Moldbug on Norway can mean only one thing … Redheads!

Mencius Moldbug has been measuring out his prose in coffee spoons for a few months now, but today he spewed forth with a piece on the Norway murders that bears a look. We’ll quote it extensively because it sounds several themes that we love to hammer on here at the Reb. Emphasis and [notes] in the following are all mine, but aside from that, from here on out it’s all Moldbug, hitting on all cylinders.

The indisputable humanity of Anders Behring Breivik

It’s pathetic but typical, I feel, that the likes of Robert Spencer and Fjordman are denying their connection to Anders Behring Breivik. Of course they are responsible for Breivik’s terrorism, just as communist intellectuals are responsible for Islamic terrorism. Someone skipped Aesop:

THE TRUMPETER TAKEN PRISONER.

A Trumpeter, being taken prisoner in battle, begged hard for quarter, declaring his innocence, and protesting that he neither had killed nor could kill any man, bearing no arms but his trumpet, which he was obliged to sound at the word of command.

For that reason, replied his enemies, we are determined not to spare you; for though you yourself never fight, yet with that wicked instrument of yours, you blow up animosity among other people, and so become the cause of much bloodshed.

APPLICATION.

The fomenter of mischief is at least as culpable as he who puts it in execution. A man may be guilty of murder who never has handled a sword or pulled a trigger or lifted up his arm with any mischievous weapon. There is a little incendiary called the tongue, which is more venomous than a poisoned arrow, and more killing than a two-edged sword.

The moral of the Fable therefore is this, that if in any civil insurrection the persons taken in arms against the government, deserve to die, much more do they whose devilish tongues or pens gave birth to the sedition and excited the tumult.

The Fable is also equally applicable to those evil counsellors, who excite corrupt or wicked governments to sap and undermine, and then to overturn the just laws and liberties of a whole people…

Aesop, you see, is above the whole thing. Aesop has no problem with putting the hammer to either seditious rabble-rousers or tyrannical commissars. He accepts it as normal. It is normal. It is war, and only the dead have seen the end of war. The trumpeter, on either side, is a soldier.

This mental habit of separating “democratic dissent” and “violent terrorism,” which the Robert Spencers of the world vainly attempt to invoke, and the Noam Chomskys successfully invoke, is one of the most curious psychological tics of the deranged 20th century. Of course its raison d’etre, as a psychological-warfare device, is to forestall the realization that leftist movements achieve power through violence, then demand pacifism of the subjugated.

All power is rooted in violence – even electoral power (to the extent that any such thing still exists). There is most definitely a continuum between democratic activism and civil war. The struggle for power is one. The whole point of the classic picket sign is that the writing on the cardboard sends one message; the two-by-four it’s stapled to sends another.

And we can tell that left rules right, because we can see that Noam Chomsky has the right to trumpet his ideas to Osama bin Laden, whereas Robert Spencer does not have the right to trumpet his ideas to Anders Behring Breivik. Did he think he had that right? He had not the might, so he had not the right. He’s finding that out right now, as he stares down the barrel of a very angry New York Times.

The trumpeter game, version left, is played ad nauseam in every school system in the world today. All our noble workers and peasants are constantly inculcated with two messages. First, you are the victim of injustice. Second, even though you are the victim of injustice, violence is evil and you must under no circumstances punish the guilty. Human beings are human beings, of course, so the second message doesn’t always take. Aww. Another “random attack.”

Robert Spencer, Fjordman, and the like – even so perspicacious a conservative as Lawrence Auster – thought they could play this game from the other side. Why? Because they believe in the game. They believe in democratic activism, and they believe they live in a democratic society and have just as much right as anyone at Harvard to toot their trumpets.

They are wrong on every count. What every conservative, moderate or “extreme,” needs to learn from ABB is that all action by the powerless, “violent” or “nonviolent,” is misguided. It is not wrong, of course, to aspire to power – but action does not create power. Action dissipates power. Until you amass the power to capture the State, refrain from any action whatsoever – certainly including voting. The weak have no right to oppose the strong.

And then there’s the “insanity” angle. In case anyone has any doubt about Breivik’s sanity, I thought I’d cut and paste the most interesting parts of his manifesto, which are naturally the parts everyone is ignoring. Not the endless Fjordman essays, but his own personal story. Page 1393:

[And blah, blah, blah. If you want to view these parts of Breivik's manifesto, go see Moldbug's site.]

While I am not so gullible as to take ABB’s autobiography as gospel, it’s also obvious that he has neither the literary talent nor the imagination to invent these squalid realities.

Robert Spencer and his ilk also need to face another obvious fact: none of this has anything whatsoever to do with the Koran, “jizya” or no “jizya.” I’ve been relieved of my lunchmoney. Who in America hasn’t? I’m pretty sure none of the collectors had any familiarity with the suras whatsoever. This is not Muslim behavior. It is human behavior.

The trouble with Oslo isn’t that the Norwegian Workers’ Party has imported a Muslim underclass – it’s that the Norwegian Workers’ Party has imported an underclass. If for whatever reasons they’d chosen their immigrants from Papua New Guinea, perhaps Robert Spencer could have become an expert in penis sheaths, noting that all the offenders had wrapped their junk in banana leaves. Instead of converting them to Christianity, he’d want to convert them to underwear. Perhaps not every population can be civilized; every population can be feralized.

It is impossible to separate Breivik the “hip-hop” Norwigga tagger from Breivik the “Knight Templar.” In both we see characteristic fauna of our era, one common and the other rare, both absolutely normal. If you ask a lot of people to be angry about the Bronxification of East Oslo, someone is going to act on it. The goal of trumpeting is to obtain power, and the means of power is violence. To denounce violence is to renounce power. To renounce power is to surrender.

So it simply won’t wash for conservatives to describe this act as “senseless” or “random” or “inexplicable,” like all those inexplicable liberal-inspired terrorists. (Much if not most black-on-white violence in America is best characterized as terrorism, because it proceeds from military, not avaricious or psychopathic, motives.) Nor will it work to rue injustice but suggest that, like Christ, Christians should turn the other cheek. Christ was Christ, perhaps, but humans are humans. And besides, didn’t he bring not peace but a sword?

Rather, a right that seeks to win power must accept that violence is a normal, essential and ineradicable aspect of human psychology, as it accepts every other reality. Fantasy is a luxury the powerless cannot afford. Denouncing violence in general is either supine (if sincere) or mendacious (if insincere), and both are equally fantastic and unaffordable. If you demand power, you are demanding violence, since power constitutes the ability to execute violence. If you are not demanding power, what are you demanding? Why are you even talking?

But there is a difference between right and left – and it’s just not that the left is in and the right is out. The right stands for order and the left for chaos. Violence is essential to both – but certainly not the same kind of violence.

The left (hilariously still named the “Norwegian Workers’ Party” – they should really update their name to match their clients) brought “A-Gjengen” and “B-Gjengen” to Oslo. And the right? There is no Norwegian right. Just Norwegian gangsters, a C-gang if you will. An ABB knows Oslo needs order, but all he can think to do about it is a spectacular gang massacre – basically a giant drive-by. In his heart he’s still a tagger. And a Robert Spencer? Tom Paine with a tame Koran. Leftism has devoured our entire civilization, which exists only in its belly.

Can violence bring order to Oslo? Or to Baltimore? Nothing is more certain. Will it? Well, I hope so. I’m not too optimistic at present. Will it involve the mother of all drive-bys? It most certainly will not. - Mencius Moldbug