Author of NZ speech quoted in killer's 'manifesto' devastated

Anders Behring Breivik used the speech as one of the bases for his 1500-page manifesto. Photo / AP

An Australian author says he is devastated that a speech he made in New Zealand in 2006 was used by the Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik, accused of killing at least 76 people, as one of the bases for his 1500-page manifesto.

"When I learned about it my heart sank. Even the slightest connection with the disgusting things that he did is traumatic," historian Keith Windschuttle told Radio New Zealand today.

He said he had re-read the speech he delivered at the Summer Sounds Symposium, at Punga Cove in the Marlborough Sounds, on February 11, 2006 to see if he could be held in any responsible or if his words were deliberately provocative.

"But the idea that anything I have written would provoke murder is just insane," he said.

"I am debating issues about multiculturalism, the benefits of western societies versus other societies and about western civilization."

His views of the western society showed that it was a benevolent, do-goody society and "thank goodness, we resolve our problems through rational debate than violence," he said.

"Some mad person can always take your words and use them for their own purposes," Mr Windschuttle said.

"If you look at mass murderers in history, they justify what they did with all sorts of crazy ideas."

Breivik quoted several statements Mr Windschuttle made in a speech titled 'The Adversary Culture: The Perverse Anti-Westernism of the Cultural Elite'.

Breivik is expected to face charges over the mass murder of mainly teenagers. He detonated a bomb in Oslo that killed eight people and gunned down at 68, mainly young people, at a holiday camp at the weekend.

He lifted extensive blocks of text from other writers to compile his European Declaration of Independence, and said of the historian: "Australian writer Keith Windschuttle, a former Marxist, is tired of that anti-Western slant that permeates academia".

- NZPA