Breivik's Fundamentalist War on Politics, and Ours Wednesday 3 August 2011 by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis
Surrounding a statue of former Prime Minister Christian Michelsen, a memorial of flowers and candles was made to honor the victims killed in an act of domestic terrorism last Friday, in Oslo, July 28, 2011. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times) ... you are operating as a jury, judge and executioner on behalf of all free Europeans. It is better to kill too many than not enough ... the time for dialogue is over ... the time for armed resistance has come. -Anders Behring Breivik, from his manifesto, "2083," sent out before the July 22 attacks in Oslo, Norway Within a week after right-wing Christian extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, many of them children, the US Republican Party leadership, in an effort to rally its members in the budget battle with the Obama administration, screened a short clip from the 2010 Ben Affleck movie, "The Town." The exchange between a young thug, played by Affleck, and one of his fellow ruffians, played by Jeremy Renner, proceeds as follows: Ben Affleck: "I need your help. I can't tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we're going to hurt some people." Jeremy Renner: "Whose car are we going to take?"[1] Affleck and Renner proceed to don hockey masks, break into an apartment, and bludgeon two men with sticks and shoot a third in the leg. What is shocking about this incident coming so closely on the heels of the media coverage of the slaughter of scores of innocent young people in Norway by an ideological extremist is that it reveals the moral blindness and political indifference of the Republican Party leadership to its own growing extremism by openly embracing the relationship between images of violence and hate and the murderous acts that sometimes follow. Yet, in this case, the indifference turned to something more troubling, in that, by using the clip from "The Town," it appears that Republican leaders used gratuitous images of mind-crushing violence and retribution as a legitimate, even inspiring, framework for motivating support for legislative practices that will have deleterious, even violent, impacts on vulnerable populations in the United States, especially children. This is not merely barbarism parading as political reform - it is also a blatant indicator of the degree to which sadism and a theater of cruelty have become normalized at the highest reaches of government. full: http://www.truth-out.org/breiviks-fundamentalist-war-politics-and-ours/1312390288
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