A Mass Revenge Killing

In some very important fundamental ways, once you have the key, I do not think people are all that hard to understand. Why they murder, for one.

I don't have to read mass murderer's Anders Breivik’s 1500-page manifesto. I’m not going to, either, not with that length. I don’t need to read it.

People murder for one reason: revenge. Revenge is an attempt to replace feelings of shame and humiliation with feelings of pride and self-respect. It is primitive, destructive and violent but historically it’s been the main response to perceived injuries.

The first recorded murder in Western mythology is when Cain slew Abel. Why? Because God rejected Cain’s sacrifice and accepted Abel’s.

“Unto Abel the Lord had respect…unto Cain the Lord had not respect.” So Cain, humiliated, attempted to replace his feelings of shame and humiliation with pride by murdering his brother, on whom he (inaccurately in this case) blamed his problems. It was revenge.

For that matter, the first recorded war in the Bible comes right after Cain and Abel, when Dinah’s brothers slaughtered the entire tribe of the man who had seduced Dinah. It was to them a matter of honor and pride and in their minds it could only be restored by wiping out all the men and taking all the women and wealth.

The psychiatrist James Gilligan, who spent 35 years interviewing thousands of prisoners, said he always heard the same story as to why they murdered or brutally assaulted people. What he heard, every time, was “He dissed me” or else humiliated, mocked, insulted and ridiculed the prisoner’s children, wife, parents, friends. Gilligan one day realized what he was hearing, over and over, was the story of Cain and Abel: the feelings of humiliation followed by revenge manifesting itself as murder. (Gilligan also said, “The most dangerous men on earth are those who are afraid they are wimps.”)

John Douglas, the retired FBI profiler of serial killers and mass murderers, stated that every serial killer or mass murderer he encountered was an “inadequate” type (i.e., he felt unbearably humiliated) who covered it up with grandiosity (like a 1500-page manifesto) and sought revenge on those he believed caused his problems. Wrote Douglas in The Anatomy of Motive about one mass murder: “…this crime…[was] a kind of revenge…it was retaliation for some perceived wrong – real or imagined – perpetrated against the killer” (In another case, a teenage school shooter said, “The world has wronged me, and I could take it no more”).

Breivik murdered those people for revenge because he believed they were the leftists destroying his country through multiculturalism and mass immigration of non-Norwegians, and he could no longer tolerate it. I believe he targeted them instead of Muslims because he decided it was easier and more effective to kill the head than try to kill the body.

After all, can you blame Muslims for wanting to get out of their failed nations and come to the West? I don’t. Apparently Breivik didn’t either. He targeted the people who let them in.

There is what I call the Cycle of Murder and Revenge. I’m sure Breivik is fanatically convinced leftists are murdering his country, so he completed the cycle by exacting revenge on them. And I’m just as sure he believes what he did was fully justified. He probably always will.

People think revenge is justified because in their minds it’s self-defense – they kill the people who they believe are trying to kill them. They’re trying to restore their honor and self-respect by eliminating those who they believe are trying to murder them – or their self-image. Or their country.

What surprised me was the fact Breivik allowed himself to be taken alive. As Gilligan has noticed, “One of the most common fantasies I have heard from many of the most violent prison inmates is the scenario of going to their deaths in a hail of gunfire while killing as many people as possible before they die.” (Seung-Hui Cho, anyone?)

Apparently Breivik wanted to stay alive to speak his piece, since terrorism is a political statement. (As an aside, I’m hardly the first to notice that if one person kills another he is a murderer; if he kills one hundred he is evil and a monster, but if he kills 100,000 or a million he is a hero and a patriot.)

Leftists, of course, will never understand the truth of things. They never do. As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn observed in his Leftism Revisited, “Leftists don’t merely misunderstand human nature; they don’t understand it at all.”

What we’re going to hear from the Left is more demands for gun control, education, tolerance. What are they going to do about the steroids Breivik used and the music he listened to in order to motivate himself? Ban them? Good luck. Nothing leftists do can work. Left-wing fantasies never do.

Leftists never listen to those who disagree with them except to demonize them. I am reminded of what Chris Stout wrote in The Psychology of Terrorism: “The first stage in the development of terrorism begins when intolerable life conditions cause suffering that produces…a malignant alteration in the personality caused by the repeated failure to respond to overwhelming trauma.”

Breivik wasn’t evil or crazy (those tiresome clichés explain exactly nothing). He was cold-bloodedly rational, lacked empathy and considered his enemies so dangerous, subhuman and evil they had to be eliminated. He had changed into a killing machine seeking revenge because of the trauma of seeing his country destroyed before his eyes. I’m sure he got a lot of satisfaction out of what he did. After all, in his own mind, he restored his self-respect and was trying to save his country from what he defined as evil.

Those who do not see what Breivik did as a warning shot against mixing different tribes on the same land are ignoring what is before their eyes.

I can’t predict specifically predict the future for Europe. But I will quote Gary Brecher (the War Nerd): “Traditionally, when one tribe runs into another the result has been genocide.” The leftists and the multiculturalists and the immigration enthusiasts won’t understand this until it’s too late.

For the people Breivik murdered, it is too late.

I’ll close with another quote from Gilligan: “Those who have interviewed contemporary terrorists…have concluded that a primary motive for such behavior is humiliation – not necessarily personal or individual humiliation, but rather the sense of collective or national humiliation that is felt when the religion or culture at the center of their collective identity has been seen as inferior and subjected to insult and contempt.”