The men the European public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars;( Indian Hindutva brigade's success is due to this) the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” So begins Anders Behring Brevik's manifesto, the words that explain his decision to set out to slaughter the women and men whose future he believed he was fighting for. No one knows precisely what he had on his mind this weekend past, when he set out with an explosive device and an assault weapon to impress upon the world the truth as he saw it — an act of terrorism that, in per capita terms, ranks high in the list of horrors and atrocities of our age. It is tempting to dismiss Brevik's acts as the work of a deranged man, which in weeks and months to come, psychiatrists may well determine him to be. But while Brevik's violence may have been psychopathic, it was also political. In his rambling manifesto, 2083: a European Declaration of Independence, he exhorts those who might follow in his footsteps to remember that their arrest will give the movement a “living martyr”; each “trial offers you a stage to the world.” Every act of terrorism — as opposed to ordinary crime, or demented rage — is, in this sense, an act of political theatre, a performance intended to reach out to an audience.  read more »