Don’t Look Now Bangstad, Sindre
World policy journal,
07/2018, Letnik:
35, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Bangstad discussed the reality of right-wing extremist in Norway, focusing on the killing of 69 people in Utoya, Norway by Norwegian right-wing extremist and white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik. ...He mentioned the film Uptya-July 22 by Erik Poppe which documented the terrorist attack and offered information on Breivik and his motivation for committing the crime. He noted that a number of survivors from the Utoya attack broke the political taboos and challenge Sylvi Listhaug 's incitement against them.
According to Anders Behring Breivik himself, his massacre of 77 innocent people on July 22, 2011 in Norway was motivated by ideology: Breivik sees himself as being morally justified to save Europe ...from multiculturalism and feminism. What makes a person join such an ideology? This paper argues that the demonization of Muslims and Eurabia fits into a psychologically threatened universe and a murderous lust for revenge. Against the background of different sources (the ideological "manifesto," forensic reports, psychiatric assessment of the mother-son relationship in Breivik's childhood, and interview material), the mass-murderer's attitudes are understood as expressing inner dynamic forces. Hypotheses about Breivik's personality and unconscious motivation are discussed using the concepts of splitting and personal myth and Oedipal catastrophe. The paper argues that the relationship between unconscious motives and ideology must be regarded as dialectical: the terrorist's actions are founded in a subjective war scenario, expressing personally motivated hatred and vindictiveness, being displaced and projected, and justified with reference to a war "out there." Thus, the terrorist seeks an ideology that fits unconscious intentions. The ideology, however, is indispensable to legitimate actions.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a Norwegian citizen, detonated a fertilizer bomb near government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, and then proceeded to a nearby island where the Labor Party ...was holding a youth camp. There, he killed 69 people before being arrested. Just before these events, he posted a "compendium" on the Web explaining his actions and encouraging others to do likewise. Much of the ensuing media coverage and trial focused on whether he was sane and whether he had a psychiatric diagnosis. One team of court-appointed psychiatrists found him to be psychotic with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and legally insane. A second team found him neither psychotic nor schizophrenic and, thus, legally sane. Their contrary opinions were not reconciled by observing his behavior in court. We discuss why experienced psychiatrists reached such fundamentally opposing diagnostic conclusions about a "home-grown" terrorist holding extreme political views.
This article discusses the Norwegian film The Pyromaniac (Erik Skjoldbjærg 2016) as an artistic attempt to come to terms with terrorism, and as a cinematic treatment of the Norwegian terror attacks ...of 22nd of July 2011. The film is discussed in relation with several written accounts on 22nd of July and focus is on the role of the individual, the family and the society when it comes to guilt and shame following incomprehensible events.
Eurabia Comes to Norway Bangstad, Sindre
Islam & Christian Muslim relations,
07/2013, Letnik:
24, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Andres Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 22/7/11 terrorist attacks in Norway, was profoundly inspired by what has become known as the Eurabia genre. Behring Breivik's 1516-page cut-and-paste ...tract, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, makes extensive reference to Eurabia authors, and most prominently to the blog essays of the Norwegian extreme right-wing blogger "Fjordman," also known as Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen. A popular transnational genre found in both film and literature, the Eurabia genre is central to understanding the worldviews of extreme right-wing "counter-jihadists." It is a conspiratorial genre in which a central rhetorical trope is that Europe is on the verge of being taken over by Muslims. It alleges that European Muslims want to establish continent-wide Islamic domination in the form of an Islamic state or a caliphate, using higher fertility rates and immigration as their main means of achieving this. The Eurabia genre has, however, hitherto received limited academic attention. In this article, I use the insights of critical discourse analysis in order to analyse some central contributions to this profoundly Islamophobic genre and its popularization and political mainstreaming in Norway in the past decade.
Anders Breivik's murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011 led to an unusual clash of interests. With conflicting psychiatric reports regarding his sanity, prosecutors argued that Breivik should be found ...not guilty by reason of insanity, whereas the defense strongly maintained that he was sane and responsible for his actions. Imposing an insanity defense on an unwilling defendant pits societal interests in fair adjudications against the right of defendants to control their defense. For crimes with political motivations, an imposed insanity verdict discredits the perpetrator and may distract the public from the threats posed by extreme political views.
In late July 2011, Norway was struck by the worst terror attacks in its history. In a fertilizer-bomb attack on Government Headquarters in Oslo and a one-hour-long shooting spree at the Labour Party ...Youth Camp at Utoya, seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, were killed by Anders Behring Breivik. By targeting young future social democratic leaders, his actions were meant to lead to the downfall of Europe's purportedly multiculturalist elites, thus removing an obstacle to his plans for an ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Europe. In Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia, leading Norwegian social anthropologist Sindre Bangstad reveals how Breivik's beliefs were the result not simply of a deranged mind but of the political mainstreaming of pernicious racist and Islamophobic discourses. These ideas, currently gaining common currency, threaten equal rights to dignity, citizenship and democratic participation for minorities throughout contemporary Europe. This is an authoritative account of the Norwegian terror attacks and the neo-racist discourse that motivated them.
In this article I explore the way in which popular perceptions of the Bible have become drawn into the ideology of the contemporary far right. By examining the far-right ideology that inspired Anders ...Behring Breivik's terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011, I demonstrate how the Bible goes from operating as a foundational corpus for 'Western culture', to being employed as a militant mouthpiece calling for violent defence of this culture. Analysing the simultaneous recourse and resistance to Enlightenment interpretations of the Bible in this far-right milieu allows for a better understanding of the connections between dominant discourses about the Bible and more marginal and extreme ideologies.
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