Anders Behring Breivik was the heavily-armed mad-dog killer who went on a rampage in 2011, killing 77 people, including a number of children at a youth camp. He released an enormous political manifesto to go with his terrorist assault, describing himself as a Christian extremist, and linking himself with the work of numerous mainstream critics of the global jihad movement.
Beivik's manifesto received a lot of play in Western media, which used his approving quotes as either subtle or explicit indictments of everyone he name-checked. (You know, the exact opposite of the way they treated the political manifesto of domestic terrorist Chris Dorner in California.) For some inexplicable reason, those same media sources don't seem very interested in reporting that Breivik has recanted his manifesto, explaining that he cooked the whole thing up to push the media's buttons and get exactly the sort of coverage he received. It's so strange that Big Media doesn't want to write about how a murderous neo-Nazi scumbag punked them, isn't it?
It falls to bloggers working outside the reach of our fabled media gatekeepers to tell this story. With the crucial understandings that (a) Breivik is nuts, and (b) foreign media sources can be difficult to vet, here's Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, who explains that Beivik still gets quite a bit of international press coverage for his prison antics, but only one Swedish outlet called Expo seemed interested in mentioning the letter recanting his manifesto:
Expo had only published excerpts from Mr. Breivik???s letter. I was curious to see the entire text, and spent some time searching for it online. The process was made more difficult by the fact that the original letter was said to be in English, but the published excerpts existed only in Swedish translation. Our Scandinavian contacts were all but certain that the full text of the letter had never been published on the Internet.
Thanks to the diligent efforts of one of our Scandinavian readers, I was able to obtain the entire text of the ???ideological??? portion of Anders Behring Breivik???s letter. The first half of the text ??? the part that contains his assertions of being tortured in prison ??? was apparently imaged separately, and the PDF that was sent to us was devoted solely to an explanation of the ethno-nationalist motives for his actions.
Mr. Breivik???s letter was actually written last September, but for unknown reasons was embargoed by the Norwegian prison authorities until earlier this month. Then, when it was finally sent, all media outlets but one chose to bury those portions of the text that would destroy the ???narrative??? they had so painstakingly crafted over the past two and a half years.
A lot of people had to work very hard to bury this inconvenient portion of the Breivik narrative. As Bodissey observes, Breivik "positive gloats over how easy it was to fool" the media. Gates of Vienna republished the madman's letter in its entirety, at the link provided above, but here's an excerpt that captures its tone. ("The compendium" is Breivik's term for his manifesto.)
When dealing with media psychopaths, a good way to counter their tactics is to use double-psychology, or at least so I thought. The compendium was, among other things, of a calculated and quite cynical <<gateway-design>> (the 2+?+?=6-approach), created to strengthen the ethnocentrist wing in the contra-jihad movement, by pinning the whole thing on the anti-ethnocentrist wing (many of the leaders are pro-multiculti social democrats or liberalists), while at the same time protecting and strengthening the ethnocentrist-factions. The idea was to manipulate the MSM and others so that they would launch a witch-hunt and send their <<media-rape-squads>> against our opponents. It worked quite well.
Gates of Vienna posted this letter a month ago, and it's still radio silence across the media. Benjamin Weingarten at The Blaze notes that Norwegian authorities officially certified Breivik as "sane," but personally I'm not giving up on my point (a) "Beivik is nuts." The point is that everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt... but salt was in mighty short supply when the media was happily pushing him as the avatar of Christian extremism and Islamophobia, not to mention the Obama Administration taking the opportunity to issue warnings about the perpetually looming threat of domestic anti-Islamic violence:
In the aftermath of Breivik???s attack, Breivik was portrayed as an anti-Islamic right-winger, heavily influenced by the counterjihadists Breivik cited, toxifying a group of people for their criticism of jihadism and Islamic supremacism. Now that Breivik claims that he manipulated the media, that in fact he used the counterjihadists to shield his true neo-Nazi allies, which he cites by name in the letter at hand, the media has gone mum.
Whatever the truth given Breivik???s questionable psychological state, serious damage has been done to the lives of those cited in Breivik???s manifesto, along with their associates. Does not the media have an obligation to report on Breivik???s newest writings in full, as a matter of equity to those damaged by his manifesto, regardless of whether or not it fits a narrative?
Blogger Geoconger at Patheos has some examples of that heavily-protected old narrative. Observing that it's "incredible" to think of a neo-Nazi laboring to preserve the image of his movement by hoodwinking the press with a false-flag operation, Geoconger says it's even more incredible that so many media outlets were - and remain - eager to help him do it:
The blogger Fjordman, who was vilified for his alleged influence upon Breivik, is part of Jewish conspiracy that includes the UKIP???s Nigel Farage and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, Breivik tells us ??? and it was Breivik???s intention not only to kill 77 people but to ???manipulate the MSM and others so they would launch a witch-hunt ??? against our opponents??? who include Fjordman, Farage, Wilders et al.
To add insult to injury, I have not seen this latest story covered by the Anglo-American news outlets who were so quick to speculate in the immediate aftermath of the shooting ??? though it is beginning to break through on the internet.
If Breivik was lying in 2011, what is to stop him from lying in 2014? Is his claim of a double-bluff a triple-bluff? Is it worth even trying to understand this man???s thinking?
Should the press ignore these latest revelations? Or should it return to a story that was misreported early on ??? and remains clouded? The answer for any journalist worth the name is yes ??? go back and dig.
At this point, I'd say we're well past talking about the media "digging," and merely asking them to notice the shovels full of dirt falling on their heads. I got a taste of how effective Breivik's narrative manipulation was when I first wrote about his shooting rampage, and got quite a few Tweets and emails from left-wingers eager to accept him as the new face of Christian fascism. One guy sent me a link to his blog, where he gleefully quoted passages from "the compendium" and insisted it was proof the Norwegian butcher basically represented the Viking wing of the Tea Party.
Now Breivik is boasting of how easy it was to run a false-flag operation and turn the media against people he didn't like, merely by pretending to agree with them. Maybe he's still just putting on an act, but it's interesting that so much of the press chose this exact moment to stop taking him seriously.
