In the morning of Friday 22. July 2011, a 32-year-old resident of a farmhouse in Hedemark near Oslo packed his van and drove into the city. After being held up in final preparations, he parked his van in front of the office of the Prime Minister in the middle of the administration area. Setting his plan in motion, he detonated a bomb, killing 8 people. From the governmental quarter in Oslo, Anders Behring Breivik, a native Norwegian, travelled to Utøya Island, located in Tyrilfjorden, 38 kilometres west of the capital city, where Norwayâs Labour Party youth movement held its annual summer gathering. There he slaughtered 69 people with an assault rifle, most of the victims were very young members of the party.
This was the most horrible incident of Nordic extreme nationalism in contemporary times. Seventy-seven people died in the terrorist attack. Before leaving his farmhouse in the morning, Breivik (2011) had published a 1500 page-long document online titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. He had distributed it via e-mail to several people around the world that he thought were of like mind to his. In this lengthy documentâa rather incoherent compendium of writings he had pasted together from several sites online and then scattered his own thoughts in between other peopleâs textsâhe argued that Europe was being ruined by the influx of Muslim immigrants, that the continent was culturally under siege by foreign infiltrators. He went on to accuse mainly feminists and the social democratic elite of having betrayed the European public into the hands of their external enemies, presumably, he argued, in order to implement their malignant ideology of multiculturalism. With his act, Breivik wanted to prevent a cultural suicide of Europe, underway and orchestrated by those he described as cultural Marxists. He called for the deportation of all Muslims from Europe.
Anders Breivik was a believer in the so-called Eurabia conspiracy theory (CT), more precisely, he maintained that the European Union (EU) was a project to culturally turn the continent into Eurabiaâthe insistence that Muslims, with the support of domestic elites in Europe, were plotting to turn the continent into an Islamic society. Breivik considered himself being a Christian knight, dedicated to stemming the tide of Muslim migration into Europe. In the manifesto, he accused his victims in the Norwegian Labour Party of being responsible for ruining his countryâs Nordic heritage with their feminist and multicultural beliefs.
Breivik was a lone wolf attacker. Still, he claimed to belong to the international Christian organization of the Knight Templar, fighting a holy war against Marxism and multiculturalism. Apparently, though, he seemed to have been the only official and active member, at least of his faction.
Previously, Breivik had belonged to the Norwegian populist Progress Party, which he later found to be too soft on immigration. He then plugged into a loose-knit underground network of militants, mostly communicating their racist message below the surface online. His terrorist attack revealed a hidden subculture in Norway, simmering undetected on the Internet. This was a network of racist and Islamophobic groups, scattered around the country. One of the main forums for this sort of politics, was the online platform document.no, where Norwegian racists exchanged their views. Breivikâs main hero on the platform was a Norwegian anti-Muslim blogger, who called himself Fjordman. This âdark prophet of Norwayââas he was referred toâpredicted that ethnic Norwegians would soon be in minority if the political elite was allowed to continue destroying European culture and turn the continent into a Eurabia (see Bergmann 2017).
Breivikâs atrocity was a response to a call that Fjordman and others within the network had issued: a moral call aimed at all cultural conservatives to defy the demographic infiltration of Muslims; a quest in which all Muslims would be expelled from Norway (Seierstad 2015).
Perfectly in line with what both populists and conspiracy theorists have in commonâas will be examined at length in this bookâhe also accused the internal elite of betraying the domestic public into the hands of the external threat. He then turned to designate himself as the true defender of the public, taking on the malignant forces.
In August 2012, Breivik was convicted of mass murder, for causing a fatal explosion, and for terrorism. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison. The ruling included a clause of preventive detention, meaning that his incarceration could be prolonged as long as he was deemed a threat to society.
This horrible terrorist attack in Norway was just one example of the effects that extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists can have on unstable recipients of their messages. It seems that Anders Breivik genuinely believed that with his actions, he was coming to the defence of European culture, which was under attack from Muslims, who in a systemic wayâand with help of domestic traitorsâwere plotting to conquer Europe and dispose of the European culture.
In this book, I examine the link between CTs and right-wing populism. More precisely, I analyse how right-wing populists apply CTs to advance their politics and support for their parties.
Rise of Populist Conspiracy Theories
The rapid rise of right-wing populist political parties around Europe and across the Atlantic in the early new millennium, coincided with the simultaneous increased spread of CTs. The two phenomena are intertwined, as is explored in this book. Still, not all populists are conspiracy theorists and CTs donât necessarily all have a populist political side. However, right-wing populists have proved to be especially prone to create and promote CTs, which is investigated here.
In his novel, Running Dog, Don DeLillo (1978) wrote of the âage of conspiracyâ in American politics. Now, it seems, we are experiencing the age of the populists, who in their politics have fully embraced CTs. The merger of the two was perhaps most obviously personified in US President Donald Trump. In their discourse analysis of campaign speeches, Eric Oliver and Wendy Rahn (2016) found that in the 2016 presidential election, Trump was far more frequently and more extensively than any other candidate prone to apply ârhetoric that is distinctive in its simplicity, anti-elitism and collectivism.â This seemed to sit well with his core voter base, as in the same study they were found to also be distinctive in their nativism and their âhigh-level of conspiratorial thinking.â Oliver and Rahn concluded that those in their study that held anti-elite sentiments and were mistrusting of experts, correlated highly on the conspiratorial scale. Those who saw the system as being stacked against them, were âfar more likely to endorse CTs of all types.â
Classical CTs of the radical-right tended, initially, to revolve around anti-Semitic sentiments, often involving ideas of a Zionist plot of taking over control in the world. Or of a wider New World Order conspiracy, led by, for example, Marxists and feminists, aiming at ending the Western dominated capitalist order. Many radical-right parties started out fighting a communist conspiracy, but have since moved on to unravel a globalist covert conspiracy, led by a band of domestic liberals and international actors, for example, within cross-border organizations such as the EU, the United Nations (UN) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Another common theme was identifying and uprooting what is referred to as the deep-state, the idea of a covert network of bureaucrats, professional politicians and interest agencies controlling society behind the scenes.
In recent years, nationalist right-wing populists in Europe and in America have firmly turned their sights on Muslim migrants, with a rapid proliferation of CTs revolving around Islamification of the West, for example, of Sharia laws being instated in Europe and in the USA. In many such cases, Muslim immigrants were portrayed as invaders, often seen as soldiers in a coordinated cultural and religious quest of conquering Europe.
In History and All Around
According to common caricature, conspiracy theorists are often depicted as being marginalised conservative middle-aged white males. However, as will be documented here, conspiracy thinking is much more widespread than that. People of all ethnicities, social and economic classes, ages, political inclinations, and across territories, believe in CTs. Still, social and cultural differences can predict which CTs they might believe, and, in some cases, indicate their level of conspiratorialism.
In history, many societies have been infested with CTs. In the wake of the Great Fire of Rome in CE 64, for example, rumours were immediately blazing of Emperor Nero, himself, setting fire to his own city (Brotherton 2015). Polities based on authoritative governance have been especially prone to subscribe to them. Hitlerâs Germany and Stalinâs Russia were, for instance, infested with vast and far-reaching CTs. In his book, Ur-Fascism , Italian writer Umberto Eco (1995), who was born in Mussoliniâs fascist Italy, wrote about fascistsâ reliance on CTs. He said that fascism could come back under the most innocent of guises. âOur duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instancesâevery day, in every part of the world.â In fascism, he wrote, individuals have no rights. Instead, âthe People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will.â Eco said that since large groups of people donât usually share a common will, the leader becomes their interpreter. âThe People is only a theatrical fiction,â he wrote. âWe no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.â
In the 1920s and 1930s, several European democracies fell into authoritarianismâfascism on the po...