New information about Anders Brievik, the Norwegian terrorist, is being published in erstwhile Soviet satellite countries – that he underwent militant-terrorist training in (post-Soviet but still communist) Belarus.

According to this report he was trained under a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, Valery Lunev.

Eastern European feeds are full of details of Breivik’s multiple trips to Belarus, changes in his behavior and wealth, and the training he underwent in Belarusian militant camps. In fact, Belarus’ tight government regime and active intelligence have served a great purpose this time around. … Belarusian KGB kept precise records on Breivik, who was called “Viking” in the intelligence reports. …

It appears that the Norwegian terrorist underwent the militant-terrorist training under the guidance of 51-year-old Valery Lunev, a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, who now lives in Netherlands but regularly visits Belarus. According to Mikhail Reshetnikov, the Head of the Party of Belarus Patriots who is familiar with the intelligence records, “Breivik visited Belarus three times. Last Spring, while actively preparing for the terrorist attacks, he entered Poland with his own passport, and then travelled to Minsk under a passport of another European country. He recently got a Belarusian girlfriend and obtained access to significant amounts of money.”

Who paid him? To do what?

His targets were members of a Russia-friendly left-wing Norwegian political party. How did his terrorist actions against them serve the interests of communist Belarus?

It is an impoverished state with a “Soviet-style economy”, ruled by a man who, according to the BBC (which is not unfriendly to collectivist tyrannies), is a nasty tyrant:

[Belarus] has been ruled with an increasingly iron fist since 1994 by President Alexander Lukashenko. Opposition figures are subjected to harsh penalties for organising protests.

In early 2005, Belarus was listed by the US as Europe’s only remaining “outpost of tyranny”. In late 2008, there were some signs of a slight easing of tensions with the West, though this proved to be only a temporary thaw. ..

In the Soviet post-war years, Belarus became one of the most prosperous parts of the USSR, but with independence came economic decline. President Lukashenko has steadfastly opposed the privatisation of state enterprises. Private business is virtually non-existent. Foreign investors stay away.

For much of his career, Mr Lukashenko has sought to develop closer ties with Russia. On the political front, there was talk of union but little tangible evidence of progress, and certainly not toward the union of equals envisaged by President Lukashenko.

Belarus remains heavily dependent on Russia to meet its own energy needs and a considerable proportion of Russian oil and gas exports to Europe pass through it.

Seems Master Putin may be choosing another class favorite:

Relations with Russia deteriorated sharply in the summer of 2010, with disputes over energy pricing, customs union terms and the presence in Belarus of ousted Kyrgyz president Bakiyev, prompting speculation that Moscow might switch support from Lukashenko to another leadership candidate.

In Russia and Eastern Europe, it seems, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

There is a mystery here. Does Belarus just train anybody  who applies to become a terrorist, regardless of the use he intends to put his training to, or the objectives he has in mind?  That would mean that Lukashenko (remember nothing official happens in a tyranny  without the tyrant ordaining it) simply wants to promote general chaos.

If not that, what particular Belarusian or Russian interests was Breivik serving? Did Lukashenko want to strike a very indirect blow against Putin by hurting his Norwegian fans?

Perhaps Breivik misled his trainers. Perhaps he told them he intended to bomb the US embassy in Oslo.

With what’s been revealed, there’s plenty of scope for conjecture but little certainty. Rather, uncertainty grows.

And it’s unlikely that explanations will come out of Belarus. None, anyway, that a savvy observer would trust.

Footnote: Of course the whole story of Breivik being trained in Belarus could be “disinformation”, a term coined during the Cold War meaning: false information, spread for mischievous ends through obscure channels on the chance of it’s reaching and deceiving the enemy’s mainstream media and intelligence agencies.

“The truth is that blood gives gravity even to very stupid thoughts,” our reader Joszaruba writes, commenting on our post Nemesis comes to Europe in which we discuss the atrocious terrorist acts carried out by Anders Breivik in Norway last Friday.

It is an astute observation. But the trouble is, we have to take into account that much of Breivik’s thinking is not stupid to judge by his book, A European Declaration of Independence. (See our post immediately below, A terrorist’s manifesto.)  We agree with his political assessments of the threat of Muslim immigration to European law and civilization. We do not agree with many of his other views, eg against “global capitalism”, for Christianity and the ethos of the Knights Templar. We agree that civil war is likely, but vehemently disagree that it should be preempted (anticipated or even precipitated) by acts of murderous violence.

There is a danger that the blood spilled by Breivik will give the leftist western governments the excuse to put another thought crime on the books: political conservatism with its tributary views against multiculturalism, and for free markets, individual freedom, and even Israel.

Throughout the rightist blogosphere there have been cries of “he is no Christian” – reminiscent of “he is no Muslim” with respect to bin Laden. Can conservative atheists say “he is no conservative?” No. We are put to the hard task of distinguishing between ideologies that do promote war, command fanaticism, desire totalitarianism and those that do not. Or we must look to psychological explanations for individual behavior and why extreme violence – terrorism – is chosen by some as a means of political self-expression. Perhaps this will result in our having to take the awkward position that fanatical conservatives go mad to murder, but fanatical Muslims are acting rationally according to the dictates of Islamic dogma.

If bad ideas are to be vanquished by good ones, how far can the law be used to support the good and inhibit the bad? If Islam is the cause of the violent backlash, should we be demanding laws that proscribe Islam? Is there a way of proscribing the practices of Islam that do not impinge on “religious freedom”: allowing Muslims to pray together, but not to cover females, or engage in polygamy, or carry out the custom of female circumcision and wife-beating, etc.?  That would be tantamount to legislating a reformed Islam – by enforcing the law against practices that would be crimes if not excused by “religion”. Would that be politically more feasible than deporting Muslim immigrants (which may not be possible  as their home countries might not accept them). Certainly Muslim immigration could be stopped, but that would necessitate a national acknowledgement – in fact a positive embracing –  of what is dubbed “racism”, actually nationalism.

If the law is always to allow freedom of expression (of which religion is a sub-category), then we must be very sure of our norms in terms of criminalizing acts, not thoughts. Whether motivated by Islam or anti-Marxism or anything else, mass murder is an individual decision and a crime – not a hate crime, nor a political crime.

When most Western states decided against the death penalty, it placed pre-meditated murder on an equal footing with lesser crime – such as “homicide” as defined in America – and undermined its defenses against fanatical political enemies. It legitimated political “war”. Killing in war is homicide. Insofar as Breivik’s mass murder was an act of war, it was invited by the degeneration of legal norms. Disallowing the death penalty was one step among many taken in the name of “social justice” and “human rights” that contributed to that degeneration.

C. Gee   July 25, 2011

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist (see our posts Nemesis comes to Norway, and Nemesis comes to Europe immediately below), can be found here.

It is a long pdf document titled A European Declaration of Independence. The author’s name – an obvious Anglicization of his own name – is given as Andrew Berwick; the place and date of posting online, London 2011.

It is clearly and for the most part correctly written. One would suppose he must have had help from someone whose first language is English, but he says, “It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily.” Chunks of it, with small variations, are copied from the writings of the Unabomber.

In most of the first two sections, reasonable arguments are set out chiefly against the Islamization of Europe, multiculturalism, Marxism, political correctness, leftist indoctrination in the universities, feminism, and what he calls “Enviro-Communism”. In support of his views he quotes or refers to many of the writers and authorities we respect, such as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’Or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple. He deplores as we do the influence that revolutionaries like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and his fellow members of the “Frankfurt School”, have had on the politics of the West over the last half century or so. The values Western leaders have failed, he says, to uphold are individual freedom, freedom of speech, democracy. Histories of Islam’s earlier advances into Europe, quotations from the Koran and accounts of Islamic belief are carefully referenced.

The reasonable arguments are interrupted now and then by flights of romantic fancy inspired by the poetry of Ted Hughes, Nordic legend, and the superman ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche. These foreshadow what becomes, in the third section, full-fledged fantasy. It is here that obsession shows itself. He revives in his imagination the crusading Order of the Knights Templar (destroyed by King Philip the Beautiful and brought to a fiery end in 1314, when the last officers of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake as heretics on an island in the Seine). He declares himself to be a “Knight Justiciar”. He writes as if a considerable number of others, predominantly northern Europeans, share the fantasy with him; a company that will mount a violent crusade against the powers who have betrayed the ideals and achievements of Christian Europe. The crusade will become a civil war – a global civil war: “not  between capitalists and socialists, but between nationalists and internationalists”; and between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

He condemns Nazism, but is prepared to fight alongside neo-Nazi groups. Criminal organizations would also be co-opted. The manifesto becomes a handbook for terrorists. He specifies the buildings that should be bombed, including government buildings and mosques. He lists the chemicals needed for making bombs, advises how to acquire them (eg. by having a farm and buying fertilizer in large quantities as if for the land), and describes in detail how to make them.

He expresses regret that women must be killed as well as men, but insists that in pursuit of such a high task as the Knights have set themselves, soft feelings cannot be indulged.

He sees the role in which he is casting himself as heroic. He encourages others to become hero-martyrs like him:

You will forever be celebrated by your people as a martyr for your country, protecting your culture and fighting for your kin and for Christendom.

You will be remembered as a conservative revolutionary pioneer, one of the brave European Crusader heroes who said; enough is enough, it is time to take back our countries before our multiculturalist traitor elites actually manages to finalize their agenda and sell us all into Muslim slavery.

Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come.

You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.

And when we seize political and military power in Europe within a few decades, it will be pioneers and historical pioneers like you who will be celebrated with reverence.

Revolutionary patriots like the Justiciar Knights will then be celebrated as destroyers of Marxism and the slayer of tyrants; the fearless and selfless protectors of Europe, The Perfect Knights.

For there is no greater glory than dying selflessly while pro-actively protecting your people from persecution and gradual demographical annihilation.

We are destined to win in the end, as our people, all Europeans, are gradually waking up from their slumber and realising the deceitfulness and suicidal nature of multiculturalist doctrine.

We do not only have the people on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have time on our side, we have the will of our ancestors and the will of God on our side.

The Left will almost certainly claim that Breivik’s atrocious acts of terrorism are what opposition to Islamization and multiculturalism et cetera lead to. They will probably use his manifesto as proof of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

The Obama administration likes to pretend that white middle class Americans are the most likely terrorists.

But the fact is that for the last 45 years, acts of terrorism carried out by leftists and Muslims vastly outnumber those carried out in the name of any cause of the “right”. And terrorism as a method has not been often or strongly condemned by the leftist intelligentsia.

It will be now. As of course it should be.

We’ll have more to say about Breivik, his manifesto, and the right and wrong  lessons to be learnt from his actions.