Huge explosion in Oslo

[Stephen Morgan]

OK, now I am confused. All of these quotes come from an AP article. Since when do AP articles ravage Western police forces like this?

Not, "western", but "Norwegian".

Okay, since when does the AP ravage another American-ally fascist police force in Christendom? Hmm, not much better.

Since Norway was an insufficiently staunch ally, mayhap?

[vanlose kid]

OK, now I am confused. All of these quotes come from an AP article. Since when do AP articles ravage Western police forces like this?

Not, "western", but "Norwegian".

Okay, since when does the AP ravage another American-ally fascist police force in Christendom? Hmm, not much better.

Unsettling Wariness in Norway, Where Police Are Rarely Armed
Johan Spanner for The New York Times

Norwegian police officers guard the courthouse in downtown Oslo where Anders Behring Breivik was arraigned on Monday.
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
Published: July 25, 2011

OSLO — When a man dressed in a police uniform began slaughtering young people at a Norwegian summer camp last week, one of the first to be killed was a real police officer named Trond Berntsen, who for years had worked in security at the camp.

Whether Officer Berntsen tried to stop the gunman is still being debated. But facing a man carrying multiple guns and ample ammunition, there was little he could do. Like most other police officers here, he had no weapon.

By law, Norwegian police officers must have authorization from their chief to gain access to a firearm, but they have rarely needed to ask, until recently. Violent crime has been steadily increasing, jolting a society used to leaving doors unlocked and children to play without fear. Coupled with growing criticism over the police’s slow response time to the attacks and confusion about the death toll, which was lowered Monday to 76 from 93, there are growing questions about whether the police are equipped to deal with the challenges.

“Criminals are now carrying weapons, so some people now think that police officers should have weapons as well,” said Gry Jorunn Holmen, a spokeswoman for the Norwegian police union. Though she said it was too early to make any assessments, Ms. Holmen said the union had formed a commission to explore the issue. For the police, she said, “it’s getting tougher.”

It took police SWAT units more than an hour to reach the camp, on Utoya Island, after reports of the shooting came in. Officers had to drive to the shore across from the site of the shooting attack, and use boats to get to the island. A police helicopter was unable to get off the ground; news crews that reached the island by air could only watch as the gunman continued the massacre.

Anne Holt, Norway’s former justice minister, told the BBC: “That makes him a person that killed one person every minute. If the police had actually been there just a half an hour earlier, then 30 young lives would have been saved.”

Officer Berntsen, 51, who was the stepbrother of Norway’s crown princess, was remembered in a service on Monday. It was among the first of dozens of memorial services and funerals expected in the coming days after the rampage. The man identified by the police as the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, most likely shot more rounds in the hourlong rampage than most Norwegian officers typically fire in a career.

Norway is internationally renowned for its low rates of violent crime, a fact that is a point of pride for many Norwegians. Murders, when they do occur, are front-page news here. In 2009, the last date for which official statistics were available, there were 29 murders in this country of 4.6 million. In Oslo, the capital, high-ranking officials rarely even bother with a security detail.

“You can walk around this city and bump into a leading government minister out promenading on the street and strike up a little conversation before you move on,” said Kristian Berg Harpviken, the director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

So it has been jarring for many in the wake of the attacks to see heavily armed commandos stationed outside the gingerbread facades of government buildings. The nation is now plainly on edge, and it is clear, experts say, that some things might have to change.

Norway is one of only three Western European countries lacking a fully armed police force. Most police officers in Britain and Iceland do not carry firearms, either. Norway’s neighbor, Sweden, began requiring its officers to carry guns in 1965.

Over the last decade, the frequency of rape and other assault has inched ever higher, statistics show. Murder rates, however, have remained stable.

The increasing presence of foreign criminal networks active in Norway is part of the reason for higher crime rates, Ms. Holmen and others said, though domestic criminal groups have also become more brazen. Just two days after the attacks, men in military fatigues shot a 27-year-old man to death in his home in southern Norway, Norwegian news outlets reported.

While Norwegian crime rates still look insignificant compared with a country like the United States, the uptick in violence, however small, has unsettled many here.

Currently, only beat police officers in patrol cars have immediate access to weapons. By law, however, they have to remain unloaded and locked in a box in the car unless authorization is given.

Some experts worry that arming police officers all the time will only lead to an escalation of violence as criminals arm themselves in response. For many, though, resistance to the idea has more to do with national pride.

“I would prefer to live in a society where police normally work unarmed,” said Johannes Knutsson, a professor of police research at the Norwegian Police University College. “It is a very forceful and symbolic sign to the citizens that this is a peaceful society.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/world ... olice.html

*

[norton ash]

SMorgan:

Since Norway was an insufficiently staunch ally, mayhap?

Yep, mayhap, chap. Valid point. I was more riffing on 'Western' and 'Christendom' as denoting Euros and their colonies on this side of the Balkans. The declining occident.

[JackRiddler]

.

Okay, let's speculate: Gladio. Why is this new incarnation fingering Nazis?

.

Cos enough time has passed, and we are pro Israel so we can't really be Nazis??

This Nazi happens to be very pro-Israel. Nowadays, that doesn't make him less of a Nazi. If after a lifetime of feeling beaten down as an oppressed white guy in Norway he determines to show the awesome power of his will over lesser humans by drilling for years in preparation for personally murdering the maximum reachable number of defenseless children ("liberal" or "socialist" ones), all so as to promote his manifesto calling for a revolution of the white Europeans to exterminate the imminent threat of Islamification facilitated by said liberals and socialists, then he's a Nazi. If he then wants to plead not guilty while looking forward to publishing Manifesto II from prison, then he's a would-be Hitler. It is a superficiality that his worldview holds the current-day Jews in Israel to be heroic fighters for the West, rather than perpetrators of the world Feminist-Socialist-Muslim conspiracy to destroy the Christian white man. Ingredients can change, but the template and the subject is the same: The white national man besieged by Modernity and the Other, fighting back through his heroic will to murder his lessers, preferably by massacre. The current-day Nazi can even renounce Hitler for being a Socialist and a loser. The then-Nazis used up-to-date media and spectacle to best effect, the current-day Nazi informs himself about the latest in viral marketing. If much of the message seems, as Hillshoist points out, uncomfortably close to the current mainstream, then that's a comment on the state of the current mainstream.

Apropos the possibility brought up by Pierre...

So anyway, speculating.. there's this focus on how this guy Anders Breivik is like a superintelligent intellectual evil villain, planning this on his own for 9 years and documenting every detail as proof.

I don't think he's exceptionally intelligent or intellectual. That's his affectation, encouraged and magnified by the cultural archetype of the superman-supervillain. That's why he wears the costumes and badges.

What to me seems more likely is we should see the guy as an actor.

I think that's exactly how he sees himself. He cast himself to act out the hero-villain he hopes will inspire the Volk.


Hitler practiced speaking in front of a mirror, taking photographs to analyze his own gestures. I've seen a set of these photos and though I haven't found confirmed images online, I think this is one of them.

He probably has some major mental issues no doubt, and is an insecure individual looking for an identity. He grew up without a father, not a lot of real friends, no serious girlfriends. There are lots of young men like that and they can be nice or not, but they are all vulnerable to being used. In other words ideal as patsies and assets. His real father worked at an embassy and his stepdad in the army, so the spook connections are there. What happened maybe is some group noticed him, maybe invited him for some masonic rituals, isolated him further by giving him some money so he could buy a farm etc. Then said he was selected for a very special mission playing on his narcissistic side. Just take the blame for an event to be staged.

This is possible and so I'm not discounting it as a possibility. Based on a) his own statements and b) the existence of a depressingly large Nazi milieu in Europe that also reaches into the deep state, it is extremely likely that he had links in this milieu, and that he may have had co-conspirators or even controllers in the Oslo-Utroya action, as you suggest. However, based on the present state of what we know, a conspiracy is not necessary to explain what happened. Don't worry, I won't apply "Occam's Razor" and conclude that the unnecessary must not exist, because this isn't a question in the natural sciences and the "simplest" explanation ("simplest" is usually the one most comforting to the complacent mentality) does not have automatic precedence. At this point I'm merely submitting there is no need for a conspiracy in the action. An asshole who fits the psychological profile exactly as you describe could have come up with the idea and done it all by himself.

21 years in a norwegian prison maybe didnt sound so bad to him, in combination with the feeling of being able to do something perceived as useful, a goal in life and becoming famous. What I'm saying is, those sort of guys are usually easy to manipulate. I think it's more likely he is a bit dim than that hes superintelligent. All this on intuition and maybe projecting my own insecureties btw.

I think it's a certainty he's dim. That's a common precondition for becoming a Nazi, or more generally for thinking the Muslim (or Mexican) refugees and goddamn loose women are the ones responsible for destroying your life opportunities as a downtrodden white man. That hardly precludes being able to train himself in weapons and combat. The set of all warriors does not have an exceptional overlap with the set of all geniuses.

That's the other part: doesn't the whole package REEK of marketing exactly for the likes of us, eg internet"nerds" into computergames, conspiracies, the knight templars, freemasonry, etc? What with all the different posed photos, the facebook, the twitter, the hidden manifesto.. seems like any other viral marketing campaign for a new (internetmedia)product these days no? Lots of things to discover, lots of things to discuss for months to come. All the work of one supersmart guy? A marketing guru on top of a bombexpert and skillful shooter?

Of course it reeks of marketing. But he (or another author) is not inventing the tools, but merely learned and deployed them, a hundred years after Bernays. Most people who can use the Internet or hold down an office job nowadays know how to cut-and-paste text and edit it to make it say what you like, use Photoshop, or deploy symbols and logos in a clean layout. In a marketing-saturated world, knowledge of marketing is widespread. It's not rocket science, only for the reason that unlike rocket science, marketing still markets itself as a mysterious art without known laws or rules, even though most people are aware of the techniques. Nowadays a huge proportion of the marks themselves know about Keep It Simple Stupid, talking points, sound bites, emotive symbols, making a splash, using stages of tease and intensification, giving a sense of exclusivity and privilege to the mark, prompting outrage and then promising a happy ending, using all available media in an integrated plan for the "synergy," etc. Facebook and Twitter are no more mysterious to exploit than the telephone. The hip consumer is expected to have a specific opinion of every brand, celebrity and campaign, even to semi-ironically appreciate the degree to which it manipulates him. Assuming Breivik made all the material himself, I don't think any of it makes him a "marketing guru." Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is not the technique surrounding the content, but that we know this Nazi shit appeals to a lot of people.

Or did one team make the manifesto, and was it another team that did the shooting? And nobody can say that they could never find someone to do such a horrible thing, there;s lots of hardened military who are used to doing things exactly like that no?

Could be. Need not be. Let's wait and see.

So with several european countries breaking down financially, generating real largescale protests, like in spain for example, bang suddenly there can appear one of these Knights Templar, nice spain marxist hunter badge and all. And noone can complain about policebrutality because its this mysterious group of internet neonazis. And everyone is now a suspect!

Then again, it might help mobilize left protests and put the bourgeois Nazi-lite parties on the run. While Breivik's shit (assuming him as author) has appeal, it's also likely true a majority of Europeans would gladly make a one-time exception to the death penalty ban and let the guillotine drop on his fat neck.

.

[Dradin Kastell]

Now I admittedly know nothing about the local geography, but when I attempted to map Buskerud at google, it showed me a town that seemed almost equidistant to Utoya from Oslo. The funny thing was that there appeared to be closer towns/villages that aren't mentioned as responding (no assets to contribute?).

Buskerud is the name of the province, Nordre (Northern) Buskerud is the police district. Look a few pages back where I linked a Norwegian police info brochure with a map of the districts. The local police station closest to Utoya is at Honefoss, it looks like 15-20 km from Utoya by road. This is where the first cops to respond would have been based.

[vanlose kid]

...

At this point I'm merely submitting there is no need for a conspiracy in the action. An asshole who fits the psychological profile exactly as you describe could have come up with the idea and done it all by himself...

.

you're allowed to say this?

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[Gnomad]

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have been trying to get talk on this started a few times in the thread, hasn't happened. have only managed to do it IRL. Brievik is not an anomaly, nor a freak madman, not a lone-nut but a lone wolf (there's a distinction), clear-headed, knew exactly what he was doing. nor was he an extremist or fringe. he might have been 10 years ago. now he's the mainstream. in my view this is not a conspiracy. it's the new normal.

Yah.
Here in Finland, the nationalist-right blogs (and even many more mainstream ones) immediately assumed the attack had been done by muslims, and posts abhorring this appeared online. When it became known that instead, the attacker was one of their ilk (Breivik had even sent his manifesto to at least one True Finn party member - a populist party that recently won a lot of places in the parliament), the explanations and downplaying began - "just a rotten apple, one off". Even though many of them have supported similar views of islam before.

Recently, the atmosphere here, also in Sweden, has gone in that direction, with populist right gaining large support in elections. The new normal indeed.

Like what you said too, Jack.

[Stephen Morgan]

[8bitagent]

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have been trying to get talk on this started a few times in the thread, hasn't happened. have only managed to do it IRL. Brievik is not an anomaly, nor a freak madman, not a lone-nut but a lone wolf (there's a distinction), clear-headed, knew exactly what he was doing. nor was he an extremist or fringe. he might have been 10 years ago. now he's the mainstream. in my view this is not a conspiracy. it's the new normal.

the psyop was 9/11 and the new media discourse/saturation that followed. psyops is a means, this is one of its ends. the seed was planted there and this is just one of the fruits. i think it's the tipping point and i only see this act strengthening the ideology behind it. i see a decoupling happening. there will be no fight back. there is no one to fight back.

Ex-Berlusconi minister defends Anders Behring Breivik
Northern League member says Norwegian killer's ideas are in defence of western civilisation


John Hooper in Rome guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 July 2011 15.28 BST Article history


Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist and author who popularised the term Eurabia for a supposedly Islamised Europe. Photograph: Gianangelo Pistoia/AP


One of Silvio Berlusconi's former ministers has defended the thinking of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

Interviewed on a popular radio show, Francesco Speroni, a leading member of the Northern League, the junior partner in Berlusconi's conservative coalition, said: "Breivik's ideas are in defence of western civilisation."

Speroni spoke as other right-wingers around Europe, including leading officials of his own party, distanced themselves from the massacre on Utøya and the ideology that inspired it.

The Italian politician was endorsing the comments of another high-profile member of the league who had drawn fierce criticism for arguing that the killings might have been part of a plot to discredit hardline conservative thinkers. Like many in his party, Mario Borghezio, who sits in the European parliament, is an admirer of the writings of the late Italian journalist and author Oriana Fallaci, who popularised the term Eurabia to describe a future, supposedly Islamised Europe.

Borghezio, a member of the European parliament's committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, suggested that there was something suspicious about the fact that Breivik had been able to move around freely until last Friday. He said he disagreed with the way "this massacre is being used to condemn positions like that of Oriana Fallaci".

While describing the Norwegian killer as "unbalanced", Borghezio said: "Christians ought not to be animals to be sacrificed. We have to defend them." His comments brought outraged demands for his expulsion from opposition politicians and at least one member of the Berlusconi government.

The party's chief organiser, Roberto Calderoli, who also sits in the cabinet, responded with a public apology to Norway "and above all to the relatives of the victims for the terrible, unspeakable remarks made in a personal capacity by [Mario] Borghezio". His gesture was almost immediately undermined, however, when Speroni spoke up in defence of his party colleague, using even franker language than Borghezio.

Unlike his fellow MP, who is notorious for headline-grabbing, extremist comments, Speroni is a Northern League heavyweight. He was the minister for institutional reform in Berlusconi's first government between 1994 and 1995 and has since been the league's chief whip in the senate, the upper house of the Italian legislature, and the European parliament.

"I'm with Borghezio. I don't think he should resign", Speroni said. "If [Breivik's] ideas are that we are going towards Eurabia and those sorts of things, that western Christian civilisation needs to be defended, yes, I'm in agreement," he told Radio 24.

In France, the National Front announced on Tuesday it had suspended a former local election candidate who made remarks on his blog that were interpreted as supportive of Breivik.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ju ... ds-breivik

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Not surprising to hear, since many in the Italian government back in the 60's thru 80's and even 90's were involved in the NATO/Masonic neo fascist terror networks under Gladio.

[vanlose kid]

*

have been trying to get talk on this started a few times in the thread, hasn't happened. have only managed to do it IRL. Brievik is not an anomaly, nor a freak madman, not a lone-nut but a lone wolf (there's a distinction), clear-headed, knew exactly what he was doing. nor was he an extremist or fringe. he might have been 10 years ago. now he's the mainstream. in my view this is not a conspiracy. it's the new normal.

Yah.
Here in Finland, the nationalist-right blogs (and even many more mainstream ones) immediately assumed the attack had been done by muslims, and posts abhorring this appeared online. When it became known that instead, the attacker was one of their ilk (Breivik had even sent his manifesto to at least one True Finn party member - a populist party that recently won a lot of places in the parliament), the explanations and downplaying began - "just a rotten apple, one off". Even though many of them have supported similar views of islam before.

Recently, the atmosphere here, also in Sweden, has gone in that direction, with populist right gaining large support in elections. The new normal indeed.

Like what you said too, Jack.

'

think i posted about the true finn party member earlier in this thread. it came up following news on the manifesto. (wasn't it the party leader?) i've been around a few of the sites and forums since. the common consensus there and in parts of the normal right wing media has been that the issues Breivik raised, despite his actions, are important and valid so they're pushing the idea that if these issues were given more serious consideration this would not have happened. and that the longer they are not recognized things will only get worse. echoing Breivik's warning basically. think i even posted two pieces by Fjordman and others to that effect. not that you'd notice.

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[8bitagent]

@Jack Riddler:

You're right about modern day Nazis and Israel. Things change.

Hitler sided with the Muslim Brotherhood, North African Muslims and Muslim armies in the Yugoslavian area as another SS front. Now days Muslims are the new Jews, especially Muslim immigrants.
Some neo Nazi and white nationalist types are pro Muslim but anti Israel. These are the ones who exclusively believe Israel carried out 9/11 and that Zionists are behind everything. David Duke and others speak in Syria and Iran and claim to be defenders of Palestinians. Basically, they take the pro palestinian/9-11 truth beliefs of a lot of us leftists and graft it into their own distorted worldview.

I wonder how pro Israel/anti Muslims and pro Muslim/anti Israel(the belief Muslims have been unfairly scapegoated by Jews) Nazis get along?

Earlier I said Breivik may not fit into a typical neo Nazi ideology spun by the media; however it's definitely shades of both original fascism and a strange new neo Nazism.

[vanlose kid]

...

Not surprising to hear, since many in the Italian government back in the 60's thru 80's and even 90's were involved in the NATO/Masonic neo fascist terror networks under Gladio.

you know, i can see the "genetic" relation but i still think this is different, mostly due to the way things have changed in the last ten years. back then the left was stronger, more organized. there was a left or something like it. back then the hard right were more clandestine. now though. and it's not even nazis in the usual skinhead EDL sense. we're talking mainstream academics, pundits, experts, politicians and their voters in European governments and the EU. a while ago i listened to this podcast with Robert Fisk on the Sabra and Shatila massacres and he said something that stuck with me (i'm quoting the gist from memory).

the interviewer was asking him about the coverage of the massacres and western press in general with its ideas of impartiality and fairness in giving both sides of the story (implying that Fisk might be a bit biased against the falange and israelis by not giving them a fair airing). and Fisk said: "you know, can you imagine a news crew at Treblinka first interviewing a Jew and then going over to interview the camp commandant in order to get his side of the story and give a fair and balanced view? do you see how wrong that is?" things have changed.

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[8bitagent]

...

Not surprising to hear, since many in the Italian government back in the 60's thru 80's and even 90's were involved in the NATO/Masonic neo fascist terror networks under Gladio.

you know, i can see the "genetic" relation but i still think this is different, mostly due to the way things have changed in the last ten years. back then the left was stronger, more organized. there was a left or something like it. back then the hard right were more clandestine. now though. and it's not even nazis in the usual skinhead EDL sense. we're talking mainstream academics, pundits, experts, politicians and their voters in European governments and the EU. a while ago i listened to this podcast with Robert Fisk on the Sabra and Shatila massacres and he said something that stuck with me (i'm quoting the gist from memory).

the interviewer was asking him about the coverage of the massacres and western press in general with its ideas of impartiality and fairness in giving both sides of the story (implying that Fisk might be a bit biased against the falange and israelis by not giving them a fair airing). and Fisk said: "you know, can you imagine a news crew at Treblinka first interviewing a Jew and then going over to interview the camp commandant in order to get his side of the story and give a fair and balanced view? do you see how wrong that is?" things have changed.

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Oh I agree. When I talk to people from Northern Europe online(or occasionally when I run into them in real life) they always talk about how they hate how far right Europe and Euro politics is getting. Austria, The Netherlands, even Sweden has growing ranks of far right politicians in parliament and people who back them.

Yeah the left seems non existent, neutered. Hell, "what left?" I often ask. There's no mass anti Islam European or Tea Party like equal with liberals. I mean many are still supporting an administration that routinely is using hundreds of billions to blow up villages, if anything to not seem like a Tea Party Obama hating racist.
The thing with Israel is, I found that in the summer of 2006 and especially by January 2009 with Gaza; a lot of the coverage and public reaction in America was not in favor with Israel's actions...least it wasnt overwhelmingly pro Israel.

[MacCruiskeen]

One striking thing about 9/11 is that we've still learned hardly anything about the childhood and youth of those 19 Deathloving Muslim Superstudents. If they did what they're alleged to have done, what made them the kind of people capable of doing it? Nobody in the media ever even asked, except to say "Well, that's what them Moozlims are like, innit? Capable of anything, that lot!" And that was the full extent of the psychological analysis. No biographical evidence was required in support of it, nor was it ever even asked for.

Well, I've never found it remotely plausible, myself. And I pointed out more than once that if they'd been 19 Deathloving Blonde Christian Superstudents, then everyone would have been baffled and horrified, and serious questions would have been asked. Because Arabs are monsters, but Real People don't do things like that.

Surprise, surprise, the Norwegian mass murderer is not a cipher, and his childhood & youth is something people are considerably more interested in investigating. So we learn, for example, that he was the son of a diplomat and grew up in a prosperous but fatherless home:

“I view this atrocity with absolute horror,” said Mr Breivik, a retired diplomat who worked at the Norwegian embassy in London and Paris.

Those who know the killer yesterday painted a picture of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian boy brought up in wealthy Skoyen. He spent his youth playing football and listening to music and lived in a £250,000 two-bedroom apartment with his family. After his parents split up, Breivik had his first brush with the law, aged 13 – he was fined by police for painting graffiti on walls. His childhood friends have revealed how he was just a “fun, life-loving boy”.

But one friend said the killer’s attitude towards life changed when he hit his late teens. He said: “He was just like an ordinary boy but with the years passing he isolated himself more. That was in the mid-90s and after that he didn’t talk to me any more.”

[...]

Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-storie ... z1TKhTJQH2

It would be worth finding out a lot more about his childhood and youth, and about what started and sustained the transformation of that “fun, life-loving boy” into someone at least as deathloving as those 19 Mad Moozlims (conveniently deceased) allegedly were. Not out of idle curiosity or mere prurience, but because these things obviously matter, for many reasons.

[justdrew]

A police guard had been due to be on the Norwegian island where a gunman massacred at least 86 people but detectives do not know where he was, they have revealed.
"There was supposed to be a police officer there," acting police chief Sveinung Sponheim told a news conference, adding that it is unclear where he was.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/norway-suspect ... 38770.html

well, perhaps we know where the shooter got the uniform now.


FYI - I'm assuming they're not talking about the off-duty cop hired as a guard. Since we know where he is