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The question of technology

July 25, 2011 Andrey Soldatov, Irina Borogan

Photo from News.nswap.info

Anders Bering Breivik, a Norwegian businessman with right -winged views, who arranged a massacre on the island of Utoya and an explosion in Oslo, told the police that he had acted alone. Oslo police confirmed this, saying that she did not have information about his connections with illegal criminal organizations.

Until recently, it was believed that for the implementation of such large -scale terrorist shares it is necessary to have a group of supporters, that is, an organization. Without it, it is difficult to get weapons, explosives and money to buy them. The usual path - participation in the criminal business, racket and robberies or raising funds (not always voluntary) among the population - is possible only in the group, but not by the strength of an individual. That is how the Irish Ira’s cells acted, this Baskskoy, left -wing groups of the Red Army faction in Germany or Aquion Direct in France. In addition, only the organization is able to provide the necessary training and infrastructure - without reputation and ties Ira, Irish militants could not train in the Middle East, Germans from the Red Army faction - in the GDR, and the Algerian militants who exploded the metro in Bosnia.

Initially, Anders Breivik tried to go traditionally, and it was precisely because of the lack of organization that this did not work. He went after Kalashnikov to Prague, but could not get in touch with serious people and returned with nothing. In the only party where he tried to find supporters - in the Party of Progress - he was not remembered, because he was afraid to participate in disputes and could not move forward.

After that, Breivik began to act as a law -abiding loner. This is what ensured his success. He was not a prominent activist of right -wing groups and did not register the Norwegian police, he could not break into the illegal weapon market and bought weapons as an approximate member of the hunting club. He did not know how to get explosives, and registered a company to grow vegetables, receiving the ingredients for its manufacture in a legal way. The absence of supporters guaranteed that there was simply no one to give it out.

This method of carrying out terrorist attacks or mass killings by stranger Europe, but is well known in the United States. Timothy McVei, acting alone in Oklahoma City in 1995, when 168 people were killed, Unabobert sent parcels with bombs from his gatehouse, where he lived in complete isolation, lonely maniacs, hung with machine guns, shot his fellow students at universities.

Such shares are not accidental in the United States, where the right to own weapons is part of American culture, as well as the cult of individualism. However, this did not happen in Europe.

The case of Breivik, apparently, will become an example of a media terrorist, inspired by the information space - television, cinema and the Internet.

The stories of the Uta eyewitnesses surviving on the island have no analogues in the history of real terrorism, but they make the Japanese thriller “The Royal Battle” with Takeshi Kitano in the title role, where adolescents methodically kill each other on a uninhabited island. The most replicated photograph of Breivik-where he, dressed in the wetsuit, is aimed at the void, resembles a scene from the film “Shakal” with Bruce Willis in the title role, shot from the novel “Jackal Day” about the Kil-lone Killere, hired for the murder of the president. Even a trip to Prague for weapons is clearly inspired by espionage novels, because it is in this literature that the Czech capital is described as the center of illegal weapon trade, however, in the era of the end of the Cold War, and is mentioned in this capacity in the novels of the same Foressite.

Apparently, Breivik drew his knowledge in the film and media space, over the past twenty years destroying the borders that previously shared a teenager from Helmen and the American veteran of the Gulf War (as Timothy McVay). By the way, Norwegian experts, having analyzed the Brevik manifesto, have already found quotes from Unabert there.

For several years now, Western intelligence agencies have been warning about the danger that may come from such loners that are not included in any organizations, and which is therefore almost impossible to track down. True, in these analytical reports, it was mainly about Islamic youth in Europe and the USA, which could somehow be incorrectly affected by al-Jazis with a horror of war horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan, then video rollers on the corresponding sites and communication on the forums.

As it turned out in Oslo, this method of radicalization is in no way connected with a certain ideology. This is just a matter of technology.