“Love your Folk”: The Role of ‘Conspiracy Talk’ in Communicating Nationalism

Abstract

22 July 2011 the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people. It started with a bomb placed outside a government building and continued with a mass killing on the island of Utøya, where the Labour Party’s youth league was holding its summer camp. The perpetrator himself defined the massacre as an act of terrorism based on a specific ideology. The ideological message was conveyed through a manifesto which he published online prior to the killings. In this document, entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, Breivik defined the attack as a legitimate act of self-defense on behalf of the European people. The core message in the document was that in the face of an ongoing Islamization of Europe, the political and social elite have entered into a pact with the enemy. The underlying motive for Breivik’s actions was, he claimed, to be found in the dream of an ethnically and culturally homogenous (pure) society, and in hating those who allow such impurity to develop (politicians, multiculturalists and “cultural Marxists”). Breivik’s ideas are in many ways the quintessence of a merge between conspiracy ideas, ethno-nationalism and racism. The overlap between notions about conspiracy, nationalism and racism is typical also for the themes and forms of communication found in online milieus of the far right. In the comment boxes of alternative news sites and on Facebook, people share variants of narratives about Europe going to wrack and ruin, but also of a rescue mission based on ethnic nationalism. Norway’s media landscape is seeing an increase in right-wing populist – sometimes extremist – alternative news sources and organized Facebook communities (Bjørgo 2018). This chapter is based on an analysis of the patterns of communication in open Facebook groups in the landscape of the 1