‘The main aim is an increase in political influence by means of unofficial support for the Progress Party and the Conservatives,’ he declared.
At midnight he saw the result of the election. It was depressing.
* * *
Fifteen hundred kilometres further north, Anders Kristiansen was jubilant. ‘Four more years!’ He had dipped into his savings so he could stay at a hotel in Tromsø and join Labour’s election-night vigil. They’d done it! Viljar was up in Svalbard with his parents and younger brother, Torje; the Sæbø family was celebrating in Salangen. The Norwegian people had spoken and wanted the red–green coalition of Jens Stoltenberg to carry on.
The three comrades had not cast votes themselves. Viljar and Anders were still only sixteen. Simon had just turned seventeen. But next time, at the 2011 elections, they would finally be old enough to vote!
* * *
‘Norwegian journalists won their war against the Progress Party,’ Anders B wrote that night. ‘They were able to bring down the vote by 6 per cent after four weeks of concerted warfare.’ It was the media’s blockade of news about the Muslim riots in France, Britain and Sweden that ‘set the seal on our fate and cost the right-wing parties election victory’.
He nonetheless awoke the next day with his fighting spirit undampened and wrote an email to Hans Rustad about the need for a culturally conservative newspaper. Within the hour he had a reply from his role model.
‘There is no doubt that your analysis is correct. If we are to win the election in 2013, we need more effective media. This puts the Progress Party at a real disadvantage. It gets pushed around and there’s no third force to mobilise,’ wrote Rustad.
Anders replied at once that the first thing he would do was ‘to arrange a meeting between myself and Geir Mo’, to discuss the Progress Party’s view of the matter.
Months passed and he heard nothing from the General Secretary of the Progress Party. Nor did he ever quite bring himself to contact the editor of Kapital. He did not approach any of the investors he had boasted that he could contact so easily, nor was his lodge ever informed of his newspaper initiative. The only thing he did was to ask a print shop how much it would cost to print a glossy monthly magazine.
In November he started ‘email farming’. Via Facebook accounts, he issued invitations to cultural conservatives and critics of immigration all over the world to become his friend. It was time-consuming, because there was a limit to how many invitations one could send per day. Fifty friend requests went out from each account every day.
About half accepted.
He had set up his profiles in such a way that it would be quite natural for cultural conservatives to accept his invitation. But he steered clear of any who seemed too extreme and deleted all those who had dubious symbols on their websites. He did not want any neo-Nazis as friends.
It was people’s email addresses he wanted. After a few months, he had a database of eight thousand addresses.
Only at the end of January 2010 did he receive an answer from the Progress Party; a rejection from the parliamentary group. They wished him the best of luck with his newspaper project, but could not promise anything beyond giving interviews.
Anders wrote to Hans Rustad in disappointment. He also informed him that his book was finished.
I shall be leaving for book-promo before the end of February and may be away up to 6 mths. Regards Anders.
The Book
He began with a quotation.
‘The men the European public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.’
He continued with a plagiarism.
‘Most Europeans look back at the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two-parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school.’
He had no inhibitions about stealing for the good of the cause. He credited hardly anyone. They were all subsumed into a higher entity: Andrew Berwick.
What was going wrong with Europe?
Andrew Berwick blamed it on the ideology of Political Correctness which, he wrote, was the same as cultural Marxism – Marxism transferred from the economic to the cultural sphere. He wanted to recapture the values of the 1950s, when women were housewives and not soldiers, children were not born outside wedlock and homosexuality was not glorified.
‘Those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it,’ urged Andrew Berwick. ‘They must shout from the rooftops the realities it seeks to suppress, such as our opposition to sharia, the Islamisation of our countries, the fact that violent crimes are disproportionately committed by Muslims and that most cases of Aids are voluntary, acquired from immoral acts.’
One of the prominent features of cultural Marxism is feminism, wrote Berwick. It is ubiquitous and all-consuming:
It is in television, where nearly every major offering has a female ‘power figure’ and the plots and characters emphasise inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the military, where expanding opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double standards and then lowered the standards, as well as a decline in enlistment of young men, while ‘warriors’ in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use ‘sexual harassment’ charges to keep men in line. It is in public schools, where ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-esteem’ are increasingly promoted while academic learning declines. And sadly, we see that several European countries allow and fund free distribution of contraceptive pills combined with liberal abortion policies.
He went on: ‘The man of today is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.’
It was great to sit there cutting and pasting. Lots of the stuff he had been brooding about, but had not put into concrete form, was all thought out for him.
‘Who dares, wins,’ he wrote at the end of the introduction.
* * *
‘We are deceived by our own governments into thinking that Christian and Islamic civilisation are of equal value,’ he wrote. Obviously, they were not.
The book veered between polemic and pedagogy. He listed the five pillars of Islam – faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and the giving of alms – at times presenting the Qur’an as though he were a primary school RE teacher: Allah’s commandments to Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel; the great battles for Islam; the taking of Mecca and introduction of sharia.
But then he got to jihad – the Muslims’ duty to wage holy war – and he explained the Arabic term al-Taqiyya, which translates as dissimulation and in Islam means that Muslims can conceal their faith if it would put them in mortal danger to confess to it. Berwick claimed this was a Muslim tactic to hide their ambition of taking power in Europe. Until they struck. He explained the term dhimmi: non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, who are protected and allowed to exercise their own faith as long as they pay a tax, jizia, and do not raise any objections. This was the future lying ahead for Christians.
He used the Arabic terms to prove the Muslims had a plan to conquer the West and to kill Jews and Christians. The Repentance verse of the Qur’an was part of the proof: kill the polytheists wherever you find them, arrest them, imprison them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every site of ambush!
The verse was much more effective without the word polytheists. Then you could write that the verse was about Jews and Christians, when it really referred to sects that worshipped multiple gods in old Arabia. It also had more impact if you put kill them last.
He ofte
n quoted Robert Spencer, the man behind Jihad Watch. Spencer had dissected the Qur’an into its component parts, taking them out of context to show how violent and full of hate it was. Berwick subscribed to that understanding of the Muslim holy book.
He hastened on, jumping backwards and forwards in time. The Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the extermination of the Christian minority in Lebanon in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide in 1915, the different dynasties of the seventh century. Towards the end of the book he got to the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the start of the Ottoman downfall in Europe. The battle was a prophetic parallel to his own book, which he had given the title 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence. Four hundred years after the famous battle, the Muslims would be vanquished and out of Europe for ever.
* * *
‘You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.’ With this quotation from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World Berwick opened the second part of the book, which he called Europe Burning. Starting with quotations added authority, so he threw in various bits of Orwell and Churchill too. He only had to google ‘famous quotations’ and so many good ones came up.
The first hundred pages were essays by Fjordman with titles like ‘The Eurabia Code’, ‘Boycott the United Nations’, ‘How the Feminists’ War Against Boys Paved the Way for Islam’, ‘What is the Cause of Low Birth Rates?’ and ‘The Fatherless Civilisation’. The themes overlapped with things Berwick wrote himself. It was cut-and-paste, stolen and shared. A lot of it was sheer repetition. One thing that could not be clarified too often was: why we can never trust those who call themselves moderate Muslims.
Because they are deceiving us.
The Qur’an usually furnished the proof Berwick needed, as in sura 8, verse 12: Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant the believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their very finger!’ He really liked using that particular sura, called al-Anfal. It was the sura Saddam Hussein had used to name the genocide of the Kurds in the 1980s. In Berwick’s reading, the unbelievers were the Christians; in the Ba’ath Party’s they were the Kurds.
Then he complained a little. It was, after all, quite a laborious task he had taken upon himself. ‘Occasionally I get annoyed over the fact that I am compelled to spend significant amounts of my time refuting Islam, an ideology that is flawed to the core and should be totally irrelevant in the twenty-first century.’
But he had to do it, because the actual number of Muslims in Europe was being kept secret by the authorities. There were far more than they said and, more importantly, those numbers were increasing all the time, through births and mass immigration. This assertion was supported by more Fjordman essays and quotations from assorted experts, and finally proved by the Qur’an.
Berwick also endorsed Bat Ye’or’s theory that EU leaders had opened their doors to mass immigration of Muslims in exchange for peace, cheap oil and access to markets in the Arab world, the so-called Eurabia theory. He adopted her expression ‘freedom or dhimmitude’. Freedom or subjugation.
* * *
In the middle of his critique of Islam, Berwick abruptly threw in some comments on how a blog could be turned into a newspaper. He ridiculed all those who were not bold enough to take the risk.
‘I have spoken to numerous successful and less successful right-wing blog/newssite/Facebook “reporters” over the years and the general opinion seems to be that the creation and distribution of a paper-magazine/newspaper is so incredibly difficult and problematic. I can honestly not understand why people feel this way.’
He then offered a three-step design with a planning phase, the development of a subscriber base and use of bloggers’ texts as material to fill the pages. The only thing to be cautious about was ‘hate speech’, because racist magazines were bound to be banned.
At the very end of Book 2 he was critical of Fjordman, Spencer and Bat Ye’or in the chapter ‘Future deportations of Muslims from Europe’.
It was the same question he had asked them to answer on Gates of Vienna. About the D-word. They didn’t dare raise the subject of deportation because it would ruin their reputations, wrote Berwick. ‘If these writers are too scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance, then other writers will have to.’
Berwick felt himself called.
* * *
The chat went on about the weather, the neighbours, the children and other matters at the smokers’ table of the café outside the Coop.
‘Anders is writing a book,’ Wenche said.
‘Oh is he?’ said the others. ‘What about?’
‘Something historical,’ replied his mother. ‘It’s a bit above my head.’
The neighbours nodded.
‘It’s going to be in English,’ Wenche went on. The book would go all the way back to 600 BC, she explained. So everything was covered, as Anders put it. It was going to be about all the wars, everything that had happened.
Anders’s mother was quite worried about his future, in actual fact. She had even told him she could go with him to the job centre. They would be able to help him to find out what sort of job could suit him.
She once told him she thought he would make a good policeman with ideas like his, decent and fair.
‘For that I’d need to have taken some different choices in life,’ Anders had answered then.
‘He’s good with computers, he’s good at history…’ his mother mused. ‘But really I’ve always wished he could be a doctor,’ she said to her friends at the café. The nicest thing of all, she thought, would be for Anders to be a Red Cross doctor caring for starving children in Africa and helping people. Maybe Zambia, she suggested.
When he told her he wanted to be an author, she said, ‘That sounds grand!’
She remembered his very first proper job, when he was seventeen. He had got a job with a company called Acta, where he sold shares to rich people.
‘Rubbish,’ Anders’s sister had said afterwards. ‘He’s not selling shares, he’s selling magazines.’
This had made Wenche sit down and wonder whether Anders felt that he wasn’t good enough.
At the smokers’ table where the sun rays never reached, they had learnt not to bring up the subject of Anders. They had a tacit understanding that if Wenche wanted to talk about him she would, and then they could join in, but they never asked the first question. They knew he was just sitting there in his room, engrossed in his games.
If they made some comment about compulsive gaming being a form of illness, she might say they were only jealous because she had a good, kind son like Anders.
The sons of several of the women at the café had finished courses in law or economics; some had already qualified as lawyers. Others worked in banks and finance.
Some had children. And when the ladies started talking about their grandchildren, Wenche pursed her lips.
Anders had told his mother to stop nagging him about getting a proper job. But it was even worse when she went on about how he ought to get a girlfriend.
‘Why not find a nice little single mother then?’ Wenche asked.
‘I must have my own children,’ Anders replied.
He said he wanted seven.
How Can I Get Your Life?
The buses were already waiting. They quickly filled with passengers from the ferry who had onward journeys along the peninsula. At rush hour the ferries ran every twenty minutes. On the way to Oslo, on the way back from Oslo – the short crossing on Huldra or Smørbukk could be a peaceful interlude or a chance for a chat.
If you hadn’t been able to sit with who you wanted on the ferry, there was always a second chance on the bus.
One day Bano deposited herself in the seat next to a slender woman with an elegant short haircut. It was no accident.
‘Hello,’ said Bano with a broad grin.
The blonde woman in her early forties return
ed the girl’s greeting. The teenager stopped chewing gum and started to speak.
‘I know you’re a member of the Labour Party. I am too,’ said Bano. ‘I’m a local politician just like you.’ Bano was fifteen and had just joined the AUF.
Nina Sandberg was the Labour Party’s mayoral candidate in Nesodden. What a spring of joy, was the first thing she thought when Bano sat down beside her.
‘I’m supporting you,’ Bano confided. ‘So are my sister and mother.’
Then she got off the bus, while Nina Sandberg continued her journey to her farmhouse at the southern end of Nesodden.
* * *
Bayan and Mustafa tried from the moment they arrived to be part of Norwegian society. First they had to learn Norwegian, so they could look for jobs. Initially Bayan cried when she saw people on their way to work in the mornings. How she missed her accountancy job in Erbil! Mustafa, who had been a mechanical engineer, looked for engineering jobs. Water and drainage specialist, he wrote.
It got him nowhere.
He went to the social security office on Akersgata in Oslo.
‘I’ll take anything,’ he told the woman behind the counter.
The adviser helped him improve the standard of his applications. She corrected his written Norwegian and suggested he take a language course to improve his chances. Then they sat talking for a while.
‘Why did you come here?’ she asked.
Mustafa said nothing.
‘To Norway, I mean,’ she went on.
Her question hung in the air.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mustafa.
Life had become a blur. The days passed by in idleness. He felt something had slipped away; he had lost something, himself, his self-confidence and the status that his education and professional experience had conferred on him. He had only a hazy understanding of Norwegian and felt excluded.
The only thing that made him feel alive was the children, seeing them take root and grow, even if the girls were finding it a bit hard to settle at school. One of the teachers had told him that his daughters did not play with the other children, only with each other.