With the death toll in the Norwegian terrorist massacre at 76, and its nature as a coolly planned political act becoming clear beyond all question, the Right continues to avoid anything resembling moral reflection on the role that a decade-long discourse of hysterical commentary on immigration and culture in Europe played in forming the thinking of killer Breivik.

The widespread circulation of Breivik’s manifesto “2083 — a European Declaration of Independence” has allowed people to see exactly how closely fits the respectable hysterical conservative arguments about cultural and population change — most particularly works such as Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept, which popularised the term “Eurabia”, which Breivik uses repeatedly throughout his work.

Indeed it is hard to find anything in Breivik’s work that does not cut with the grain of mainstream hysterical conservatism, from an unquestioned Western supremism, to a belief in the innate inferiority of Islam and Muslims, to an ultra-Zionism that even the Jerusalem Post found excessive, to notions that leftists are using “cultural Marxism” to reprogram children, destroy marriage and the family, etc, etc.

Though the Right kept up various bizarre theories about Islamist involvement all through the weekend, long after Breivik had been captured and confessed to — confessed is the wrong word, jubilantly claimed — responsibility for the murders, by Monday it was clear that Breivik was sane, and of the political Right.

Thereafter some new gambits were required. The first was to argue that Breivik’s actions demonstrated that the European far Right was beginning to ape al-Qaeda in its methods, and had thus been influenced by radical Islamism.

This was trotted out by many of the security “experts” who had earlier claimed that the attack bore all the hallmarks of Islamism, and it was as spurious. Right-wing terror had existed long before al-Qaeda, and it had long been notable for its appetite for large-scale mass death — thus, in Italy, the 1980 bombing of Bologna train station by fascist “black” terrorists killed 80, with no warning phoned through. Former militiaman Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City followed the same pattern.

The second tactic was to deny Breivik any political status whatsoever, or his actions any content. Andrew Bolt, having “updated” his way out of implicating Islamism, now speculated that Breivik might be a “[Martin] Bryant”? But of course this made no sense whatsoever. Bryant was an isolated and deeply dysfunctional person who had perpetrated a general massacre — it was precisely the randomness of the people killed that gave his act its (anti-) meaning.

Bryant hated society, the others, and wanted to kill. Breivik was not merely a terrorist but a political assassin —  he chose the youngest members of the party he accused of having betrayed Norway and Europe, and went to war against them. A variant of this was by my good friend Brendan O’Neill in Spiked, who argued that the massacre was “Columbine-on-steroids”. Of course it wasn’t.

The Columbine killers were targeting their community, which they felt had rejected and denigrated them. Like the Virginia Tech killer, they killed people they knew and those they didn’t, mixing passionate, personal hatred with general social murder — but in neither case was there any political motivation. This was a different form of killing to such killers, and to assimilate it to such massacres was to misunderstand it, often wilfully. Part of this process was to describe Breivik’s manifesto/book as “rambling”. But it is nothing of the sort.

Like most such manuscripts — they come through publishers’ doors all the time — its sections are badly organised and parts of it are narcissistic and self-regarding; but the idea of “rambling”, as if it lacked internal coherence or sense is false. Indeed, in jumping around from Islamic history to European birthrates to neuroscience, it bears more than a passing resemblance to Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself.

Depoliticising Breivik was also essential for those who wanted to keep the focus on the great geopolitical war against Islamism, aka the “war on terror” — thus in Slate Christopher Hitchens described it variously as an “anti-civilian mass murder” and a “pogrom”, anything but the T word. Hitchens compared Breivik’s writings to a “Jared Loughner reading list”, which was flat wrong — Loughner, as well as dipping into the classics was overwhelmingly a fan of Ron Paulite-style tracts.

Hitchens’s piece was not without political analysis; he made the point that Breivik’s violent social conservatism had a lot in common with al-Qaeda’s social values — but it was overwhelmingly in service to keeping the “real” enemy — the confected entity “Islamofascism” — in view. Breivik joins the “respectable” Islamophobia of Mark Steyn et al, to a whole series of social science and history texts. His reading material is slanted rightwards in terms of what is included, but a lot of what’s there is boringly studious.

There was a fourth tactic too: psychobabble. That brought us back to Andrew Bolt, who had found the true reason for Breivik’s actions:

But some people are simple wired evilly, and some are left deeply wounded and enraged by a sense of powerlessness and rejection. Which means this is more likely than anything else I’ve seen to be a clue to this explosion of murderous rage:

Jens Breivik, who divorced Anders Behring Breivik’s mother in 1980, said he lost contact with his son in 1995, when he was about 16 years old.

“We never lived together but we had some contact during his childhood,” he said.

When he was younger, he was an ordinary boy but not very communicative. He was not interested in politics at the time.

Of course, the ’60s are to blame — an echo of Jerry Falwell’s post-9/11 argument that liberals and homos-xuals were to blame for the attacks. Trash, and obvious junk. Quite aside from anything else, Breivik isn’t enraged. From police reports, it’s become clear that he is justifying his attacks as a deliberate and considered “strategy of outrage”.

Breivik knows how abhorrent his actions were, he does not bear his victims any personal malice — he simply wants to make a point in the most demonstrative way. Quite simply, Breivik sees himself as the armed wing of the sort of arguments that Bolt, Steyn, Daniel Pipes and others have been making about Islam for the past decade — hence his “not guilty” plea on the grounds of justification. Still, if we’re going to start bringing childhoods in, it’s worth asking what effect being dragged around the desert by your mad, Calvinist-preaching Dutch father through your childhood will have on your mature political attitudes. Could hardly not be significant, in those terms.

By far the weirdest reaction was a continued refusal to accept that Breivik was who he said he was, or had done what he did for the reasons he gave. Thus in Quadrant, Merv Bendle seriously wonders if the whole thing is a “false flag” operation to discredit the West. It’s only Quadrant, of course, who know a thing or two about false flags, but it suggests that out of the incident, hysterical conservatism may breed its own “truther” movement — clear delusion based on a desire to protect one’s prejudices, and psychology, from the evidence.

I wonder if any of the hysterical conservatives, in a quiet moment in the past few days, have had cause for reflection on the things they’ve said and written over the past years — what they’ve contributed to, and what may be yet to come. With groups such as the CIS playing peekaboo with crackpots such as Thilo Sarrazin at its now-ridiculous “anti political correctness” conference, one doubts it.

Nor is there much hope that those from the more classical liberal side of the Right — no matter how odious they find this stuff, those who’ve stuck with the Right’s origins will never find the courage to speak back to their own tradition, or to engage in internal debate. For all their pose as outsiders, they are overwhelmingly careerists and conformists, and they’ll put up with a lot of talk about “Jewish genes” and “Turkish genes”, before they raise a word of protest — as was demonstrated in the past century. In this one, for the sake of the young dead, I would love to be proved wrong.