THE NORWEGIAN MASSACRE

This morning I watched the terrible scenes from Norway and felt that awful sense of dis-ease when witnessing the execrable depths to which human beings can sink. There was something particularly grotesque about a murderous assault on young idealistic social democrats, part of the great European socialist tradition, the best and brightest attending a camp to share ideas, sing and dance and presumably enjoy teenage romances and the summer sunshine. So many dead children, their bodies hastily covered, lives un-lived, promise unfulfilled, my human rage that the man who slaughtered them was still alive, the pain he has brought beyond his comprehension.

In the reporting and media speculation of this event there has been some rather unpleasant undercurrents. The right have never been comfortable with the success of Scandinavian social democracy and there has been an extremely nasty whiff of Schadenfreude, as put in the words of ex MP Edwina Currie ‘well we always knew there was a dark side to these societies, remember Quisling was a Norwegian,’ then comes the pious platitudes about Norway's loss of innocence.
Whilst on the left there has been an indecently hasty attempt to connect the attack with Geert Wilders and the English Defence League. Now whatever you think of Wilders or the EDF, they are a world away from the mass murder of teenagers. All this whilst bodies are still being uncovered!



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