Greater Surbiton

The perfect is the enemy of the good

Anders Behring Breivik, the Balkans and the new

European far-right

(h p://greatersurbiton.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/breivik.jpg)

The Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik appears very interested in the Balkans. A lot ofspace in his ponderous 1,518-page ‘manifesto’ is devoted to discussing Balkan themes. This is notlimited merely to praising Radovan Karadzic (‘for his efforts to rid Serbia of Islam he will always beremembered as an honourable Crusader and a European war hero’), supporting the past Serbethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Albanians, condemning Kosovo’s independence and demandingthat all Bosniaks and Muslim Albanians be deported from Europe (while the Muslim Turkishpopulations of Cyprus and western Anatolia are to be deported to central Anatolia). It involves alsolengthy ruminations on hundreds of years of O oman and Turkish history, in which Breivikdemonises all aspects of the O oman heritage.

Some commentators have argued that this psychopathic mass-murderer represents such anexceptional case that his actual beliefs are irrelevant to understanding his actions. According toSimon Jenkins (h p://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/26/norway-illiberal-britain-patronising) in the Guardian, ‘The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify

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anything and should not be forced to do so. A man so insane he can see nothing wrong in shootingdead 68 young people in cold blood is so exceptional as to be of interest to criminology and brainscience, but not to politics.’ As a rule, Jenkins is absolutely wrong about everything, and this is noexception. Breivik represents the exemplar of an extremely dangerous trend in Western andEuropean politics, and his interest in the Balkans – or rather, in his own mythologised narrative ofBalkan history – flows naturally from this.

Breivik’s actions are exceptional, but his views are not. His views on Islam and on immigration arein some important respects typical of the right-wing Islamophobic current, some ofwhose prominent members and groups he cites or sympathises with in his manifesto: GeertWilders, Robert Spencer, Melanie Phillips, Srdja Tri ovic, Mark Steyn, the English Defence League(EDL) and others. He sees immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, coupled with liberalmulticulturalism and political correctness, as a mortal threat to European or Western society. Suchviews are often justified by their holders as being ‘pro-Western’, whereby ‘the West’ iscounterposed to ‘Islam’, as if the two were binary opposites. In reality, the very opposite is true(h p://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/2008/02/15/embracing-europes-islamic-christian-heritage/):modern European civilisation was built upon foundations that were Islamic as well as Christian,Jewish, pagan and others. The Enlightenment gave rise to a Europe in which the sectarian religiousanimosities that characterised the pre-Enlightenment age could be transcended; modern Westernliberal and secular values are founded upon the principle of religious toleration.

Far from being ‘pro-Westernʹ; our contemporary right-wing Islamophobes, in seeking to rekindlethe religious divide between Christians and Muslims that characterised pre-Enlightenment Europe,reject Western values in favour of pre-Western values. During their successful Vienna War of1683-1699 against the O oman Empire, Austrian Habsburg forces slaughtered, plundered, expelledor forcibly converted to Christianity the Muslim population of the Hungarian and Croatianterritories they reconquered, which were forcibly de-Islamised; the Austrians burned the O omanBosnian city of Sarajevo to the ground. The subsequent O oman Bosnian victory over Habsburgforces in the Ba le of Banja Luka of 1737 saved the Bosnian Muslims from their destruction as apeople that an Austrian conquest of Bosnia would have involved. Yet when the Austrian Habsburgsdid finally succeed in occupying Sarajevo and Bosnia in 1878, they protected the Muslimpopulation and respected the Islamic religion. Europe, in the interval, had experienced theEnlightenment. It is the pre-Enlightenment Europe to which today’s right-wing Islamophobes lookback nostalgically; something symbolised in the name of the anti-Islamic hate-blog, ‘Gates ofVienna’ (h p://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/), named after the O oman siege of Vienna of 1683 andcited approvingly by Breivik. Hence Breivik’s own obsessive demonising of the O oman ‘other’and its history, all the way back to the Middle Ages.

The right-wing Islamophobes are the mirror-image of the Islamists they claim to oppose.Nineteenth-century opponents of liberal secular values frequently became anti-Semites, seeing theJews, as they did, as the beneficiaries of these values, to which the Jews owed their emancipation.Today’s Muslim opponents of the Enlightenment have inherited Christian anti-Semitism, whereasthe Christian reactionaries have transferred their animosity to a different – Muslim – minority.Apologists blame individuals like Breivik and groups like the EDL and British National Party(BNP) on supposedly ‘objective’ problems of aggressive Islam and immigration that mainstreampoliticians are supposedly failing to tackle. Just as apologists for Islamism blame it on supposed‘root causes’ to be found in US imperialism or the behaviour of Israel. Just as earlier apologists foranti-Semitism blamed anti-Semitism on the Jews. The Islamophobes point to Muslim support forIslamic extremism as their anti-Semitic predecessors once pointed to Jewish support forcommunism. As their Islamist counterparts point to Jewish support for Zionism. And so on.

Such chauvinistic ideologies are not caused by the minority or foreign groups that they target.Undeniably, popular anti-Semitism before World War II tended to be strongest in countries with

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large, visible Jewish populations, like Poland and Romania, just as popular Islamophobia today isoften strongest in West European cities that have experienced large-scale Muslim immigration, butthis does not mean that the victims of the bigotry are to blame. Muslim immigration does notautomatically give rise to Islamophobia, any more than Zionism automatically gives rise to Muslimanti-Semitism, or ‘US imperialism’ gives rise to Islamist terrorism. Right-wing Islamophobia,Islamism, anti-immigrant racism and modern anti-Semitism are all, in their different ways,expressions of a more general reaction against, and rejection of, modernity and what it implies.

Interestingly, Breivik, who apparently never had a proper girlfriend and lived with his mother untilhe was thirty, shares Islamism’s extreme misogyny and gender insecurity. His manifesto railsagainst the ‘feminisation of European culture’ and the supposed emasculation of the contemporaryEuropean male, complaining that Muslim immigrants are systematically raping white Europeanwomen, but that ‘As a Western man, I would be tempted to say that Western women have to someextent brought this upon themselves. They have been waging an ideological, psychological andeconomic war against European men for several generations now, believing that this would makeyou “free”… Western women have been subjected to systematic Marxist indoctrination meant toturn you into a weapon of mass destruction against your own civilisation, a strategy that has beenremarkably successful.’ But of course, not all Islamophobes are straightforwardly conservative;some oppose Muslims and Islam on the grounds that the la er are sexist and homophobic. Suchsyntheses of liberalism and illiberalism are nothing new; European fascism and its sympathisers ofthe 1920s, 30s and 40s had their liberal roots and tendencies too, however paradoxical that mightsound (readers are recommended to read Julian Jackson’s excellent France: The Dark Years,1940-1944 (h p://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Julian+Jackson+Dark+Years&x=0&y=0), that describes the synthesis of liberal,conservative Catholic and radical right-wing currents that found expression in the 1940s Vichyregime in France).

What our contemporary Islamophobes share – conservatives and ‘liberals’ alike – is conformism,xenophobia, fear of change, hostility to diversity, paranoia about minorities and a longing for theorder and certainties of a lost, idealised ‘golden age’ that, in some cases, may not even be very longago. In the Nordic countries, home of the Jante Law, where an apparently model liberalismfrequently masks extreme conformism and insularity, where foreign guests and immigrantsusually find it very difficult to fit in (in a way that they don’t in London or New York, for example),and where virulent anti-immigration parties such as the Danish People’s Party and SwedenDemocrats have enjoyed success at the polls, this takes its own particular form. Far from needing tobe shielded from greater diversity, my feeling is that the Nordic world would benefit from more ofit; that even if Norway has no pressing economic reason to join the EU, immersion andparticipation in the common European project would benefit it culturally and spiritually. But for allthat, the sickness that created Breivik is a European and global sickness, not just a Nordic sickness.

This brings us back to the Balkans, a region that resembles the Nordic world in the extent of itsoften stultifying insularity. For all that Serbia appeared to pursue its own sonderweg during the late1980s and 1990s, at another level, the Serbian nationalist right and anti-democratic left wereexemplars and pioneers of what became an all-European anti-immigrant and Islamophobic trend.Serbian nationalist and Communist hardliners railed against the restrictions supposedly placed onSerbia by membership of a multinational community – the Yugoslav federation. They railed againsthigh Muslim and Albanian birth-rates that were resulting in the Serbs being ‘out-bred’, whilelamenting the lower birth-rate among Serbs as symptomatic of national decline. They railed againstthe supposed mass immigration of ethnic Albanians from Albania into Kosovo; against thesupposed Kosovo Albanian cultural ‘otherness’ and refusal to assimilate; against Kosovo Albaniansallegedly raping Serb women while the authorities stood idly by. They lamented the supposedcorruption and decline of their national culture while indulging in medievalist escapism. All thesethemes have now been taken up by nationalists in other European countries. For example, in

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Breivik’s words, ‘The Muslims in Bosnian Serbia; the so called Bosniaks and Albanians had wageddeliberate demographic warfare (indirect genocide) against Serbs for decades. This type of warfareis one of the most destructive forms of Jihad and is quite similar to what we are experiencing nowin Western Europe.’

Andrew Gilligan, writing in the Telegraph, has claimed (h p://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8660011/The-British-far-Right-is-nothing-but-a-rabble.html) thatthe danger posed by far-right (i.e. white, Christian) terrorists like Breivik is simply not on the sameorder of magnitude as that posed by al-Qaeda: ‘Over the last 10 years, nationalist terrorists, evencounting Breivik, have killed about 200 Westerners; al-Qaeda has killed about 4,000… The whiteRight should not be ignored by the security authorities – but it would be dangerous to divert oura ention from the real threat.’ But this is wrong: tens of thousands of Muslims were killed by whiteChristians in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya in the 1990s. Breivik has praised the killers, bothRadovan Karadzic and Vladimir Putin; the numbers of their victims in Europe dwarf those of alQaeda.

The danger is that Breivik is the harbinger of a trend. Extremism and chauvinism among themajority will always ultimately be more dangerous than extremism and chauvinism amongminorities. Right-wing populists such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen may not themselvesincite violence, and cannot be equated with a killer like Breivik. But the climate of intolerance theyare promoting threatens to give rise to many more Breiviks. The Islamophobic, anti-immigrationfar-right is the no. 1 internal threat in Western Europe to European society and Western valuestoday.

This article was published today on the website of the Henry Jackson Society(h p://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/stories.asp?pageid=49&id=2350).

Friday, 29 July 2011 - Posted by Marko A ila Hoare | Anti-Semitism, Balkans, European Union,Former Yugoslavia, Immigration, Islam, Marko A ila Hoare, Misogyny, Norway, Politicalcorrectness, Red-Brown Alliance, Serbia | Anders Behring Breivik, Andrew Gilligan, ArnaldurIndridason, BNP, British National Party, Danish Peopleʹs Party, EDL, English Defence League,Geert Wilders, Henning Mankell, Jante Law, Mark Steyn, Melanie Phillips, Radovan Karadzic,Robert Spencer, Simon Jenkins, Srdja Tri ovic, Stieg Larsson, Sweden Democrats

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About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis, with a particular focus on South EastEurope. Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and amintimately acquainted with, and emotionally a ached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to theBosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of theBosnian people. In 1997-1998 I lived and worked in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 1998-2001 Ilived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As ajournalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for theInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the draftingof the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.

I received my BA from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and my PhD from Yale University in

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2000. I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy in 2001-2004, a member of theFaculty of History of the University of Cambridge in 2001-2006, and am currently an AssociateProfessor at Kingston University, London. I live in Surbiton in the UK.

I am the author of four books: The Bosnian Muslims in the Second World War: A History (Hurstand Oxford University Press, London and New York, 2013), The History of Bosnia: From theMiddle Ages to the Present Day (Saqi, London, 2007), Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia:The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and How BosniaArmed (Saqi, London, 2004). I am currently working on a history of modern Serbia.

Marko A ila Hoare

markohoare AT hotmail DOT com

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