Anders Behring Breivik
On 22 July 2011 Anders Breivik bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 members of the Workers’ Youth League of the Norwegian Labour Party on an island youth camp, wounding many others. Breivik’s online manifesto advocates the expulsion of Muslims from Europe, support for Israel combined with anti-Semitism and hostility to ‘cultural Marxism’. Such hatred of Muslims and belief in racial superiority has been fed by a steady stream of lies by the ruling class. The cold calculation with which Breivik planned these murders reflects the racist incitement which has accompanied the ‘war on terror’ over the last ten years.
The attack on immigrants, particularly those from the war zones where imperialism has sponsored conflict, has been ratcheted up under the call to defend Europe from ‘Islamicisation’. This year started with Prime Minister David Cameron, following on from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, attacking ‘multiculturalism’. When national leaderships give open support to xenophobia, racism becomes increasingly acceptable and respectable.
However, behind these leaders’ words of concern about protecting a beloved German, Norwegian, Italian, French or British culture lies the reality of imperialism. The relentless demand for profits and markets speak a different truth about the national interest. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently reported that companies in Britain like the better education and ‘positive attitude’ of European Union migrants and will choose to employ them rather than young workers born in the UK. Indeed, such is the demand for migrant workers that there was a rise of 21% in net migration into Britain during 2010. Cheap labour and skilled labour are vital for employers.
Of the 575,000 people migrating to the UK in that year, 110,000 were arriving for a definite job and 228,000 to study. Three quarters of arrivals were from outside the EU. The ConDem Coalition government has pledged to reduce net migration to ‘tens of thousands’ by 2015 and has introduced immigration caps, but under EU law it cannot restrict immigration from EEA countries.
Despite the patriotic talk and Gordon Brown’s rallying call of ‘British jobs for British workers’ the interests of multinationals and corporations are served by immigration. While the right-wing chattering classes of the Daily Mail cheer on the national flag, the wealthy are interested only in their class. Populist right wingers are useful fools of the system. They keep divisions and hatreds aflame within the working class in the service of the ruling class. Labour’s massive immigration policing machinery – immigration controls, the detention of asylum seekers, the criminalisation of migrant labour as ‘illegals’, the denial of health services and the right to work – has been fully adopted by the ConDem government. Such legal measures of repression sanction and feed racism within the working class. The English Defence League (EDL), cited and congratulated by Breivik, is just as much the child of state racism as the murderer himself.
The shocking killings in Norway this summer are part of the poisonous legacy of racism and we must stand together against it.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
