The killer’s supposedly fully thought out plan does not compute

As discussed at Gates of Vienna, an Irish right-liberal blogger, Mark Humphrys, has looked at the killer’s writings and finds that

In fact he was apparently like me—liberal right. He was anti-racist, pro-gay and pro-Israel. So how on earth did someone like that become a terrorist against the West?

Then Humphrys says:

It was sort of an attack on left-wingers, but a very strange one. It targeted children who had nothing to do with policy, and was incredibly sadistic, hunting them down and executing them close up. Even targeting the centre-left government is incredibly extreme—they support the Afghan War and the Libya War.

Humphrys then lists what he describes as

[t]he killer’s mild, moderate, anti-jihad online comments…. One would expect a mass murderer to post more extreme comments. This is incredibly strange.

Gates of Vienna concludes:

And that sums up the nightmare for me: it.will.not.compute.

And here’s another way that it does not compute. VFR reader Ben S. writes:

Considering that the killer complained specifically and repeatedly that cultural conservatives were tarred by cultural Marxists as fascists and Nazis, and that he listed Nazism, Communism, and Islam as ideologies of hate, why did he adopt Nazi (also Communist) tactics, namely the mass killing of actual and potential ideological opponents for the perceived crime of betraying the nation/system to hostile outside forces? His acts are a double hypocrisy: they not only contradict his expressed principles, but they are also the best evidence for the very equation of conservatives with Nazis that he inveighed against.

Ben’s point is worth repeating: if the killer didn’t like the way the left smears cultural conservatives as fascists and Nazis, why did he commit an act that will vastly magnify the left’s smears of cultural conservatives as fascists and Nazis?

The Norway killer is a sick monster. People on the right—and there are a disturbing number of them out there—who say anything to justify or rationalize this monster have gone badly astray. Such comments will not be posted at this site.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 24, 2011 10:26 AM | Send