(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I have never claimed to know anything special about evil. It takes some self-confidence to embark on something about it. That is why I have thought that evil is a field of knowledge that some of a certain professional caliber may be acquainted with, such as philosophers and theologians, not like me. But now four years have passed since 22. July, without appearing to be particularly wiser – on the contrary, it may seem that the narrative of the mentally ill deviant, the lone wolf, has replaced the national dialogue that should have continued.
The latest example is an essay by Karl Ove Knausgård with the title The inexplicable – Inside the mind of a mass killer, which was recently in print in The New Yorker. The text, a heavily edited version of an earlier essay, is extremely well-written – and rather poorly thought out. Unlike the original text that was printed in Contemporary in 2012, Knausgård now writes firmly that "Breivik has nothing to teach us". We do not find answers if we examine his childhood, his character or his political ideas – he is an anomaly. Breivik kept on role-playing, dress-up and fantasy, not political terror. It was the desire to be seen, "nothing else," that drove Breivik. This according to the man who has written a six-volume work about himself.
The white man's dissatisfaction. The revised essay by Knausgård is, in my view, one of the most intellectually lazy I have come across in my reading on terror. It also contains factual errors that must be commented upon.
It is remarkable that Knausgård seems to think that the terror can be decoupled from the background of the man who committed it. Of course, this is as little true as the terror is "inexplicable". On the contrary, literature and research on evil reveal patterns of actions and traders who ask to be understood analytically, not pushed away as coincidences and anomalies.
In the days following July 22, I contacted American sociologist and masculinity scientist Michael Kimmel, whom I have known for several years. It was natural to ask him to write a comment about the terrorist attack on the feminist journal Fett, for which I was then political editor. Kimmel has for many years been researching right-wing extremism in the US, Scandinavia and Germany. In his comment, he compared Anders Behring Breivik to the solo terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 bombed a government building in Oklahoma and killed 168 people. McVeigh, then 27 years old and a veteran of the Gulf War, justified the attack by destroying the American dream. An indifferent government allowed the middle class to starve, while immigrants and social recipients were spared the community. In the book Angry White Men – American Masculinity at the End of an Era Kimmel further writes that McVeigh's anger is shared by a growing number of white men in the United States who feel oppressed and marginalized. They blame Jews, gays, women, intellectuals, feminists, blacks. The common denominator is class – they are in a downward spiral of social mobility and cannot inherit their fathers' privileges.
The white man's discontent unfolds in the wake of the nineties' economic globalization, which has led to the flagging of American industry and unemployment. In addition, dissatisfaction increases proportionally with the increased influence of the civil rights movement and feminists in American social life. Defining oneself as something other than a family provider is difficult in a culture that cultivates gender differences and the ideal of the self-made man. It goes loose on the masculine self-esteem, simply. The white man's dissatisfaction is general, and the white man's terror special. But dissatisfaction has a common sounding ground that crosses time and space, whose origins are historical changes in class relationships and in power relations between men and women, majority and minority. And it is from this world – not from the peaceful, egalitarian paradise with red-skinned children on the May 17 train that Knausgård portrays in The New Yorker – that Breivik's roads to the government quarter and Utøya go.
Knausgård's essay is one of the most intellectually lazy I have come across in my reading of the July 22 terror.
Anti Feminism. Anders Behring Breivik developed both his emotional numbness and his disdain for human life in a context. Breivik's attempt to externalize his internal conflicts reflects the society he lived in, or at least his interpretation of it: a society where families are disintegrating and traditional masculinity is under pressure. As several commentators have pointed out, gender is a highly present factor in Breivik's meaning universe.
In the manifesto Breivik seems to be obsessed with "the other's" sexuality in at least two meanings. First, Muslims pose a threat because they give birth to so many children. Secondly, they are a threat because they rap Norwegian women. 21-year-old Dylann Roof used the same rhetoric when he shot and killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17 of this year: “I have to. You rape our women and take over our country. And you have to disappear, 'he said. In a manifesto, Roof describes blacks as "stupid and violent," complaining that economic crisis has forced whites to live with blacks. Like Breivik and Fjordman, the goal is absolute separation: “Not only did [segregation] protect us from interacting with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but also from being dragged down to their level. Integration has only dragged whites down to the level of brutal animals. ” Roof's manifesto is characterized by the same offending tone as Breivik. It is a shorter route between Utøya and Charleston than one would think. Both of the young men's political projects are paved with offended, white masculinity, and a loneliness that finds expression in hateful purity ideology and "I-will-take-back-what-right-is-my" mentality. In both right-wing sense universes, "the other men" figure as primitive sexual animals, like alpha males.
Imagined fellowship. For Roof and Breivik, the goal was to start a civil war. They did not act alone, as Knausgård states in his essay, but with the imagined permission of commoners. Admittedly, Breivik dressed in uniforms and invented a temple knight organization that no proof of existence exists, but even in this fantasy world there is theorist Benedict Andersson referred to as "imagined fellowship". Such imagined communities are a prerequisite for all nationalism and totalitarianism. When Roof poses with southern state flags and apartheid effects, and when Breivik puts on his uniform and in court ties his fist in a fascist salute, they stand on stage. Their role play may be incomprehensible to us, it may also be the expression of sick minds, but it has a meaning – to them. The role play and symbolic uniformity legitimize the violence and terror and place them as recognizable actors in such "imagined communities". In his manifesto, Roof assigns himself a grandiose role in a larger community, and a place in history: whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no Ku Klux Klan, no one who does anything other than talk online. Someone must have the courage to take it out into the real world, and I guess it must be me. As I write this, I unfortunately have a bad time, and some of my best thoughts – in fact many – I have had to leave out, and they are lost forever, "he writes, before he concludes," But I think it's probably big white thinkers out there already. ” With the shots in Charleston, after his own distorted and self-righteous image, he became one of them.
Outside, abandoned, overlooked. As Knausgård is in, we are created through the eyes of others. And when these men feel invisible, it can have fatal consequences. Then they create their own community or seek out and borrow ideas from others who express the same dissatisfaction. Just like McVeigh and Roof, Breivik felt abandoned and overlooked by the political establishment. Breivik was not, as Knausgård claims in the New Yorker, a "relatively well-functioning man", as little as Norway is a country free of social friction. On the contrary, we get in Aage Borchgrevink's excellent book A Norwegian tragedy a heartbreaking glimpse into the life of a neglected boy and a young man who grew up outside on Oslo's best west side.
Breivik was surrounded by privileges, but never got his own success – neither as a hip-hop in his youth, as a business entrepreneur in his early adulthood, or as a political ideologist. The kebab cod looked ridiculous, the companies went bankrupt, and the political ambitions did not materialize. Neither Frp colleagues, the example Fjordman nor the Islam critics in document.no took his outstretched hand. He hadn't drawn on the ladies either, but he was just scratching it when he tried to check up nice blondes on Skøyen.
As a child, Breivik was abused by a mentally ill mother, and he badly needed his father, but was let down and overlooked by child and adolescent psychiatry. This happened at a time when family policy was based on mother's parental rights. For the same reason, it makes sense for him to replace a (imaginary) matriarch with a social system that strengthens the father's status. Breivik's patriarchal dream is devoted to many aspects of the manifesto that deals with "the solutions of the future."
Inward, backward, outward. Whether the amalgamation of anti-feminism, Islamophobia and militant high-nationalism triggers the actions, or are merely convenient ideological legitimations he draws on in retrospect, we hardly ever get an answer. As Kjetil Østli writes in her records Justice is just a word From the trial, we must live with the fact that there are no simple causal explanations for evil. The sum is always larger than the parts.
I have also experienced the same in my research on rape. I have spent more than 400 hours in Norwegian courtrooms and read hundreds of judgments. Neither I nor serious researchers have succeeded in finding a single factor that triggers the action. On the contrary, my work has sharpened my attention to detail. Evil acts – be it terror, murder or sexual violence – are complex phenomena that require fine-grained analysis. The feminist doctrine that rape alone is an expression of men's structural dominance over women is as inadequate as the idea that only immigrants or psychotic deviants with low impulse control rape. Neither terrorists, rapists nor killers are just lonely wolves.
In her master's thesis on therapists' perspectives on rape, my co-author Anja Emilie Kruse writes that rape must be understood on three levels, and as a social act with meaning beyond the action itself: It points bakover, against conditions in the abuser's life before the action, innovate, against psychological conditions, and outward, against the social, cultural and historical context the abuser is orienting himself to.
Roof and Breivik did not act alone, as Knausgård claims, but with the imagined permission of opinion-makers.
Having sat there on the spectator's bench in court, I have never had access to the inside of the abusers, just the pointing back and forth. And I've met many young, white frustrated men who seem strangely disintegrated and numb. Maybe it's the phrase, maybe I don't have the prerequisites to really understand – who has it? – but often I have thought that there is something Teflon-like, something impenetrable there. I have therefore given up my thinking and rather looked around.
And one thing has been left in almost all cases: a spectator's bench where the abusers' parents are never present. Many disappointed looks. And the most obvious question is never asked, not even in the confession cases: Why did you think this was okay? How do you think your actions have affected offenders?
The whole man. Thus, the connection is broken, again and again, to the attitudes among us, the great we, as the abuser also reflects. Among the young abusers, the lack of adult involvement and a collective correction of their distorted images of sex is striking. In our book on rape, Behind closed doors, Anja Emilie Kruse and I come up with a call that I think is transferable to how we can deal with evil acts more generally – including those committed by terrorists: “We bribe him from us, can't bear to understand him. He is often unable to understand himself either. Is it possible to take responsibility and make up for it when you are basically morally banished? How are really good opportunities for change created? First and foremost by putting unambiguous and uncompromising words on the wrong done. It really shouldn't be that difficult. Second, we must try to understand. Then man must be allowed to be all man, and not just his evil deed. It may prove to be the most difficult, but perhaps it is also the most important. ”
Bitsch is a social geographer
and permanent columnist in Ny Tid
