Norway,
a northern European country that is a member of NATO, suffered a
horrible terrorist attack on July 22. Anders
Behring Breivik detonated a car bomb, left outside a government
building in the capital Oslo, killing eight people. He then went to
the island
of Utoya, where he brutally massacred 68 people attending a Labor
Party youth camp.
Mainstream
media coverage of this attack contained an abundant dose of the
racism that was the root cause of the tragedy. With no evidence
whatsoever, immediately after the news broke out, corporate media
outlets began pointing the finger at “Islamic extremists.” They
continued doing this even after emerging facts contradicted this
assumption. An example is an article in the London Telegraph written
after it
was revealed that the perpetrator was a white Christian Norwegian,
which stated: “al-Qaeda
has also been known to recruit local extremists and converts.”
The
racist
assignment of blame prompted a condemnation by the United Nations’
human rights office. On July 27, Heiner Bielefeldt, the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on religion and freedom of belief, stated: “The way in
which some public commentators immediately associated the horrifying
mass murder in Norway last Friday with Islamist terrorism is
revealing and indeed an embarrassing example of the powerful impact
of prejudices and their capacity to enshrine stereotypes.”
It
is not as if all such attacks in Europe have been carried out by
Islamic forces. Europe
has witnessed numerous bloody right-wing terror attacks. According to
Dr.
Robert Lambert, from the Center for the Study of Terrorism and
Political Violence at Scotland’s University of St Andrews:
“Contrary
to popular belief, most terrorist attacks in Europe are the work of
extremist nationalists.”
When
it appeared that Breivik was the lone perpetrator, the same media
outlets more commonly referred to him as a “madman” or a
“psychopath,” rather than a terrorist. The term “terrorist,”
it seems, is primarily reserved for Muslims. The capitalist class and
its media mouthpieces, the “free and independent media,” often
attribute social phenomena to individual characteristics. This serves
to exonerate the irrational capitalist system from its murderous
record of wars, poverty and environmental destruction.
We
often see this approach when imperialist wars are portrayed as the
inevitable result of the intransigence of “madmen” leaders of the
countries the imperialists are targeting. Even fascism, a particular
form of capitalist rule, is often portrayed not as what it really
was, a right-wing movement funded and organized by Italian and German
banking and industrial capitalists, but as the product of the
deranged minds of psychopaths Mussolini and Hitler.
Similarly,
more emphasis is given to Breivik’s mental health than to the
extreme right-wing political views that motivated his actions.
Breivik has a long history of right-wing activity. Until 2006, he was
a member of Norway’s right-wing “Progressive
Party.” He has written a 1,500-page manifesto explaining his
right-wing, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic ideology. An active blogger,
Breivik faulted Norway’s Labor Party, the left-wing pro-capitalist
party, for “multi-culturalism” and for allowing the
“Islamification” of Europe. He saw a “Marxist-Islamic alliance”
as a mortal threat to “European Christendom.”
If
the mainstream media attempt to detach Breivik from his ideology,
right-wing, bigoted forces around the world find much in Breivik’s
manifesto that they like. In fact, the manifesto indicates that he
was influenced by bigoted, right-wing racists in many countries,
including the United States. Three days after the shooting,
right-wing U.S. commentator Glenn Beck saved his harshest words for
the victims of the terror attack: “There
was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you
know, the Hitler youth.”
Right-wing,
racist movements and their ideology do not grow in a vacuum. They are
one of the ways in which the capitalist ruling class attempts to keep
people divided. While advertising itself as grassroots and
spontaneous, the Tea Party in the United States is an example of a
right-wing movement that has been funded directly and indirectly by
big capitalists such as the Koch brothers.
Only
under certain political circumstances have capitalist ruling classes
been in favor of the direct ascension of the fascists into political
power, and those were periods of extreme crises when the survival of
the system was in question. But extreme right-wing parties and
movements serve their class functions at other times as well.
Right-wing
movements are particularly useful to the ruling class during times of
capitalist economic crisis, high unemployment and declining living
standards. Fascistic ideologies provide a false explanation for the
root cause of the crisis. They promote racism and hatred towards
immigrants, people of color and oppressed countries to prevent the
formation of unity among the working class and the oppressed, the
victims of the capitalist system. Individuals like Breivik are
by-products of this right-wing ideology.
So
long as the capitalist class has political power, racism will thrive,
not spontaneously but promoted and supported by that class. The way
to combat racism is to struggle for working-class unity and
solidarity along the lines of actively fighting racism. An organized,
class-conscious working class will bring an end to the capitalist
system, along with its inevitable diseases, including racism.
