10 years after the Oslo massacre, Anders Breivik’s manual continues to inspire neo-Nazi terrorists around the world

The bells of Oslo Cathedral and the rest of Norwegian churches rang in unison on Thursday to mark the 10th anniversary of the massacre that shook the country and whose leader continues to inspire far-right terrorists around the world. July 22, 2011 Anders Breivik detonated a powerful bomb in front of government buildings in the Norwegian capital, killing eight people, then He traveled to the small island of Utøya to murder 69 teenagers young members of the center-left Labor Party. Breivik had drafted a 1,521-page manifesto which continues to circulate on social networks and is considered an “essential manual of far-right terrorism”, cited and studied by dozens of attackers in serious attacks around the world.

“Breivik is one of us and hatred is still with us”, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General who was Prime Minister of Norway at the time of the attacks, warned during the ceremony at the cathedral. It was listened to by King Harald, 84, sitting next to Queen Sonja, relatives of the 77 victims, Prime Minister Erna Solberg and much of the Norwegian political apparatus and the rest of Scandinavia. “Norway has changed forever and what happened still causes us great pain. It was a terrorist attack on the youth, the Labor Party and the heart of our country. It hurt us very badly“said Premier Solberg in her speech.

It all happened for four hours on July 22, 2011. Breivik, dressed as a policeman, parked a white van in front of the main government building in Oslo. Then he walked over to a car he had left ready and left the scene. A few minutes later, the truck carrying a fertilizer pump exploded. Eight people were killed, ten were injured and it left enormous devastation three blocks away. Breivik traveled about 40 kilometers and hopped on a ferry to the island of Utøya, where the Labor Party youth movement held its annual summer camp. He said he was a policeman who came to protect the area after the Oslo bombing. Immediately started shooting trying to kill as many of the 564 teenagers and youths who were on the island at the time as possible. In the hour and thirteen minutes it took for the police to arrive and arrest him, Breivik scoured the island, killing anyone he could find. Killed sixty-nine people, thirty-three of whom were under eighteen, and dozens of seriously injured.

Breivik made it clear during police questioning after his arrest, and in his subsequent trial, that his atrocities were simply “The fireworks” to announce the presentation of its manifesto, entitled “European Declaration of Independence – 2083”, a vast collection of over 1,500 pages with its Nazi vision mixed with the “counter-jhad” rhetoric of racist hatred and its own thoughts on how to plan and prepare for an attack. It is divided into three sections. The first two, which speak of history and ideology, have been largely copied and pasted or plagiarized by other far-right authors. The third part is his. In this section offers strategic and operational advice to future “militant nationalists” who “I hope will follow in my footsteps”. It includes information on organizational structures and details on uniforms, instructions on how to carry out a coup, moral justifications for brutal violence, information on acquiring weapons, selecting targets and other matters related to operational planning and preparations. He also explains how he was able to overcome obstacles and produce a fertilizer-based explosive device.

Breivik believed that his “courageous actions” would enlighten “the people” who “The powerful are vulnerable”. And he hoped that his violence “would inspire admiration and respect” from many other personalities – “many imprisoned and some even martyred” – who had fought against what he called the “Marxist / Multiculturalist Cultural Alliance”. And he assured that he had been led to act by “the real heroes of the conservative revolution”.

At one point the manual became something of a journal and in the entry for June 11, on the 41st day of his preparations for the bombings, he wrote that he had prayed, “I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the safe Islamic takeover of Europe, had to ensure that “To succeed in my mission and thus help inspire thousands of other revolutionary nationalist conservatives / anti-communist and anti-Islamist revolutionaries across the European world (sic)”.

Unfortunately, he is successful in his request for divine help. In the ten years since his heinous attack, numerous cases have been recorded in those that far-right terrorists have declared to be “influenced” or directly “obsessed” by the perpetration of a “Breivik-style massacre”. A New York Times investigation found that at least a third of far-right terrorists who attacked or planned attacks from 2011-2020 had taken inspiration from Breivik’s handbook, worshiped it, or studied its tactics and tactics. ways of acting.

The most emblematic case of this current of Norwegian imitators occurred on March 15, 2019 when Brenton Tarrant, unemployed Australian, killed 51 people in terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch (New Zealand) and dozens of injured. He planned to attack a third mosque, but the police intercepted and arrested him. Hours before the attacks, Tarrant posted another manifesto called “The Great Replacement” on the Internet. Full of far-right clichés and with a lot of irony and jokes inside, he wrote that he had read the writings of other racist terrorists like Dylann Roof, but “I was only really inspired by Knight Justice Breivik.” And he planned his attack according to the rules that the Norwegian terrorist had written.

The first attack inspired by what happened in Oslo took place on August 10, 2012 and was carried out by a 29-year-old man from Ostrava, Czech Republic, who used the name “Breivik” in his accounts. Internet. Police managed to arrest him in time and recovered explosives, hundreds of cartridges, helmets, police uniforms and police ID from his apartment. In November of the same year, another attack planned by Brunon Kwiecień, a doctor of chemistry at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland, derailed. He had four tons of explosives to blow up the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, and the Norwegian assassin’s manual. A third Eastern European terrorist “obsessed” with Breivik, Ukrainian student Pavlo Lapshyn, murdered an elderly Muslim and detonated a series of bombs outside two mosques in the West Midlands days after arriving in Great Britain. Brittany in 2013. Belgian intelligence agents arrested around 20 people. three years in Sint-Niklaas, nicknamed by his supporters in a closed neo-Nazi conversation the “Dutch Breivik”. He was looking for other activists to “overthrow the Belgian state” and had planned a very detailed attack on the Flemish public television channel VRT.

At that time, they also appeared several unbalanced people who killed or seriously injured relatives and friends after seeing footage of the Breivik trial. This is the case of a 37-year-old man arrested in June 2014 in Britain, who killed three members of his family “Inspired by Breivik and McVeigh (the Oklahoma Bomber)” because he said he was constantly ridiculed for being red-haired. In January 2015, Swedish police in the city of Jönköping received a desperate call from the mother of a forty-year-old man with a history of mental illness. He had Nazi sympathies and idolized Breivik. He was arrested in possession of 10 kg of black powder explosives. That same year, in July, Swedish police arrested two prominent neo-Nazi activists in Falkenberg and found large quantities of explosives in their homes. During the trial, several witnesses said the neo-Nazis claimed that his attack “would be more important than that of Breivik”.

On June 16, 2016, Thomas Mair, a 53-year-old gardener, repeatedly shot and stabbed British Labor MP Jo Cox. He had been affiliated with the National Front and was linked to far-right groups in the United States and South Africa. In his house he had a huge archive of press clippings on the Breivik attack and its aftermath. Also an underlined copy of the Norwegian manual. A month later, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the Oslo attacks, a German-Iranian teenager, David Sonboly, took to the streets of Munich, and using the same type of gun the Norwegian terrorist had used, he indiscriminately killed nine people. And even a Maryland Coast Guard lieutenant in the United States, Christopher Hasson, who pleaded guilty to four federal crimes of arms trafficking with intent to commit a terrorist act, also did so in inspiration from the murderer of the island of Utøya. . Hasson had “Reviewed regularly and read carefully” the parts of the Breivik manifesto that asked a potential terrorist to stockpile guns, food, costumes and survival supplies.

During the trial against him, between April 16 and June 22, 2012, Breivik had despicable attitudes making the nazi salute, making an absurd claim based on the fact that his actions had saved Norway “and possibly all of Europe” from the Islamist threat and he even allowed himself to be joked. He said between laughs that “With that, they will give me the Nobel Peace Prize like Mandela”. Attitudes that have also sparked the pent-up bloodlust of far-right extremists around the world.