St Petersburg: IF MY experience of the time it takes to read a 1,500 page book is typical, not one of the myriad opinion pieces so far penned on the ideology of Anders Breivik can possibly be based on close textual study of the ideas advanced in his now notorious manifesto.

As the rush to blame Islamists for last Friday’s atrocities in Oslo underlines, it is always wise to regard instant punditry as at best preliminary judgement, offered only until a considered opinion can be reached.

With that qualifier out of the way, I have skimmed ‘2083: a European Declaration of Independence’, and my first impression is of a document lacking any intellectual concision whatsoever. Names – including those of eminent liberal and even leftist thinkers – are dropped widely, but in a way that suggests only cursory familiarity with their thought.

Some rightist commentators use Breivik’s nods to Locke, Burke, Mill, Gandhi and Orwell to insist that he could hardly have been influenced by any of the key themes of contemporary rightist discourse. Sorry, but that contention doesn’t quite stack up.

The available précis suggests that the substantive content is based on popular reactionary arguments that regularly find their way into the pages of Britain’s large circulation conservative newspapers, of which he appears to have been an avid reader.

It is these opinion columns deprecating ‘cultural Marxism’, ‘political correctness gone mad’, ‘the EUSSR’, and ‘the Islamisation of Europe’ that provided Breivik with the raw material that enabled him to form what passes for a worldview.

This has led some leftie bloggers to assert that moral responsibility can be traced back to original purveyors of these positions, in the same way they held Sarah Palin responsible for Jared Loughner. That would be a mistake, too. It surely wasn’t Melanie Phillips’ finger on the trigger at Utøya.

It would be doubly wrong to move on to call for the suppression of wrong-headed ideas falling short of direct incitement to violence, simply because of the risk that they might prove inspirational to the cracked.

In any case, Breivik could just have easily latched on to some other set of syncretisms by way of his search for a theoretical basis. Relatively recent history alone provides examples of leftist and religious terrorism, too.

Plenty of gunmen who go postal – to use a US vernacularism that originated from just such a mass shooting – are strictly apolitical. In that sense, the ideology at work is pretty much incidental.

Unfortunately we have to face the truth that no measures can guarantee against future slaughters of this kind. By all means monitor internet discussion boards, and double check on guys who order fertiliser by the tonne. And then keep your fingers crossed, because after that, you are on your own.