Just look at all the intense, heated discussion about multi-culturalism, political correctness and islamofascism going on in just about every blog and forum the world over… It appears that the Nordic terrorist was looking for a way to make this debate front and center and “fuel a fire”. Tragically, he concluded that a horrific large scale massacre would focus the world’s attention. To that extent, he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
I know Scandinavia as a frequent traveller in 2009-2010 and I can say the sense that the society’s “political correctness” and “cultural relativism” had exasperated the younger “natives” feeling like strangers in their own land was more than palpable and well above the surface. Hence the terror attack did not come as a big surprise.
I recalled the incident when I was assaulted and mugged during my first year in graduate school in the 80’s. After visiting the university’s student health center to get bandaged up, I was referred to a “student mental and emotional health counsellor” who began to kindly educate me about how my ordeal should be understood as a direct consequence of America’s shameful history of Slavery! I think that was meant to enlighten me and at the same time help with my distress and “anger management”… But it had the exact opposite effect! I vividly remember that moment when my natural sense of disgust, focused on the retarded (possibly affirmative-action) tolerance preaching “counsellor” who could not tell from my Iranian accent that I could not possibly have anything to do with Slavery in the USA, and had only showed up to get quick outpatient treatment! The anger I felt was as intense as that which I had once felt after getting savagely beaten up by my high school’s Hezbollah bullies. That was because I thought I had moved to a civilized country only to experience, first-hand, some sinister form of “education” at a rather inappropriate time! I had understood what Amercans meant by the expression “Adding Insult to Injury”!! (Afterwards some of my roommates explained “political correctness” and “affirmative action” and lent me Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, two books that I read with passion and led to a revelation that liberated me from my dissonant left-liberal worldview.) I remember how I finally “got” Dirty Harry!!
The point I am trying to make is that Political Correctness can be as sinister as “Adding Insult to Injury” and I in my conversations with some of my young and intelligent Swedish and Danish friends, when they were most lucid after consuming copious doses of alcohol, I could sense the simmering anger and their intense sense of unease and loss. It was only a matter of time before a Scandinavian-style cold and calculated form of madness would overcome someone of their generation …
