The essay from Inside Higher Ed is here. Below I'll lay out a few thoughts on the move from culture war to shooting war as the move from ideology to political physiology. Before that, excerpts:
Shortly before the bombing and shooting spree in Norway last month that left 77 people dead, Anders Behring Breivik e-mailed a thousand people the document he called his “compendium” -- a more accurate label than “manifesto,” as some have called it, since large chunks of text were cut and pasted from various sources rather than composed by the murderer himself....
Breivik’s anti-feminism and Islamophobic rage, his conviction that “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” are destroying civilization, and must be stopped -- all of this is the usual stuff of contemporary resentment.... But there turns out to be more to Breivik’s text than the usual hateful boilerplate. The killer was also a perverse sort of public intellectual.
He devotes almost 30 pages of single-spaced text to a peculiar tour of 20th-century thought. It is poorly informed but passionate. Breivik thinks of himself as an enemy of critical theory, which, by his reckoning, has ruined modern culture by undermining the rightful authority of European males. In particular, he appears obsessed with the influence of the Frankfurt School....
The other noteworthy thing about Breivik’s section on intellectual history is its provenance. All of his ideas came from the United States. Even that may be understating it. Nearly every syllable of Breivik’s diatribe against critical theory, “cultural Marxists,” and militant feminism was taken from a think tank in the Washington, D.C., area. His rampage was, in effect, the American culture wars continued by other means....
The ersatz erudition all comes secondhand, from a collection of articles called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology, edited by William S. Lind, which is readily available online. It was published in 2004 by the Free Congress Foundation, a think tank founded by the prominent conservative fund raiser Paul Weyrich in 1977. (Its offices are currently in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.)
The foundation once sponsored a TV network called National Empowerment Television, which is now defunct. In 1999, it aired a program called “Political Correctness: The Frankfurt School.”...The NET program is still around, courtesy of YouTube....
It's very important however not to neglect, along with the "why" of his killing -- his racist and misogynist ideology if you will -- the question of "how" he managed the massacre.
That is, besides his ideas, his management of the act of killing is also crucial to understand. It's far beyond the capacities of most people to kill in cold blood at close range; it's just too intense: hands shake, stomachs heave, even at the thought of it.
How then did Breivik withstand the intensity of the act of killing so many people over such a long period of time? Apparently he was so cold-blooded that the act just wasn't that intense for him. How did he achieve this cold-bloodness? What feedback loops linked the hateful words he read and wrote to this cold blood? What role did drugs play here? Did he train with first-person shooter games? What sort of male fantasies lie behind his self-portraits in dress uniform, evening wear, and combat gear?
These and many more are the questions of political physiology.
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