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Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part II

Peter Dale Scott - The planted clues for Breivik’s legend
Breivik the man must be viewed as unreliable, and every statement from him viewed with the greatest suspicion. Yet his extensive autodocumentation -- by which I mean the Internet manifesto, video, and Facebook page attributed to him -- deserve to be assessed carefully regardless of authorship, especially in the light of later statements he is alleged to have made to the Norwegian police. And here we can say that, whatever the truth about Breivik, the autodocumentation shows connections leading ultimately to the shadowy underworld of arms and drug traffickers that may also have fostered al Qaeda.

It is exceedingly common for high-publicity deep events to be accompanied by such autodocumentation, After the diaries of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged diary attributed to Arthur Bremer (the man said to have shot the 1972 presidential candidate George Wallace, stimulated Gore Vidal to wonder, in an essay for the New York Review of Books, whether the true author of the diary might not have been the CIA officer and Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt (or in my terms, whether the Wallace shooting might not have been a systemic deep event).

Nearby in a rented car, the police found Bremer’s diary (odd that in the post-Gutenberg age Oswald, Sirhan, and Bremer should have all committed to paper their pensées).

According to the diary, Bremer had tried to kill Nixon in Canada but failed to get close enough. He then decided to kill George Wallace. The absence of any logical motive is now familiar to most Americans, who are quite at home with the batty killer who acts alone in order to be on television.18

Gore’s perceptive witticism, the “killer who acts alone in order to be on television,” fits Breivik very well: his documents seem clearly designed to generate maximum publicity and speculation.

Somewhat like Breivik, Oswald left behind him a legacy of autodocumentation, some of which proved to be very suited for post-assassination television. This included, besides a diary and extensive political manuscripts, an audio-video tape involving an ex-Army psychological warfare expert, and expounding his alleged political beliefs. Yet the differences are instructive. Oswald’s autodocumentation of his alleged left-wing identity can be seen in retrospect as false, and probably part of FBI-CIA efforts to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee which Oswald tried to penetrate.19

Breivik’s video appears to express his true beliefs, even though I shall argue in a moment that most of the video may have been prepared by someone else. Yet in contrast to Breivik’s, the misleading Oswald audio-video was aired extensively after the JFK assassination, as part of the propaganda campaign to describe him as a leftist.20 The Breivik video, by comparison, has been downplayed, and has indeed disappeared from many if not most of the web sites where it was originally posted.21

This suggests to me that the Breivik video was intended to capitalize on the publicity caused by his actions, but that the group behind this effort was not part of mainstream western society, and is not currently being supported by those in charge of the mainstream media. I shall suggest shortly that it was designed primarily for a different audience: the world of the resentful who find an outlet for their resentments on the Internet.

What Does Breivik’s Video Indicate? That Breivik Did Not Act Alone
Both the content and the authorship of Breivik’s video remain very mysterious. What seems relatively clear is that it was not composed and controlled by Breivik alone.

The evidence for plural authorship for the video is internal.22 Almost all of the video appears to be a speeded-up version of a text-heavy sequence of stills, possibly originally a slideshow presentation about knights templar and their fellow crusaders. It is clear both that a great deal of work has gone into the preparation and presentation of this text, and also that the text serves little or no purpose in the speeded-up Breivik version, For there are sometimes up to about twenty lines of text on a screen page, of which not more than about four or five lines can be read, even swiftly, in the time now allotted to them.

Otherwise the video is of professional quality, definitely not a home movie. One of the stylistic features unifying it is the steady predictable rhythm in the three- or four-second time-lapses allotted to each still. This rhythm is broken, jarringly, at the very end, when three photos of Breivik himself appear. The first two are presented very swiftly, completely out of sync with the rhythmic presentation in the rest of the video.

I am left with the strong impression that whoever added Breivik’s stills at the end of the video – who may possibly even have been Breivik himself – was not the original videographer or slideshow preparer. It was someone instead with a different style, sensibility, and purpose. (It would not surprise me to learn that there are other discernible and even quantifiable differences between the slideshow and Breivik parts of the video, with respect to such details as light.)

Whoever emailed out the video and manifesto just before the attacks was most likely aware of the massacres about to unfold. And if there is more than one author for the video, then Breivik was most probably not acting alone. For the release of the two documents must be considered an integral, indeed an essential, part of the 7/22 event -- indeed the point of it. I shall argue shortly that its aim was not just slaughter but publicity: to provoke a heightened discussion of the issues and promoters of counter-jihad.