DEATH IN NORWAY

by Hans-Juergen Hoehling

The horrifying  bomb attack in Oslo and the killing of over 80 unsuspecting youths in Norway on July 23, 2011 should not, as it seems in danger of doing, produce only an emotional response. Evil is not bound to racial, religious or national groups, as so-called security experts implied immediately after the news became known (a man named Crump and introduced as security adviser from London said on Al Jazeera that the attacks bore “the hallmark of Islamic terrorism”). Evil is a state of mind, and “there is no art to read the  mind’s construction in the face,” as Shakespeare’s King Duncan puts it.

Worse still: evil is a matter of one’s point of view. “We know he is a bastard, but he is our bastard,” was the long-standing justification for the US support for Saddam Hussein. One man’s freedom fighter is the other man’s terrorist.  Many people would accept the bombing of enemy settlements in war(Ironically expressed by John Betjeman in 1940: “Gracious Lord, oh, bomb the Germans! Spare their women, for thy sake; and if that is not too easy, we will pardon thy mistake.” The speaker goes on, characteristically:”But, gracious Lord, whate’er shall be – don’t let anyone bomb me.”) The more radical partisans in a war will argue that children are only enemies under fighting age, enemies in waiting, so to speak, and women are potential mothers of future enemies, so they should, nay, must! all be destroyed (“The only good Indian is a dead Indian” – this was the general view among white Americans in the 19^thcentury, and it was not a slogan only, it was put into devastating practice – there were almost no Indians left at the end of the century. German SS killers operated on exactly this premise in Poland and Russia during World War Two. “We” are good, “they” are evil – it is a simple maxim which  even the stupidest can grasp. Naturally, it is not a thing of the past. On the “Charlie Rose” programme on July 22, 2011 (Bloomberg TV) the American Security adviser Tom Donilon implicitly followed the same line of thought when he justified the ongoing military activities in Iraq,  and Afghanistan with the 3,000 people who died in New York on 9/11 – completely ignoring that neither the Afghan nor the Iraqi people had anything to do with the attacks, not even their governments were involved in their planning or execution. The perpetrators were Saudi nationals operating from bases in Europe and the United States. An estimated 600,000 men, women and children were killed by the US in Iraq alone to soothe hurt American feelings of pride and self-love, and scarely anyone in the US minded then, or minds now. The victims, after all, have no names, or names that are unpronounceable, they are brown-skinned, and at any rate not US citizens – the only thing that would at least partially make up for the defect of their skin pigmentation.

The blond, blue-eyed Norwegian killer of the same day, July 22^nd, 2011, is associated with the same kind of thinking. Only he did not wait for government orders, and he was more logical than most governments care to be: to his mind, as far as we can see at this point,  socialists help brown-skinned people, so they are on the side of the enemy, hence are enemies themselves, and must be eliminated. There is no point in sparing their young, on the contrary – the earlier one catches them the less bother all round.

This frame of mind, seeing in the opponent, the competitor, or just the unknown a mortal enemy, is the root of the murderous evil of which human history offers so many examples. It is this attitude that we must combat, in ourselves, and in others. It is no good moaning about violence, and “unacceptable acts” (President Sarkozy of France), and then go on doing what allows or even provokes such violence[1]. Except in clear cases of defence against imminent danger of death or mutilation, we must desist from all acts of violence against anyone, whether carried out individually, or on behalf of, or through governments. No political principles can be validly defended by violence – not even our own.

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