Energy and Inflation

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

Energy and Inflation

by Fjordman

Many countries are currently experiencing rising inflation rates. Some of this has been blamed on the Russian invasion of the Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This war between two of the world’s major food exporters will certainly make matters worse. Yet the truth is that many countries, from the USA via Russia to Germany and other European nations, had already experienced rising prices throughout 2021 and early 2022. The war between Russia and the Ukraine simply made a bad situation even worse.

What are the causes of rising inflation? In some sense, the Western world has still not fully recovered from the financial crisis in 2008. Central banks have been printing money for years without truly fixing most of the underlying problems of the economy. Many European countries have higher levels of debt now than they did a couple of decades ago. The USA suffers from enormous levels of public debt, and the U.S. Congress keeps raising the debt ceiling again and again. In this situation, the administration of President Joe Biden has irresponsibly increased government spending in 2021 and 2022.

Another factor is the coronavirus pandemic. The new coronavirus known as COVID-19 spread worldwide during 2020 and 2021. It was first recorded in late 2019 in the city of Wuhan in China. Partly due to Chinese censorship, we may never know the full truth of what happened there. However, the most likely explanation is that the coronavirus spread from the virus laboratory in Wuhan, perhaps by an accidental leak. The virus also bears indications of having been deliberately altered by humans. If that is true, the Wuhan coronavirus is the first known case of a global pandemic created by a pathogen that had been actively manipulated by humans.

The coronavirus has made many humans sick and killed millions of people. Yet its greatest negative effects have arguably been economic. Several billion people from India to Canada have been affected by strict coronavirus lockdowns imposed by the authorities. Critics argue that some of these restrictions may have caused more problems than they solved. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and hundreds of millions of people have suffered negative effects from the lockdowns. Western countries have become more authoritarian and less free in just two years.

The war between Russia and the Ukraine thus came before the world had a chance to recover from the global effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This added another layer to the international economic turmoil.

An emerging energy crisis, largely created by political decisions, seems to have contributed directly to rising rates of inflation. On both sides of the Atlantic, Western politicians proclaim that the world is threatened by alleged man-made climate change and global warming caused by greenhouse gas emission from the use of fossil fuels. The European Union has approved a European Green Deal. It is supposed to make the EU climate neutral in 2050 through huge and costly changes to the economy and energy supply. Such drastic changes are allegedly needed to save our planet. The Biden Administration promotes similar policies in the USA.

Despite claims to the contrary, not all scientists are convinced that human actions are causing big changes to the Earth’s climate. Moreover, some of the suggested policies will probably not make any major difference to future climate if they are implemented. These policies will first and foremost cause major economic harm, and undermine the energy supplies of the Western world.

The Neolithic Revolution was the great transformation that occurred when hunter-gatherers became more settled and started growing their own food through the domestication of plants and animals. This changed human societies forever. It was also a gradual change that took thousands of years, and seems to have started independently in many different places.

The Industrial Revolution was another great transformation that changed the face of this planet. However, this revolution began in one civilization only, and spread everywhere within a few generations. Britain had an early leading role, followed by other European countries, North America and eventually the rest of the world.

Continue reading

Breivik: A Madman Returns to Court

Long-time readers are cognizant of the fact that Fjordman has strong personal reasons for paying attention to news reports about the convicted mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Below is Fjordman’s account of the recent parole hearing for the Butcher of Utøya.

Breivik: A Madman Returns to Court

by Fjordman

In January 2022, the mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was in court again in Norway. This time, he was asking for parole. The case was largely a formality. Hardly anybody truly believed that he would be set free. As expected, the court rejected his bid for release.[1]

Norway does not have the death penalty. A few traitors were executed shortly after the Second World War, most notably the Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling. Yet nobody has been executed since 1948, and the death penalty was formally abolished in 1979.[2]

Norway does not have life imprisonment, either. The most severe sentence you can get for any crime, even mass murder, is 21 years in prison. This is the sentence which Breivik received for the 77 people he killed in 2011. It amounts to a little over three months per murder. That number does not consider the dozens of attempted murders which he also committed during his attacks.

Breivik also received forvaring, which may be translated as preventive detention. This means that he can still be held behind bars, in theory for the rest of his life, if he is still deemed to pose a threat to society. However, this detention is not a regular prison sentence. Nor is it referred to as such.

Although most people still call him Anders Behring Breivik, the killer legally changed his name to Fjotolf Hansen in 2017.[3] Hansen is a common surname in Norway. Fjotolf, however, is an extremely unusual and possibly unique given name. It sounds like the kind of name which a three-year-old child might give to his imaginary play friend. It is an appropriately absurd name for an absurd person.

I currently live in exile and will probably not return to live in Norway again for many years, if ever. The reason for this is that some of my legal texts were quoted without my knowledge or approval by a mentally disturbed man I have never met. This is strange, but true.

Since I had already wasted years of my life on that man and the July 2011 case, I was initially reluctant to follow the 2022 trial closely. However, what was new this time was that some mass media would post video from the proceedings. I had read his so-called manifesto, plus many books and articles about the case. However, I had not actually listened much to Breivik himself speak on video. Neither had most other Norwegians.

The national newspaper Dagbladet on their website showed 96.7% of Breivik’s own statements to the court in January 2022.[4] The fact that they cut out a little bit was negative, but they still showed most of it unfiltered and uncensored. This was quite eye-opening for many viewers.

The forensic psychiatrists who assessed Breivik in 2011 concluded that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is insane. This triggered an outrage from major media and many politicians. After massive pressure, the judges in Oslo District Court relented, ignored the first psychiatric assessment and concluded that Breivik is sane. However, many people still suspect that the original assessment was correct.

If ABB does indeed have paranoid schizophrenia, he is not likely to have improved after spending over a decade in isolation in a prison cell with no known medical treatment. The Breivik which the public saw in 2022 was at least as deranged as he was in 2011. Possibly worse.

Continue reading

R.I.P. Lars Vilks

Fjordman just sent this brief note:

Big news tonight from Sweden that the artist Lars Vilks, best known for depictions of the prophet Muhammad, has been killed in a car accident. Two police officers assigned to protect Vilks were also killed in the crash. As police were involved in the crash, it is currently being investigated carefully.

Links:

It’s too early to say whether cultural enrichment was involved in Mr. Vilks’ tragic death.

I’ll be writing more about the legacy of Lars Vilks in later posts. For now, I’ll just quote from what I said back in March of 2015:

Although he would probably not agree with the characterization, the Swedish artist Lars Vilks is a hero of the Counterjihad movement.

Like many other people who have chosen to criticize or mock Islam, Mr. Vilks’ life has been in danger for years. Last month he was the target of a failed assassination attempt in Copenhagen. Throughout the aftermath of this incident, and during all his previous tribulations, the artist has remained steadfast in his defense of free speech as an absolute. For the past eight years he has never retracted or groveled or apologized to Islam. His position in March 2015 remains the same as it was in July 2007.

In the fall of 2007, at the height of the initial controversy over “The Prophet as a Roundabout Dog”, someone asked Mr. Vilks if drawing the cartoon was worth dying for. In reply he said simply, “Yes, it is.”

That’s what makes him a hero.

I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. Vilks in person, but he was kind enough to send the following drawing to us, which he drew especially for Gates of Vienna:


Lars Vilks: Jan III Sobieski and a rondellhund at the Gates of Vienna

Rest in peace, Lars Vilks.

For previous posts on Lars Vilks and the Roundabout Dogs, see the Modoggie Archives.

The Crash of Civilization

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

The Crash of Civilization

by Fjordman

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were the type of shocking event where many people remember exactly where they were and what they did that day. Personally, I was living in Egypt at that time. I had started studying Arabic language at the University of Bergen in western Norway. In 2001 I continued these studies at the American University in Cairo.

My linguistic skills in Arabic were mediocre. Since I left the Middle East in 2003 and haven’t practiced the language since, my Arabic has deteriorated and is now quite poor. For me, studying Arabic primarily became a door into studying Islam and Islamic culture. I was far better in this field of study, and continued my personal studies of Islam for years. I am at heart not a linguist, but rather an analyst with a strong interest in history.

Before September 2001, I was already growing more skeptical of Islam based on my own studies and personal experiences. Still, living in the largest city in the Arabic-speaking world during the September 11 Jihadist attacks was certainly interesting. The Mubarak regime imposed a curfew on Tahrir Square and parts of downtown Cairo that day. Perhaps they feared that some local Muslims would publicly celebrate the attacks, the way some Palestinian Muslims did. When Egypt received billions of dollars in aid from the USA, this would not have been good publicity.

I followed the news and newspapers back home via the Internet. They claimed that all Arabs and Muslims were sad and horrified by the attacks. This is not true. I know. I was there. Some of my Egyptian Muslim neighbors celebrated with cakes and said openly that they were very happy about the attacks.

To me, the most shocking thing about this was not that many Arabs and Muslims hated the West in general and the USA in particular. I already knew that. What was truly disturbing was that virtually the entire Western world seemed to be in complete denial about this fact. This was an entire civilization which once used to cultivate logic and reason, yet now seemed to have lost the ability to think rationally. That really scared me.

The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu completed his book The Art of War around the year 500 BC. Despite being more than 2,500 years old, it remains surprisingly fresh and relevant. This is because Sun Tzu focused mainly on the psychological aspects of conflict. While human technology has changed greatly in 2,500 years, human psychology has changed a lot less. One of the most famous quotes from The Art of War is this:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

From what I observed in September 2001, it seemed that the Western world had forgotten who our enemies are. Far worse, though, was that we had even forgotten who we are, and the roots of our own civilization.

A decade later, another terror attack would have an even more direct impact on my life. Both attacks became national traumas. Yet the 2011 attacks in Norway were carried out by a single individual acting alone, whose alleged terrorist network only existed inside his mentally disturbed head. The 2001 attacks in the USA were carried out by many different individuals from a real international terror network whose ideology has adherents worldwide. Moreover, when a small country is attacked, this is bad for that small country. When a large and powerful country is attacked, this has geopolitical consequences.

By 2011, I had been living in the same flat in Oslo for eight years, since my return from the Middle East. When the July 22 attacks happened, some people blamed me personally for the atrocities. I suddenly found myself near the epicenter of an international news story. This was extremely unpleasant, but in some ways also educational. If the 2001 attacks weakened my trust in Western mass media, the 2011 attacks totally destroyed it.

Continue reading

Europe Under Siege

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

Europe Under Siege

by Fjordman

As I write these words, Europe is under siege. An invasion is taking place by land, by sea and sometimes by air. Nearly every day, migrants show up uninvited in Europeans waters. Sometimes in southern Italian islands such as Lampedusa,[1] other times in Lesbos or other Greek islands near the coast of Turkey, occasionally in Malta or Cyprus, and increasingly in the Canary Islands.

The migrants are sometimes called “refugees” in Western media. Yet many of them are not refugees in any meaningful sense of the word. They come from different countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco or Ghana where there is no war. The majority are young men of fighting age. When groups of men of military age systematically force their way into another country’s territory, this is an invasion. Not all invasions happen by tanks.

Europe has a turbulent history and has experienced many sieges of castles or cities before. Yet what we are witnessing now is different. This is the siege of an entire continent, one that could last for generations. Many Trojan horses are already inside the gates, and the walls are crumbling.

The global population reached one billion people for the first time around the year 1800, during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.[2] By then, all major habitable land masses on this planet had been settled by humans. It took all nations and tribes hundreds of thousands of years, from archaic humans such as Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, to reach one billion people. Now, a single continent, Africa, grows by a billion people in a few decades.

Some technologically sophisticated societies such as South Korea or Japan have low birth rates. Meanwhile, backward societies such as Niger or Yemen have high birth rates. Ethiopia will surpass Japan in population within this decade. Meanwhile, Ethiopia experiences tensions with Egypt over the use of water from the Nile River .[3] Egypt, too, has surpassed 100 million inhabitants, mostly crammed into a narrow strip along the Nile.[4]

Overpopulation in parts of Asia and Africa could potentially cause wars over water and other resources in the future. Some of these countries have problems feeding themselves even now.

If we state that 220-230 million people lived on the entire African continent in 1950, this is a reasonably realistic estimate. A single African country, Nigeria, now has a population of nearly 220 million people.[5] And it keeps growing fast. If this population growth continues, Nigeria alone could end up with a population larger than that of the entire European Union.[6] Africa is projected to have a population of perhaps 2.5 billion people by the year 2050.[7] The poorest and least technologically developed continent on this planet will thus have expanded its population ten to eleven times in less than a century. This is clearly not sustainable.

Continue reading

Fjordman: The Disaster in Afghanistan

If you appreciate this essay by Fjordman, please consider making a donation to him, using the button at the bottom of this post.

The Disaster in Afghanistan

by Fjordman

The Western pullout from Kabul during the Taliban advance on August 16, 2021 was a chaotic and embarrassing mess. This was a global humiliation for the USA and the Western defense alliance NATO.

The Western-backed former Afghan leader, Ashraf Ghani, reportedly departed his country with so much money that it couldn’t all fit in his helicopter. He was thus forced to leave some cash at the airport.

The total costs of the war in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021 are disputed. However, sums of up to one trillion — one thousand billion — US dollars have been mentioned as reasonably realistic estimates. What did that money achieve? Absolutely nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. The Taliban in August 2021 controlled more territory in Afghanistan than they did in August 2001. And they had better weapons, too.

The Americans and their Western allies spent tens of billions on building up Afghan security forces, including the Afghan National Army and the police force. When the USA and its allies pulled out in 2021, the Afghan army collapsed with astonishing speed. Even the Taliban seem to have been surprised by how quickly any resistance evaporated.

This means that the modern military equipment that was intended to combat the Taliban is now in the hands of the Taliban. Twenty years of fighting, costing perhaps 1,000 billion dollars and the lives of over 3,500 Western soldiers, has simply handed the country back to the Taliban, with some weaponry added as a bonus.

The fact that many Muslims in Afghanistan put up little resistance against the Taliban probably indicates that they like them and share their Islamic sharia ideals. In any case, they deserve the Taliban when they are not willing to resist them. This result could encourage more Jihadist aggression, in Afghanistan and beyond.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the country became a battleground in the Cold War. The USA and other nations supported various armed Muslim rebel groups in their fight against Soviet forces. After the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, these Jihadist groups claimed victory.

The Afghan mujahideen included the embryo of what would become the Taliban, as well as foreign militant Muslims such as Osama bin Laden and the terrorist network al-Qaida. Islamic groups such as the Taliban can thus claim that the mighty forces of Allah in Afghanistan defeated two superpowers in just over three decades. This is not an entirely empty boast.

The disaster in Afghanistan was caused by the stubborn inability of Western elites to understand Islamic culture and tribal societies. They believe that other people think like us, and want to become like us. This is both extremely naïve and extremely arrogant at the same time.

Continue reading

Danish Days

Steen has posted an excellent selection of photos of Fjordman taken during the latter’s exile in Denmark.

Now that Fjordman has given permission for photos of him to be published, I dug through my image archives to see what I could find. I have a fair number of photos taken between 2007 and 2013, the last time I was in Europe. It fills me with a kind of nostalgic melancholy to look at them, since I know I’ll never see Denmark again, given that that I won’t be getting the “vaccination”. Even if I could somehow hop a catamaran to cross the Atlantic like Greta Thunberg, the Danish immigration authorities would still want to see my vaccine passport before they’d let me in.

A lot of the photos in my archive can’t be posted, because they contain other people who have yet to go public, and I don’t feel like trying to pixelate all of them out. However, I picked out a small selection to post here.

Steen took this photo of Fjordman and me in Copenhagen after one of our Counterjihad meetings in 2009:

Not all the photos are from Denmark. This one of Fjordman with Tommy Robinson was taken at an event in London in 2011:


Fjordman and Tommy Robinson, 2011

You can see Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in the left background.

As he mentioned in his post on Thursday, Fjordman spent some time in the USA in the spring of 2012 during the trial of Anders Behring Breivik. While he was here, he went to several wine tastings:


Fjordman at a wine tasting, 2012

In the process of digging through various folders, I came across a couple of screen shots of the letter that Anders Behring Breivik wrote and sent to major media outlets in the fall of 2013:

Continue reading

July 22, Ten Years On

Ten years ago today Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. Of all the Counterjihad activists who were impacted by the political blowback from the attacks, none was more affected than Fjordman. Below are his remarks on the occasion of the anniversary.

July 22, Ten Years On

by Fjordman

Sometimes life can be very strange. When I was eating lunch in my small basement flat in Oslo on July 22, 2011, I did not anticipate that in a few hours my country would be rocked by a brutal mass murder. And I certainly did not expect that these events would also turn every aspect of my own life upside down.

Suddenly and without warning, I was thrown into the epicenter of an international media storm. Less than two weeks later, I had evacuated my home and fled from Norway out of serious concerns for my safety. At this point, I was publicly accused of being a possible accomplice to mass murder, and the suggested brains behind an international terrorist network. If my life in the summer of 2011 had been the script for a film, it would have been rejected as being too improbable to happen in real life. Yet all of this did happen to me, plus a lot more. All because of the actions of a man I have never once met in my entire life, not even for a cup of coffee.

Ten years later, things have calmed down somewhat. I have managed to reestablish a reasonably stable personal life. However, this is a new life in a new country.

I quietly moved back to Norway in 2017, to see whether it was possible for me to have a normal life there again. The answer was no. Three and a half years of applying for jobs turned out to be futile. I got no job whatsoever, not even as an unskilled laborer in factories, butcheries or the fishing industry. I applied for such jobs, too, not just for work in offices or shops.

In early 2021, I therefore decided to leave Norway again, for the second time in less than ten years. It is unlikely that I will return in the foreseeable future for anything other than short visits.

A decade of smears following the July 22 attacks by Anders Behring Breivik has left its mark. Norwegian media still publish new articles suggesting that I inspired mass murder. New comments are still being published on social media claiming that I have the blood of children on my hands. Not every month, fortunately, but from time to time.

Being quoted in Breivik’s confused compendium/manifesto is by far the greatest curse of my life. Nothing else even comes close. But perhaps it is possible to be cursed and blessed at the same time. I was also blessed with being surrounded by kind people. Both old friends and new friends alike.

I was homeless for some time. Friends in Denmark referred to me, only half-jokingly, as a political refugee from Norway. My first temporary home was with my friend Steen Raaschou in Copenhagen. He was exceptionally patient, and allowed me to occupy his sofa for months at a time. I also stayed for a while with professor emeritus Bent Jensen and his lovely Russian wife Tatjana. In the spring of 2012 I spent several months in the USA, and never lacked a bed to sleep in. My friend Ned May from Gates of Vienna helped me with this arrangement*. Not all of those who helped me probably want to be named. But they know who they are, and they have my gratitude.

In 2011, I had a part-time job in Oslo, working with young people suffering from autism. After the massive and extremely negative media focus on me in July and August of 2011, it was impossible for me to keep doing this job. Frankly, it was probably dangerous for me to even stay in my old flat. So I suddenly no longer had a job or steady income at the same time as I had to spend money on lawyers.

Continue reading

A Summer of Madness

Ten years ago I walked this street; my dreams were riding tall.
Tonight I would be thankful, Lord, for any dreams at all.

— Robert Hunter, from “Mission in the Rain”

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack in Norway. On July 22, 2011, a man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a truck bomb in central Oslo next to government headquarters, killing eight people. While police and emergency services were dealing with the aftermath, Mr. Breivik drove to the island of Utøya, where a summer camp for Socialist Youth was being held. There he methodically shot and killed sixty-nine teenagers with a high-powered rifle. When police finally arrived at the island, he calmly surrendered.

Anders Behring Breivik was a neo-Nazi, but that fact did not emerge until several years later, when he wrote a letter to multiple media outlets and admitted that his declared affiliation with the Counterjihad movement had been a strategic misdirection, to spare his Aryan nationalist comrades from persecution. That part of his letter to the media was widely ignored, and was never publicly reported by any major outlet. To this day he is widely identified as an anti-Islam ideologue.

Before he committed his atrocities, Mr. Breivik had arranged the media distribution of his manifesto, or as he preferred to call it, “the compendium”. It was a lengthy, rambling treatise. It contained some of his own writing, but most of it consisted of extensive quotes from various English-language writers, the most prominent of which were Fjordman and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

Those writers and others mentioned in the manifesto became the focus of a media frenzy beginning the following morning. Progressive pundits applied their usual pseudo-syllogism to the Utøya massacre:

1.   Breivik admired Fjordman.
2.   Breivik massacred innocent people.
3.   Therefore Fjordman was at least partially responsible for the atrocity. Q.E.D.
 

As I mentioned above, the Butcher of Utøya did not really look up to Fjordman; his admiration was a feint. So even the pseudo-syllogism was wrong. But none of that mattered; any information to the contrary was ignored by the left-wing media. Fjordman became an object of universal loathing. In Norway he was Public Enemy #1, in some ways eclipsing Breivik himself.

Up until that time Fjordman had only published his essays under a pseudonym. Beginning on the morning of July 23, the press and internet sleuths began an intensive effort to unmask him. It was only a matter of time before his real identity was uncovered, so after retaining counsel and making himself known to police, he outed himself via an interview with the tabloid VG. After that he fled the country and went into hiding.

And it’s a good thing he did: there were calls for him to be arrested and tried as Mr. Breivik’s accomplice, despite the fact that the two had never met, and Fjordman had never advocated violence in any form. But Norwegian public opinion did not bother itself with such trivial matters as facts and the truth. The slaughter on Utøya required a scapegoat, and Fjordman was chosen for the role.

He lived outside of Norway for a number of years, and only returned when the risk of arrest had diminished. However, he was unable to find work. Any prospective employer who was aware of who he was would refuse to hire him, and if he somehow found a job, even a menial one, he would be discharged as soon as his employer became aware of his identity. Now, ten years after the attack, he is living outside the country again, since he is unemployable in his homeland.

And, regardless of Mr. Breivik’s admission that his admiration for Fjordman was a ruse, Fjordman is still widely known as “Breivik’s mentor”.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

I won’t go into the Breivik affair in great detail, since this is primarily a reminiscence about the effect the atrocity had on Gates of Vienna and the Counterjihad in general. To learn more, check out the archives for the period from July 22, 2011 to ca. November 2011. Or look up the relevant items in the Fjordman Files. The trial of Anders Behring Breivik sucked up a lot of our blogging oxygen in the spring of 2012; see Circus Breivik for a relevant sample.

Because Gates of Vienna was the main venue for Fjordman’s writings, and was mentioned repeatedly in the killer’s manifesto, this site was put under the media’s klieg lights beginning the day after the massacre. We were thrust into a prominence we had never seen before (or since). It was a hideous kind of fame that I would never have asked for — they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but my experience in the summer of 2011 makes me vehemently disagree.

In the first few weeks we received hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails. Some of them were simply requests for information, but they were mostly hate mail, sometimes in Norwegian and Swedish. Various media outlets wanted to contact Fjordman, and I dutifully passed the messages on to him, but he didn’t respond to any of them.

The number of comments at Gates of Vienna (which was still on blogspot at the time) rose into the hundreds for each post, many of them from obvious trolls and provocateurs employed by one or another state intelligence service. They soon became unmanageable, so we reluctantly closed the blog to comments for a couple of months. When we reactivated them, we made them subject to moderation, and they’ve been that way ever since. It’s frustrating and annoying for commenters to have to wait to see their contributions appear, but otherwise Dymphna and I would have been unable to cope with all the trolls and provocateurs.

By the beginning of the week following the attack, media outlets started contacting me. They somehow managed to obtain my phone number, and I received calls from newspapers in Norway and the UK. Needless to say, I declined to say anything to them.

During our fifteen minutes of lurid fame we were mentioned in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other illustrious publications. The following report from the NYT told its readers that Anders Behring Breivik had commented on Gates of Vienna several times:

What they said was quite true. Fortunately, I had already been alerted to the fact by a European contact, who told me the pseudonym that had been used by Mr. Breivik, so I was able to track down all his comments. Some people urged me to delete them, but that’s not the way we do business here at Gates of Vienna. First of all, nothing ever disappears completely from the Internet; it can always be found in the Wayback Machine or other web archives. But more importantly, I don’t believe in hiding the truth, whether it makes me look bad or not. So I collected all of the Butcher’s comments and reposted them.

Other things published by major media outlets, particularly the British tabloids, were not as accurate. The Washington Post published my name and something about me that was completely, factually false. I sent them an email demanding that they retract and correct their error, but I knew that nothing would happen. All I could do was post about what they did and ridicule them. If I had been a famous movie actress or best-selling novelist who could afford to retain high-powered lawyers, I might have had more success. But the WaPo knows it has nothing to fear from minnows like me.

Other papers, especially the tabloids, published even more ludicrous falsehoods about Gates of Vienna — who we were associated with, where we got our funding, etc., etc. And they asserted various bogus things about other people in the Counterjihad whom I knew personally — so-and-so is funded by the Koch Brothers, or the Mossad, or whatever. Just absolute nonsense.

That summer taught me not to believe ANYTHING that I read in the media unless it is corroborated by multiple independent sources and has a breadcrumb trail that leads back to verifiable facts. Which doesn’t leave much. Reading media news reports has become a form of entertainment for me, like reading mystery novels or watching The Simpsons.

The general effect on the Counterjihad was catastrophic. A lot of sites, especially those in Europe, closed down for good. A number of Counterjihad activists I knew personally soiled their breeches and fled the field at the first whiff of grapeshot. I must admit that I became exasperated with them — I said, “You knew how serious this work was when you got into it. What did you think we were doing, playing tiddlywinks??”

However, in retrospect, I’ve had to acknowledge that they did what they had to do. Unlike me, most of them had day jobs. They stood to lose a lot if they were exposed. Some of them had families to support. I can’t judge them. They dropped out of sight, and I haven’t heard from them since.

A few people urged me to shut down Gates of Vienna. But my Scots blood comes to the fore at such times, and my natural response is defiance. I said, “F**K THAT S**T!” [emphasis in the original] and soldiered on. It was a rough time, and I didn’t get much sleep for the first couple of months. But we weathered the storm.

On the whole, however, it was a major setback from which the Counterjihad never fully recovered. The resistance to Islamization has never returned to the level of July 21, 2011. Freedom of speech has been eroded even further, and sharia is now de facto in force in much of the West.

Dymphna and I always thought that Anders Behring Breivik’s machinations had been guided and assisted by a certain three-letter agency with the assistance of Norwegian intelligence. His “compendium” was obviously in large part not his own work, and his selection of “mentors” was exquisitely chosen to do maximum damage to those who opposed Islamization, at the exact time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the thick of collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood in what eventually became known as the “Istanbul Process”. Resistance to Islam was a thorn in her side, and Anders Behring Breivik helped remove it.

I don’t think mass slaughter was part of the plan, however — the Norwegians would never have co-operated with such an operation. I think the intention was to let Mr. Breivik put together his scheme, and then roll it up at the last moment before it was executed. There would have been a prominent arrest, followed by maximum media publicity for his manifesto.

However, just before the plans matured, Wikileaks released a damaging series of documents showing some of the things [agency name redacted] had been up to in Europe, which forced them to shut down their presence in the American embassy in Oslo and withdraw Mr. Breivik’s handlers. The Butcher of Utøya was then let off his leash, and the rest is history.

Whether mass slaughter was intended or not, the plan was a great success. The Counterjihad was hobbled, the spread of sharia proceeded apace, and the Obama administration became a servant of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Biden administration is, in effect, Obama’s third term.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Before I close these remarks, I’d like to address an appalling issue that has emerged surrounding the mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik. When it first came up it was very distressing, but I’ve had ten years to get used to it. Now it’s just something that I have to endure whenever the topic is broached on this site.

In those early days I was shocked by the number of people who supported Mr. Breivik and considered him a hero for what he did. And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and Aryan supremacists, but more mainstream people who oppose mass immigration and hate socialism. Every time I post something about the Butcher of Utøya they pop up again and express their admiration for him.

I’m not going to tolerate such comments, and will delete them when they appear. You might as well spare yourself the effort. If you want, you can visit Storm Front and similar sites and make your remarks there, where you’ll get a sympathetic reception and find a lot of people who agree with you.

I’m familiar with the arguments that people make to justify their opinion: Mr. Breivik was targeting future socialists, who would otherwise have grown up and entered politics and invited even more of the Third World into Norway. But that’s a specious line of reasoning, in my opinion. The mass slaughter only hardened public opinion against those who oppose mass immigration, and made it even more difficult to restrain such immigration. Killing all those kids inspired no sympathy for the Aryan cause; it had the opposite effect.

But that’s just the practical, utilitarian argument against it.

Mr. Breivik’s strategy was a recapitulation of one of the major trends of the 20th century: the mass extermination of entire classes of people. For him it was Young Socialists. For Hitler it was Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and the feeble-minded. For Stalin it was counter-revolutionaries, “wreckers”, the bourgeoisie, kulaks, and Ukrainians. For Pol Pot it was the intellectuals. For the Hutus it was the Tutsis. For Muslims it was Jews, Christians, Hindus, and other infidels.

What all the architects of those atrocities have in common is that they considered it morally justifiable, and even laudable, to engage in the mass slaughter of people based on their membership in a particular class — a race, a social class, an occupation, a nationality, etc. Individuals meant nothing. Those who engineered the massacres were not required to determine whether their victims were guilty of any crimes, or even subscribed to a particular ideology. They were members of a class, and for that reason they deserved to die. Men, women, children, invalids, the elderly and enfeebled — all had to go.

That is a pernicious mindset, and I’ll have none of it. It was the bane of the 20th century, and we’ve no business extending it into the 21st.

I know the counter-arguments — we’re in a war, and war sometimes requires us to do horrible things, etc., etc. If we want to win, we have to grit our teeth and do what is necessary.

Well, if that’s what it takes to win, then I don’t want to win. I’ll go down to defeat rather than jump into that particular boxcar to hell.

The Terror on Utøya and the Nuances of Insanity

Next Thursday will mark the tenth anniversary of the massacre of 77 people in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, the Butcher of Utøya. The events of that day turned my life upside down for a few months, but what happened to me is trivial compared to what Fjordman went through.

There were far too many posts on those events for me to link to just one. If you want a refresher course, dig into the archives beginning on July 22, 2011 and work your way forward. It began with a live blog that included Fjordman himself.

I expect that we’ll be hearing from Fjordman in due course, and I’ll write a brief reminiscence of my own. But today I’ll start with excerpts from a post by Ronie Berggren, a Swedish blogger and podcaster. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:

The terror on Utøya and the nuances of insanity

July 4, 2021

Ronie Berggren reviews the book Witness to madness [Vitne til vanvidd] by Peder Jensen, about the witch hunt against Islam critics and critics of mass immigration that prevailed after the terrorist attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya on July 22, 2011, for which Jensen himself was pilloried as perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik’s prophet.

It has been ten years since Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb in Oslo’s government quarters and then shot 69 young people dead in a Social Democratic camp on the island of Utøya. It happened on July 22, 2011. An insane world was on view, for which Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

[…]

I have not read everything that his critics have written. I have read parts of Øyvind Strømmen’s book, whose Swedish translation I bought when it came out. I have not read Simen Sætre’s book about Jensen / Fjordman, but I have seen a lecture by him on YouTube, a 20-minute sleeping pill.

My own impression is that these experts are less knowledgeable than their Swedish counterparts, and especially Mattias Gardell (whom I read most of, and whose research methods I have great respect for even if I do not share his political views, which I consider obscure his conclusions). Gardell’s strength is that he is usually well-read about the subjects he describes, although he often simplifies and paints with far too broad a brushstroke, and creates his own narratives instead of examining the truth objectively. But despite that, he is still knowledgeable, or at least well-read, which Simen Sætre does not seem to be at all.

I therefore judge, based on the qualifications I actually have, that Peder Jensen is much more credible than his critics. Which brings me to the last part of my conclusions.

For the past ten years Peder Jensen has had to live as an outcast from his own country. Social stigma and unemployment are the price he has to pay for living by a principle that should be respected: the search for the truth and the courage to stand up for the truth he believes he has discovered. In a healthy nation, such people are utilized, made into political leaders if they are practical, or professors if they are more theoretically minded. This has not happened in Jensen’s case. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Continue reading

The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints — A Book Review

Long-time readers will remember Max Denken, who contributed a number of essays here several years ago. Mr. Denken retired from the scene to write books about our civilizational crisis. Fjordman has kindly reviewed the first one for Gates of Vienna readers.

The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints — A Book Review

by Fjordman

It is not every day that you come across a book dedicated to the continued survival of an entire civilization. Yet the author Max Denken has written just such a text. He has previously written under the pen name Takuan Seiyo for dissident online publications such as Gates of Vienna, The Brussels Journal, The New English Review, Quarterly Review, Takimag and others. His well-written and carefully researched book about the future of European civilization is called The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints: Poland and the erosion of Western sanity, 2015—2020.

The title is a reference to The Camp of the Saints (“Le Camp des Saints”), a novel from 1973 by the French author Jean Raspail. It predicted a Third World mass invasion of Europe, causing the downfall of Western civilization. This process was compressed in time so that what might take fifty years in real life took fifty days in the book. In addition, the bulk of illegal immigrants in the novel came from India. Today, while immigration to Europe comes from every corner of the planet, much of it comes from the Islamic world and Africa.

Apart from that, the novel was remarkably prescient in describing the dysfunctional mindset of the modern Western world. We have become so wedded to unsustainable humanitarian ideals that we are mentally incapable of defending our national existence. When faced with millions of people coming from the global South, we simply raise a white flag and say that they are welcome to colonize our countries. At least, that is what our leaders and mass media do. The EU and Pope Francis react to illegal mass migration in the Mediterranean in almost exactly the manner described in Raspail’s book decades earlier. Europe risks committing suicide because of abstract humanitarian ideals and a Globalist ideology of open borders.

Jean Raspail died in June 2020, shortly before he would have turned 95. He lived to see his native France and other Western countries being partly overrun by migrants. Max Denken completed The Camp of the Sane in the summer of 2020, just as the author of The Camp of the Saints died. Western cities were then engulfed in Black Lives Matter protests, attacks on statues and European monuments and sometimes violent riots. Western mass media presented U.S. President Trump as an extremely evil man, as they had been doing continuously for five years. Some Western media said more positive things about the Communist dictator Fidel Castro when he died in November 2016 than they said about Donald Trump when he won free elections that some month.

Max Denken has Polish ancestry, has lived in California for many years and worked in other parts of the world. He considers the entire Western world to be deeply sick and heading for some form of collapse. This applies to North America as well as Western Europe. Against this crumbling Camp of the Saints, Denken pits what he terms The Camp of the Sane. Roughly speaking, this encompasses much of the eastern half of Europe, or at least the eastern quarter. Ironically, these are countries that were squeezed and bloodied between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War and endured generations of repressive Communist rule during the Cold War. Perhaps their recent historical experiences have provided these nations with a stronger resistance against ideological indoctrination.

Western Europe still has some brave political leaders such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, but they may have emerged too late to save their countries from collapse. The Western world and what remains of its civilization are in freefall. Denken does not rule out the possibility that something sensible can be created in North America out of the disunited Multicultural mess that is present-day USA and Canada. However, he believes that the best future prospects for European civilization lie in Central and Eastern Europe.

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe no doubt believed that they had joined a sensible project for European cooperation and joint prosperity when they joined the EU. Some of them have come to realize that the increasingly repressive EU now resembles a cultural suicide pact. Money from the EU may seem tempting to nations that were left impoverished after decades of Communist rule. Yet these are silver coins laced with ideological poison. For 1400 years, the forces of Islam have been the collective enemy of the peoples of Europe. Now, the EU wants to force formerly independent European countries to take in Muslim immigrants.

Continue reading

Fjordman Interview, Part 7: “An Entire Civilization That Has Lost the Ability to Think”

This is the seventh and final excerpt from a January 11 interview with Fjordman. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

Below is the final installment of the Document.no interview, recorded on January 7 and published on January 11. It was translated for subtitles by Fjordman himself.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

For more on Øyvind Strømmen, see:

Video transcript:

Continue reading

Fjordman Interview, Part 6: “Breivik Wanted to Copy al-Qaida”

This is the sixth excerpt from a January 11 interview with Fjordman. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Below is the sixth installment of the Document.no interview, recorded on January 7 and published on January 11. It was translated for subtitles by Fjordman himself.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

Continue reading

Fjordman Interview, Part 5: “They Had to Invent a Version of Me as the Culprit”

This is the fifth excerpt from a January 11 interview with Fjordman. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Below is the fifth installment of the Document.no interview, recorded on January 7 and published on January 11. It was translated for subtitles by Fjordman himself.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

For more on Breivik’s letters from prison see “Breivik’s ‘Double-Psychology’””.

Video transcript:

Continue reading