Peter Dale Scott, Norway's Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites

The most surprising aspect of the recent unexpected terrorist violence in Norway is that, in retrospect, it is not surprising. Our revived hopes after the end of the Cold War, that we might finally be emerging into a world of diminishing bloodshed, have been abundantly disabused. Events of seemingly random irrational violence, such as that which so shocked us when President Kennedy was assassinated, have become a predictable part of the world in which we live.

To some extent we can blame the violence on our social system itself. It is clearly unsatisfactory, and needs fundamental reconstructions that nonviolent actions have been painfully slow to deliver. Thus violence slowly builds up at all levels, from the flash mobs of the hopeless at the base of society to the war schemes of those in high places. In such a milieu Anders Breivik is only one of many, from the Unabomber in America to the jihadi suicide bombers everywhere, who have chosen to dedicate themselves to sacrificial violence, rather than to an eventless survival in an alienating status quo.

But the backgrounds of some violent events are more mysteriously organized than, say, those of a resentful and quasi-spontaneous grudge killing or flash mob. For some time I have discussed acts such as the Kennedy assassination as what I have called deep events: events, obscured and/or misrepresented in mainstream media, whose origins are mysterious but often intelligence-related, attributed to marginal outsiders, but intersecting with large and powerful but covert forces having the power and the intent to influence history. More recently I have emphasized the need to analyze deep events comparatively, as part of an on-going hidden substrate in so-called developed societies. And to raise the question whether key deep events are interrelated.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.  

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "Norway's Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 34 No 1, August 22, 2011.

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