Pigeonholing Anders Breivik: What He Is And What He Isn't

In the rush to put a label on the terrorist Anders Breivik, the loudest voices have been those of the Left wing, who are determined to pin the Conservative label on every act of violence.

J.E. Dyer writes about Anders Breivik, post-modern Crusader specifically about the man whom the Left is so eager to paint as a Conservative.

Not only a Conservative, but a Christian Conservative.

A Christian?

Tellingly, there is not one reference in “2083” to the power of spiritual Christianity deriving from the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For spiritual Christians, that’s the bottom line. It’s what you say, what you talk about, your confession of faith. Breivik doesn’t allude to it at all. Again, it’s not his thing. He doesn’t think of Christianity as transforming hearts and lives for the better. He thinks of it as a positive, unifying symbol-set, one that evokes the energy, reason, and strength of the traditional culture of Europe.

On the question of Breivik being a Conservative, Dyer judges him by his own words, in his video:

As the video crescendos, he harks back to the Middle Ages, lining up one image after another of armored knights in battle (or in heroic stances). His hall of European fame is a series of military commanders who fought against Muslim armies in centuries past (the most recent being Czar Nicholas I in the 19th century).

These images are not compelling to conservatives in the US, and I don’t see any evidence that they are the organizing idea for classical-liberal thinkers or political parties in Europe. There is literally no mainstream interest in refighting the Crusades or wrestling the church down and making her culturally militant on the model of the Middle Ages. There is a varying level of political engagement among Christians: some are very left-leaning, others are conservative (or liberal in the classical European sense), many of both kinds have little interest in politics, and others find politics important and rewarding. Anders Breivik’s model of a post-modern Knight Templar resonates not at all with the actual beliefs and stances of conservatives, Christians, or conservative Christians.

That is partly because Breivik seeks a form of tribal symbology and validation that modern society has grown comparatively comfortable without. Mainstream classical-liberalism in Europe doesn’t offer the mystical power of either Norse gods or a Latin-speaking church with its own army of knights. These symbols of cultural connection to the transcendent haven’t been Christianity’s reality for centuries; and in politics, there has been a very long trend toward prosaic bureaucratic consultation, which no one envisions operating outside of. There’s no way to torture modern Christianity or modern social or political conservatism into the Crusader mold – which is why Breivik had to find his calling elsewhere.

Brett Stephens also asks What Is Anders Breivik?

The more telling side of Breivik's manifesto is his self-description as "Justiciar Knight Commander for the Knights Templar of Europe," a group he claims has some 80 members and held a secret meeting in London in 2002. The fetishistic medievalism—Breivik seems to have designed a military dress uniform, and wants to wear it to his trial—is significant: Like Osama bin Laden and his epigones, his worldview seems mainly defined by the politics of the 13th century. And that worldview is fundamentally geared toward hastening an apocalypse.

The terrorist in "Knights Templar" getup.

In a superb new book, "Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience," Boston University's Richard Landes notes just how pervasive this kind of impulse has been throughout history and across cultures, and how much its many strains—Christian, Marxist, Islamist, Nazi, environmentalist and so on—have in common. Breivik, Mr. Landes says, was of a piece: "Like many active cataclysmic apocalypticists, he believed that the socio-political world is in huge tension, like tectonic plates about to crack, and if he can set off a small explosion in the right place it will unleash far greater forces." In this sense, Mr. Landes adds, "the thing he resembles most is the people he hates."

The labels that the Left wing has been in such a rush to pin on Breivik simply miss the point:

On Friday morning Breivik wrote that "today you will become immortal." He seems to have meant it literally. Whatever else might be said of that particular longing, it can hardly be called religious (what then would be the point of an afterlife?), or Christian (murdering children en masse is not a tenet of any Christian faith), or conservative (a political tendency that is fundamentally anti-utopian).

What it is is millennarian: the belief that all manner of redemptive possibilities lie on just the other side of a crucible of unspeakable chaos and suffering. At his arrest, Breivik called his acts "atrocious but necessary." Stalin and other Marxists so despised by Breivik might have said the same thing about party purges or the liquidation of the kulaks.

These are the politics that have largely defined our age and which conservatives have, for the most part, been foremost in opposing. To attempt to tar them with Breivik's name is worse than a slur; it's a concession to a killer with pretensions of intellectual sophistication. And it's a misunderstanding of what he was all about.

As Dyer concludes:

We can hope – I certainly do – that the flurry of mistargeted denunciations from the political left will die down quickly. All you have to do to see that conservatives and Christians are not responsible for Anders Breivik is read 1500 pages of his musings. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, nor any particular religious denomination, political party, or school of thought in Europe, is “responsible” for Breivik; he did his own research and made his own choices, and he had alternatives. He is undoubtedly not the only young European who wishes for a more compelling, inspiring, successful, and victorious cultural idea of Europe to give his life meaning. But he is the only one who decided to blow up a building and go on a shooting rampage.

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