Norwegian Bombing: The Irrationality of Rationality
A truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer bought by a young clean cut looking member of the community. An explosion of a government building killing scores of innocent men, women and children. Timothy McVeigh didn’t fit the physical description of a terrorist. Neither does Anders Behring Breivik.
Attempts are already predictably being made by CBS and others comparing the Norwegian attacks to the Oklahoma City Bombing. But comparisons should go much deeper than the obvious.
First, Timothy McVeigh was not crazy. He was not some loose social nut bent on irrational action. In one of his letters to Gore Vidal McVeigh writes: “If federal agents are like “so many Jacobins at war” with the citizens of this country, and if federal agencies “daily wage war” against those citizens (alluding to David Koresh and the Waco massacre by ATF agents), then should not the OKC bombing be considered a “counter-attack” rather than a self-declared war? Would it not be more akin to Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor?"
Rationality is not a hallmark of the insane. According to Vidal, “McVeigh had also noted that Harry Truman had never said that he was sorry about dropping two atomic bombs on an already defeated Japan, killing around 200,000 people, mostly collateral women and children.”
McVeigh believed he was fighting against the injustices committed by the Federal government and the liberties it was trying to take away. He believed quite tragically that the Oklahoma bombing would be an effective way to highlight his point.
Like McVeigh, Anders Behring Breivik also had a grievance. And like McVeigh, Breivik too, was rational. To Breivik, the problem was not the’ extra constitutional’ violations of a government against its own citizens. It was much broader. According to Breivik’s Manifesto, it cost him a 9 year journey and much personal cost to put his ideas together.
In it he gives a well thought out almost dissertational analysis of the social ills of Western society. Again, hardly a hallmark of the insane. To him ‘Cultural Marxism’ was the enemy. The multicultural embrace of non-Westerners was diluting the societies of the historically Christian and freedom loving peoples of the West.
Ironically to Breivik, the solution to stop this social transformation is decidedly antithetical to the values of Western freedom. “The problem can only be solved if we completely remove those who follow Islam (ship them back home or convert them to Christianity),” he says.
Like McVeigh, Breivik believed that the best way to get his point across was to bomb a federal government building. Both men believed in their causes in no irrational way, with intolerance being the contrasting trait separating Breivik from McVeigh. Both, however, ultimately acted in irrational ways.
So how should Norway respond? How should the civil societies of the West respond? First of all in a civil society the ends don’t justify mass killing as a means. But the world is fast changing. Change too rapid always renders insecurity and societal reaction.
The question that then must be answered is this: how many Breiviks and McVeighs are there out there who are anxious but choose not to act out with violence?
As such, civil society then fails if it does not render space to the disquiet of this non-violent rational fringe. Case in point: Timothy McVeigh and Anders Behring Breivik.