Daily Kos’ David Waldman points out that the horrific events in Norway were not just the acts of a right-wing terrorist – they were deliberately targeting the Norwegian Labour Party’s “Worker’s Youth League.” He likens it to sending a Terminator back in time to eliminate future Parliamentary opposition leaders.
The truly stomach-turning aspect of the stunning terrorist attacks in Norway yesterday surely had to be the shooting spree that was initially reported—in English language outlets, anyway—to be at a “summer camp.”
I had heard through the grapevine that the “camp” had a very distinct political affiliation, but it didn’t really register with me, perhaps because we don’t really have any cultural analog in the United States to what this “camp” was all about. But I picked up on something on Twitter this morning that changed the nature of the story dramatically, at least for me:
@gusbbaker Gus Baker BBC needs to stop referring to ‘summer camp’- Utoya was political crime and it diminishes the young Labour members deliberately targeted
See, the “camp” event is really more akin to a political retreat and training, it seems. It’s an annual event of Norway’s “Worker’s Youth League,” in Norwegian, the Arbeidaranes Ungdomsfylking, or AUF, which is itself essentially the youth arm of the country’s ruling Labour Party. And by “youth arm,” I really mean something like a “farm team,” to use a sports analogy.
And we’re in need of analogies here, because we don’t really have anything like this here in the United States, which also makes it difficult to appreciate the scale of the potential losses. Eighty or more lives taken translates anywhere, of course. Eighty or more young people, all the more. But it’s more than that. It’s 80 or more of the country’s most politically engaged young people, self-selected from the ranks of a single political party. In a country of just 4.9 million, that’s an enormous loss. Strictly by the numbers, the ratio to the population of the United States suggests it’d be like the wiping out of over 5,000 activists from, say, OFA or DFA. Or, I guess, every single person attending this year’s Netroots Nation. Twice.
The bombing in downtown Oslo was horrible enough, but the slaughter out at Utoya (“Utopia”) meant that 20, 30, 40 years from now, an entire generation of young Labour politicians will just have been… erased from existence.
If Norway ever suffers under a politically oppressive and intolerant Conservative or white-supremacist regime in the future, it will have its roots in Utoya.
