Neoliberalism in Norway: The creation of Anders Behring Breivik [View all]

[HiPointDem]

When a bomb devastated the government district of Oslo on 22 July 2011, everyone at first assumed it was the work of Islamic terrorists...as the news of the massacre on the island of Utøya...broke, there was confusion...When the killer turned out to be Anders Behring Breivik, a former member of the rightwing populist Progress Party and entirely Norwegian — blond, blue-eyed, from a smart district of Oslo — Norway went into shock... Breivik...declared that it was a political act to draw attention to the way “cultural Marxists”...were handing Europe over to Muslims...

Norway seems to have succeeded in creating a multicultural society where integration is not a major problem. Yet Islamophobia is a growing element of the political debate....For years, Norway has been top of the UN list of the best countries to live in...Yet it has not been spared by neoliberal policies, championed by the Labour Party. Social and wage inequality has grown sharply over the last 20 years... “... much faster in Norway than in the UK or the US”. The share of gross financial assets (bank deposits, shares) held by the middle classes was halved between 1984 and 2008...

It’s against this backdrop that immigration has become a central political issue. The neoliberals...financed by employers’ organisations, have done their best to prove that the Nordic welfare state model is no longer viable, although day-to-day reality shows that taxation and productivity growth are more than enough to support the current system. The Progress Party and elements of the Conservative Party have blamed, and continue to blame, immigrants for the supposed breakdown.

Norway’s prosperity... has helped to mask its worsening social inequality. This has allowed the populist right to harness the frustrations of an electorate that feels it has been mistreated — particularly the middle classes, who have been left behind by the richest...

“Throughout the western world, over the last few decades, the highly organised forces of capitalism have fought to prevent economic stagnation by means of even greater exploitation, and by attacking former bastions of the labour movement — pension systems, public health services and labour law. The present difficulties present a golden opportunity to exploit fear and divide society on ethnic and religious lines. These themes are recurrent and transnational.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/06/norways-day-of-reckoning/