example we see that peaceful protests do not work and result in an Orwellian crackdown on the protesters. Any attempt to speak out will result in being silenced. The political officials reject the will and the vote of the people and are allowing the enemy to take over. The governments are full of Islamic collaborators. What good will voting or waking up the “sheeple” do if the will of the voters is ignored anyway? What is the only option left for the patriotic True Believer when even peaceful protest is taken from him?

From page 599:

In Brussels, Belgium, gangs of Muslim immigrants harass the natives on a daily basis. We have had several recent cases where native girls have been gang raped by immigrants in the heart of the EU capital, yet when the natives wanted to protest against the Islamisation of their continent on September 11th 2007, the demonstration was banned by the Socialist mayor of Brussels, whose ruling party is heavily infiltrated by Muslims. Those who attempted to carry on with a peaceful protest were arrested by the police.

So, gang rapes are common and peaceful protest against Islamization is criminalized. The options for a patriot who wants to save his countrywomen from violent rape are becoming more and more limited in Fjordman’s rhetoric.

Then we have this strange passage from page 590:

Is it just a coincidence that the one country on the European continent that has avoided war for the longest period of time, Sweden, is also arguably the one Western nation where Political Correctness has reached the worst heights? Maybe the prolonged period of peace has created an environment where layers of ideological nonsense have been allowed to pile up for generations without stop. I don’t know what Sweden will look like a generation from now, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be viewed as a model society. And if the absence of war is one of the causes of its current weakness, I fear that is a problem that will soon be cured.

Of course Fjordman means Sweden got soft and allowed the cultural Marxists to run amok because of peace, but it can be seen as a call to arms to end the peace in Scandinavia. In this sense, peace means cultural death and ABB certainly interrupted any sense of Norwegian peace. And even if that is not the case, the last line implies a vicious war with Islam looms, another heavy idea for a True Believer who thinks he is in a cultural war with Islam.

More about peace and war, from page 522:

Furthermore, the Islamic world has not only the attitude of open war. There’s also war by infiltration, as we can see in Western countries now. Is there a possibility to end this dance of war? According to Moshe Sharon, the answer is, “No. Not in the foreseeable future. What we can do is reach a situation where for a few years we may have relative quiet.”

Fjordman makes the case that there are several ways that the Muslims are committing Jihad against the West, one of them being immigration and excessive child-bearing. So even in times of peace, the warrior must be preparing for war with Islam. Even if the Muslims in some areas are not creating the panoply of problems Fjordman talks about, they are quietly infiltrating and the canny Westerner must be ready, even in the face of “relative quiet.”

This bit from page 588 is a call to arms, pure and simple:

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people like this? Well, for starters, because it can. Sweden is currently arguably the most politically repressive and totalitarian country in the Western world. It also has the highest tax rates. That could be a a coincidence, but I’m not sure that it is. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, including the media, there are no places left to mount a defence if the state decides to attack you.

The governments are attacking their own people because they have no accountability anymore. The state is so large and so ominous that there is nothing anyone can do if the state decides to turn against them. The implication, of course, is that a True Believer must launch an offensive because all defensive moves are doomed to failure.

From page 587:

This is a government that knows perfectly well that their people will become a minority in their own country, yet is doing nothing to stop this. On the contrary. Pierre Schori, Minister for immigration, during a parliamentary debate in 1997 said that: “Racism and xenophobia should be banned and chased [away],” and that one should not accept “excuses, such as that there were flaws in the immigration and refugee policies.”

In other words: It should be viewed as a crime for the native population not to assist in wiping themselves out.

That is hardcore, right there, the idea that failure to cooperate will be a crime. If failing to cooperate is a crime, then it makes any other sort of action the only moral course, since we seem to be dealing in black and white. And once the case is made that there is no way to affect the government as they ignore the voters (which one presumes would make it difficult to “throw the bums out” as we used to say in America), that they turn against the native citizens at every provocation, that they have criminalized protest AND may criminalize non-compliance, there really is no course of action left for a True Believing patriot than to act against the government in a direct offensive.

There is no hope of change via the democratic process, from page 376:

In 2007, former German president Roman Herzog warned that parliamentary democracy was under threat from the European Union. Between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany – and the majority in all EU member states – stemmed from Brussels. According to Herzog, “EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers.” Despite this, the EU was largely a non-issue during the 2005 German elections. One gets the feeling that the real issues of substance are kept off the table and are not subject to public debate. National elections are becoming an increasingly empty ritual. The important issues have already been settled beforehand behind closed doors.

If there is no way to change things via a political process, is it surprising ABB took to his guns and bombs? Fjordman is raising these issues with the intention of waking up Westerners but if there is nothing legal they can do to stop immigration, what else is there for them to do when rhetoric wakes them up? Blog about it? Amusingly, that will come up in my discussion of ABB, a section wherein he takes a small jab at those awake and still writing and not acting.

In fact, here is a little snippet of Fjordman’s own strange, backhanded criticism of blogging. I will touch on his other inconsistencies in part two. From page 377:

In the eyes of American theorist Noam Chomsky, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” This is undoubtedly true, which is why it’s strange that Chomsky thinks that the Internet, currently the freest medium of all, is “a hideous timewaster.”

And yet Fjordman kept writing about all these horrors in a hideously timewasting manner. One wonders if ABB was trying to best his teacher by not wasting time.

There is no middle road for the Eurabia conspiracy True Believer to trust even mainstream Muslims, from pages 518-519:

Examples such as these leave non-Muslims with a very powerful dilemma: How can we ever trust assurances from self-proclaimed moderate Muslims when deception of non-Muslims is so widespread, and lying to infidels is an accepted and established way ofhiding Islamic goals? The answer, with all its difficult implications, is: We can’t.

Does this mean that ALL Muslims are lying about their true agenda, all of the time? No,of course not. Some are quite frank about their intentions.

So, even the moderate Muslims are lying about their true intentions and the only ones not lying are the ones telling the West to their faces that they plan to defeat them. Doesn’t really leave a lot of wiggle room for negotiations. People may be willing to say that Fjordman and writers like him are trying to wake up Westerners but to what avail? In the process of making their case for Eurabia conspiracy theory, writers like Fjordman painted themselves into corners. Fjordman gave lip service to changing the situation via changing laws but goes into excruciating depth about how it is impossible to do that to which he gave lip service.

It’s sad, in a way. Fjordman proved the Eurabia theory so well that his acolytes had no choice, if they wanted to change things, but to act violently. Of course, Fjordman was engaging in rhetoric. All politics is rhetoric, it seems at times. People who bloviate about conspiracy theory mainly want to be believed, and belief in the theory, the comaraderie of being among people whom you think are not deluded and see the world as you see it is one of the heady reasons conspiracy theory will never go away. It is comforting to have others who believe as you do, and there is a lovely sense of arrogance wherein all those people know they are right and the others are wrong. This arrogance fuels endless debates, it fuels political action, and when those arrogant folk throw around violent, urgent rhetoric that offers no peaceful recourse, they should not be surprised when someone who believes them takes action.

So we come to end of Fjordman: Part One. Come back in a couple of days for Fjordman: Part Two, where I will discuss things like Fjordman’s take on feminism, some of his strange notions, and other elements to his writing, like his misuse of literature and popular culture in his articles.  Next week I will post my discussion of ABB, but I need to mention again that I find Fjordman so much more interesting than ABB. Don’t be surprised if my analysis of Fjordman’s words far outweighs my analysis of ABB’s words.

Since I suspect these entries may attract new readers , please take a moment to read my comment policy.   And welcome!  Be sure to tune back in on Thursday for more from 2083.

Author: Donna Kossy

Type of Book: Non-fiction, aliens, bad science, utter insanity, conspiracy theory, evolutionary theory, whacked theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: AQUATIC APES!

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2001, it appears to be out of print, but you can still get a copy here:

Comments: I know absolutely nothing about Donna Kossy aside from the fact that she clearly revels in bizarre ideas and has more knowledge on the topic of strange people and crackpotology than I can safely absorb in one sitting. Just reading the bibliography for this book was vaguely exhausting. I have extraordinary respect for anyone who has read Helena Blavatsky from cover to cover, even if it was abridged. I have similar respect for anyone who managed to make it through Atlas Shrugged in one go. Such people are made of sturdier stuff than I am.

I wanted to read this book because it discusses one of my all-time favorite whacked theories, that of the aquatic ape. As I read, I discovered an entire world of bizarre, unique, unnerving and upsetting theories of the way humans evolved or came to be. In fact, this book made it look easy, reading such dense and lunatic theories and making sense of them, that it was the inspiration for my now-aborted “Alien Intervention Week.” As much as I love the strange, I have my limits.

But Kossy is an intrepid woman and possesses not only the skills to make the most extreme idea accessible to her readers, but is a writer skilled in revealing the humanity and humor in some of these beliefs. I will admit I never want to read the phrase “root race” ever again, but aside from that, I found the surveys of belief in this book fascinating and utterly readable. I was disappointed when, after a search on Amazon, I realized Kossy has only written two books and I already own the other, entitled Kooks. I comfort myself that even though there is no more Kossy for me to read, she led me to some superb and lunatic books. I will totally be discussing Behold!!! the Protong here at some point.

Chapter one begins by discussing that topic which so utterly thwarted me when I set out on my own: alien invaders shaping the Earth. Her distillation of the the topic made it seem very accessible, though it is an incredibly dense read. Because he was the most unknown to me, I was very interested in her discussion of Zecharia Sitchin‘s ideas. His ideas, riffed on by Paul Von Ward, seemed very intriguing to me but after slogging through Von Ward, I am unsure when I am going to be able to stomach Sitchin in an entire book. But despite how daunting he seems, Kossy cut his strange interpretations down into small, easily chewed bites.

Since the first specimens of Homo sapiens were created as hybrids – like mules – they were infertile. It was only through genetic engineering that our ancestors were given two sets of sex cells so that they could reproduce. This is what the story of Adam and Eve is about. In the story, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a symbol for the primeval pair’s newfound ability to reproduce.

And that is what is so tantalizing about this for me, because I cannot get enough of alternate history (most of the time). But Kossy has no problem calling a spade a spade and is less amused by Sitchin and writers like him than I am.

Obviously, Sitchin’s popularity comes not from the strength of his arguments. He’s more concerned with “proving” his alternative history by bending the available evidence than altering his theory to fit the facts. Like von Däniken, he has tapped into the imagination of the popular mind which is disillusioned and distrustful of hard science, even while embracing many of its accomplishments.

Ironically, Sitchin’s interpretations of myth are embedded in a stubborn materialism usually identified with science. To Sitchin, myths don’t depict anything spiritual or intangible at all; they depict only hard, historic events. Ea wasn’t the god of wisdom, he was the god of mining. Though Sitchin’s conclusions seem imaginative, they stem from a lack of imagination shared with some fundamentalists, an inability to connect with the cosmos and its mysteries in any but the most literal way.

This was not a perspective I would likely have considered without Kossy pointing out the obvious. Because even as I am charmed by this strangeness, it very definitely mirrors some of the more detestable elements of fundamentalist religious interpretation. I still find it exotic and very interesting, but I didn’t really see the complete lack of intellectual subtlety until Kossy had pointed it out.

The next chapter covers de-evolution and was fun, fun, fun to read for this former SubGenius:

Broadly speaking, de-evolution – the idea that humanity is in a decline, be it spiritual or physical – is a universal concept, common throughout history and among diverse culture. According to historian J.B. Bury, the modern notion of “progress,” from which sprouted the theory of evolution, is a historical anomaly. Diverse peoples through the ages more often viewed life and history cyclically, with humanity sliding down the declining arc of the cycle.

[...]

With the veneration of antiquity goes the denigration of the present.

Simple enough.

But never fear, Kossy takes a look at those who have made the theory of man’s degeneration their life’s work. But then again, maybe you should be afraid because part of it involves Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. I cannot even begin to tell you how tiresome I find HPB and Theosophy in general but Kossy explains well and in a manner that doesn’t necessitate clawing out my eyes:

In Blavatsky’s cyclic version of Earth history, humanity proceeded through seven “Root-Races” on seven primeval continents, each Root-Race representing a step down – spiritually – from that which preceded it. In the process, matter attempted to triumph over spirit, but failed, and humanity both “evolved” and de-evolved.

During the first epoch, lasting millions of years, a race of immortal giants with ethereal bodies lived in the Imperishable Sacred Land at the North Pole. The second race – giant androgynous semi-humans – resulted from the first attempt at material nature; they lived on a continent called Hyperborea, south of the North Pole. The third race represented the “fall of man” because they were divided into two sexes; they lived during the Golden Age, 18 million years ago, when the “gods walked on Earth and mixed freely with mortals” on the continent of Lemuria. The fourth race lived on Atlantis, and the fifth, called “Aryans,” lived in Europe. Two more races are supposed to follow before the end of this cycle or “Round.”

So yeah, this makes perfect sense on every level and there’s nothing to discuss, really. However, you know that when you read the word “Aryan,” in nine contexts out of ten it’s not gonna be good, and since it’s been at least two decades since I was foolhardy enough to try to read Blavatsky, I don’t recall how overtly racist she was. Doesn’t matter that much because she has all the key words. Where there are references to degenerate men and the North (or in some cases South) Pole, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to repellent racist theories:

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) first used the term “Aryan” to denote an aristocratic race of ancient Indians, purportedly the ancestors of the Germans. Thus some of the early freethinkers who rejected the biblical Eden replaced it with an Asian one, populated by Aryans. The Aryan myth, which developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, was first embraced by the German Romantics, then by Theosophists and occultists, and later, by the Nazis.

It goes on further:

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), founder of “Ariosophy,” was among many in pre-Nazi Germany who adhered to more esoteric versions of the Aryan myth. Calling the Aryan homeland Arktogaa, which is Greek for “nothern earth,” von Liebenfels taught that non-Aryans were the result of bestiality between the ancient Aryans and beasts. One of his disciples lectured that humanity was the result of a forbidden mixture of angels and animals and used the Bible to back it up. Each race, he said, represented a different percentage of angel and beast, the Aryans coming out on top, with one percent angel.

Yeah, nothing says de-evolution like angel-animal hybrids.

And we sink further down into the sewer:

The Nazis adopted their Aryan myth from Alfred Rosenberg, author of the 1930 best-seller Myth of the 20th Century, and through the revisionist science of Herman Wirth. In his 1928 book, The Rise of Mankind, Wirth wrote that humanity began at the North Pole, having split from the apes millions of years ago. After shifting continents and poles made the nether regions uninhabitable, the Arctic Aryan wandered South. The remnants of Aryan high culture survive to this day only in the blind, bearded Eskimos found by the Danish “Thule Expedition” of Knud Rasmussen. Implicit in all of these stories is the idea that much of present humanity has degenerated (for various reasons such as mixing with Jewish blood) from its former superiority and purity. Only Aryans retained the former glory.

Kossy goes on to discuss the works of the man who, after Nietzsche, is most quoted by “racialists” and those who attempt to give their racism a tinge of intellectualism: Julius Evola. I cannot even bring myself to discuss him because I have spent far too much time in my life talking to people for whom Evola is a god, whose writings are a means by which they can assign their race hate an esoteric definition and therefore rarefy their motives. I tire of such things these days. That’s largely why I find little interest in most origin stories, from the Bible to evolution. Sometimes it seems like even the kindest mind is able to take an origin story and twist it into evidence of his or her superiority.

So with the above stated, let’s just skip chapter three, wherein the Bible, the Koran and elements of evolution are used to prove that blacks and Jews are the devil, that Caucasians are the devil and people from Asia and Africa are closely linked to simians, which means they are not godly and are therefore the devil. Yeah…

I almost don’t want to discuss the next chapter on eugenics but there were elements of this chapter that were new to me. For example, I had always attributed the phrase “survival of the fittest” to Darwin, when it was really Herbert Spencer, a Darwinist philosopher, who created the phrase. I wonder how many of the Tea Party quasi-Libertarians with their heavy reliance on the Bible would respond if they realized that much of their tenets were shared by an evolution proponent (politics, strange bedfellows, etc.):

To Spencer, biological evolution implied moral progress. “Progress,” he wrote, “is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.” Thus, the state was foolish in supporting welfare for the poor and diseased, tampering with the natural process of evolution. Instead, the unfit should be eliminated: “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.”

And it goes in a similar but uncomfortable vein. But then Kossy discusses the Oneida Community, which I had heard of before but not in any detail, and it was utterly fascinating. The brainchild of John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Community was a commune of sorts in New York. Based on bits and pieces of the Bible, the commune practiced “complex marriage” (which reads to me like a strange way for the middle-aged and older to prey sexually on the young but perhaps there is more to it than that) and “Stirpiculture,” which was a form of selective breeding. The whole thing was bizarre, with couples having to seek permission to have sex, male continence and in the mid-1800s, the commune produced 58 children, all of whom presumably were scientifically superior to kids whose parents didn’t practice eugenics.

Interestingly, the superior children the Oneida Community claimed to have produced (who were called “stirps”), were likely better off because of the child-centric mindset under which they were conceived. Sadly, the community disbanded before any real scientific measure could be made of the children produced with “barnyard ethics.”

Then the chapter on eugenics takes a dark turn and we move from positive eugenics, wherein people breed with an eye to excellent offspring, to negative eugenics, wherein those considered unsuitable are prevented from reproducing and in extreme cases are killed off entirely. The usual “academic” studies are mentioned, including the Jukes and Kallikak family, which led “to the public crusade against what became known as the ‘Menace of the Feebleminded.’” But then it exploded into the belief that things adults engaged in, aside from the obvious ringers like drinking when pregnant, could make them a potential threat not to just the moral fiber of the country but the overall genetic health of the nation. After urging the youth of 1920s America to avoid victims of VD and the mentally retarded as their spouses, the advice just got more icky, as psychiatrists were sure that masturbation was “one of the great causes of insanity.” So you’d have to be sure to avoid masturbators, too. Good luck with that.

As I read chapter four, I had a hard time understanding how it was that eugenics could be considered an origin theory. Kossy cleared that up for me:

Indeed, many scientists, educators and authors believed in eugenics with a religious faith: they replaced Jesus Christ with Charles Darwin, brotherly love with better breeding, and the Second Coming of Christ with the prospect of a perfect race. Though many mainstream clergymen – especially Catholics – bristled at this new religion, some accepted, and some even embraced it. In 1926 the American Eugenics Society sponsored a eugenics sermon contest. Three hundred sermons of various denominations were inspired by the contest, and 60 were submitted for judging. Protestants reinterpreted the Bible as a eugenics book, claiming that Jesus was born into a family resulting from “a long process of religious and moral selection.” Jews accepted eugenics as just another commandment of God: as one Rabbi put it, “May we do nothing to permit our blood to be adulterated by infusion of inferior grade.”

And of course, as it does with all origin theories, it breaks down into an us versus them wherein people decided they were the best example of genetic purity, aligning themselves with racial ideals of racial superiority, with some interesting and borderline humorous results. Kossy quotes from the 1937 book Apes, Men & Morons by Ernest Hooton, who attended a genetics conference to hear speak a man whom he had never met but was evidently one of the best examples of the Nordic race:

From my obscure and remote table of uncelebrities, I peered myopically to catch a glimpse of this dolichocephalic, blond Viking who was to embody the physical, intellectual, and scientific ideals of the “Great Race.” At first I got the elevation of my sight too high and saw no one standing at the speaker’s table except the blandly smiling president who had made the eloquent introduction. Then I heard sounds of broken English, and, lowering my gaze a foot or two, I was able to discern its source. It was a sawed-off, rotund person with a head round as a bullet, black hair, a blobby nose and a face reminiscent of the full moon – in short, the complete Alpine. I thereupon decided that every man is his own Nordic, and I am afraid that I leaped to the conclusion that eugenics is a lay form of ancestor worship…

And anyone who has ever been sucked into the practice of Asatru can holler a hearty, “Amen!”

From there we slide into Hitler, Mengele, Nazis, Nazis, Nazis… Yep, almost all origin myths seem to result in genocide. That’s why I so love the Aquatic Ape theory because as of this writing, it has only resulted in anti-Aquatic Ape smuggery and nary an instance of race hate. But for now, let’s have a look at chapter five. Creationism.

Sigh… Yeah, yeah, dinosaurs and man walked together. The Earth is 6,000 years old. I have little sympathy or affinity for those who espouse this utter bullshit but Kossy explains them in a manner I would find impossible:

Today’s fundamentalists seek to convince themselves and others that their conception of natural history which relies entirely on a literalistic reading of one sacred text – is consistent with current observations of the world – and they’ll do anything to defend it. Rather than endure a soul-testing crisis of faith, fundamentalists prefer to think that their creation myth is somehow different from all the other creation myths in the world. It’s unique, it’s literally true, and what’s more, it’s scientific.

Kossy then goes on to discuss that various amounts of science that these creationists, mainly Christian, have to ignore or warp in order to ensure their version of events remains true to them.

There was not a lot that was new for me but there were some issues that are of concern for those of us who have been standing on the sidelines as pseudoscience has been taking more and more ground in public discourse and education:

The scientists slowly noticed that science education was under attack, and have been actively combating the creationists ever since. While the Tennessee law challenged by Scopes forbidding the teaching of evolution was obviously a draconian measure, the legislation introduced by creationists in the ’80s looks much more benign. All they want, they say, is “equal time.” If you teach evolution, they argue, then to be fair, the public schools should also teach creation. By this argument, the Aquatic Ape theory, various alien intervention theories, de-evolution, and countless creation myths and alternative theories of evolution should also be given “equal time” in the classroom. “Equal time,” in fact, is just a device creationists use to ensure their own voices are heard over the threatening sounds of secularism they hear in the schools, on television, and at the movies.

I would go further to say that equal time is a ploy wherein creationists hope to replace all other theories with their own – that’s why the Aquatic Ape theory is not taught because it’s not about equal time. It’s about wriggling into the system and eliminating all other educational options. And it’s worked. In the face of all reason, it has worked, and even though evolutionists and scientists have worked hard to dissuade the public from adopting methods of pseudoscience, it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Explaining the subtleties of current evolutionary theory to people who get their history from docudramas and their science from the Discovery Channel isn’t easy; evolutionists might do better if they simply accused creationists of molesting children.

It rankles people to read this, to realize that this is all boiling down to a lowest common denominator argument. But people who don’t see creationism as dim should realize that creationists do, in fact, appeal to emotion and poor thinking and analysis skills.

The creationists want to have it both ways: when defending creationism, it’s just a matter of philosophy, but when attacking evolution or demanding “equal time” in science education, it’s a matter of scientific evidence. The authors are chained to Scripture, but refuse to admit it.

But it gets far worse than just engaging in spurious reasoning. Some creationists take it to that next, repellent level.

But fossils that turn out to be genuine after all are not allowed as evidence for evolution, but instead “might well represent disease or degeneracy.” And if that argument doesn’t convince you to abandon evolution, try this one: evolution causes racism. “It is important to recognize,” say the authors, “that racism in its virulent forms is mainly a product of evolutionary thinking,” because even recent history can be shaped to fit the creationist mold…

Then the name Hitler is invoked and it goes downhill from there.

But the hell of it is, in some respects the creationists are right. Of course racism existed long before Darwin came onto the scene and the existence of the Christian Identity movement show that Christians don’t really have clean hands. But all creation theory lends itself so well to this sort of thinking.

The creation chapter, like all the others, descends into a look at some fascinating and completely lunatic methods of proving the Earth was made by some divine creator. Reinterpretations of time as it is presented in the Bible. Genesis denizens in space. Proof positive dinosaurs walked the Earth alongside men. Some of it is amusing, some of it is horrible, but all of it is interesting.

And finally we reach chapter six and can discuss AQUATIC APES. I have no idea why I love this theory so much but there you go. Life is strange. One day I will discuss the book, The Aquatic Ape. Until then Kossy’s take on the book will have to suffice. Anyway, Elaine Morgan, a feminist writer, came up with the Aquatic Ape theory and perhaps one of the reasons I love this theory so much, other than just how awesome it feels to say AQUATIC APE over and over again is because the theory, at first glance, seems so reasonable.

Its ideas were irresistible. The Aquatic Ape turned out to be one of those books – one of those theories – that fits everything together so well you feel it just has to be true. For weeks after reading, I pondered the theory. Soon I found myself preaching the gospel of the Aquatic Ape to my friends.

That was more or less my experience. Of course, after a while reality sets in and holes in the theory become apparent, but there are holes in all theories so I didn’t get as hung up on them as I perhaps should have. Regardless, AQUATIC APES is the most charming, inoffensive origin theory I’ve been exposed to in about 15 years or so.

So here’s the Aquatic Ape theory (AAT):

The Aquatic Ape theory observes that various human traits, such as bipedality, speech, lack of body hair, subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, weeping, face-to-face copulation and sweating are unique among primates and therefore hard to account for by conventional theories of human evolution. But if humanity was at one time aquatic or semi-aquatic, these traits could be easily explained. The AAT tells us that we share many traits with aquatic mammals which we don’t share with our closer relatives, the primates. Therefore, says the AAT, we acquired those traits in an aquatic environment. The beauty of this theory is that is seems to solve, in one fell swoop, all the mysteries of human uniqueness. It’s also championed by a skilled writer, unencumbered by the stringent guidelines of scientific research.

Yep, Elaine Morgan was no scientist. She was not an anthropologist, but rather she was a feminist writer, and from my perspective, the whole AAT was a feminist reaction to a lot of evolutionary theory that was macho-man oriented that didn’t have a whole lot to back it up. Kossy was on the same page as me. Observe:

The Aquatic Ape began as an essentially female version of human evolution, an antidote to what Elaine Morgan then called “The Mighty Hunter” – a brutish ape-man who used to dominate popular stories of human evolution. The Aquatic Ape, by contrast, emerges from the sea, like Venus or an aquatic Madonna-and-child. Some of the appeal of the AAT might stem from Morgan’s depictions of what is essentially a mother goddess.

Before Morgan presented her take on the AAT, a British marine biologist called Alister Hardy presented the idea and it even has a mention in Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape. But it was not until Morgan infused the theory with her feminist challenge to male-dominated theories of evolution that the AAT really got its controversial legs.

Riffing off Hardy’s ideas and adding her own interpretations, Morgan postulated that resource scarcity forced early hominids from the forest out into the savannah. These hairy apes found life hard and were often fodder for predators. Then one day, a former tree-climbing ape carrying her child fled into water to escape a quadruped predator and thus became the progenitor to aquatic apes. Fleeing into the water when in danger caused these hairy apes to undergo the same evolutionary changes that oceanic mammals underwent – becoming more hairless, developing subcutaneous fat, among others. Standing in the water aided walking erect posture and having to spend long periods of time in the water caused the apes’ fingers to become more dexterous and led to effective tool use. But one of the reasons why this theory was so compelling to me was how Morgan took Hardy’s assumptions and added her own in her book, The Descent of Woman:

Hardy had explained hair on the aquatic ape’s head as protection from the sun while wading, but Morgan explained it as a way for the aquatic ape baby to cling to its otherwise naked mother… This also explained male baldness because “in communities where the males took no part in the bringing up of the offspring, there would be nothing to prevent their heads going bald as their bodies…”

She later refined these ideas in The Aquatic Ape and The Scars of Evolution. The media and the general public rather liked the AAT but the academic and scientific communities were not impressed, almost universally dismissing it.

Much of the chapter deals with scientists discussing the AAT and proving that it is false, that the fossil record does not support it, and Morgan insisting that the fossil record does, in fact, support her theory. Frankly, as a non-scientist I tend to think the fossil record does not support the AAT as the bulk of the examples of hominids walking erect were found in dry places, whereas if Morgan was correct, we would expect to find them near the water. But reading that Kossy, a writer who clearly has more discipline than I do, found the theory as embraceable as I did when I first read about it, makes me want to get all of Morgan’s books and read them in sequential order and see what I think once I am finished.

Chapter seven was sort of a trashcan chapter, with all the odd origin theories that could not fit into the proceeding chapters. Kossy called these the “aberrant anthropologies” and begins with the strange anthropology found in The Urantia Book. Those of you who are debunkers or fans of the late Martin Gardner may find the name Urantia rings a bell. The Urantia believers, whom I have to give their due for slogging through that brick of a book (over 2000 pages), believed William Sadler channeled space aliens in his sleep. There’s a whole lot more to it but just know that the Urantia theory was a strange Seventh Day Adventist shoot off that included some members of the Kellogg family and theories of eugenics as appalling as all the others discussed in this book. Add in some alien intervention urging human kind via the sleep trances of William Sadler to achieve racial purity and it’s just bleah all over again. I think the section on Urantia was most notable because the followers in this weird cult were puritanical in their approach to life and their work ethic and nothing in their lives seemed like it was the least bit enjoyable.

This chapter also discusses the Heaven’s Gate cult, the group of mild and meek cultists who believed the mothership was coming for them behind the Hale-Bopp comet. They committed suicide en masse in California in 1997 and an appalled nation got all kinds of unseemly details as we learned most of the men had castrated themselves.

But the best part of this chapter was the section that dealt with Stanislav Szukalski. Oh good lord, this small section of a very involved book just revved up that part of my brain that loves the strange but has no desire to engage in dogma. Szukalski, I suspect, is perfect for my undisciplined mind because he is less strange religion than he is rogue ideas filtered through the brain of a genius or madman. Szukalski was a Polish artist who emigrated to America and became friends with people like Clarence Darrow and Sherwood Anderson. His return to Poland to create art for the goverment was cut short when Poland was invaded during WWII, forcing Szukalski to return to the United States, where he begin to refine his theory, researching languages and archaeology.

Szukalski’s origin theory involves humans, apes, and de-evolution but is still somehow wholly unique in its own bizarre right:

According to Szukalski, our blood has already been mixed; not with inferior human blood but with that of apes – human history is the story of the struggle between the true humans and the a-human Yetinsyny, who even now live among us in human society. They speak our language and they sometimes even take over our nations, but a few of their physical features give them away as the gluttonous anthropoids they are.

During his studies of language in California, he made a major discovery:

His studies of pictographs and illustrations of archaeological finds culminated in the discovery of what he called “Protong,” or the “proto-tongue.” Protong, claimed Szukalski, is the mother of all languages, a pictographic language common to all cultures before the Tower of Babel.

He died not long after he wrote up his theories and his works were discovered by underground artists who exhibited his art and published his treatise on “Zermatism,” the science that evidently explains all of his theorizing.

Szukalski’s belief that humans had been sexually mixed with violent, rapacious apes, can be seen illustrated throughout history. To him, the Greek god Pan was an ape variant that raped women. Some of the ape women were seductive enough to attract men and the offspring of these interspecies unions have ruined the world, creating a de-evolving race that is overwhelmed by war and strife. (Also, please note the random capitalizations. That is a sign of quality in crackpotology.)

Szukalski enthusiastically identifies the descendants of these couplings by such traits as an “undercut nose,” long upper lip, long torso, short upper arm, wart nose, pot belly, and sometimes even a tail. These bastards typically end up as dictators, political subversives, and communist agents in all nations. Their compulsive opposition to human decency is the cause of all our troubles, past, present and future…

[...]

According to Szukalski, these Yetinsyny, once identified, should never be allowed to enter politics or the the military service, for they are “devoid of all the genteel traits of [humanity] but retained all the avaricious, vengeful, ferocious traits.” They only enter public service “for the purpose of attaining positions that allow them to gloat in Vengeance for their obsessive psychosis of Inferiority.” And there they bide their time until they get a chance to “exterminate Handsome mankind by the millions.” Politically dangerous Yeti have lately included such historically influential characters as Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Nietzsche, Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Behold!!! The Protong contains many of Szukalski’s drawings and his theory, Zermatism. I have it on my shelves, ordered after reading this book. I hope I get to read and discuss it sooner than later.

Kossy’s book, aside from simply being an entertaining read, was important for me because it ultimately showed me why my innate atheism is the only rational choice I have. I have often wondered why it is that, given my predilection for lunacy, I have never been able to embrace for long any of the ideas that so enthrall me. I can dip my toe in the water but I can never go for a swim, and in my attempts to find some truth, I have tried to open my mind to ideas uplifting and despicable, but none ever stuck. I had always been able to see the threads that run common in all the major religions, but I couldn’t see the common threads in the more crackpot ideas that I, by all rights, should have adopted by now.

Perhaps I knew it subconsciously, but Kossy lines up clearly for me, all the commonalities. Alien intervention, eugenics, race hate, rampaging apes, bizarre castes of human existence – it seems that with the exception of the AAT, all of these origin stories wove at least two of the above threads into tapestries that ultimately do not look that much different from each other. With so many common elements, it’s clearer to me why I, a borderline lunatic, have never completely descended into solidly odd beliefs. I find all the offerings at the crackpot buffet to have come from the same cookbook.

But as much as I cannot embrace the bizarre, these ideas that Kossy examines puts into perspective the less strange creations on the landscape. With precision, a love of the strange yet with a distance that enables her to dissect and analyze dispassionately, Kossy’s book is a masterpiece of crackpot beginnings and crazy origin theories. I highly recommend this book and hope that when you read it, you come back and tell me the origin theory that made you log onto Amazon and order a book so you could find out more. Then mourn with me that we have only the two books from this writer.

Author: Adam Parfrey

Type of Book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, history, sociology, pop culture

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the cover was pretty much a dead giveaway, what, with the David Koresh angel of justice drawing. But then you factor in that Adam Parfrey, owner of Feral House and an all-around-odd-content kind of guy, wrote most of the articles in the book and you’ve got an odd book on your hands.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 1995, it’s out of print, but you can still get a copy relatively cheaply online:

Comments: Lord a’mercy, I love books like this. I love these sort of collections of whacked culture, weird theories and weird people. If you’ve read Apocalypse Culture or Apocalypse Culture II, you have a good handle on what to expect from this book, though I sensed a healthy amount of snark from time to time. Or maybe I was just projecting my own snark. But even if there was not any snark, it was still a fun, entertaining book.

Over 15-years-old at this writing, much of the book could seem dated to a person who needs to be up-to-date on their high weirdness and occult-goings-on. Luckily, I need no freshness when it comes to topics odd. But even taking into account the relatively dated elements of some of these articles, this collection was informative, interesting, saddening, silly, funny and in some respects quite disgusting.

So, to make it easy on myself, I’m just gonna discuss the articles in the order they occur, but I will group the ones that left me with literally nothing to discuss at the end. I think my verbosity where certain articles are concerned may be a very good look at my id at the moment. Clearly harmless crazies, Nazis, gross people and certain areas of feminist thought incite my love of typing.

The first article, The Gods Must Be Crazy: The Latter Days of Unarius, discusses the delightful apocalyptic cult led by Ruth Norman, aka The Archangel Uriel. Ruth always reminded me of Mrs. Slocombe from Are You Being Served? with an irritating, mystic edge to her. Despite the fact that Ruth died in 1993, the cult still limps along today. If you know about this cult and you aren’t a complete loon like me, it’s likely because the group was a popular topic during the talk show explosion in the early 90s. The Unarians channel aliens and think they have a line on a new way of looking at science, with all the usual attendant failed prophecies but since both of the founders, Ruth Norman and her husband, are dead, it doesn’t creep me out as a mass suicide waiting to happen. But this article discusses the cult during the time when the fickle sun of the media was shining on them but before the Internet made it easy to know every detail about every wacky cult out there. They were still pretty exotic at the time of Parfrey’s writing.

I entered this article thinking I had nothing new to learn and I was proven wrong, but then again, I had never really ventured past the outer layer of Unarius’ weirdness because these channeling cults bore me (because the Lemurians, ancient spirits, Atlanteans, Ramtha and all the others seem to say the same things, so why bother?). All I knew really was that the Unarians were a bunch of channelers who talked to the dead and gave their beliefs a patina of respectability via pseudoscience. So while I did not know that Ruth liked to engage in past life psychodramas, the whole of the insanity of it should not have surprised me. Yet I was surprised and a little amused but mostly appalled in that way you are appalled when your right wing lunatic relatives talk about race relations over Thanksgiving dinner. I searched the Internet for a sample of her psychodramas, specifically the one called The Ballad of Annabelle Lee, because Parfrey describes it as being “the kind of project that would make John Waters green with envy.” Alas, I could only find it on sites for weird film, available for trade, and I don’t have enough time left in my life to deal with video traders, so let me share what Parfrey described, because hoo boy, is this some horrible, wonderful crap.

Let me set the scene: A man in black face and in pillow-stuffed drag to make him look like a black Mammy caricature called Nell is caring for his/her young charge, Annabelle. Two other women in black face are flitting about as well. Annabelle is played by a 75-year-old Ruth Norman.

“Today’s the big day,” announced Nell. “Miss Annabelle Lee is goin’ a courtin’ on the riverboat!”

“Oh, Miss Annabelle,” coos the mammy, “you always my beautiful girl. You got mo’ beaus up and down the Mississippi than anyone cans hake a stick at.

“What’s all that commotion, Nell?” cries Annabelle, the most ancient ingenue to fill out bloomers and hoop skirt. “I’m sleepy!”

“Miss Annabelle must be tired, tryin’ on all dose dresses and wigs all day long!”

A banjo twangs a Stephen Foster tune which inspires Miss Annabelle to go all misty-eyed as she heart-to-hearts with her faithful servant. “It is said, Nell, they don’t treat you black people on the riverboat like I do — and you might have to take lodging down below, way down below.”

“Miss Annabelle, you treats us black folks, so good, so good!”

“God loves all God’s chilluns!” replies Annabelle profoundly, a beatific smile on her face.

And it just gets worse from there. Annabelle’s Nell is forced to swab the deck by a Simon Legree type, Annabelle somehow drowns and Nell is hanged for a crime she didn’t commit. Later, in comments after the film, Ruth babbles in complete defiance to the facts laid out in the film, indicating that Nell had murdered her. But beneficent Annabelle doesn’t blame Nell for the senseless murder:

“Nell loved me so,” reasons Uriel. “She would never have deliberately hurt me. I was born the same time as one of Nell’s daughters, but she gave more attention to me than her own little pickaninny.”

Yeah, this psychodrama was filmed in the early 1980s but even then this had to have sounded racist and completely insane. And this scene pretty much explains why you should never obtain religious beliefs from anyone who claims they spoke to otherwordly beings the rest of us can’t see because chances are they are going to be more than a little crazy and if you ever regain any self-awareness, you will be horribly embarrassed by the shit you engaged in. All in all, an amusing article about a largely harmless but clearly batshit cult.

From Russia, With Love: The Business of Mail-Order Brides also suffers a bit from the passage of time but when it was written, I don’t know if the idea of mail-order brides had been explored so much by media, and if they were, much of the focus was on South America or the Far East. Recent cases of murdered Russian “internet order” brides have brought full-force to the media this bizarre tradition of eschewing us American bitch harpies for more compliant women from the former Soviet nations. The stories were grotesque, sickening and salacious. I ultimately don’t resent how any person obtains happiness in this life, but as an American woman who is pretty certain that Russian women aren’t really that different than me aside from the economic climate in which they live, I knew Parfrey and I were going to be on the same page before I ever even read the article. From the intro:

My interviews with the American boors in the market for a Russian sex slave revealed themselves as victims of an inferiority complex. The interviewees embodied the Reichian “Little Man” — prone to psychological overcompensation by securing women they can easily dominate.

The men in Parfrey’s article had to pore over photos printed on paper rather than viewing pictures online, but they more or less followed the same procedure those who want to obtain a foreign bride use today: use an agency that tries to pair off single American men with women in Russia made desperate by economic privation. Some of these agencies have the best interests of both parties involved but even the best operate with the profit motive as the main objective, and woman are a cattle-like commodity to be selected by the more feminine human equivalents of checking their teeth and hooves.

Okay, my vague disgust isn’t so vague but Parfrey’s article doesn’t have to work hard to show the repellent natures and shady motives of the men who were seeking these women. On Russian women with children:

Does the fact that she has a child phase [sic] you?

“Yeah. I mean, that doesn’t bother me. As a matter of fact, that would probably be a safer bet than having a single gal come over here that has no kids, you know.

Safer? In what way?

“With no kids, she might be inclined to wander.”

These are the words of an American pilot with a spare tire around his middle and a couple of American girlfriends who are baffled by him.

Here’s a charmer who is explaining his desire to import a bride:

“See, we spoil them in this country. They all are looking for their superman, so to speak. They see tv, they see Kevin Costner, they see the heroes there. They’re quite demanding, and there’s so many people it’s easy come, easy go. If you’re one of the few who have very wonderful endowments, you’re okay. It’s difficult in a sense that I’m past my prime. It gets harder and harder to compete and you have to put up with so much stuff. The thing about this country, even if they’re Gravel Gerties they’ll make demands.”

Yeah, I had to look up “Gravel Gertie.” This is a middle-aged man whom Parfrey describes as being bird-like in appearance. He had initially sought a wife via a Scandinavian agency but found the women not to his liking because evidently only tall, leggy blondes get his motor running. But given that Scandinavia as a whole beats the hell out of the USA in terms of quality of life, those who wanted an American husband didn’t suit his tastes as they were not the “quality” he had been led to expect from Sweden. I guess only the Gravel Gerties in Scandinavia wanted out.

I don’t know if I ever have read an article wherein the author didn’t even have to do anything other than let the interviewees hang themselves with their own words. Actually, Parfrey is a master of this, of letting people’s words stand for themselves, though often he cannot resist adding some of his own snark from time to time. And given some of the people he interviews, who can blame him.

The Devil and Andrea Dworkin was one I looked forward to reading as I knew it had been featured in the infamous “Rape” issue of ANSWER Me!. Though Parfrey apologizes in his intro for equating mainstream feminism with Dworkin’s extremist stances, and I appreciate it, the fact is that so many people, mostly men, who want to denigrate elements of feminism look to Dworkin as their go-to-girl, as if her polemics about men are in any way a good view of the female struggle for equitable and, in some cases, merciful treatment in the modern world. But the fact is that the older I get, the less of a shit I give about any philosophy because the binary nature of American politics has ensured any thought is an either/or proposition and that all conversation, especially online, becomes a nasty clusterfuck of shouting everyone down.

But this article, if you bear in mind that Parfrey has already copped to his “lazy, misogynist assumption” equating feminism to Dworkin, is pretty interesting. It’s hard to approach Dworkin with an open mind because her essential premise is so extreme only a handful of people can find much merit in her arguments. In my traditional manner, I have a lot of sympathy for the devil and I have a soft spot for Dworkin, even as her arguments repel me. I adore the scariness of her mind the way I adore Peter Sotos because mental extremity forces reaction. And make no mistake – Dworkin was scary. Anyone who looks at all acts of heterosexual sex as rape are frightening, because no one comes to a conclusion that upsetting unless some heavy shit has come down in his or her life. To see the very act that perpetuates the species as a violation, a sex crime, implies that the mind who thinks this way has suffered deeply.

But Dworkin needs no apologists nor would she want them were she still alive, and this article cuts her zero slack, engaging in the sort of language that would be most insulting to a woman like Dworkin, as well as many others who never once considered sex as rape (cooze, caterwauling, tube steaks, cunt) but my eyes and ears are not that delicate. Also, I’ve always thought a man with good intentions in life can only react in rage to the sorts of ideas Dworkin put forth. I appreciated Parfrey’s disgust at Dworkin’s explanation of a sexual act that contains none of the thrusting she found so soul-shattering. The presumption Dworkin needed to prescribe an acceptable sex act reeked of Popish-approved sexual positions and a zealotry that is, and I invoke this word again, scary. But zealotry has a short shelf-life and Dworkin was a relic even when she died. I can’t imagine she comes up much in the feminist discourse of women 20 years my junior and that’s a good thing. Ideas burst forth, they get examined and when as bad as Dworkin’s ideas, they get buried. I once wanted to write a book about pagan feminism (and still sort of do but that’s neither here nor there) and maybe it’s good I didn’t. All these ideas of utopia and we still can’t even get equal pay for equal work. Who needs another fucking treatise, eh?

Back on track, there are many reasons to read this article, among them the acerbic and perverse reactions Parfrey slams on the table:

Those who most treasure Dworkin’s hysteria aren’t mainstream feminists but prohibitionist paper-pushers and the fundamentalist right. I’ve envisioned a scene fit for a Jodorowsky movie in which Richard Viguerie and Jesse Helms go down on Dworkin and MacKinnon on a bed of severed penises.

Harsh and full of names that might trip up the average 25-year-old but all the more reason to read it, I say.

Oh god, I just died a million times inside when I read The Girlfriend Who Last Saw Elvis Alive Fan Club. I wrote a well-received story many years ago that I only last year realized was fan fiction. It was a weird feeling, knowing I had written fan fiction, though fan fiction has come a long way since Parfrey wrote this article, and while he says he feels “shame over the article’s laconic sadism” he also goes on to say:

Why begrudge, even make fun of, the only escape route open to the genetically deprived?

In Parfrey’s defense, the fan fiction in this article defies sane fandom and the poor woman depicted in this article is a near-perfect example of the stereotype of the pitiful, obese, weirdo living in their parent’s house, scrawling out page after page of questionable fiction that inserts them into their favorite book or the life of their favorite star. Debby Wimer was a member of the Ginger Alden Fan Club. She was emotionally fragile, dense, and sort of gross and she evoked nothing short of utter disgust in Parfrey. But given the details he shares in the story, even if he was exaggerating a bit, the then 35-year-old Wimer was pretty grotesque.

Who was Ginger Allen, by the way? She was Elvis Presley’s girlfriend at one point, the woman who found him collapsed in his bathroom, and the women who formed her fan club loved her “the best of all the women Elvis was involved with.” Her fans think she was not only the prettiest of his women, but also that she was just more virtuous:

“Priscilla and Linda Thompson seemed to be out for the money. Ginger isn’t. I never liked that kind of person.”

So in defiance of all that seems like it is worth doing, a fan club grew up around this golden-hearted woman who was there when the King breathed his last, and some incredibly bad, Mary Sue-laden fan fiction came into being. It’s worth a read if only because it’s an interesting look at fandom and how it seems utterly trivial to those of us not bitten by the bug. These days half the people I know write fan fiction of some description, but I do hope they don’t live a life of quiet, repellent despair. My desire to respect human dignity, such as it is, and my innate tendency towards snark were at war with each other when reading this article. Don’t miss Debby Wimer’s story, “Spanish Eyes.” It follows the article and it inspired such second hand embarrassment that I actually had to stop and look away from the pages when I read it.

I have remarkably little to say about Will Somebody Please Find a Mate for This Nice, Well-Mannered, Aryan Psycho Killer? Yet I bet I will still throw a few words at the article anyway because that’s just who I am. The article is interesting enough in and of itself but it’s really just another look at a sexually-demented, white pride lunatic who killed, went to prison and became a footnote in history, relegated to books like this. Maybe it’s because I spent way too much time exploring the white pride movement in the United States and pretty much already know that a statistically significant and startling number of the men are violent and utterly twisted sexually. Kevin Strom, though he never killed anyone, comes to mind. At any rate, although interesting and well-written, it’s just another look at a man who is a terrible physical representation of the Aryan culture he touts so highly, bitching about how he couldn’t find a pretty Aryan woman to polish his knob because they all dated Jews, Mexicans and African-Americans, and this made him nuts. Of course, the fact that he is a fucking white supremacist who looks like he barely made it off skid row and has a sexual ethos that was vaguely alarming even to an old jaded broad like me is a hint as to why no woman, Aryan or otherwise, wanted anything to do with him, but the obvious answer to Jonathan Haynes’ problems was to kill a plastic surgeon who created fake Aryan beauty. But if you are an Aryan beauty who feels that “National Socialism encouraged a pragmatic sort of sexual freedom…” you are in luck. In 2002 or thereabouts, the governor of Illinois pardoned Haynes and he is no longer on death row. Act quickly and maybe you can land a be-prisoned pseudo-intellectual who combines weird sexual ideas with race hate to compensate for being a complete loser at life. You know someone reading this will jump at the chance to get to know this dude – I think there are reality shows about this topic of ordinarily sane women dating the worst sort of scum behind bars. It could happen (and probably will). Be sure to read “The Sex Economy of Nazi Germany,” which is Haynes’ weirdo treatise, helpfully included by Parfrey. I could summarize it but I just don’t want to.

The Endangered Freak was an article with an interesting premise and one that covers a lot of ground. He discusses how the biologically atypical have been granted a sort of purity of spirit and mind as modern culture has romanticized the disabled and imbued them with a saint-like image that ultimately is demeaning. I recall, back in the days before Jerry Springer became a show wherein half sisters slept with each other and flashed their breasts to the audience, former carnival freaks who were frequent Springer guests, bemoaning the death of the freak show. A woman who was a former human torso had been retrained as an office worker when her carnival shut down and as a result made far less money. She infinitely preferred the day when people were open about their shock rather than condescending to her as she struggled to file receipts in an office with her mouth. Parfrey compares the saccharine storyline of Forrest Gump, wherein the “biological deficient are compensated with a purity of heart and nobility of soul unattained by those of sound body and mind” with the hard reality of Tod Browning’s Freaks.

The age of Tod Browning’s Freaks did not stoop to portray monstrous specimens as moral Pollyannas but as a kind of Mafia that found solace and power in acts of brotherhood and retribution. Ruling this hierarchy were the true biological anomalies rather than the “gaffed” or faked freak; the value of the congenital freak was most clearly demonstrated in the size of the weekly paycheck.

This article discusses this issue in depth – the acceptance of physical abnormality for what it is and refusal to make it a condition that implies a higher spiritual plane or a closer link to God in contrast to those who want to imbue simple biological differences, however mild or catastrophic, with holiness.

And yeah, it was totally on the nose that Parfrey followed that article with Please, May I Touch Your Scar? Queasy Hours Among I CAN: A Cult of Sex-Obsessed Cripples. Oh man… David and Violet Brandenburger are a physically interesting couple. She’s small in stature and so riddled with profoundly horrific rheumatoid arthritis and other issues that she is a quadriplegic. I can’t recall what is wrong with David. He’s just big, fat and gross, forever going shirtless, wearing shorts so tight and ill-fitting his balls fall out. Violet discovered that she could control pain via pleasure and began a non-profit “human potential” organization based on paganism, new age nonsense and questionable science, all relating back to sex.

Okay, disabled people have sex. This is not a new idea and hedonists and religious whack jobs come in all varieties. It’s just… Sigh… As I read this article, I remembered when Dave Attell visited a sex club (filled with the last people any sane person would want to have sex with) for his sadly canceled show, Insomniac . He saw an old fashioned room deodorant that attached to the wall and said, “Air freshener. The unsung hero of the sex club.” This article evokes a funk. Not a sexual funk, which would be bad enough. Rather, it evokes the funk of unwashed feet, sweaty armpits and, I can barely bring myself to type this, dick cheese. Ugh. Since the folks of I CAN are, for the most part, repellent people (posters of wrestlers adorn the walls, the rest of the house decor is trailer home in Florida circa 1974, David removing his false teeth so he can suck on feet, and a cast of regulars that would have fit in well cast in Gummo) it feels okay to pretty much say I am glad they all found one another because ain’t too many people lining up for a foot gumming. It would be pretty condescending not to call them all gross just because I was keeping their myriad disabilities in mind, though I think the blind guy had it the easiest. I respect human dignity but I don’t get the feeling the members of the I CAN house often had human dignity in mind. Also, if you look too long at the picture of all the house denizens dressed in costumes, most of them as clowns, you will have to go to the hospital. Just looking out for you.

But even as distasteful as this article began, it got worse, discussing a girl who had to live in the I CAN house because her fucking whackaloon of a mother decided it was, you know, a really good idea to expose her kid to a home of unbridled and bizarre sexuality. The thirteen-year-old girl was never forced to have sex with the people in the house, but she was forced to masturbate daily and discuss it in detail. David was the worst, the girl said, and Violet and David ran up her mother’s credit cards. It was all utterly nasty and skeevy and manipulative and about as un-Forrest Gump as you can get. I swear to all that is holy, the picture of David deepthroating Violet’s foot will probably be the last thought in my head before I die. :twitch:

Moving on to a topic that is creepy in a wholly different manner, we have Citizen Keane: The Sordid Saga of the Weepy Waifs. You know those repellent paintings of kids with enormous, crying eyes? Maybe not — a lot of you reading here are pretty young, and they were passe when I was a kid. They were mainly popular from 1950-1970, but have made a comeback in certain ironic, hipster art circles. This article deals with the struggle between Walter Keane and his wife over who was the mastermind behind these wretched paintings. I had read a similar article at some point in my indiscriminate reading past, discussing these iconic but repellent paintings and the problems the Keanes’ divorce caused, but if this is new to you, this was a reasonably interesting take on pop culture, the concept of art ownership and how ego infects even the most humble and silly of art.

G.G. Goes to Heaven is Parfrey’s interview with GG Allin a few days before he overdosed epically on heroin. Oh, I found GG Allin as repellent yet hilariously interesting as everyone else, but as Parfrey says, he “was simply too much of a fuck-up to achieve mythic status.” But I disagree with Parfrey’s assessment that Allin was “nothing less than an Andy Kaufman-type stand up act.” I just never felt there was that much intelligence burning behind Allin’s burnout (though he was clearly not the semi-retarded hick many thought him to be, but there was no advanced theater behind his shtick).

The interview has questions and answers along these lines:

When are you finally going to kill yourself?

The biggest question that everyone keeps asking me is about the suicide thing. For me right now to say I’m going to commit suicide is just way too premature because there’s too many battles and it seems like there’s too many people who want me to do it now, so as long as I’ve got to battle and to fight, and as long as I got some enemies, I gotta keep going to fuck these people up. To end it now is what the government would want and what society would want, and as long as I can be that dagger in their back and as long as I can be the enemy of the people then I’ve go to stay alive.

So you weren’t anybody’s punk in jail?

Fuck no.

Sigh… I can believe the latter but that first answer was just so pitiful. Of course, Allin, unknown by 98% of the American public at the height of his career, and that’s a generous estimate, was no threat to the government or the fabric of the country. His enemy list was mostly the people he’d puked on or flung shit at or stole drugs from but I sense Allin genuinely believed he was a threat, which means he lacked the self-awareness to be as subversive as an Andy Kaufman. But opinions vary, clearly. The interview also contains an affidavit from a woman Allin tortured and assaulted. It’s pretty sordid. Very much worth a read for a look at a redneck punkpuke phase in American music.

Riding the Downardian Nightmare was both excellent and a topic that I cannot go into here because there is no way for me to discuss James Shelby Downard with anything approaching brevity and this article is already way too long. I also feel like I have read this article, or at least most of it, as the intro to the book The Carnivals of Life and Death, but I am way too lazy to go get my copy down because I’m barely five feet tall and it’s on a case that requires a ladder and I sense my memory is pretty sound. But any article on Downard, the possibly non-existent purveyor of ideas of mystical topography, religious symbology and overwrought Masonic fears, is worth it. Totally worth it.

I am too exhausted to discuss Project Monarch: How the U.S. Creates Slaves of Satan by Fritz Springmeier. That’s not Springmeier’s fault. It’s because I am currently fielding e-mails from a woman who insists that she was made into a sex slave by men at Cornell University and forced to sexually service lots of famous names from Bush the Elder’s administration. Her story sounds not entirely unlike that of Cathy O’Brien, who is mentioned in this article, and I have no idea if she is having me on or if the Monarch Project really did make her a sex slave and there are startling commonalities between stories. I have a tiresome inability to tell people whom I fear may be damaged in some manner to go fuck off, and I’ve reached my tolerance level for this sort of thing at the moment. At any rate, if you know your conspiracy theory, there is likely to be little new in this article, though I will admit I was fascinated by the idea that the business of country music is linked closely to the Monarch Project.

I also lack the will to discuss How to Frame a Patriot by Barry Krusch, Linda Thompson’s War and Finding Our Way Out Of Oklahoma. But I am grouping them together because I think they are a very illuminating look at how the “militia” movement and its coverage in the press have changed in the last fifteen years. The anti-Communist, Libertarian, fringe movement’s focus has changed in some respects but at the same time, it still has a similar message and it’s worth a look at these articles to examine how the Patriots of two decades ago compare to the Tea Party of the now.

God, Christ, Satan or Con? Westerners Worship a Hindu Godman, Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, Guns, Gold, Groceries, Guts ‘n’ Gritz, and SWAT in Theme Park Land are the only articles in this book that mean too little for me to discuss even briefly. It happens. In a book that covers this much ground, it’s surprising there were so few I had so little reaction to.

So, the upshot is that while some of the content is very dated by now, this is still a very entertaining, interesting, whacked, absorbing, disturbing, gross and at times deeply funny book. I say buy it and see which articles make you want to search the Internet for more information.

Type of Book: Non fiction, conspiracy theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Conspiracy theory is always odd and this is no exception.

Availability: Published by Adventures Unlimited Press in 1999, I purchased this from my local amazing strange book source, Brave New Books, but they are revamping their online store, so for now, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, this book and others like it are why I decided to ax I Read Everything and make it just an occasional sidebar to this site. You see, I read so much faster than I write and when I take too much time to discuss a book after I have read it, with some books it feels like I have forgotten huge chunks of the content. This happens especially with scatter-shot conspiracy theory like this because at some point, most of this stuff eventually covers the same ground. I mean, I will always know Icke’s alien lizard theory from James Shelby Downard’s mystical topography but unless you are a conspirator rock star, it can be hard to keep things straight unless you discuss the book within a few days of reading it. In order to give my first odd love its due, I need to just focus on the weird, you know?

And this book is wonderfully weird. And in some ways it makes sense and in other ways I can see how I lost the thread of how all of this held together, but Liquid Conspiracy explains an interesting theory, to some observable level of success, though it was all a bit mutable. It’s supposed to be mutable, though. It’s liquid, you see. But give Piccard his due, as he has a pretty interesting theory on how things work behind the scenes and under the surfaces.

Now, if you think the “liquid conspiracy” in this book refers to copious amounts of acid, you are not alone, because that was my first thought too, that all of this revolved around LSD and its impact on JFK, the CIA, etc. But really, Liquid Conspiracy refers to the information Piccard claims he received from a man called Kilder, a man who worked for the RAF during WWII and in his capacity as some sort of governmental flunky managed to find out who the men behind the curtain are and what they want to do. It is, as referenced in the book, a “Grand Unification Theory of Conspiracy.”

The elderly Englishman contacted Piccard with his information and unloaded it all before he died and Piccard did his best to verify it. Luckily, Kilder had a photographic memory (one day I will go off on a rant about how it is eidetic memory does not mean what people think it means and how it is often more than not a relatively useless trait, but that day is not today) and wrote a lot of things down. Of course, the skeptic in me is always immediately ready to snert when a clerk in some governmental agency is able to get the lowdown on the conspiracy controlling the world because, you know, it’s a damn conspiracy and you’d think they’d be a little more careful in how they disseminate their evil plans, especially when they know they have a clerk with a photographic memory who has access to their nefarious plans, but all I can do is give my head a shake, refuse to approach this with reason, relax and enjoy the show. I advise that you do the same.

Relax… Because here it comes. The Liquid Conspiracy features all the usual players in conspiracies that control the world. The Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Masons, the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, Adam Weishaupt, the Federal Reserve, the Catholic Church, Skull and Bones, Nazis, aliens, Communists and on and on. You’ve likely heard it all before or read it on websites that are generally nothing but a wall of Geocities text with a series of eyes in pyramids blinking at you when you reach the bottom of the page. And really, it’s nothing new. There are men behind the curtain, lots of them, some with competing interests but all with a common goal of keeping us, the common men, so distracted from their goals that they keep us in chains and we wreck our interests as they keep all the power and the money away from us.

But the conspiracy Kilder shared with Piccard is that all of the forces that seek to control the world entered into a pact.

The Knights, the Elders, and the aliens made a pact. The conspiracy–its character subtly changed with their recent collaboration–made its final plans for the coming One World Order. The dangerous union of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Templar Knights and the Roman Catholic Church with the support of the Grey aliens, brought to an end a fifteen hundred year struggle. These rival groups came together to put aside their previous animosities and to forge an invincible power.

And why not. Why wouldn’t the Masons, the Illuminati and little green–er–gray men join together? In unity there is strength, right? The proof for this alliance is what Piccard calls “The Breakfast with the Kingmakers of ’45.” Present at this breakfast were representatives of all the major conspiracies, twelve entities in total, and it was then they merged together to form a sort of perpetually moving, form-fitting, Lycra-blend conspiracy.

The new conspiracy was an entity unto itself. Using ritual magic and technologies still never spoken of, the attendees initiated an incredible device. A poltergeist of sorts, an ever-evolving energy form which would transfer power inner-dimensionally, from thought to reality. This curse (and I use these terms with reservation, for there is no other terminology to describe it) would grow, mutate, and adapt to the desires of its masters. The will of the secret world government would come to manifest physically. Still, actual temporal involvement was absolutely required. But with the aid and intelligence of their psychic contraption, their desires faced no opposition in the realm of the feeble masses.

So, it’s not just the aliens and the Trilateral Commission and the Masons and the Illuminati and the greasy soul of Prescott Bush we got to worry about. It’s a device that can… I don’t know… control our minds and adapt our reality on behalf of all these combined conspirators. Yeah, this is one helluva theory. All based on the photographic memory of some British clerk and who am I, in all seriousness, to argue with that.

You think I am being sarcastic? Well, maybe a bit, but for me conspiracy theory in a very real manner is not dissimilar to religion, an attempt to explain that which seems hidden, mysterious, beyond comprehension. There is a gossamer thread that runs from being very suspicious about the Federal Reserve to believing that there is a bizarre cabal that uses an inexplicable “psychic contraption” to blur things so we cannot see how they are perpetually working behind the scenes. One is a reasonable but at times paranoiac topic, the other is an attempt to create a story to force the world into a mechanism that to them makes more sense than the randomness that often surrounds world events, and it is all too easy to start with one and end up wallowing in the other. Human beings like believing strange things. It is a part of who we are as a species.

I mean, is a “psychic contraption” uniting the Bilderbergers and the Catholics and the aliens really that more outlandish than a talking bush afire or immaculate conception or some awesome guy rising from the dead? Of course that’s up to the individual but atheist though I am, I recognize that wacky beliefs fuel the world and I have always wondered why some wacky beliefs make the cut for widespread belief and some don’t. I suspect it is personal salvation and a sense of a larger presence looking out for us in a positive manner, something that most conspiracy theory lacks, but the cynics among us might think that makes conspiracy theory more believable.

But an angel Moroni brought Joseph Smith golden plates and a British clerk named Kilder remembered a bunch of fantastic stuff, wrote it down and shared it with Piccard and there isn’t a whole lot of proof for either happening so all you can do is decide whether or not you believe. I don’t believe either, mainly because I lack of capacity for belief but conspiracy is amazing to me in the same way religion is because I love seeing what it is that make people believe and how beliefs evolve. Conspiracy is a religion, pure and simple, a religion without a savior, and in a way, that makes it all the more amazing. So yeah, I give this no credence but I don’t have to because I love it for what it is, not for its truth or reality.

So back to Piccard. After chapter one, the rest of the book becomes his version of world events filtered through the lens of his take on the conspiracy controlling the world, and even without this filter, this book is a good conspiracy primer because it covers pretty decently a lot of territory, from Operation Paperclip to LSD as a CIA means of mind control and how it influenced the Kennedy administration, the JFK assassination, Area 51 and UFOs, MK-ULTRA, Jim Jones, the general complete anomaly that is the state of Ohio and AIDS. This is just a small sample of what this book discusses and like I said, if you remove the whole Liquid Conspiracy you still get an excellent overview of conspiracy and high weirdness in general. I could spend a lot of time dissecting the weirdness but this is not new weirdness outside of the Liquid Conspiracy. All that is different is the interpretation of the forces behind it. So if you are new to conspiracy, you could do a lot worse than begin your trip into this cloudy place of utter paranoia reading this book.

So I say read it. I haven’t been able to find out much about George Piccard online and that’s a shame that this guy may have petered out at some point, but this kind of thing gets exhausting for men who are not made of stern and lunatic stuff, like Alex Jones. But even as a side player in the madness, I think Piccard deserves a look.

Author: Dr. John Coleman

Type of Book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, disease

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, I bought it at the marvelous Austin book store, Brave New Books. That’s a good clue as to potential oddness. The content cinched the deal.

Availability: Published by World in Review Books in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Take this statement for what it’s worth but it took me forever to write this discussion because I came down with a case of the flu that will not go away. If I were paranoid, I would be very concerned.

Man, I am definitely going to have a good time examining this book in close detail because it combines all the best things I have come to love in lunatic screeds predicting the end of the world, but before I begin, I have to say that books like this make me long for the days of ‘zines. Really, this book is a long form ‘zine, or maybe a very long newsletter. This book should have been written on an electric typewriter, single spaced, no margins, hand-written corrections in the margin and mailed to everyone who signed up for it. This book took me back to those days long past, wherein the only way one could get a hold of a strangely-spelled, interestingly-reasoned screed was to wait impatiently by the mail box.

If you are of the right mind, this book will amuse you to no end. Because when you pick up a book that is ostensibly discussing the diseases that could mark the end of the world, and the disease “Guillain Barre” is spelled “Guillane Barre” on the cover and in the table of contents you find a chapter called, “The Terrible Toll of NRSA,” you know you are in for one hell of a time.

There are moments of complete coherence wherein you think, “Hey, Dr. Coleman may be on to something, though he seems like he may be overstating it.” Then there are moments of utter lunacy wherein you think, “What sort of doctor is this guy anyway?” I still have not been able to determine what his doctorate is in, or if he is an MD, but the little bit of research I did showed me that Dr. John Coleman is a man who should have already been on my radar because he is a conspiracy theory Renaissance Man. Sometimes I am disappointed in myself but I comfort myself with the knowledge that my new Kindle and I will rectify my Coleman deficiency as soon as possible.

So, in just the cover and the table of contents, I already know this book’s content is going to be a bit iffy and my suspicions are played out in the text. This book is ostensibly a treatise on the diseases that could potentially end mankind as we know it, and it takes all kinds of very interesting turns while offering some information that turned out to be more or less factually correct when I looked into it and some that is simply the stuff of conspiratorial dreams (and that is a statement anyone should take advisedly because though I am deeply interested in illness as a topic, I am a liberal arts sort of gal, not a scientist).

It’s hard to buy into the alarmist nature of the book but all conspiracies are alarmist and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I knew I was in for a ride when I read this (and from here on out, just know I am not going to enter the traditional [sic] when there is a grammar, spelling or structural problem in Dr. Coleman’s text because it would become tiresome):

The cardinal sin being committed against God and man by the spiritually wicked men in high places is the destruction of mankind through so-called “natural means.”

Okay, so I now know Dr. John Coleman is going to look at this via a Christian filter of the Apocalypse, which is just fine with me because as an atheist I don’t have any dog in that fight but it also means I will be able to dismiss some of what he considers proof. We also know that we might venture into the idea that some of these diseases threatening us are not natural in origin. Hoo boy, I am very excited now. You should be, too.

Despite the fact that I know that very excellent conspiracy awaits me, I have to say the hands-down best parts of this book are all the left turns that come out of nowhere. The sort of shifts in content that make you shake your head and wonder if you missed a page or something, and realize no, it’s not you. The quote I give above is at the top of page 2. Dr. Coleman then spends three paragraphs discussing disease and how it is that the death toll of disease far outweighs casualties of war plus some fear of Socialist government, which was sort of a “What?” but still mildly topical in context, then :RECORD SCRATCH:

This book is not about politics per se, so I will confine my remarks to posing the question that so badly needs to be asked: What in God’s name are our soldiers doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?

No matter how tragic the Columbine School and the Virginia Tech massacres of April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, they cannot be viewed as anything other than sad and terrible occurrences. What is so savage about it all is that the victims were not allowed by law, to defend themselves.

Okay, so we now know this is going to be a roller coaster of weirdness. We now have a pretty good window into Dr. Coleman’s mind: the government is going to kill us with disease, governmental action that Dr. Coleman does not like will be called Socialist and he is pro-gun to the extent that he thinks high school freshmen should carry them to school. And if it sounds like I am mocking Dr. Coleman, maybe I am a little, but mostly I have mild affection for people with mindsets complete different than mine because without them this website would be basically a shill for Eraserhead Press. And, it has to be said, I have been known to harbor one or two wacky ideas myself…

Of particular interest to me was Dr. Coleman’s take on the Clinton presidency refusing to destroy all of the smallpox samples housed with the CDC:

In 1996 the World Health Organization demanded that all existing stocks of smallpox viruses be destroyed. At first the United States was vociferous in its demands, that all nations possessing stocks of the virus join the U.S. in destroying such stocks. All of a sudden, having gotten a taste of what it is like to be mass killers in Serbia and Iraq, the governments of Britain and the United States did a 180 degree turn. “We are not going to carry out our previous decision” (to destroy the smallpox hoard), said Clinton “just in case the U.S. may need them in the future.” This startling announcement came on April 22, 1999. Mark the date well. Future historians will trace the start of the coming apocalypse to this date.

Having read enough Richard Preston to ensure I lost sleep, I have a different take on the U.S. refusal to destroy their smallpox stocks. You see, disease is a form of mutually assured destruction and nations talk a big game about getting rid of disease stocks and nukes but such stores are preventative measure to keep other countries from using disease as a form of warfare because they know we could just return the favor. Moreover, in the event a country launches a dirty bomb against us and we don’t have samples of the disease to make a vaccine, we are sitting ducks. Unpleasant, but true. Stocks of nukes and stocks of disease make for better diplomacy in a world wherein seats of political power are occupied by egoists and madmen. Interestingly, before declaring Clinton the worst sort of bastard for reneging on the U.S. promise to destroy smallpox stocks, Coleman, who has already shown little use for dictatorships and Socialism in general, declares:

When apprised of Clinton’s decision not to destroy our stash of deadly smallpox viruses, Mikhail Shurgalis, Russia’s spokesman on the treaty, denied his country has any stocks of smallpox. Iran and China also deny holding any Biological Warfare stocks.

Okay, I don’t think Dr. Coleman is twisting facts and ideas to suit his particular hobbyhorse. I think riding his hobbyhorse gives him a strange myopia. Does he really trust Iraq, Russia or China’s word on whether or not they destroyed their smallpox stores? And say Clinton had believed them and sometime in our lifetime we found out those nations in fact had their smallpox stores and we had destroyed our disease deterrent as well as the means to make a vaccine? Policy in such matters is cloak and dagger to be sure but not nearly as straightforward as Dr. Coleman seems to think. “Oh, China and Russia say they no longer have smallpox viruses? That’s good enough for us. Those countries have never given us cause to doubt them before,” seems to be the reasoning where disease stockpiles are concerned. Would such a naive approach work in nuclear disarmament? Probably not.

The overall structure of Dr. Coleman’s book makes some level of sense and as a rule, I can see where he is coming from as this sort of conspiracy is nothing new – the government wants us sick and covers it up, the government accidentally makes us sick and covers it up. Many people exhibit this manner of thinking, notably Jenny McCarthy, and it was therefore not that surprising to see it in action here.

Autism in children may be the result of vaccinations. British doctor, Stephen Walker, was the first to discover a possible link between child vaccinations and autism on June 3, 2006. This has led to speculation among medical researchers that there must be a common factor somewhere, but discovery of what that factor is, remains beyond reach. Are we being used as human guinea pigs?

Well, we might be, but not via vaccinations. Stephen Walker has come out and admitted he cannot prove a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and as of right now there is not a single link between vaccinations and autism.

But Dr. Coleman is all too willing to go that extra step in the course of his paranoia despite the fact that one of his own sources has backed down from his initial findings:

We know now vaccines injected into children weaken their immune system and leave them vulnerable to other diseases. Could it be that the grand design is to make children vulnerable to infectious plagues, which will then sweep millions of people to their deaths in far greater numbers than the Black Plague of the 14th Century? After all, didn’t Bertrand Russell say that there had to be a return of the Black Plague. Vaccinations have become the chic way of allegedly warding off terrible diseases, but what we are learning through research into such illnesses as chronic fatigue syndrome is that the more prevalent the inoculations programs are, the more there is a growing incidence of strange and exotic diseases, which hitherto, were unknown or only occurred in limited numbers.

It’s actually extremely questionable that vaccines weaken a child’s immune system when the end result is that children with these vaccinations do not develop mumps, measles, German measles, whooping cough and all the myriad childhood diseases that made children die left and right. And if you don’t get Dr. Coleman’s riff about Bertrand Russell and why his musings on the Black Plague are de facto evidence of anything sinister in the government to sicken people, it’s discussed in the book and evidently in some of his other books and I will touch on it more in a bit. But yeah, it’s conspiri-tastic. And bless Dr. Coleman for associating vaccines with the word “chic.” When I get my next flu shot I better get a Chanel bandaid. I also dispute the idea that CFS is new or burgeoning as it is a disease that most commonly afflicts women and the annals of medical history are crammed with depictions of sickly, easily tired, wasting, neurasthenic women. CFS has been around for a long time but like most auto-immune illnesses, there is still very little known about it.

But don’t get me wrong. I love conspiracy theory but I have no issue discussing where it falls short and can be dangerous. Hell, the conspiracy about vaccines has led some to believe that Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine advocacy has a body count. So while I am largely amused by Dr. Coleman and quite interested in reading more of his books, the fact is, he sort of doesn’t mind mixing it up in a way that makes it hard to swallow even the passages where he gets things right. The government is at fault, Bertrand Russell is somehow behind it, and that’s all well and good because heaven knows Russell could stand to be taken down a peg or two posthumously. But given all the conspiratorial bends this book takes, the following was… shocking… and upsetting to a liberal gal like me:

The incidence of all strains of hepatitis, A-G, is very heavy in Central and Latin America and India, and immigrants from these areas are not screened when they are arrive in the U.S., so that there is a vast pool of infection — a veritable reservoir of hepatitis in our midst. In California the situation has become so serious as to border on panic as more and more people are discovering that they are infected with hepatitis C. Yet, in spite of the terrible dander, concerned citizens who demand medical screening for immigrants are called “racists.”

Terrible dander, eh? One would think a panic about an infectious disease that reduces lifespan would be more than a dander but maybe I shouldn’t nitpick that. Instead let me nitpick facts. In the United States, the vast majority of people who currently have Hepatitis C contracted the disease before blood was tested for the diseases as a matter of course in refined tests to find the disease, which was developed in 1990. Since accurate screening began, the number of people who contract Hepatitis C has fallen dramatically. In the current climate, the top causes for Hepatitis C transmission are via risky sexual and drug usage behaviors. Because Hepatitis C is blood-borne, there is some risk from food-handlers, and to be blunt, no one really knows all the potential methods of transmission but blood seems to be the most reasonable risk.

But as a whole, it is, in fact, racist to say that people from Central and Latin America and India who have Hepatitis C are more likely to become drug abusers and engage in unprotected sex, and statements like this one, a statement Dr. Coleman makes several times in the book, is a rallying cry for people who desperately need to cling to something to prove motive behind their race hate. Moreover, most people well-versed in epidemiology will tell you that we have far more to fear simply from legal travel. A disease like Hepatitis C is small beans compared to the capacity for a super-flu to spread and cause a pandemic because of the ease of rapid air travel. Immigrants with Hepatitis C are the least of our troubles.

But the weird statements don’t stop there, and it would be disappointing if they did:

In a sense, HVC [Hepatitis C] is worse than HIV because there is no indication at the onset of the disease that one is really ill.

Well, actually, there isn’t a whole lot at the beginning of HIV contraction that lets you know you’ve contracted the disease. Obviousness of infection and delay of symptoms are actually a common trait of both conditions.

Then there are the delightful statements, like this one:

It is more desperately urgent, that we defend our liver!

Ignoring the implication that we are all sharing a single liver, I shouted a comma-less variant of this exhortation the day I stopped drinking.

Now here is why Dr. Coleman is such an excellent conspirator: He lays out interesting information that may or may not link together ideas but never really follows through, which is one of the hallmarks of excellent conspiracy:

A horrific outbreak of the Black Plague occurred in 1348, dislocating the wage and price structure producing major economic and political conditions and social crisis, and carrying away millions of people. We are presently living in the middle of economic and political conditions closely paralleling those of 1338, which fit in with the predictions of Ziegler who said a great plague would come by the year 2020. This also confirms the expectations of Hecker who said that each succeeding plague would be more virulent that the last. In 1347, famine in parts of Europe, notably in what is now Italy, helped the spread of the Black Plague. Compare this with Africa today, where millions are dying from starvation and AIDS.

Actually, Dr. Coleman rides off the rails with the AIDS comparison because despite the sheer horror of AIDS, the fact remains that it does not kill with the rapidity of yersinia pestis. A person with AIDS can live a very long time and the way the disease is spread is more selective so while it is a pandemic in parts of Africa, it is not even in the same class of rapid-death disease spread we are discussing when we talk about Black Plague. But this is a tantalizing passage because Dr. Coleman is not talking about Nostradamus-styled predictions. Phillip Ziegler is an excellent source for information about the history of the Black Death and it would have been nice if Dr. Coleman had told us how the economic and political conditions today closely parallel those of 1338 because having read Ziegler (admittedly many years ago), I don’t see the correlations. The Hecker he is referring to is J.H. Hecker and I know nothing of his work so I don’t know if Hecker is a good source, but this could have been such an interesting section if Dr. Coleman had laid out for us how we are looking at a political climate and social climate that could result in a plague. I think such conditions are here. I’ve read enough writers like Laurie Garrett to know that things could become quite dire quite quickly if conditions were right. I just want Dr. Coleman to better explain his alarmist utterings.

And I gotta tell you, his section on MRSA, though he calls it “NRSA” in his table of contents, was damn informative. I have family in the medical community who have echoed that MRSA is a nightmare, that once a hospital has a MRSA contamination, getting rid of it is dicey, that unions prevent some hospitals from removing from service nurses who test positive as being carriers for MRSA via the nose tests, and that in many cases, surgery is a crap-shoot (and if you ever read much about prion diseases, you will fear surgery for the rest of your life, believe me). I had to have a steel plate put in my ankle two years ago and I recall the weird things people told me to do after surgery. One nurse told me that after surgery that I needed to go home and run the hottest water I could stand over my incision, no matter what the doctors said. I didn’t because it would have hurt like 20 bastards in a bastard boat but I always wondered if she told me this because she felt this was a deterrent to MRSA. The parts about MRSA are as jumbled and use as interesting grammar as the rest of the book but here Dr. Coleman was on point and his paranoia, while perhaps overblown and strangely stated, was not out of bounds when healthy teenagers are picking the infection up in locker rooms and dying from it.

And then there are other sections where he starts off strong, with cogent, well-thought out points, but then he just veers off course, falls down the mountain and crashes in the valley below. In an excellent paragraph explaining what he failed to explain in the passage about the Black Plague, Dr. Coleman explains in detail how poverty, overcrowding, and crappy government in Brazil have led to a perfect storm for AIDS that could lead to a complete pandemic. Then he follows that with this:

The monsters in the Club of Rome and those running the Global 2000 mass extermination program are well pleased with their work. Barring a change of plan – - which appears totally unlikely – - billions of people will die of AIDS this decade. If Lord Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells were alive today, they would look upon AIDS as a providential gift, a dream come true.

Dr. Coleman explains earlier in the book what the Club of Rome is and why Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells are among history’s greatest monsters (they evidently are a part of a plot to kill off “useless eaters”) but I’m weary, the explanations are suitably lunatic and until I read his books on the topics themselves, I will not discuss them, but I wonder why, in the face of actual evidence of wrong-doing that causes problems in the here and now we have to ascribe these ills to the machinations of two dead Brits, one so priapic he barely had time to manage his sex life with decorum, let alone plot to destroy the world a century after his death.

Dr. Coleman’s information about AZT, the drug used to treat AIDS is another instance wherein Dr. Coleman may have been presenting excellent information but the fact that he thinks that Bertrand Russell was a part of a cabal to kill off the world makes it hard to know if AZT is the poison that Dr. Coleman says it is. That’s one of the few times conspiracy theory makes me unhappy – when conspiracy folk may have an excellent point but you can’t trust in it because of all the lunacy that accompanies it. A very basic Google proved that AZT is not in fact the miracle drug I had initially thought it to be. But it is… unsettling that many of the voices who bring us dissenting information are as untrustworthy in their own way as the the standard sources of news.

His take on flu viruses, especially H1N1, was timely but also unnecessarily alarmist:

According to a top scientist for the United Nations, who examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as the victims of HIV/AIDS, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission vectors that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon.

He goes on to cite “scientists,” who are evidently working for the UN, who say that H1N1 was a human-engineered disease, which doesn’t pass the basic skeptic sniff test. The H1N1 virus subtype has been identified for almost a century, both the avian and swine infections. I can only assume that the horror of it creating a Spanish flu-type pandemic (which was caused by the avian H1N1 virus) is one of the reasons people feared this disease so much and as I have begun to note, fear is the cause of most conspiracy. However, unless anyone can give me the mechanism by which they think this known disease was mutated to make it similar to Ebola, I call shenanigans. I can only assume that the reason anyone would link H1N1 to Ebola is because the former on occasion and the latter always cause a cytokine storm in the sufferer. But the cytokine storm was an element of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic so again, we’ve known for almost a century that cytokine storms can happen in flu and it would be hard to say that a flu that causes a cytokine storm is anything new.

The conspiracy continues, and this seems especially odd since Dr. Coleman understands in Brazil how poverty, overcrowding and bad government contribute to the spread of disease:

…I believe that Swine Flu will return with a vengeance once the creators of the virus have finished their new genetic model and it is once again released to run amuck throughout the world. Certainly there have been several major pandemics in the U.S. (poliomyelitis, Spanish Flu and Avian Bird all proven or suspected). With Swine Flu, there should have more than likely been well over a thousand fatalities. But what was the actual count? The only fatality was a child. Of course that has changed but why is it that so many more deaths occurred in Mexico than anywhere else. Other races, even other Hispanics, appear to contract a much milder form. Was this due to the lack of medical facilities and the state of the slums around Mexico City and other major cities? But if one looks at Rio de Janeiro and its infamous “favelez” slums –far worse than anything found in Mexico — the theory does not hold up.

Well, the epicenter of the Swine Flu outbreak occurred in Mexico City, not Rio. Had it started in Rio, would we wonder why people in Mexico City slums didn’t fall as fast or as often? No. Where a disease begins is hit the worst. North and South America had time to react and the disease spread simply didn’t occur the way some panicked epidemiologists suspected it would, exactly as what happened with recent outbreaks of SARS and Avian Flu. And as a whitey white white, I got H1N1 and have never been sicker so I am unsure where the idea that other races are less affected comes from – the people who died in the U.S. were not in slums nor were they uniformly of Mexican descent. My anecdata and the actual data simply do not bear out Dr. Coleman’s beliefs.

And it spirals down the rabbit hole from there, with incendiary insinuations that the WHO sat on information about the outbreak of Swine Flu in Mexico, the WHO may have started the outbreak and bizarre and completely unscientific assertions that it is impossible for “four different viruses from three different animals” to mutate into a single disease.

And that’s the worst part of this whole thing, the sour note at the end of this symphony of sickness: Dr. Coleman has interesting points that are made suspect or outright overshadowed by some of his more lunacy-laden beliefs. I haven’t read anything else by Dr. Coleman – maybe he has a line on information that will completely redefine how I think about Bertrand Russell – but there is enough truth in so much that is terrible in medical history that I really don’t need to know about the Club of Rome or a plan by H.G. Wells to believe terrible things have happened and have been covered up. The presence of such whackadoodlery taints the points that Dr. Coleman could drive to town and take to dinner. Hell, I consider myself a skeptic but still believe Edward Hooper’s research that indicates that AIDS is a zootrophic condition that jumped from simians to humans as a result of the development of an oral polio vaccine in Central Africa. That’s some hard core conspiracy right there but it doesn’t require a cabal of long dead elites – just the hubris of a few men who hid the bad things they did and a compliant and easily redirected medical community and press that would not and still refuses to look hard into the issue.

So, I can’t really recommend this book unless you, like me, like nothing more than out-there conspiracy and stories of disease. I think Dr. Coleman’s works, however, are going to appear here again soon, because I have had ill-will for H.G. Wells after discovering he was a plagiarist of the worst sort. I really want to believe Dr. Coleman that Wells was indeed a terrible, terrible man. But there are far better books that make the case for conspiracy and illness. Tackle one of those first before reading this. But I intend to start reading Dr. Coleman’s works apace. He seems a man who will offer a ton of insanity with a few ounces of clarity and frankly, a few ounces of clarity combined with the entertainment of good conspiracy are worth it for me.

Author: Alex Constantine (and yeah, I am submerged in his site right now, reading about Duncan and Blake – brb after I have fallen off the deep end entirely)

Type of Book: Rock and roll, conspiracy theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It posits unusual theories about the deaths of famous rock stars.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2000, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, by now, if you’ve spent any time reading here, you’ll know I am highly skeptical of much conspiracy theory despite the fact that I can’t ever read enough about it. Yet, even as a skeptic, I have a conspiratorial bent to me, depending on how much my belief is beggared. I think there was a covert CIA plot to kill JFK. The more and more I read about the death of RFK, the more uneasy I am about whether or not Sirhan Sirhan acted alone and if his current mental state is due to organic schizophrenia. So embracing such ideas means that a little part of me believes that elements of the American government could want specific celebrities dead. And while some of this book seemed unlikely to me, some of it that hit my belief-o-meter. I’ll need to read more and research more before I can completely buy into some of this content, but there was a lot of information in this book that had the ring of truth to it.

I was surprised at how much of this I knew before reading this book – I’ve clearly absorbed more conspiracy than I thought. Very little of it was new, yet I am surprised by my reactions at the parts that were new to me. I mean, I always suspected there was much more behind the deaths of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh than just cancer and a gun shot, respectively. I mean, when the CIA decides to destabilize an entire country, it isn’t too much to believe that they would also take steps to assassinate reggae musicians who, through their charisma and music, were overt leaders against American political control. Did Bob Marley really get cancer via a copper wire put in boots given to him by the son of a head of the CIA? I tend to think maybe not, but then again, I also live in a world where dissidents get killed via ricin in an umbrella gun.

But the part of this book that was the most new to me was the section about Tupac Shakur. I recall clearly when he died but I thought little of it. He had seemed like a gangsta to me and gangstas sometimes get shot. I didn’t (and mostly still don’t) listen to rap and knew little about the man, to be honest, but the media portrayal of him painted a picture that substituted itself for real information about the man and his death. Constantine’s research into Shakur’s death revealed a completely different picture of Shakur for me, and pointed to very sound reasons why there might have been a conspiracy to kill him. That Shakur was the heir apparent to an activist family, one of whom escaped from prison and defected to Cuba, the way the shooting occurred, the seeming lack of police attempts to solve the murder, all make it seem as if there were some sort of conspiracy to kill Tupac and obfuscate the investigation.

Aside from the belief that Mama Cass Elliot may have been the victim of government-sponsored assassination, there was not a single case in this book that I could say, “Pants!” to (Cass Elliot died of an undetected heart defect, nothing more, nothing less). Whether or not you think the government killed John Lennon, Phil Ochs, Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison, Constantine raises interesting questions about time lines, government interest in these performers and details that were blurry then and blurrier now. (Actually, I did invoke underpants when I read Constantine refer to Donald Bains’ The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones. I found the book so lacking in anything approaching proof that I didn’t even want to keep the book once I discussed it here. Candy Jones was a victim of her own sad mind and the utter incredulity of Long John Nebel, not the MK-Ultra program or the CIA or anything else.)

Of all these deaths presented in this book, it was Michael Hutchence’s that affected me the most. Born in 1970, neatly sandwiched between the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, I was too young to be as interested when most of the stars in this book died, or, in some cases, I was not alive yet. But INXS was a band I adored as an adolescent and young adult. I recall seeing INXS perform on their tour for Listen Like Thieves. Terrence Trent D’Arby opened and despite being in nosebleed seats, my friends and I danced and danced, thrilled to be there. Shabooh Shoobah and The Swing are two of my favorite pop albums ever. His death just seemed so unlikely – death by auto-erotic asphyxiation? Really? The information Constantine presents about elements of Hutchence’s death, important details that never made the public airways, genuinely make me wonder about Hutchence’s demise.

All in all, this was an interesting book. It took itself seriously and as a result, I took it seriously. Constantine certainly knows his conspiracy, and he can write a tight sentence. I think the chapter on Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls is worth the price of admission, and the chapter on Marley and Tosh was a welcome double feature. I don’t buy all of the content in this book but it raises a lot of questions, which, when you are dealing with content of this sort, is often the best anyone can ask for. I mean, I still think Mark David Chapman acted alone, but just because he beat the government to John Lennon, that doesn’t mean the government did not want him dead. This the oddbooks corollary to “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

(However, aside from Mama Cass and Candy Jones, this book did strike a major discordant note with me. Maybe rock conspirators can help me out. Constantine asserts that Joan Baez claims she is a survivor of ritual abuse via the Monarch Project. However, the sources he uses combined with his specific verbiage do not support that Baez ever said she was a victim of ritual abuse. Though he says Joan makes this claim, his actual sources never verify anything except she is a vocal opponent of torture and that she has been in intensive therapy. So I fired up the ol’ Internet to see what I could find out.

After several hours spent online reading lots of assertions that Baez survived the Monarch Project (and cringing as the sites pinged my anti-virus software), all I could find were people saying that because her father worked for Cornell, the supposed site of many government mind control experiments in Ithaca, and because she wrote a song called “Play Me Backwards,” which has lyrics that can be interpreted as the words of an abuse survivor, Baez was a victim of mind control. I could not find a single source with a direct quote from Baez indicating she was a victim of the Monarch Project. Those sites that claim she says such a thing use her song lyrics as a de facto admission on her part, which in my mind is hardly the same thing.

More troubling is that the longer I read, the more familiar the phraseology the sites used became. In fact, I began to think there was a single source that asserted Baez was a victim of the Monarch Project, likely based on the fact that she once lived in Ithaca and wrote a disturbing song, and endless others cited that first source. See for yourself what I mean. Google “joan baez ritual abuse.” Soon the phrase self-described victim of ritual child abuse will become very familiar, as all the sources for this information seem to be revisiting one original source that I cannot run to ground. If the belief that Baez was a victim of such abuse is stated outright by Baez somewhere and I missed it, I would love it if someone would direct me to the source. That she has been through intense therapy and speaks out against torture is not enough proof in my books. Interpretation of song lyrics is not enough proof either. Baez has worn her beliefs and attitudes openly for years, speaking out about injustices. If she was a victim of the Monarch Project, I would expect there to be a direct quote from her saying so, not innuendo about song lyrics. So if it is out there and I densely overlooked it, please direct me to it. Leave a comment here, or e-mail me. Some of you send me some pretty interesting e-mails so if anyone knows the answer, I think one of my readers might.)

Author: Adam Gorightly

Type of book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, occult symbology, Masonry

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s about James Shelby Downard’s whacked out and at times strangely on the nose beliefs and how they relate to the mass of conspiracy theory as a whole.

Availability: Published by Virtualbookworm.com in 2008, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Having read Carnivals of Life and Death by James Shelby Downard (I reviewed it here), I wanted to know more about the man, whether or not he was a real human being, and specifically what Gorightly had to say about him. I really like Gorightly’s biography of Kerry Thornley, which I also discussed on this site. I also have a soft spot for Discordians, it must be said, so I am kindly disposed towards Gorightly in general. But I was not as impressed by this book as much as I was by Gorightly’s earlier effort. There was a scattered quality to this book, with a ton of information thrown at the reader in very short order. If you are unfamiliar with Downard or with vast swathes of conspiracy theory in general, you will spend a lot of time Googling when you read this book.

It was quite nice to see that some of my own research and my own suspicions may have some validity to them (because it is impossible not to start feeling some paranoia when you read content like this and it can become hard to determine if you are suddenly seeing odd shadows where there are none). In my review of Carnivals of Life and Death I posited that Downard likely did not exist and may have been a group hoax created by Adam Parfrey, Michael Hoffman and William Grimstad, and Gorightly addresses that idea without confirming or denying it. I find that interesting but don’t see it as anything anyone should find upsetting if Downard is indeed a hoax. Art (or artifice, as it were) is the lie that tells the truth, sometimes. And even though I felt at times that Golightly veered off into his own riffs, I found this book mostly interesting, though the discussions were shallow and yet covered a shocking amount of ground. This is a short book, only 93 pages long, 10 of which are two separate introductions and another three are the index and appendices.

Chapters 1-5 discuss some of the topics Downard covers in Carnivals of Life and Death, as well as the article Downard wrote about the JFK assassination called “King Kill 33.” His unbelievable stories of being a Masonic scapegoat, combined with his supposed sex slave wife and similar mental maunderings are better read in his book, but Gorightly’s discussions are amusing enough. I particularly enjoyed chapter five, which dealt with mystical toponomy. There is an intoxicating “holy crap” element to Downard’s discussions about the 33rd latitude – there is something completely insane yet undeniably obvious about all of it.

It’s around chapter six and onward that things just let loose, applying various branches of conspiracy theory to Downard, mainly via mystical toponomy and mind control. A whole bunch of names who are more or less entire books in their own right get tossed out there in just chapter six alone, from Aleister Crowley to Richard Oppenheimer to Jack Parsons and how they all relate back to the 33rd latitude. From there we expand into Robert Temple’s Sirius theory and UFO-lore, including the Order of the Solar Temple cult suicides, then move on to the assassination of Robert Kennedy, “The Revelation of the Method,” insane journeys with Downard in his silver stream trailer, the connections between Jim Keith’s death at Burning Man and the movie The Wicker Man and the Son of Sam murders… and it was about here that I found myself a little overwhelmed. There is a ton of information crammed into this little book, almost too much.

Seriously, from chapter six on it is like a who’s who of whacked culture and fucked history. David Berkowitz, Terrence McKenna, the Unibomber, Jim Keith, the Carr family, Henry Lee Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, Bill Cooper, Prescott Bush, my hometown hero Alex Jones and so many, many more. This little book could make you go blind from the sheer audacity of its scope. I am unsure if this is a complaint or praise. You tell me…

Because stuff like this matters to me, I will add that the editing at times annoyed me. I suspect that most people who read this sort of stuff don’t care but the editing got very sketchy half-way in. Pepsi Cola did not have an ad that wanted to teach the world to sing. The use of dashes was bizarre. The book incorporated British-style and American-style use of conversational punctuation with no real rhyme or reason. If you’re gonna present a boatload of information in a short amount of space, it helps when the editing and more basic elements of fact checking are on the nose. In some places the editing outright grated.

And so did some of the theories and assertions. I mean, one cannot really disprove that the planet Sirius brought civilization to Earth (well, maybe you can) but you can definitely prove that Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole did not commit several hundred cannibalistic murders. The only reason Henry Lee Lucas is linked to Jim Jones is because he confessed to killing everyone at Jonestown himself, but I think he claimed he shot and stabbed them instead of delivering cups of cyanide-laced fruit drink. Lucas was a semi-literate, probably mentally-challenged grifter who could be coerced into admitting anything. Indicating there was anything sinister in Bush the Lesser commuting his death sentence, linking him to the MK-ULTRA program and the Matamoros drug cult is wacky and sort of dumb. But then again, I also tend to think Gorightly has more than a little trickster in him. I suspect sometimes he just throws things out there to see what will stick, who will believe and who will not. But that’s just a guess because of the whole, you know, Discordian thing.

So, this is a reserved recommendation. If you’re new to the game, you may wanna read up on various insanities before reading this book because it is just an overview of madness and how it related to the theories of James Shelby Downard, and if you have not read Downard, definitely read Carnivals of Life and Death before you read this book. This book was loony though maddening at times, but because I kind of like Gorightly and because I was never bored reading it, I fall more on the end of recommending it than not. But heed my warnings, gentle readers – this book is a one-inch dip in the ocean of conspiracy and as a result may be more taxing than entertaining.