Lest we forget… THIS is what Breivik did. NEVER forget it…
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What difference would it make if you confined a man who killed 69 people on the Norwegian island of Utøya (and another 8 in downtown Oslo, bringing the total number to 77) to an ordinary prison or a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment? It might appear to be incredibly humane to give this man a chance to recover and (theoretically) to regain his liberty one fine day. Of course, there’s a lot of confusion in this case. What should we do with this Anders Behring Breivik? How can he avoid diagnosis as a paranoid schizophrenic? If he is, how can we put him on trial at all? If the police failed to shoot him on the spot where he perpetrated this atrocity, the simplest and shortest explanation is that someone who killed 77 people just couldn’t be sane.
There are certain individuals who don’t understand evil. These are generally very good people. Among the most well-known was a British World War II naval intelligence officer, who did a good job in the post-war period organising a foreign correspondent network for an influential newspaper, and later wrote several spy novels that immortalized his name. His name was Fleming… Ian Fleming. However, two different people seem to have written his James Bond novels. One, a clever and subtle person, describes the emotions of an agent that has the right to eliminate evil-doers. The other attempts to portray evil … and fails horribly. Now, he’d invent an armless Dr No, now, an Auric Goldfinger who would gild young females, and you know what he’d do to them next… this means that he simply couldn’t comprehend what went to make up a villain, although he certainly tried. The seemingly peaceful society of Norway, a quiet Scandinavian country, doesn’t understand either.
Only Russian literature, it seems, is able to understand this. Nevertheless, classic writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky never crossed path with the likes of Anders Breivik. I suspect that Breivik isn’t a deviant, but that he’s a human phenomenon typical of our day and age. Those of Dostoyevsky’s century were of a different kind. It’s terrible to admit, but Breivik represents a typical phenomenon in European culture (and Russian and US culture as well). It’s sufficient to recall numerous recent school-shootings or assaults on US presidents. Psychiatrists debate this point from time to time. If someone like Breivik fancies himself a Knight Templar, ready to save the world, what can we do about this? In short, many depict this major crime of 2011 (committed on 22 July) as a moderate natural calamity or an accident. Immediately, one’s mind brings up the Japanese tsunami and Fukushima disaster that claimed thousands of lives, or the flood in Thailand, where the death toll reached several hundred people. By comparison, there were only 77 people killed there.
However, we’d better let the cat out of the bag. Breivik wanted to save the world (or at least Europe) from Muslims. Before going on his shooting spree, he wrote a manifesto, which is now openly available in the Internet, explaining everything. Any educated person, let alone a psychiatrist, could easily tell that someone with very limited intellectual powers wrote the manifesto. That’s the core of the problem. There are a great many narrow-minded (though seemingly normal) people. Strictly speaking, racists are mostly irresponsible imbeciles, as I’ve had the opportunity to discover. Racism is a mental dysfunction that affects poorly-educated people. You can explain to them as much as you like that racism destroyed the British Empire (beginning in India), or that our home-spun racists (as well as extreme Western-oriented liberals {“conservatives” in Anglosphere usage: editor}) feed on an ideology that was laughed at in London back in the 1930s… and you will only be wasting your breath.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t a matter of whether Breivik is going to end up in an ordinary prison or a mental clinic. The problem is that even though European society enjoys all possible liberties, free education, and so on, Europe (and Russian society as well) breeds a lot of narrow-minded people who hate everyone, including people with different skin-colour. We seem to have reached a dead end in our civilisation, but there’s been no attempt at so much as acknowledging this obvious fact.
1 December 2011
Dmitri Kosyrev
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20111201/169192455.html
