letter from Oslo

Below's an email from Mike Seltzer in Oslo in response to a piece about the massacre there. I'm republishing it here (with permission, and in a slightly edited version) because of the fascinatingperspective it provides:

Greetings from Oslo.

I hope this reaches you. First I want to thank you for two things in your Counterpunch piece about Breivik which have been absent from all the pieces — many nonsensical — I have read and heard about the  bombing and massacre of the innocents on 22 July.  Firstly, you put Breivik in into a class perspective where he most certainly belongs.

I have been helping Mattias Gardell, a Swedish professor who has little knowledge of Norway but lots of knowledge about Islamaphobia and racist groups in Sweden and the US.  I have pointed out to him the location of Breivik's home, a place many of us call  Vanilla Town in Oslo, owing to the color of almost all of its inhabitants.  His father and step father were both petit bourgeoise, the former middle level bureaucrat in the foreign deparment of Norway and the latter an office in the Norwegian military.  Breivik's address however placed him in the lowest and most shaky level of the petit bourgeois – his mother was a single provider for most of his upbringing yet Breivik went first to a grade school where the current  crown prince and crown princess were also pupils, he then went to a middle school often referred to as THE snob school in Oslo – but again Breivik was simply not financially equipped to compete with the majority of his classmates: designer jeans, vacations trips with mamma and pappa to exotic locations, etc.  As I wrote Mattias when he was putting together this piece: Breivik is right out of Bourdieu who has much to say about the shaking position of the petit bourgeois whose greatest possession is a gigantic set of aspirations to acuqire more economic, social, symbolic and cultural capital. And I added for Mattias, their greatest fear as so eloquently described by Barbara Ehrenreich in her Fear of Falling is namely that of falling into the working class whose party Breivik wished to erase – or at least its future leaders as he tells in the Manifesto.

The second point I wish to thank you for raising is about how members of this strata who like Breivik have more education than the working -class they fear and despise use their writing skills to pour streams of racist consciousness in Islamaphobic manifestos in cyberspace.

I wrote 3 decades ago a long manuscript comparing Vidkun Quisling's National Unity Party of the 1930s  (Nasjonal Samling) with the McCarthyites in the 1950s.  Their membership (until Norway was occupied and Quisling became the puppet leader) was again petit bourgeois from the cities and the relatively  well to do farmers from rural areas.  And their ideology was a simple one: a return to a pure Norwegian culture by throwing out Jews and other foreigner, purging Norway of foreign cultural influences such as "Nigger" music (as they termed jazz) and Jugend architecture and of course Bolshevistic ideas, and a return to partriarchy with women in the kitchen, nursery and bedroom.

I now have read BReivik's Manifesto twice – something I would wish on my worst enemy – but what strikes me is how his perfect Norway is almost a resurrection of the National Unity program.  And of course,  Tailgunner Joe and his much less organized followers in the US wanted a return to the Old West where men were men and women were kitchen, nursery and bedroom – but interestingly, an Old West where the upper class (bourgeois) traitors born with silver spoons in their mouth were no more.

Finally re your writings about the atmosphere in the racist blogosphere: Andreas Malm, who in some ways carries on Stieg Larsson's battle against the racist and neo-Nazi right in Sweden, wrote a few days ago about this toxic blogosphere cited hundreds of time in Breivik's manifesto a very astute observation which I translate for you here.  Malm wrote:  Breivik and thousands of others have created a special atmosphere in this space which they all breathe in, but Breivik was the one who exhaled!!

[…]

Many thanks for bring class back into the discussion at a time when the lone nutter theory is being pushed by the liberal pundits and neo-Nazis,

In solidarity,

Mike Seltzer in Oslo at Oslo University College