The Missing Lesson from Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform

"Never Forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anybody has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn't allow him to do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians." -- Alexander Hope

  

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military." -- William S. Burroughs

Monday, July 25, 2011

The Missing Lesson from Norway: Never Trust a Man in Uniform

 Roughly a decade ago, Al Pacino starred in a movie entitled S1m0ne, a cyber-era updating of the Pygmalion myth in which a film director creates an uncannily realistic digital actress. Despite the fact that “Simone” was a computer-rendered composite fantasy, the lustrous blond enchantress becomes a global pop culture sensation – a profitable illusion sustained through increasingly desperate acts of misdirection on the part of the director. 

It’s tempting to think that accused Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik is a S1m0ne-style digital fantasy drawn to specifications provided by Morris Dees’ so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. Breivik used social networking sites to create a cyber-persona seemingly made to order for left-leaning “watchdog” groups. Available photographs depict the blond, stereotypically Nordic Breivik as if he were a dress-up doll, his face oddly unmarked and expressionless as he poses in a variety of guises – including Freemason garb and a scuba outfit. 

In similar fashion, his recorded ideological pronouncements – the quotes attributed to him in the aftermath of the killing spree in Oslo and Utoya, and his bloated “manifesto” – could be the work of someone determined to embody every detail of the familiar caricature of the right-wing “hate criminal.” 

Breivik may be exactly what he appears to be – a murderous nationalist ideologue determined to precipitate a European culture war that would end with the expulsion of Muslims from the continent and the mass liquidation of “cultural Marxists.” Breivik’s uncredited borrowings from the “Unabomber” manifesto underscore the possibility – however distant – that he, like Ted Kaczynski, could be a product of a CIA-style “behavior modification” program, or a pawn in a false-flag operation. 

Whatever we eventually learn about Breivik’s background and motivations, one detail of the killing spree he allegedly perpetrated offers a timely and critical lesson practically everybody has missed: We should never trust an armed man wearing the costume of a police officer. 

According to the narrative provided by Norwegian investigators, Breivik detonated a remote-controlled bomb in downtown Oslo before traveling to Utoya, site of an annual summer retreat for young activists affiliated with the Labour Party, many of whom had parents or relatives who had been employed at the government offices targeted in the bombing. 


When he arrived a few hours after the blast, Breivik was disguised as a policeman. This allowed him to gain access to the facility, and the confidence of his victims: Trained to defer reflexively to someone wearing the insignia of “authority,” the young campers were psychologically disarmed when the assassin told them he had been sent to check on their “security.”

By the time a SWAT team managed to arrive an hour and a half later, Breivik had mowed down at least 86 scores of innocent youngsters. “It was a slaughter of young children,” one witness said following the massacre. They were sheep who had fallen prey to a wolf wearing what the victims had been taught to perceive as the attire of a “sheepdog.”

Read More...