Isolated bomber or strategy of tension? Both scenarios emerging from the first news from Oslo are terrifying. The death toll is impressive: we are rapidly approaching one hundred dead to which we must add numerous wounded (at least twenty of them in serious condition). A gigantic explosion in the center of Oslo and then the massacre of Labor youth in the Utoya summer camp. Only one arrest: Anders Behring Breivik, the killer of Utoya, disguised as a policeman and believed to be a right-wing extremist, probably also a Christian fundamentalist, also suspected for the Oslo bomb.
It would not be the first time that isolated fundamentalists have carried out great massacres, even if this case seems to have exceeded all limits. More impressive was perhaps only the terrorist attack carried out in April 1995 in Oklahoma, in the United States, which caused 168 deaths and 680 injuries, as well as damaging 324 buildings, also carried out in that case by very few right-wing fundamentalists, Timothy McVeigh, with the help of Terry Nichols and the more indirect complicity of two other people. Also in April 2007, Seung Hu Cho killed 32 people before committing suicide on the Virginia Tech campus. The same month in 2002, Robert Steinhaeuser, before committing suicide, killed 16 people in Erfurt, Germany. Eric Homs, age 18, and Dylan Kleibold, age 17, killed 1999 people and then killed themselves in April 13 at Columbine High School in Colorado. In Tasmania, in April 1996, Martin Bryant killed 35 people in the seaside resort of Port Arthur before committing suicide. And so on. Each of these terrible episodes has its own story and motivations. However, in the Norwegian case, as in that of Omaha, it is not possible to ignore the possible connection with extreme right-wing extremism.
For some time there has been talk of a reorganization and a strengthening of the fundamentalist and neo-Nazi movements in Norway, after similar and apparently stronger and more organized Swedish groups appear instead to have entered a crisis, also thanks to the work of the police and services. Underestimating right-wing extremism and essentially focusing on the risks of Islamic terrorism has often proved to be a serious mistake in underestimating the real threat. Both of these realities are now focusing on the so-called "do-it-yourself" terrorists, who act in isolation or in very small groups completely independent and autonomous from the political and ideological centers to which they refer. They are therefore difficult to identify and prevent, but greater attention to news circulating on the web, as well as a more widespread work of surveillance of the materials and technical means (as well as the skills of individuals) necessary for the construction of explosive devices, as well as the availability of weapons of war, is certainly the way forward with priority.
