Henryk M. Broder is a favourite commentor and writer on contemporary issues of mine. He writes books, and for newspappers like Die Welt and formerly, Der Spiegel. He is witty, has a dark, often sarcastic sense of humour that respects nothing, not even the Holocaust (he is a Polish Jew whose family has been in the camps camps), and has a very sharp tongue. Breivik quoted him, and Broder reacted to that in this article which i found very good and right in mark, so I took the time to translate it manually.
This was an original German release on Welt Online.
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The manifest of Anders Behring Breivik, and me
(Henryk M. Broder,
translated by Skybird)
Our author gets quoted in the 1500 paged manifest of assassin Anders Breivik. He describes on Welt Online, how it could get to that.
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So this is a a causal chain: roughly 5 years ago I gave an interview to a Dutch newspaper, where I said that if I were younger, I would leave Europe and move to a country that was not threatened by a sneaking Islamisation.
This interview then got quoted by the Islam-critical Norwegian blogger "Fjordman" in one of his texts. The "Fjordman"-text
("Islamisation and Cowardice in Scandinavia":
http://www.achgut.com/dadgdx/index.p...the_manifesto/ )
now is to be found in full length in the "manifest" of Norwegian Breivik, who killed 76 people in two strikes. And as soon as that, me and other fellow travellers are declared responsible for these strikes:
Writes Turkish Ercan Tekin on the website Turkishpress:
"Wilders, Sarrazin and Broder along with the whole udder-clique (=Euterclique) can be proud of having raised this breed with their atmosphere of "constructive debate" (=Streitkultur), and have in the name of freedom and Christian-democratic love for thy next exposed as targets all those "Gutmenschen", leftists, liberals and Muslims who were not d'accord with this sick way of thinking." Headlined as
"Wilders, Sarrazin, Broder - intellectual arsonists?", the question mark at the end of the headline had a rather rethoric function only.
By "udder-clique" are meant
Seyran Ates, Necla Kelek, Güner Balci, Cigdem Toprak and other journalists, who the writer for Turkishpress despises so very much that he could not bring their names over his lips.
With a bit more finesse it was formulated by Patrick Gensing on the homepage of Tagesschau.de . "
The fight of the right extremists for more freedom" had turned into it's "
opposite", the "
consequences" were "intolerance
, hate, and now even mass murder", he wrote.
He adds cream to his analysis by this advice: "
Maybe the events give food for thought to burgoise circles in German society, who love to coquet with alleged breakings of taboos." Gensing not only lumbs together "rightwing radicals" and "burgoise circles", he attacks them both also for the same crime: to have paved the way for this mass murder by "breaking taboos". (Skybird: Broder means the ongoing debate over the failing of integration of Islamic migrants in Europe, where labelling the integration as failed indeed marks a breaking of a long-standing habit here ein Germany).
This is as logical and convincing as if somebody would hold both cannibals and vegans responsible of having ruined food culture.
Nevertheless I have a certain understanding for this kind of arguing. The deed this Norwegian has committed, is so monsterous, perverse and unbelievable, that one is tempted to accept just any explanation for it just in order to understand it.
Strealing food in a supermarket means the offender had hunger, who sets cars on fire by night has something against rich people (Skybird: he refers to Berlin were "autonomous" people set ablaze cars almost every night now), and who abuses a child, has had a dififcult childhood himself. But what does somebody have who wears a police uniform and shoots children and teenager as if they were flying ducks? What about this:
lust to kill?
But in a society that rationalises and explains EVERYTHING - from alcoholism zu climate change - , this is no acceptable argument. The nutheads sit in the TV containers of "Big Brother" or showfight in the TV "Jungle Camp", but on the streets there are only rational, reasomnablel self-controlled people who always know exactly where to find the cheapest price for what they want to get.
And if the go wrong and fall nevertheless, then the automatism of cause study takes over immediately. Yes, if the art academy would have accepted Herrn Hitler, he wouldn'T have entered politics, WWII would not have taken place, and Wroclaw still would be named Breslau (Skybird: Broder is Jewish of Polish descent). And if the blond and blue-eyed Norwegian wouldn't have read Broder and Sarrazin, but Patrick Bahner and Roger Willemsen , he wouldn't have turned into a mass murderer.
I know I simplify, but I only trty to keep pace with the people in the opposite camp, who try with an unprecedented shamelessness to gain a moralising advantage in the debate, by trying to claim that Islam-critics from Ates to Sarrazin, from Broder to Wilders are responsible for the mass murder.
Breivik is a monster in human form, but stupid he is not. He prepared his deed extremely precisely. Part of that also is that "manifest", that beside me also quotes other Islam-critics like Richard Rorty, Immanuel Kant and Franz Kafka.
Breivik knew that he had to give rational reasons for his deed. And that he has not learned from Thilo Sarrazin or me, but he learned that from Mohammed Atta and Osama Bin Laden, the assassins from Madrid, London, Mumbai, Bali; from Carlos the Jackal and those "martyrs" who record a video before they leave to bomb themselves into paradise.
And whenever there was a terror strike or the plot had been spoiled in time, from the semi-professionals of the Hamburg terror cell to the dilletants of the Sauerland-group, immediately "experts" headed for the scene of the crime - means: the media - in order to ask the mother of all questions: "how desperate are people who do things like this?"
This question always has been the starting shot for the search for mitigating circumstances. In his first comment on 9/11, Günter Grass reasoned over the ammount of guilt "we" need to accept for "them" hating us so much.
After the assassination of Theo can Gogh, no commentator wanted to pass on makling the remark that the Dutch filmmaker had "offended" many Muslims, like Danish cartoonistr Kurt Westergaard also did, who had provoked his almost-executioner by painting those Muhammad cartoons.
Breivik noted all that. Very possible that he thought: "What they can do, I can do even better." And if he would have chosen as targets not a holiday camp of the socialist youth organisation, but an American embassy, or an Israeli group of athletes, then the differentiators and understand-it-alls already would be on the road again: "Terrible this attack, but..."
At Wikipedia there is a list of all suicide bombings in Iraq in 2010. It were dozens of attacks with hundreds of deaths. But I cannot remember a single report that asked the question what books the terrorists had read, and what literature had motivated them for their crimes. "Les Damnés de la Terre" by Frantz Fanon? Or the biography of Alfred Nobel? Because, different from the Norwegian murderer, they did not leave behind a manifest filled with lists and lists of literature references.
On his Twitter-.account, Breiivk left behind a quote by English philosopher J.S. Mill (1806-1073): One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.
This quote also is by Mills: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." High time to remove the writings by John Stuart Mills on the book shelves and to replace them with the works by Richard David Precht: "Who Am I ***8211; And If So, How Many?"
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Skybird: the last line: about Precht, here is basic info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_David_Precht
Quote:
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Originally planned as an introduction to philosophy for young people, his most successful work, the non-fiction Wer bin ich ***8211; und wenn ja, wie viele?(English: "Who Am I ***8211; And If So, How Many?"; release of the English version in April 2011.) was published in 2007. It is an introduction to philosophy with results of brain research, psychology, behaviour research and other sciences linked. The book regards itself as an introduction to the great question of being human and mankind, structured in Kant's classification: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? After a recommendation by Elke Heidenreich, the book ranked the first place in the Spiegel bestseller list. It was sold yet over 1,000,000 times and translated in 23 languages. According to non-fiction bestseller list of Spiegel, it was the most successful hardcover non-fiction of the year 2008 and ranked the third place in the bestseller of the decade.
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The website "Turkishpress" is an extremely orthodox Sunni, ultranationalistic Turkish site known to be in favour of strong supression of women and servicing Turkish imperialistic propaganda. I would take everything they write with a truck-sized grain of salt.
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All links on names added by me.