The political establishment and the Oslo massacre

WSW

The establishment political parties and media have been busy covering their tracks following the massacre in Oslo last Friday.

While it is still not clear whether the 32-year-old killer Anders Behring Breivik acted alone, one thing is certain: there is a definite link between the campaign of incitement against Muslims, which has been supported by all of the parties of the US and European bourgeois establishment and by the media, and the political motives of the fascist who murdered 76 people. 

At his first court hearing on Monday, Breivik declared that he wanted to inflict maximum damage on Norway’s social democratic Labour Party because, he claimed, it had polluted Norwegian culture by allowing large numbers of Muslims to enter the country. From his anti-Islamic blogs and 1,500-page manifesto, it is clear that Breivik sought with his bloody act to strike a blow against Muslim immigrants and everything he regarded as Marxist, left, multicultural and “politically correct.” He chose to target the Norwegian Labour Party because he, erroneously, considered it to be Marxist and pro-immigrant.

Despite—or, more accurately, because of—Breivik’s explicitly fascist agenda and his known ultra-right associations, the media is at great pains to obscure the political issues raised by his atrocity and portray him as nothing more than a lone psychopath. His ideas, however, are not simply the creations of the diseased brain of one individual, but rather the products of a diseased social system. [...]