{"id":782,"date":"2011-07-23T00:11:19","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T23:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/?p=782"},"modified":"2011-07-24T00:23:24","modified_gmt":"2011-07-23T23:23:24","slug":"a-monument-of-civilization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/2011\/07\/a-monument-of-civilization\/","title":{"rendered":"A Monument of Civilization?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It now seems that the atrocities in Oslo and Ut\u00f8ya<\/a> were commited by a single person<\/a>. I think we can rule out completely any kind of organization. Apparently, the killer – a tall, blond native Norwegian, age 32, who speaks the local dialect – was taken to the island on the organizers’ own boat. Now, if there were more than one person involved, surely someone in the organization would have had a speedboat ready for him on the mainland?<\/p>\n

Besides: Ut\u00f8ya? A summer camp for politically engaged youths?!<\/p>\n

Granted, if terrorism is all about creating fear and terror, there might be some logic to it: strike where the shock will be greatest.<\/p>\n

But still, I can’t in my wildest imagination come up with a scenario where a bunch of Mossad agents or al-Qaida sympathizers have sat around and discussed their next step and that<\/em> idea has materialized – it’s just too weird.<\/p>\n

Norway Cup (an over-sized symbol of Norwegian greatness), or some Confirmation Sunday (“all those pork-munching, cartoon-printing infidels celebrating their successful indoctrination of yet another generation”) — that <\/em>I can imagine.<\/p>\n

But a summer camp on an isolated island? No way.<\/p>\n

So my hope is that the Norwegians are able to put aside all the national rhetorics, all the talk about threats to democracy and being a small country in a difficult world. And stay away from using words like “terror” and “terrorism”, at least for as long as these words are near- synonymous with “islamism”.<\/p>\n

And this is where my headline comes in:<\/p>\n

If<\/em> this is the deed of a single madman, which seems to be the case, it is a sign of what a thin, thin, fragile varnish civilization is. It’s not that <\/em>difficult to set an entire society on ends. All it takes is a van filled with explosives (which, I suppose, any construction worker can get hold of) and a convincing policeman’s shirt.<\/p>\n

When we can still lead perfectly normal lives most of the time, and have so for hundreds of years (except for brief interludes of socio-economic and military madness), it is for the single reason that most of us<\/strong>, very nearly all of us, don’t do such things<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

We’re civilized. We behave. I frankly don’t care if that’s because we’re all indoctrinated or something like that: we behave because that’s what we want to do anyway — that’s how we feel most alright. If it wasn’t for this collective “We behave”, there isn’t a terror plan or a millennium act<\/a> in the world that could uphold civilization as we know it.<\/p>\n

It’s a tragic day, of course, and nothing to celebrate. That something like this happens is — seen in isolation — a sign of failure.<\/p>\n

But seen in a larger perspective — and here I mean: over hundreds of years, generations way beyond our own memory and the memory of those we remember — it’s a sign of success: that the glue that binds us together is so strong that something like this has never happened before.<\/p>\n

That it is so easy to tarnish civilized life — and yet: nobody has done it.<\/p>\n

Until now, that is. In Norway, that is. Now, where to go from here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It now seems that the atrocities in Oslo and Ut\u00f8ya were commited by a single person. I think we can rule out completely any kind of organization. Apparently, the killer – a tall, blond native Norwegian, age 32, who speaks the local dialect – was taken to the island on the organizers’ own boat. Now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":837,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions\/837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oestrem.com\/thingstwice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}