What has happened in Norway is terrible, atrocious, disgusting, terrifying and deeply, deeply saddening. Of that, there can be no doubt. The hearts and the minds of the whole world have turned to Scandinavia, and to those who are directly affected by what has happened. The shockwaves have hit us all.
Already, the world’s media, the world’s politicians and the world’s habitually angry people are looking for what went wrong, what could have been done differently to prevent Breivik from killing those innocent people, and who failed to do what they should have done. But we’re going to have to face up to it – there was nothing anyone could have done to make this all end differently.
The Norwegian government has been accused of being too complacent, yet they seem to me to have taken every precaution they feasibly could have. The Norwegian police have been criticised for not noticing the man before it was too late. But what were they to do? He held some extreme opinions, certainly, but if we deny people’s right to an opinion in order to protect our society, then we wouldn’t have a society worth protecting. So I don’t think that the police had any hope of preventing the shootings. At the end of the day, if someone decides to walk into a summer camp or a shopping mall or anything else with guns and starts shooting, there’s not very much you can do about it. OK, maybe some alarm bells should have started ringing when the man bought a 6 tons of fertiliser, but it seems that he even timed the purchase of his materials so that it made sense that he was using the fertiliser for wholly legitimate purposes. He bought a few tonnes of fertiliser, but I would imagine a lot of farmers bought far, far more than that this springtime. Are they all to be investigated on suspicion of links to terrorism?
No, we cannot simply turn around and say, “you did this, this and this wrong, so this is your fault.” It is no-ones fault. Not even Breivik can be held fully accountable, because we’ve got to assume that there was something wrong with him, haven’t we? And whatever that mental defect was, it was probably outside of his control. Should we pity him? Can we find it in ourselves to pity this man? Perhaps not, but I think we should. As our mothers always told us, we have to be the better people.
Is that my response? Pity him! The man is a mass murderer! But before you stop reading, please think about it. Shouldn’t we pity anyone so ignorant as to be racist? Shouldn’t we pity those who cannot see the beauty of the world, and who see only the differences, never the similarities, or the common ground? His life is ruined, and was it by himself, and only by himself? Is his ignorance and his stupidity entirely his own fault? I don’t think so.
You’re still reading? Thank you. My point is not merely that we should pity racists, of course. I believe that the only way we can take a positive from an episode like this is to view it as a challenge to our way of thinking, and to use it, therefore, as a way to better understand ourselves. Not merely an opportunity to reflect on what that man did, nor to simply remember his victims. I sincerely hope that Breivik’s manifesto was shocking to all of us, and that it went against many of the things we believe about society, many of our ideal, and that it portrays a very different world view to our own. Shouldn’t we use that as what it is: the perfect devil’s advocate? From it, we can set off to consider the society he thought he was crusading against.
The deranged man might have thought that he was attacking the Muslim community, but he has attacked the whole world. It is no longer possible to single out one group and say that they represent a separate faction. What does that tell us about our society? Indubitably, if any politicians were to latch on to this, they would eagerly point out that this is evidence of multiculturalism at it’s best, and that it shows just how superb our global society is.
Nonsense.
Multiculturalism does not exist. We can have two cultures existing independent from one another, as various cultures do in many places, all over the globe, from Iraq to Israel, London to New York, Australia to the tiny school I went to on the North York Moors. It isn’t multiculturalism – it’s different cultures that happen to be in the same place. There is almost always friction and discrimination between these wholly separate groups. When was the last time someone talked about the multiculturalism of Gaza? When two cultures exist alongside each other without interacting, nobody benefits. At best, nothing good comes of it. It is only when two cultures come together, cooperate and share the best aspects of each that progress is made, and that isn’t multiculturalism, either. When a toddler gets a pot of blue paint and a pot of red paint, they either smear them on separate areas of the page/table/room, or they mix them together. If they do the latter, is it multi-coloured paint? No, it’s a new colour, probably a disgusting mucky purple. Likewise, if you mix two cultures, you don’t get a “multiculture,” you get a new culture.
Whilst that culture can be a fascinating, vibrant and exciting one, obviously linked to the parent cultures, it is a new entity that exists separately from those original cultures. This has happened across the globe, starting as government, news outlets and companies spread from covering individual parishes to covering nations. This eroded the individuality of these local cultures and created much larger, more far reaching cultures that, therefore, grew to be far more vibrant and interesting as a result. Now, these national cultures are spreading towards a global culture. I can look at art from anywhere, well, certainly anywhere “Western,” and it can resonate with me, consider the same things I do and talk about the same society and culture that I live in.
This global culture does not consist of multiple, separate cultures, it is a new, united one. Of course, the old cultures still exist, but more and more we are marching towards a homogenised culture that will have enormous vitality, will change and evolve in its own right and will encompass almost everyone on the planet. The internet and global news have made this possible. Now, almost everyone on this huge and crowded planet has access to one another, and they are all affecting each other, regardless of their religious or ethnic background, regardless of which country they were born in, or which country they live in. They all drink Coke, they all get CNN and can read the New York Times, if they want to. They are all linked. This is something Breivik failed to understand, and it is something we can come to understand by looking at what he did.
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