but the liberal Western elites, and their children, who were destroying Europe from within through "multiculturalism" and "cultural Marxism."

"Deliberately reviving the terminology of World War II": Geert Wilders in Berlin

​​In fact, what Breivik wrote in his rambling manifesto, entitled A European Declaration of Independence, is more or less what populists, such as Geert Wilders, have been saying. Of course, there was much else in the manifesto – fantasies about reviving the medieval Knights Templar, for example – that suggests a more bizarre disposition, and Wilders was quick to distance himself from Breivik's violent methods.

Indeed, only one right-wing European politician, Francesco Speroni of the Italian Northern League, which is part of Silvio Berlusconi's government, was prepared to defend Breivik. Speroni claimed that Breivik's "ideas are in defence of westerncivilization."

So, how seriously must we take the ideological reasons that killers like Breivik and the September 11 terrorists invoke to justify their murders?

Radical losers

A few years ago, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote a fascinating essay about the "radical loser". Radical losers are mostly young men who are so enraged by their own lack of social, economic, and sexual self-esteem and the indifference of the world around them, that they long for a suicidal act of mass destruction.

Anything can trigger such an act: rejection by a girl, being fired from a job, failing an examination. And sometimes the killers reach for ideological justifications: building pure Islam, struggling for communism or fascism, or saving the West. The particular ideals might be unimportant – simply those that happen to