Monday, April 16, 2012

UPDATE: DAY 3 of the Anders Breivik trial:
Anders Breivik, CPAC 2012
Share the Same Philosophy and Politics He Uses
to Justify Slaughtering 77 People

UPDATE 4/18/'12:  The Guardian newspaper in the UK has journalists at the Breivik trial in Norway.  One of those people, Helen Pidd, has been streaming content back from the courtroom, promising an update at some point today after the court adjourns.

Of the various bits and pieces, I found this assessment of Breivik to self-describe his politics and his hope for their eventual domination of society, to be particularly apropos this post:

For the extreme right to be ever be able to prevail in Europe in the future, one had to distance oneself from the old school ideology.


While most conservatives do not favor violence to attain their goals, their goals are largely the same.  They want everyone else to do things their way, when clearly the majority of people do NOT choose to do so.  The only difference is substantially one of whether or not violence is acceptable to attain the goal of compelling conformity, not whether that conformity is desirable in the first place.

We have clear demonstrations of the abuse of power by the right when they get it, in the legislation and disunity of this country.  Every abuse is continued and expanded; every equality and fairness is denied or reduced.  The very essence of representative government - the vote - is diminished.  The right makes us less free, less a democratic republic, and less competitive and successful as a nation.

They provide less protection to children, less autonomy over our bodies to women, less pay for work, a less safe environment, greater freedom for white collar crime, and more emphasis on guns and violence, while hating anything connected to love and sex.

Breivik has a fantasy of a modern Knights Templar group, with himself at its head, armed with lots and lots of guns, all vaguely Christian.  What a classic conservative wet dream that is, one he himself admits is a far right extremist position.

No surprise Breivik's bloody wet dream is much like the programming at CPAC....... an ugly fantasy world out of touch, disconnected badly from the real world.

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Repudiating multiculturalism; rabid, rampant Islamophobia; refusing to acknowledge the jurisdiction of judges.
Disregarding and disrespecting the rule of law, the role of an independent judiciary, which translated from Nut-speak dog whistles to the extremist base means attempting to intimidate any judge who makes a ruling he doesn't like.  Back in December, the Nut made this statement, which he as repeated often (despite the fact that the most egregious examples of activist judges are conservative, including the conservatives on the SCOTUS):

Gingrich: Send U.S. Marshals to compel ‘radical’ judges to explain rulingsBy

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich showed no sign Sunday of letting up on his assault on “activist” federal judges. During an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gingrich suggested the president could send federal law enforcement authorities to arrest judges who make controversial rulings in order to compel them to justify their decisions before congressional hearings.   
While Congress has the power to impeach a Supreme Court judge, it takes a pretty extreme and outrageous instance for that to happen, something which has never occurred in the history of the United States, in spite of some incredibly poor decisions on occasion - like Dredd Scott or the SCOTUS decision that allowed the persecution of Japanese Americans in WW II.
Sound familiar? It is the same sewage spewed by the American right wing extremists at CPAC that you can hear from Anders Breivik on the other side of the Atlantic, to justify shooting unarmed kids and blowing up people in a government building.
He is pleading self defense.  And he is asserting that he will be bringing right wing nuts like him to testify on his behalf, noted Islamophobes, and reportedly American right wing nut bloggers according to worldnews.
Some Norwegians fear Breivik will succeed in making the trial, with about 800 journalists on hand, a platform for anti-immigrant ideas. His defense team has called 29 witnesses, ranging from Islamists to right-wing bloggers, to shed light on his world view.
A blogger who has been linked to Breivik was Pamela Geller, who won the blogger 'Anti-Jihad' award at CPAC.  We have profiled some of the rabidly islamophobic and severely fact-deficient hate purveying writing here before.
Think Progress back in the day noted:
Anders Breivik’s manifesto contains numerous in-text and footnoted citations to prominent Islamophobic bloggers, supposed experts on Islamic terrorism and think tanks claiming to be on the frontlines of battling Islam’s attacks on democracies.
Individuals cited in Breivik’s manifesto include: Center for Security Policy‘s President Frank Gaffney; “counterjihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer; Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Director Steven Emerson; Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes; and controversial historian Bat Ye’or.
Presumably some of the preceding will be testifying on why a fear of Arab language classes and a factually inaccurate terror of Butterball turkeys justifies killing 77 people in self defense.
This is the same woman who was recognized by a blogging award at the 2012 CPAC, the same gathering of conservatives that hosted other groups which share Breivik's sentiments.  That includes hatred and fear of blacks, Hispanics & Latinos, and anyone who wishes to immigrate to this country from across Asia. 
  Per MSNBC.com:
"Not only will he explain (his actions), but he will also say he regrets that he didn't go further," Geir Lippestad, Breivik's defense attorney, said before the trial began, according to Reuters.
From the Huff Po:
Anders Behring Breivik
This Monday Feb. 6, 2012 file photo shows Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who confessed to a bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, arriving for a detention hearing at a court in Oslo, Norway. (AP Photo/Lise Aserud, Scanpix Norway)
OSLO, Norway — With a defiant closed-fist salute, a right-wing fanatic admitted Monday to a bomb-and-shooting massacre that killed 77 people in Norway but pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, saying he was acting in self-defense.
On the first day of his long-awaited trial, Anders Behring Breivik rejected the authority of the court as it sought to assign responsibility for the July 22 attacks that shocked Norway and jolted the image of terrorism in Europe.
Dressed in a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smiled as a guard removed his handcuffs in the crowded court room. The 33-year-old then flashed his salute before shaking hands with prosecutors and court officials.
"I don't recognize Norwegian courts because you get your mandate from the Norwegian political parties who support multiculturalism," Breivik said in his first comments to the court.
Eight people were killed in Breivik's bombing of Oslo's government district and 69 were slain in his shooting massacre at the left-leaning Labor Party's youth camp on Utoya island outside the capital. Breivik has said the attacks were necessary to protect Norway from being taken over by Muslims.
What Breivik wrote, what Breivik did is no different than the actions and beliefs of Timothy McVeigh; or the actions by the four armed while old, fat, white and crabby militia members in Georgia who just pled guilty more recently.  This is EXACTLY the politics of the right, the politics courted by the whole gaggle of Republican presidential candidates, including those like Mitt Romney who not only appeared alongside these fringe extremist goons at CPAC, but who rigged their straw poll by buying up enough votes and memberships for his supporters.  The dirty deeds of the right wing candidates through this election has given the lie that the right cares in the slightest about honesty in politics, much less electoral policies.
These, the people like Breivik who applaud the speech like that of Sharron Angle's big talk about the bullet box instead of the ballot box, these are the people who will be listening and applauding the sick and ugly rant of Anders Breivik.  I can only hope his family and all the rest of the people in Norway are appalled and repudiate him for his hatred.  We can only join the rest of the world in condemning the politics and the violence of the far right.  We can only underline to them, including at the polls in November 2012 why they are out of step and out of touch with the rest of us, the sane and civilized world, not the barbarism of their faux patriotism.
To the extent that the participants in CPAC has embraced hatred and violence, to the extent that they identify so many as other than themselves and therefore the enemy, they deserve the losses they are likely to endure in 2012.  They will have brought it on themselves.  They should not, by any attempt to disassociate with these horrors, these right wing equivalents of the terrorism of 9/11 in 2005 and the destruction at the Alfred P. Murrah building in 1995.
We need all of us, to stand up, to stand together, condemning the politics of the right, the ignorance of the right, the horror of the right, and banish them from acceptance at any level in our politics until they abandon their extremism.  We must do this whether they are old, fat, white, crabby guys like the terrorists in Georgia, or that other old, white, flabby, crabby guy from Georgia, the Nut Gingrich.  And we must condemn, abandon and repudiate the harpies among the right, like Pam Geller and Sharron Angle, and the popsie Palin and the bimbo Bachmann who are persistently hateful and factually inaccurate, the princesses on the right of bigotry, fear and distortion.
Time for all of them to go away, and not come back, regardless of whether they are pasty gray and balding or blond and balding.  They should take their hate and fear and bigotry with them back into the past.  There is no place for them in the present or future.

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