Resisting the Temptation to Blame the Police

Of course the Norwegian police did some things wrong on Friday, and of course there are crucial lessons that could be taken from Friday's atrocity. Making sure police commando boats actually work would be one such lesson. But the desire to blame the police seems to be to miss the point of what actually happened last Friday and who is actually to blame.

Breivik may be insane (surely the most accurate description of his motivations to date, and from his own lawyer to boot) but that doesn't make him stupid. And he knew exactly what he was doing. The general feeling seems to be that this attack was planned over several years, and during those years what Breivik set up was a massive distraction designed to get the attention away from his real target - the youth camp on Utoeya. He knew - just as almost every now knows, in retrospect - that if you plant a massive bomb in the heart of a country's government district then what will tend to happen when that bomb goes off is that the police, and the other rescue services, will rush to both investigate and carry out search and rescue operations in the area affected by that bomb.

Which is precisely what this evil man wanted. The rescue services were distracted, giving him more time. That distraction allowed him to turn up in his police uniform on the island, apparently a figure representing what was at the time a very welcome form of security. Which then allowed him to start his murderous operation on Utoeya. And the very fact that the youth camp was on an island made him even more effective in his rampage - his victims had the option to hide and potentially die, swim away from the island and potentially die, or just plain die. The island location also made it immediately more difficult for the police to reach him and to save his potential victims. Yeah, a boat didn't work and a helicopter crew were on holiday. But take any relatively remote island in this country and ask yourself if something similar happened on that island how quickly the armed response units could reach that island.

I dare say the next time a bomb goes off in the Western world, the word will go out to all vulnerable areas and meetings (such as a youth camp of the party leading the government) that they should only let those with identification or who are already known gain access to those areas/meetings. And if this lesson is understood and actioned, then there can be no doubt that it was a lesson learned in possibly the most horrific circumstances possible. But the truth - the dark, malign truth that many people would do anything to avoid - is that this sort of thing cannot be stopped. Especially when the perpetrator is willing to use and abuse the uniform of a police officer to complete his murderous agenda.

Yeah, the police could have done things differently last Friday - I have no doubt that this will be the general conclusion. But the very fact that their attention was deliberately distracted by a madman from Utoeya by a bloody great bomb in Oslo should be acknowledged. After all, only one man truly knew that the carnage in Oslo was only the start, and that the eight people murdered there was only a distraction from a much wider atrocity about to start on an idyllic looking island elsewhere in Norway.

Conspiracy Theory Loons

Whenever we are faced with a mix of tragedy and terror, two things tend to happen. Firstly, the government of the nation concerned flexes its muscles and - by intention or otherwise - suppresses freedom in an attempt to make the land safer. Secondly, the conspiracy theorists flex their limited intellectual muscles, and see the atrocity as part of a wider government led conspiracy to control the citizens. To date, the former hasn't happened in Norway. But in relation to the events of Friday, the latter certainly has - as some of the comments on this Orphans of Liberty post so ably demonstrates.

See, it isn't enough that a man might have gone a bit mental and killed loads of people. No, that isn't ghastly and terrible enough. Instead, we need the spurious and completely farcical notion that the governments of the nations concerned have run lethal operations in order to inflict draconian policies on their people. So the conspiracy nuts won't see Breivik as working alone or with one of two accomplices in the manner of Timothy McVeigh. No, he's a cipher - part of a "false flag" operation run by the government and/or its associates.

Of course, this is utter horseshit with no real grasp of reality. I mean, most governments are incapable of lacing their own fucking shoes without a government leak and the accurate accusation of incompetence. Look at the Watergate scandal - a genuine attempt by a government to create a conspiracy around a pointless fucking burglary. And the conspiracy unravelled within months despite all the power of the imperial presidency leading Nixon - who had just won one of the most stupendous electoral victories in US history - to resign. If a government runs a conspiracy, it will probably be the worst conspiracy in the world.

Yet this sort of analysis is not good enough for a conspiracy theorist. And so JFK was murdered on the orders of LBJ, just as the US government destroyed the Twin Towers with help from a Jewish Cabal. The fact that no government would be capable of the sort of secrecy involved in this sort of conspiracy is irrelevant. Instead, the conspiracy loons see malign shadows that are, at best, tricks of the light for the terminally naive. They are adding 2 and 2 and getting not just 5, but 55.

But why does this matter? Why not let the loons babble their nonsense without passing comment on it? Well, the answer is twofold. When so-called friends of liberty start spouting this shite, it reflects badly on us all. We cannot credibly point out the draconian knee-jerk reactions by government to terror attacks when so many of our numbers are unconvincingly accusing the government of having commissioned that atrocity in the first place. It obliterates what little credibility we have.

And then there's the creation of paranoia in the minds of the loons. For the most part, this is harmless. But the Norway killer seems to have believed in one of the increasingly popular conspiracy theory bollocks - that of cultural Marxism. And that may well have motivated his carnage. Of course, it is more than possible that the motivator for the killing spree is irrelevant since Breivik would have found an excuse for his killing anyway. But the more people believe in this non-existent underworld of absolutely non-existent conspirators, the more they lose connection with reality and with that the ability to respond to reason. Everything feeds their paranoid theories; nothing can be disprove those theories. It makes trying to debate with them like trying to debate with a block of concrete - completely pointless.

As an advocate of free speech, of course, I don't want to suppress the loons, even if the bollocks they spout has all the connection with reality as an episode of the Teletubbies. But I will use my right to free speech to call them on the shite they vomit forth, and in the process hopefully elucidate an analysis of the threats to freedom that actually has a connection to the real world.

The Norway Attacks

The terrifying and tragic events in Norway are still being played out. I would be surprised if the death toll does not continue to rise, and if by the end of the rescue operations more than a hundred haven't lost their lives at the hands of what now looks like being one evil man*. As such, any comments made may well be contradicted by what happens in the near future. Nonetheless, I'd like to make some observations of the events that started to unfold less than 24 hours ago.

Like most, I suppose, when this first happened I thought that it would have been an attack (and then attacks) perpetrated by Islamic Fundamentalists. Indiscriminate mass slaughter has tended to be the watchword and the calling cardss of the Muslim militants. A couple of things nagged at me, though. Because while the terror attacks of Islamic Fundamentalists tend to be abritrary on the surface, certain key things do emerge as themes when you study them. Firstly, when al Qaeda and its myriad of off-shoots and tangentially linked jihadists attack the West in the West, they tend to attack ordinary people. As such, they tend to attack mass transport systems. They also tend to time their attacks for the morning rush hour - in part to kill as many as possible and in part to get their attacks at the top of the media cycle and therefore in the faces of the public for as long as possible. This was an attack later in the day against the PM, the government, and the ruling party in a coalition. So the fact that this appears to be the work of one right-wing, Christian fundamentalist is not a total surprise. This may be Norway's Oklahoma City bombing rather than their 9/11 - although I have no doubt that this distinction will offer scant comfort to the newly bereaved.

After any terror attack, there is that burning temptation to blame certain freedoms for allowing it to happen. Any such actions - especially since it tends to end up in legislation - needs to be left until a calmer time for Norway; for a time when the initial panic, rage, fear and deeply felt loss are all a little less raw both for individuals and the mass psyche. There will be a temptation to adopt something like the Patrior Act or 42 Days Detention in the aftermath of this slaughter for some in Norway; the country as a whole would do well do resist that temptation. Good legislation happens after debate and thought, not after the jerking of a knee.

Likewise, there is the temptation to stigmatise the (more often than not minority) groups who are associated with the crimes. Witness the rise of Islamaphobia in the West after 9/11 - a rise that missed the point that it was not Islam that committed that crime, but a small bunch of Islamic fundamentalists with a clear political as well as religious agenda. So again there may be a temptation in the aftermath of these attacks to stigmatise conservatives, Christians, individualists, libertarians. Any such stigmatisation is likely to misrepresent all four positions. Furthermore, and far more importantly, any such stigmatisation is like to increase the radicalisation of affected minorities, and make further attacks more, not less, likely.

Finally, it is easy for those watching this drama from afar to get caught up in the political ramifications and the hysteria around it. However, this is not just the political - this is personal as well. Because with nearly 100 people dead, there are hundreds of people now in mourning. Family and friends, spouses and lovers, brothers and sisters have all lost someone through the brutal attacks of yesterday in shocking circumstances. So as fingers points and people pontificate, let's try to remember the appalling personal tragedies that also occurred yesterday, and the heart-breaking grief that so many must now be feeling.

*Although whether it is logistically possible for one man to carry out such slaughter is still understandably being questioned by some.