Oslo and Profanity for Profane Times

By Jim O’Neill Sunday, July 31, 2011

“Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”—Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“If you can’t say f—k, you can’t say, ‘f—k the government.’”—Lenny Bruce (1925-1966)

“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bulls—t.”—Mel Brooks

Before getting into the meat of this article I would like to briefly discuss the recent acts of terrorism in Oslo, Norway. No sane person, and certainly no Christian worthy of the name, could possibly condone such horrific activity. Link

Yet our purveyors of leftist anti-American doublethink—the media—have been quick to promulgate the myth that the alleged perpetrator, Anders Breivik, is a “right-wing Christian fundamentalist.” Link

That is a lie. Breivik’s manifesto has much more in common with the rantings of eco-nut Ted Kaczynski, than the teachings of Jesus Christ. But I will let that pass for the moment, and shortly direct attention to some other whoppers that the mass media have told us. These lies, or Sorelian myths if you prefer, are sometimes given as evidence of the media’s hypocrisy and double-standards. I prefer to call the media bald-faced liars—it’s more to the point. Link Link

via Oslo and Profanity for Profane Times.

A Right-Wing Monster

For many years, a quiz entitled “Al Gore or the Unabomber?” circulated on conservative Web sites. The quiz juxtaposed passages from the former vice president’s eco-manifesto “Earth in the Balance” with quotes from Theodore Kaczynski’s critiques of industrial civilization and asked the reader to guess which writer was which. Was it the bearded hermit who hailed “isolated pockets of resistance fighters” for struggling against modern society’s “assault on the earth”? No, that would be the former vice president. Was it Kaczynski, the mathematics Ph.D. turned mad bomber, who complained about the “destructive” impact of bringing a child into “the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world”? No, Gore again.

Enterprising left-wing bloggers have already begun to play a similar game with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who apparently justified last week’s mass murder of helpless teenage campers with a 1,500-page “compendium” calling for a right-wing revolution against Europe’s ruling class. Judging by the manifesto’s contents, Breivik has roughly the same relationship to the cultural right that Kaczynski had to certain strains of environmentalism. The darkest aspects of his ideology belong strictly to the neo-fascist fringe. But many of his beliefs and arguments echo the rhetoric of mainstream cultural conservatives, in Europe and America alike.

Despite what the Norwegian authorities suggested over the weekend, those beliefs probably aren’t a form of Christian fundamentalism. Breivik’s writings bear no resemblance to the theology of a Jerry Falwell or an Oral Roberts, and his nominal Christianity (“I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he writes at one point) seems to be more of an expression of European identity politics and anti-Islamic chauvinism than any genuine religious fervor.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com …

via A Right-Wing Monster.