Steven Sailer: Breivik ... A Right-wing Imitator of Marx and Lenin

Steven Sailer is an American journalist and movie critic for The American Conservative.

It has long been anticipated—with foreboding on the right but with something approaching longing on the left—that mass immigration would lead to a ghastly backlash atrocity.

Thus, when in January a young white man in Arizona, the frontline state in the struggle over illegal immigration, attempted to assassinate his Democratic congresswoman, numerous voices of respectability, such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, blamed the massacre on the hate-filled bigotry of Arizona Republicans, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and anybody else they happened to loathe.

Almost immediately, copious evidence emerged that the killer was psychotic and had never paid attention to conservative commentators. When confronted with the facts, though, some of the press doubled down.

Now in Norway the long-expected enormity has finally happened. Yet the killer of 76, Anders Behring Breivik, turned out not to be a lowbrow soccer hooligan taking out his rage on immigrants. Instead, he is a cold-blooded, excessively rational highbrow who turned his guns not on immigrants but on the children of their sponsors, the white liberal elite.

Among terrorist monsters, Breivik is perhaps the most lucid since the Unabomber, whom he plagiarizes in the 1516 page “compendium” he posted online just before his crimes. So I undertook the unpleasant task of trying to understand what motivates him. Is he a Christian fundamentalist fanatic, as has been widely assumed by the U.S. press? Or is there something else going on here that won’t make sense from an American perspective?

Having thought about this rotten person longer than I’ve wanted, I have finally grasped that Breivik only makes sense when viewed on his own terms, which are those of the bloody history of continental European ideology. Breivik, I’ve come to realize, is a Marxist heretic...