ANDERS BREJVIK - EUROPEAN 09/11

Anders Breivik’s, the mass murderer from Oslo, supposed delight with Serbs caused strong reactions among the Serbian public. They were so strong that one newspaper article about this had the headline – “The rights of Serbs are defended by madmen!”

At the home of 32-year old Breivik, who had killed 76 Norwegians last weekend, a 1500-page manifest was found. In this manifest he presents himself as an anti-Islamic Christian fundamentalist who praises the Serbian battle in the wars of the 90’s.

Breivik states that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was against “our Serbian brothers who wished to deport Albanians back to Albania”.

Apart from that, Breivik wrote how he wishes to meet the arrested leader of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzich who will, “due to his efforts to eradicate Islam from Serbia, always be regarded and remembered as an honorable crusader and European war hero.”

The Serbian antinational intelligence is afraid that Breivik’s manifest will show that his crime was inspired by the wars led by Serbs. They are also afraid that this could destroy the international reputation of today’s Serbia, whose leadership, tending toward European membership, recants these wars.

One of the leaders of the nongovernment sector, Miljenko Dereta says that Breivik was not inspired by the Serbs themselves, but the politics of the spin doctors of Slobodan Milosevic, the demonized Serbian leader of the 90’s.

“We should finally in due manner determine what that policy was,” Dereta self-critically proposes. Vojin Dimitrijevich, one of the most influential intellectuals in the antinational nongovernment sector, is still more radical. He says that Breivik’s massacre is indeed the “success of the media campaign during the time of Milosevic.” “Breivik could find followers in Serbia,” Dimitrijevich says.

In show of extreme self-criticism, these intellectuals, whose credo is giving up all Serbian national interests in the aim of entering the European Union, have forgotten a significant point. Namely, Breivik did not mention only Serbs. In his manifest, he supported Israel, Christians in Armenia, and conservative Hindus. Aside from this he showed great delight in the creation of Christian nations in southern Nigeria, Sudan, and panegyrizes the Russians, Thais, Philippinos, and the Chinese as warriors against Islam.

Nowhere other than in Serbia do intellectuals have the need to separate themselves from Breivik’s crime, and be critical towards their own nations. This instance of Serbian self-criticism many interpret with the fact that western countries have been financing various nongovernment organizations and their respective media in Serbian for the past 20 years in order to blame Serbs for the wars of the 90’s. This campaign, whose sole end was the demonization of Serbs has been reemphasized since the 90’s in the past four years. It is this long that last attempts of the USA and the more influential countries of the European Union to force the Serbian government to accept the independence of Kosovo. The territory in question is a Serbian province, mainly populated by Albanians, which, during the NATO bombing of 1999 seceded from Serbia. It is then that the pressure began from western countries on Serbia to accept the independence of Kosovo, which was declared contrary to the clauses of international law.

However, it cannot be said that the sole motive for the anti-Serb campaign in the few, but nonetheless influential pro-western circles in Serbia is money. A two-decade indoctrination of Serbs is in question, whose intellectual circles are becoming increasingly provincial, convinced that Serbs need to turn completely to the West, which is tearing their territory apart.

As Serbia fought for its Kosovo territory during the 90’s and after the breakup of Yugoslavia protected its Serbian population living in other nations, in the West it was portrayed as a nationalistic country of almost Nazi-like attitude.

But two of the afore-mentioned intellectuals, who had influence in the 90’s as well as today, have failed to mention that “nationalistic” Serbia, as well as Montenegro, remained the sole multi-ethnic country on the territories of ex-Yugoslavia. In its government today reside two ethnic Muslims and one of them, according to research of public opinion, is listed among the most popular ministers of Serbia.

Dereta and Dimitrijevich didn’t mention that Milosevic, a leftist and atheist could not fight a war of faith in Kosovo against the Muslims, but a war against irredentist forces who were supported by the West and the mother nation of Albania. They forget to mention that Breivik could not have been delighted by the Serbia of the 90’s, but by the brutal image of it, painted by the West, and supported by pro-western nongovernment organizations in Serbia. This is why Breivik cannot be the child of the “propaganda of Milosevic’s Serbia” as Dimitrijevich says, but rather the child of the anti-Serb propaganda of the time in the West, which was supported in Serbia by Dimitrijevich himself.

This picture was affirmed in the 90’s by the influential philosophers Bernard Henry-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut, historians Noel Malcolm, Timothy Garton Ash and an entire plethora of journalists who reported on the wars from ex-Yugoslavia.

Thus, if Breivik could not have been motivated by Serbia, but the terrible picture painted by the West, it is a question of what could it be in that picture that Breivik found appealing.

Together with a likely pathological streak in his character, Breivik, a member of the Norwegian elite undoubtedly educated and informed, is the dramatic and tragic finale of a grave trend in a critical Europe. This is why his motives cannot be found only in his psychology, just as it could not be done with the terrorists from 9/11/2001.

This is why Breivik’s crime requires investigation in a wider context of Norwegian circumstances. It could even be suggested that a sort of “European crime” is in question. Meanwhile, one should have in mind the historical fact that Europe is a unique territory where often the high dose of civilized accomplishments (education, technological advances, etc.) was not enough to evade drastic historical scenarios.

Nazism did not sprout in the “primitive” Balkans, but in the very heart of European Germany, just as communism was born in German philosophical thought.

Many critics of today’s Europe will agree that she is fighting her crisis by gradually renouncing its democracy and sinking into bureaucracy, and consequently this drags a certain autocracy with it. Europe today is led by politicians far below the capabilities of their great predecessors. At its head is Herman van Rompuy, an anonymous Belgian Christian democrat who was not elected, but appointed to the office. Foreign affairs and defense of the EU is led by the Brit Catherine Ashton, who was never elected for any office in her life. Due to this absence of legitimacy, her adversaries claim that the only reason for her high appointment in office was her marriage with a friend of Tony Blaire’s. The intellectual head of today’s pro-European intelligence is, for example, Timothy Garton Ash. He gladly deals with the question of how to remove the islamophobic rightists from the political scene, such as Dutch politician Geert Wilders, but so that removal may remain within the limits of democracy. On the question of why the removal, Garton Ash would probably say – because he is not one of us. And this becomes the key question in today’s Western world – how do we commit evil and remove those who bother us without committing the sin of authoritarianism. Is this not one of the formulas of barren bureaucracy?

This idea belonging to Garton Ash is not defendable with political thought, but this is easily feasible with bombs. And here we arrive at a philosopher who loves bombs. Does the egoistic euro-fanatic Maoist Bernard Henry Levy not raise military spirit in Libya today by comparing the world potential for democracy with the potential of American missiles?

When Europe was ruled by De Gaulle and Adenauer, and thought of by Marlow and Camus, democracy had faults but it produced results. In the government of the weak, democracy gave way to bureaucracy. The problem is that bureaucracy does not solve issues, but removes them, just as Garton Ash wishes to remove Wilder. Bureaucracy is just a different name for the removal of the Other One in any political discourse.

But accumulated problems are not solved there where the Other is expelled from the debate. There are not solutions there were democracy is measured by the number of American missiles. It is not possible there where any intellectual superiority is outweighed by administrative superiority of barren mediocrities who support and protect the system. He who refuses solutions, who wants to remove Wilders, he will get Breivik. And he already has him because Breivik will not raise his hand to ask for the right to speak, but rather will attain it with a gun. This is why Breivik is the European 9/11, the day when American democracy died at home. As Breivik was killing, democracy ceased to be a side in the battles of Europe. From that day on, the opposing sides in the conflict became bureaucracy and authoritarianism. This crime took place in a system which ceased to produce values or anything apart from the force of the word and tricks which prevent any change. This bureaucratic system, with refusal of change at its heart, collided with brutal violence head-on. And violence in itself is a change, but what kind of change?

This is why it is too late for Europe. Bureaucrats from Brussels believe that the continent is being drowned by financial deficits. False. Europe is being suffocated by a grand lack of ideas and removal of anything that produces solutions but is outside the world of bureaucracy, which in itself has no solutions.

Europe which Henry-Levy and Garton Ash think of is a Europe without ideas. It is a Europe which no iPod or super train will save from slipping into barbarism.