As details come in from Norway, and we get more details about the gunman and his possible motives, we have to wonder about why he did it. He was a Norwegian, killing Norwegian teenagers. There were probably political motives, but just trying to imagine the clear conscious thought of being alone on an island armed to the teeth, beckoning these teenagers out of safety only to shoot them?
What makes that possible?
Throughout history, rulers in times of conflict have felt it necessary to teach their own people that the enemy, the other, are different, inhuman, and therefore worth killing. It goes against the sensibilities of many modern people to intentionally kill another human being. One of the main reasons for such strict training of discipline into militaries is simply to take normal men and teach them to shoot other people at an order.
Sometimes it goes a lot beyond that though. The worst excesses are in the last 100 years, when people were taught that other races were beneath them, and therefore deserved death at their hands. People know this well regarding Hitler’s ideas about Jews and other minorities, but it was a broad thing as well. Following the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese, a Western journalist asked a Japanese officer of the time how he accounted for this, to which he responded:
“Frankly speaking, you and I have diametrically different views of the Chinese. You may be dealing with them as human beings, but I regard them as swine. We can do anything to such creatures.”
Little wonder China can’t forgive Japan to this day. I think some 20,000 women (children and the elderly) were taken in trucks to be gangraped by groups of 10-15 Japanese soldiers each. It’s a curious phenomenon that rape was such a common punishment on supposedly subhuman races. Japanese newspapers published stories of competitions between Japanese officers about how many Chinese prisoners they could kill by sword, who would reach 100 first.
This wasn’t just something the Axis powers were relegated to, though. There was extensive American racism over the Japanese, that they too were subhuman. There was widespread shooting of prisoners, not to mention concentration camps of Japanese ethnic minorities across America. Propaganda encouraged images of bucktoothed, yellow-skinned “Japs.”
This continued past the world wars in a variety of areas. Ethnic conflict created the majority of senseless massacres: Spanish-descended landowners upon Mayan-descended peasants in Guatemala, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia’s mass slaughter of millions, many of whom were ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese, and more recently ethnic Albanians and Bosnian Muslims in the various Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s. Despite being on the receiving end of genocidal acts, the Israelis (arguably) place the same restrictions on the Palestinians within their borders.
It seems that no matter how developed we think we are, we collectively find it hard to escape the idea that other peoples can be a malignant other species which can be legitimately slaughtered. You can see it in America’s difficulty with separating Islam in general from terrorism. It’s to their credit that it IS debated, but the fact that it happens at all suggests we have the same compulsions as our forebears.
It’s not just ethnicity, religion or race either. Demonizing any “other” makes it easier to motivate people to kill them. Mao told his supporters that any teachers, businessmen, clergymen, intellectuals, or basically anyone with a brain, was a danger. We really still don’t know how many people died as a result.
Did the Norwegian gunman do the same? It’s hard to imagine that he did what he did without that kind of mental preparation. Judging from his writings, he felt strongly about Muslims, but also was quite happy to use “Marxist” in interpreting contemporary Norwegian politics. Considering that he targeted Liberal party buildings (presuming he IS linked to the bombing) and that he shot up a summer camp sponsored by the Liberal Party, maybe he lumped them together in what he called the “Marxist-Multicultural” conspiracy.
“How many thousands of new Europeans must die, how many one hundred thousand European women should be raped, millions robbed and tractor discarded before you understand that multiculturalism + Islam does not work?”
Reading his comments, one is struck by how clear his writing is. This isn’t mindless blasting of an imbalanced mind. This was someone who worked this out in his head and carried it out. And he did it by thinking that the people he was killing didn’t deserve to live, for the goals he hoped to achieve.
We should note that today Japan, China, Russia, Germany, are all productive cultures. The states of the former Yugoslavia are (mostly) developing, modernizing, and doing quite well. Things change.
But they can also change back, made evident that a Norwegian can kill other Norwegians for political thoughts based on religious prejudice.
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To read the gunman’s comments, follow this link: http://dougsaunders.net/2011/07/political-thinking-anders-behring-breivik/
I think it’s a depressing but healthy requirement for anyone to study not just the Holocaust, but also the Cultural Revolution, the Rape of Nanking, and Stalin’s purges and gulags. Studying just the Holocaust suggests that it was a solo occurrence of one particular fanatic culture. It is a very human problem.
Third Culture Thoughts 
This is quite true and sad. The fact that people can so easily forget that people are people regardless of race, religion or any other immediate difference is astounding. The reasons for this, however, are quite complicated. Furthermore, who here is to blame? Of course, hate, discrimination and violence is wrong and I am not condoning it, but a child who was born into a society which regards others as inferior, who was taught to treat those “others” as subhuman and grew up believing it; can we blame them? Sure, but they’ve never been exposed to anything different so there is no way for them to know better. Honestly, now that I think about it, it is also surprising how we got to where we are at this point with so much freedom. A 100 years ago things were very, very different and a lot has changed in that time. I believe this is mostly due to greater mobility of people and the increase of travel and cross cultural expansion. I believe the best thing any nation which calls itself “multi-cultural” and is trying to promote that image should make this change. Instead of having a standing army and use it for “peace” keeping missions, they should have mandatory civilian service where any person after high school is required to serve for at least 1 year in cultural-bridging missions where they are sent to countries with cultures different from their own and do community work there. In that way the local people can have a chance to meet a new culture and the “guest” workers can meet and exchange ideas with local people. There is a big difference between people of the same culture who live in their home countries, are expats in another culture or are full immigrants.
European aristocratic youth used to have a tradition they called the “Grand Tour”, which involved hopping around each of the major European powers and learning from them.
Terry Pratchett once parodied this as “The Grand Sneer,” travelling to far flung countries to reaffirm how superior we are to them.
Sometimes aid programs create Mother Theresas, sometimes they only provide sustenance for disdain.
Interestingly, one of the most noble institutions was the Indian Civil Service. Britons competed heavily for the chance to take an extremely difficult sounding exam, only to work themselves daily and nightly in a difficult environment hundreds of miles from another European, building dams, sewers, solving disputes, delivering vaccinations, and so on.
What brought that? Part of it was the thought that opportunities at home wouldn’t be as good. But part of it was… something else. The idea that they were doing something good out there. Many Brits had learned from India, and orientalised themselves, too. But despite everything, eventually they got comfortable in their privileged status and wouldn’t permit Indians to sit in judgment over them.
Both problems at once, I think.