European Far-Right Music and Its Enemies

In a self-conducted interview that appeared in his manifesto, Norwegian would-be right-wing terrorist and killer Anders Behring Breivik, under the pen name Andrew Berwick, argued that specific music helps sustain ‘high morale and motivation’ of ‘self-financed and self-indoctrinated single individual attack cells’ (2011, p. 856). He went on to list several ‘motivational music tracks’ he particularly liked. Breivik described one of these tracks, ‘Lux Æterna’, by Clint Mansell, which was featured in the trailer for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, as ‘very inspiring’ and as invoking ‘a type of passionate rage within you’ (2011, p. 858). On 22 July 2011, ‘Lux Æterna’ supposedly played in his iPod while he was killing members of the Workers’ Youth League of the Norwegian Labour Party on the island of Utøya (Gysin, Sears and Greenhill, 2011). Another artist favoured by Breivik in his manifesto is Saga, ‘a courageous, Swedish, female nationalist-oriented musician who creates pop-music with patriotic texts’ (2011, p. 856).