”Enablers”

ROSS DOUTHAT “A Right-Wing Monster”*1というテクストについては、「結論として、Anders Behring Breivikを「怪物」化することによって、オスロ虐殺事件で気落ちしているだろうヨーロッパの右派に対して、こんなことが起こったからってめげることはないよとエールを送っている」と評した*2


ROGER COHEN*3 “Breivik and His Enablers” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26iht-edcohen26.html


はDouthat氏の言説へのカウンターステイトメントになっているように思われる。タイトルのenablerという言葉は訳しづらい。enableという動詞の意味は、(人に)(〜するための)手段、機会、権能、認可等を与える、また(コンピュータ用語として)待機状態を解除する等々であり、大まかに言えば(〜するのを)可能にするということである。
Cohen氏はJared LoughnerとSarah Palinとの関係*4に先ず言及している。それを踏まえて、


Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a “Muslim takeover” as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward.
と述べる。さらに、Anders Behring Breivikには大西洋の両側に〈お仲間〉がわんさかいる;

Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam.

Muslims over the past decade have not done enough to denounce those who deformed their religion in the name of jihadist murder. Will the European and U.S. anti-immigrant Islamophobic crowd now denounce what Breivik has done under their ideological banner? I doubt it. We’ll be hearing a lot about what a loner he was.

因みに、Cohen氏がムスリムが過激な原理主義者をきちん批判する努力を怠ってきたことも批判していることは注意すべきだろう。
さて、Anders Behring Breivikの「マニフェスト」の中にある”European Christendom”という表現について。ここでの鍵言葉は「鏡像(mirror image)」;

European Christendom in this context is a mirror image of the idealized caliphate of Osama bin Laden. It is a dream-world cause through which to enlist the masses in apocalyptical warfare against an “infidel” enemy supposedly threatening the territory, morals and culture of an imagined community of devout believers.

This particular Christian Europe ― the Continent is overwhelmingly secular for reasons that have nothing to do with a growing Muslim presence ― is just as fantastical as a restored 7th-century dominion of the caliph. Bin Laden inveighed against “crusaders.” Breivik attended a 2002 meeting to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. This is the stuff of video games ― except that it kills real teenagers of all faiths.

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

ところで、「十字軍」だが、聖地イェルサレム奪還のための十字軍が有名ではあるものの、起源としては当時まだペイガンだったゲルマン諸族を討伐し・改宗を迫るための十字軍が先行していたというのも、皮肉といえば皮肉(Cf. 山内進『十字軍の思想』)。
十字軍の思想 (ちくま新書)

十字軍の思想 (ちくま新書)

なお、(ユダヤ系である)Amy Winehouse*5がヨーロッパの右翼から”degenerate “cosmopolitan” trash”と罵倒されていたことを知る。Cohen氏は最後に”A good way to remember her is finally to confront the latest iteration of a European bigotry that kills. “と述べている。