a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
user-inactivated  ·  980 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What has Norway learned from the Utøya attack 10 years ago? Not what I hoped

The attacks are unique - at least in a Scandinavian context - because of the coldblooded and refined planning and execution, while the attacker and his views are not. He set out to, and partly succeeded in, eliminating a generation of politicians of the Labor party, taking the rhetoric common in the national conservative and counter-jihad circles to its logical conclusion.

I lived in Oslo at the time of the attacks, spent the night guarding a store with blown-out windows a block from the Labor party headquarters. I walked in the rose marches, attended the memorial ceremony. It was a national trauma that affected everyone. I now live in Sweden but much of the public discourse remains the same; he was a lone mad man; don't politicize the attacks. But at some point, as a society, we need to face the truth: the attacks were an act of far-right terrorism aimed at young social democrats. The terrorist shared his worldview with one of the largest parties in our parliament. Claiming that you should not make politics of an event is very much to make politics out of an event. To say that a political act isn't political is a political act.