By Ute Scheub*
IDN-InDepth NewsViewpoint
BERLIN (IDN) – It’s not just the abysmal hate of Muslims. He abhors “multiculturalism, and suffers from misogyny, which is characteristic of the genre of radical ideologues of his sort: All that and more runs like a red thread through his so-called “manifesto”.
The assassin from Oslo embodies a shocking mixture of rationality and absurdity, a diabolic logic with which he calculated ice cold the media impact of abhorrent killings.
Anders Behring Breivik’s Islam hostility derives from nationalist-populist and fundamentalist Christian sources. His objective is to preserve an endangered hierarchical order in which men rank above women, whites above non-whites and Christians above Muslims. Page by page, Breivik in his “manifesto” borrows passages from his ideological role model, the blogger “Fjordman”, who crusades against “totalitarian feminists” intent upon achieving gender equality and “gender mainstreaming” thus targeting the elimination of male identity. Divorce, abortion, pills, homosexuals – these are all an anathema to Breivik.
He wants a patriarchal system and traditional family structures reinstated in the interest of triggering a “baby boom”. Women must be prohibited from achieving more than a bachelor’s degree. Typical of a scurrilous thinking, he proposes the establishment of Sex Special Zones, which are “insulated from the outside world”.
MARX, LADY GAGA, MEN’S HEALTH
The “cultural Marxism” of the Frankfurt School, says Breivik, had paved the way for multiculturalism and the “totalitarian” radical feminism. Marx was keen to destroy the bourgeois family and build a “community of women”. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and the like wanted to set up a matriarchal society. As a result, the “feminization of European culture” is now “almost complete”.
Also, “the last bastion of male dominance, the police and the military,” are threatened. As if that did not suffice, men’s magazines such as Men’s Health have promulgated a “feminized man,” and women like Heidi Klum, Madonna and Lady Gaga personify “racial mix” and loose morals of the worst kind.
He tabulates the European countries on the basis of their “sexual morality”, as measured by the promiscuity of young women. Norway is at the bottom in terms of morality; Malta (that old home of the Knights Templar) tops. He is obsessed with the topic of sexually transmitted diseases. Presumably, his stepfather, who had 700 sexual contacts, had infected his mother with genital herpes, which had apparently caused her brain inflammation.
Also his stepsister was suffering from venereal disease: “My sister and my mother not only made me and our family feel ashamed, but they also felt themselves ashamed,” he writes, adding that “as a peripheral effect of feminist sexual revolution” his entire family had broken apart. And, the culprits were as always women. Who else?
PANIC OF LOSING CONTROL
Breivik’s pamphlet reflects extreme fear of losing command over the course of things. He sees sexuality, effeminacy, and dissolution of male identity as a consequence of “feminization”. This is again, despite all differences in detail, the crux of all dictatorial or totalitarian ideologies be they Nazis (national socialists), radical Islamists or their opponents, the conservative enemies of Islam.
In his standard work “male fantasies”, Klaus Theweleit examined the pathological fear of “physical amalgamation” that haunted the right-wing Free-Corps fighters and Nazis at the beginning of the 20th century: They were afraid of “gun women”. That’s what today’s “feminists” are to Breivik. The Nazis made the “effeminate” Jews for the decline of its military-taut masculine role model responsible; for the Norwegian, it is the Muslims and the feminists.
MOHAMMED ATTA’S MIRROR IMAGE
Behind it all lies perhaps a form of sexual jealousy. Several places in Breivik’s manifesto reflect his profound admiration for those Muslims who defend their “honour” at any price. “Honour,” he writes, “is most important.”
The assassin form Oslo portrays himself both in words and pictures as an austere monk and comes rather close to his Islamist counterpart, Mohammed Atta, who also fuelled by extreme fear of women propagated even a genocidal “cult of purity”. Like Atta, and that’s another similarity, Breivik perceives himself as “martyr” for a common cause.
Given the high level of equality between sexes, among diverse sections of the society and ethnicities, Breivik is shedding tears over a role model of masculinity, which developed historically in Europe within the emerging nation-states and their military hierarchies.
Military drill is purported to take total control of the body and the complete suppression of empathy, without which a soldier cannot do the “work” of killing. Feelings are “feminine”, and therefore stand for weakness and cowardice, and must therefore be suppressed. That is the pattern almost all the armies and authoritarian ideologies of the world pursue. So does the “control freak” Breivik.
But why has Norway of all the countries in Europe produced such a “crusader”? Norway has not triggered a war since the Viking Age spanning the late 8th to 11th centuries. In fact the Scandinavian gender equality policies are normally regarded as the best remedy against machismo and ‘Heldenkriegertum’ (heroism of warriors). But apparently they do not necessarily guard against individual pathologies.
Norway’s relatively egalitarian society appears to have isolated Breivik – caught in the grip of violence and domination fantasies – so much that he chose to be a lonesome assassin.
*Ute Scheub has a doctorate in political science and works as a freelancer journalist and author in Germany. Her last book was “The Twilight of Heroes – The Crisis of Men and Why It is Also Dangerous for Women”. A version of this article in German appeared in the German newspaper ‘taz‘ on August 4, 2011. (IDN-InDepthNews/11.08.2011)