Abstract
Using terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto as a barometer of right and far-right political rhetoric of the last two decades, this essay argues that two core ideas of Breivik’s manifesto reveal larger shifts in post-Holocaust racist discourse: first, that in a post-Holocaust world in which explicit biological racism is becoming more rare, Breivik and other figures on the contemporary European far-right have spotlighted a common Western identity, rooted in and bolstered by medieval imagery and rhetoric, as the chief quality marking the West as historically and culturally unique; second, that the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory of Lewis and Huntington has permeated far-right anti-immigration discourse.
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Notes
Writing in the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, Kay (2012) argues that Breivik is psychotic, not right wing: ‘Breivik isn’t a right-wing ideologue who strayed into murderous radicalism: He is a crazy person who was biologically pre-destined to lose his mind in a violent way – and who justified the violence by latching on to whatever stray bits of politics, technobabble, and spiritual gobbledygook that he chanced upon.’ Conservative London mayor Johnson wrote an op-ed piece in the Telegraph (Johnson, 2011) dismissing the significance of Breivik’s manifesto, arguing that it has no scholarly value and ought to be ignored rather than studied. This despite Johnson’s admission that it is to a great degree ‘rooted … in the political discourse of the Anglosphere,’ especially ‘blog-post threads that you will find in the media, especially the “conservative” media in Britain.’
Further critiques of the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ can be found in Neusner (2001) and Cohen (1970).
The Islamophobic provocateur Robert Spencer warns that if the West hopes to fend off Sharia law it must ‘reclaim our cultural heritage and defend the Judeo-Christian civilization that has given us the freedoms we enjoy’ and that it is only through the Judeo-Christian tradition that ‘we can build a moral alliance against Islamic supremacism’ (Spencer, 2007, 204). In the early 1990s, the French politician Pierre Lellouche bluntly declared that ‘Europe’s past was white and Judeo-Christian’ but that ‘[t]he future is not,’ lamenting that ‘our very old institutions and structures’ are in danger of being ‘overwhelmed’ by non-Europeans (cited in Miller, 1991). Far-right Dutch politician Wilders believes that ‘Western nations should add an amendment to our constitutions stating that our societies are based on Judeo-Christian and humanist values’ and that ‘we owe nothing to Islam’ (Wilders, 2012, 213).
Leon Wieseltier writes that although many ‘of our brothers and our sisters are still trapped in the old terms – in Argentina, perhaps also in Russia, and in certain precincts of Europe … we must immediately remind ourselves that no anti-Semitic atrocity that was committed in Europe in recent years can responsibly be compared to the murder of a quarter of a million Muslims in the Balkans a decade ago: Europe has moved on to another other’ (Wieseltier, 2005, 7).
Lewis and Huntington are sharply critiqued in Bottici and Challand (2010) and in Qureshi and Sells (2003, 1–50).
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Wollenberg, D. Defending the West: Cultural racism and Pan-Europeanism on the far-right. Postmedieval 5, 308–319 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.19