He had no reason to have so thoroughly mastered the American idiom. Even very frequent reading of it online wouldn’t have substituted for living here, for a number of years. And of those who have, even they still flub it.
Our language is an odd hybrid with everchanging popular slang and multiple, overlapping dialects that subconsciously tell us more than we realize about any given individual writer or speaker. It’s very hard to convincingly wield for a non-native.
The whole situation seems just a tad ... contrived, doesn’t it? And at such an opportune moment in time, too.
It’s almost as if white Christian conservatives are being pre-demonized for what’s to come, isn’t it? At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, I wonder if there are any decent books or even online accounts, from those who remember the early years of the Reich and the buildup to all the ugliness, the ghettos and the hell that followed. I wonder if this sounds somehow familiar to them, if they’re still around.
We’re teetering on a repeat of the Great Depression. Severe economic crises led to strongmen leaders, scapegoating and world war, then. All these seeming coincidences might seem to point in that direction now. Tell me I’m overthinking this so I can just dismiss it, it’s a disturbing line of thought.
We should not extrapolate European problems onto ourselves. Most of our ancestors left Europe. And they left their European problems in Europe. This incident to me was a political attack and represents an escalation of civil war within the European continent. There is a reason the Euro is failing. Perhaps another great European purge has begun or is looking for justification.
Given that Breivik was well educated in a country which has a high standard of English education, and may have spent substantial time in the US, I’m not surprised by his standard of English.
...at least, not after I take into account the large sections Breivik plagiarized from native English speakers. Document.no has a post up comparing the 2083 Manifesto to the Unibomber’s Manifesto: http://www.document.no/2011/07/behring-breivik-kopierte-una-bomberen/ It looks like he did a search/replace of Leftist/Cultural Marxist and Left/multicultural.
Nachum said that some was copied from Fjordman, and I think we should expect to find that other sections were copied from Geller, Malkin, Limbaugh, Buchanan and others.