You know it’s true.

In case you don’t know why I am saying this, today is the dozenth anniversary of the neofascist (and Zionist) Anders Breivik’s massacre of seventy‐seven Norwegians whom he considered ‘Marxist members of the élite’. In reality, they were young social democrats, but for anticommunists such gross mischaracterizations have always been par for the course.

Breivik’s ideas are hardly unusual for his environment: anticommunism, antifeminism, and Islamophobia, to name only the most obvious. Unsurprisingly, though, most anticommunists consider his anticommunism to be of the least importance: an innocent characteristic that is about as relevant as his dominant hand or his blood type. After all, there are plenty of self‐identified anticommunists who haven’t committed terrorism, so who cares? Consequently, they have little to say about it, if obliged to acknowledge it at all.

Nevertheless, understanding Breivik’s anticommunism, and whence he learnt it, is crucial for understanding his philosophy and his violence. Quoting Fredrik Wilhelmsen’s ‘The Wife Would Put on a Nice Suit, Hat, and Possibly Gloves’: The Misogynistic Identity Politics of Anders Behring Breivik:

In Breivik’s vision of history, ‘cultural Marxism’ also represents the source of a ‘traitorous betrayal of Europe by its own leaders’. […] The […] main culprits, for Breivik, is not Muslims themselves, but the ‘cultural Marxist’, ‘multiculturalist’[,] ‘suicidal humanists’ and ‘feminist’ élites that in alleged collaboration with Muslims perform a ‘genocide against the indigenous peoples of Europe by exposing them to more than 25 million Muslims.’

While the explicit Islamophobia may not be as popular as it is today (given how incongruous it would look with their sympathies for the PRC’s minuscule Islamist minority), the supposed ‘Marxist’ cabal remains a privileged belief. For example:

Just ahead of the event, almost thirty years in the making, the Washington Free Beacon interviewed a member of the VOC Speakers Bureau, who explained to the right-wing outlet, “Marxism has gained a foothold in the American education system through the rise of cancel culture, revisionist history lessons, critical race theory, and divisive gender ideology… The coronavirus pandemic, [she] said, unveiled the extent of Marxist ideology in public education…”

(Emphasis added. Source.)

An analysis of Breivik’s politics, however, would be incomplete without examining his class background, which unfortunately many analysts choose to gloss over (if not omit entirely) without further comment. The closest exception that I have found to this comes from Tad Tietze’s Anders Breivik, Fascism and the Neoliberal Inheritance (from Hayek: A Collaborative Biography):

Breivik’s ideological conflicts can at one level be understood in terms of the complex class and ethnic contradictions of suburban Oslo that shaped his ideological development. A supplement to this was his declared aim to become millionaire, a task he took to with gusto from his final year of Gymnasium (high school) when he started to use the wages he earned in a telephone sales job to speculate on the stock market.

This was followed by aborted ventures in outdoor advertising and a successful online business selling fake university diplomas, produced — perhaps ironically given his later beliefs — by a low‐paid forger living in Indonesia. This took him to his first million Norwegian kroner.

However, the threat of exposure over the diplomas led him to abandon the business and return to the stock market in 2005, which was followed by sharp financial losses in the market decline of 2006. He was forced him to move back in with his mother, and this served as the background to his further political radicalization.

Breivik’s petty bourgeois background is typical amongst neofascists (as is the propertarian phase). Moreover, though, Islamophobia is useful to the European petty bourgeoisie: not only does it eliminate potential competitors from the market, but it can focus capitalism’s economic pressure on Muslims rather than ordinary, petty bourgeois Europeans, hence why European neofascists are so opposed to Muslims receiving welfare and other concessions. Breivik’s terrorism against social democrats was a petty bourgeois reaction to those concessions.

This leads me to why I chose the thread’s provocative title: Breivik’s sin was not so much that he massacred people, but that he did so without the bourgeois state’s permission. This is what separates him from other militant anticommunists, such as Roberto D’Aubuisson. They acted with the consensus of the haute‐bourgeoisie. Breivik did not: revolution was not a serious possibility, and it was unnecessary to reduce whatever gains that the proletariat had left, so his violence was, in short, merely a consequence of the (European) petty bourgeoisie’s struggle for survival.

If the bourgeois state ordered Breivik’s violence (including his planned violence against certain state officials, which bourgeois states have indeed ordered before), he would have been hailed as a hero or quickly forgotten—most likely both. The fact that he massacred social democrats would have been irrelevant; anticommunist dictatorships in the Americas and elsewhere have also massacred social democrats, but (very) few anticommunists—‘moderate’ or otherwise—even pretend to give a damn. At worst, those were just little oopsy‐daisies: further proof that America ‘may not be perfect’, but what’s important is that communist revolutions, which would have been infinitely worse, failed to occur.

Certainly, yes, not all anticommunists have committed terrorism, but few active anticommunists would strongly and unambiguously condemn the extreme violence of history’s many anticommunist dictatorships. Had Anders Breivik’s actions received the blessing of the ruling class, they would extend their apathy to him also.

For a reenactment of the events, see the motion picture 22 July.

Other events that happened today (July 22):

1942: The Axis began its systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto.
1943: Axis occupation forces violently dispersed a massive protest in Athens, massacring twenty‐two people. (Coincidentally, Allied forces captured Palermo during their invasion of Sicily.)
2001: Indro Montanelli, a white supremacist and Fascist sympathizer, died.
2014: Johann Breyer, an SS officer, dropped dead before attending his extradition hearing.