If the lone wolf suicide bomber, the murderous martyr, the high school shooter, the avenger of all slights and slights from a hostile world, had a generic face, it might look a bit like anders breivik’s: chubby , piggy-eyed, with sweaty blond fine hair and a sickly grin. Breivik is the perfect example of what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger once called “the radical loser”, the angry fantasist who wants to bring the world down with him.
Åsne seierstad has written a comprehensive account of this wretch’s 2011 murder of 69 boys and girls at a socialist youth summer camp, and eight adults following a bomb attack in oslo. is a harrowing story of family dysfunction, professional and sexual failure, grotesque narcissism, and the temptation of apocalyptic delusions.
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a brilliant investigative reporter, seierstad, best known for the kabul bookseller, has based her book entirely on breivik’s statements and writings, as well as police records and interviews with people involved in the killing spree, including victims or relatives of victims. .
breivik grew up in an expensive part of oslo. but his home life must have been miserable from the start. he was still a baby when his parents divorced. his father, a diplomat, disappeared more or less completely from his life. and her mother was a depressive and self-destructive woman who thought about sending her son and her sister to an orphanage. she could “go to hell,” as she told a child welfare officer.
Breivik was spared this fate, but he appears to have been a needy child, taking it out on his mother on others, weaker than himself, bullying his sister and tormenting domestic animals. attempts to join groups or make friends almost always ended in humiliation. he made up for his social failures by dreaming of his personal greatness. After joining a graffiti gang, he pretended to be the best tagger in Oslo and was quickly dismissed by his peers as a pathetic braggart.
He had a childhood friend named Ahmed, the son of Pakistani immigrants. Breivik admired Pakistani street kids for being tough guys; he imitated his street slang (“Norwegian kebab”) and styles of dress. Norwegian children laughed at these claims; ahmed moved.
After graduating from high school, Breivik tried various schemes to make a quick buck, like selling advertising space over the phone, and failed. (He later had success for a time selling fake college diplomas on the internet, but this too fizzled out when he was in danger of being found out.)
At one time, joining the Freemasons seemed like an attractive way to stand out in a secret society, but after a relative introduced him to a lodge, Breivik grew bored and never attended. It was then that politics entered his life in the form of the Progress Party, a populist group whose main agenda was to turn public opinion against immigrants and the dangers of Islam. Breivik hoped to be chosen as a candidate for city councilman.
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seems to have projected his own sense of helplessness onto the imagined helplessness of norway, europe or christian civilization in the face of rampant ‘islamization’. his dreams of power became increasingly aggressive. he turned to weapons, gaining unusual experience in weapons and military equipment. but breivik was considered too strange even for the progress crowd and was never asked to run for office.
His love life also failed to take off. A mail order bride was summoned from Belarus. Breivik’s mother seemed delighted. her son had finally found a girlfriend. but nothing came of this, either. Some who knew Breivik, who always dressed meticulously and liked to put on makeup, were convinced that he was secretly gay. he fiercely denied it and bragged that he was quite a brothel man.
Now that power, money and glory had eluded him in real life, Breivik found temporary solace in virtual reality. locked in his room for days and nights, he became a warrior in a computer game called world of warcraft. he called himself andersnordic. In this virtual world, as Seierstad describes it, his “great body was dressed in a gentleman’s suit with precious stones sewn on the chest and huge epaulettes on the shoulders.” But even in this imaginary place of valiant warriors and catastrophic wars, Breivik remained an outsider. His peers in the gaming sphere found his delusions ridiculous and refused to accept him as a worthy player.
around 2006, he decided to go it alone. From then on, she lived almost exclusively in his imagination, but his fantasies remained tied to the real world of politics and ideology. Breivik became obsessed with the idea that the West was at war with Islam. inspired by websites, such as robert spencer’s jihad watch, or the neo-nazi stormfront, books by american journalist bruce bawer, speeches by dutch politician geert wilders, or a norwegian blogger named fjordman, breivik became a cyberspace character named andrew berwick.
As Berwick, he wrote a lengthy manifesto titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” full of bellicose speeches, extemporaneous from his favorite websites, about the need to save Western civilization from being conquered by Islam. .
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In fact, however, Muslims were not the main targets of Berwick’s war, in which he dreamed of martyrdom and murder. the main enemies of the berwick knights templar, of which he himself was the “righteous knight commander”, were “cultural marxism”, “multiculturalism” and the “cultural elites” who collaborated with the “islamization” of the west.
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for breivik, these were not just words: he had found a cause, a way to show his true power and finally gain recognition from a cold and uncaring world. now it was time for some real action. the commander of the knights rented a remote farm, where he made a powerful bomb. he also managed to acquire an arsenal of deadly weapons. And then came the bomb attack in the government district of Oslo, and the murder, with a gleeful smile on the killer’s face, of young people gathered for the summer on a small island some 24 miles from the capital.
seierstad describes all of this in chilling detail. what is striking is the extent to which breivik’s profile – the social and sexual failures, the sense of isolation, the conversion, often via the internet, to a grand and empowering cause – matches that of the jihadist killers. in fact, breivik told his police interrogators that he was actually inspired by al-qaeda’s fighting spirit. But he’s also like the Columbine High School Killers in Colorado or the Boston Terrorists: the same deadly mix of violent fantasy and feelings of worthlessness.
what these killers crave more than anything else is maximum publicity, fame, attention. this is true if they are lonely. and it is true when they act as suicide assassins of revolutionary groups. the sad irony is that politicians, journalists, bloggers, and a million commentators, including myself, invariably go to great lengths to grant their wish. worldwide publicity transforms these misfits into heroic or villainous representatives of global religions, political ideologies, and even entire civilizations.
seierstad’s book, translated into english by sarah death, contributes to this phenomenon simply by being published. on the other hand, it does the opposite of making your subject appear larger than it is. in fact, it turns him back into the sad product of his time, his country, his culture, and his family. His book is a psychiatric case story as well as a close look at Norwegian society, especially paying as much attention to Breivik’s victims as to his killer.
and yet, is it really good enough to see the killer only in terms of pathology? How far can we separate a breivik from the ideas that inspired it? muslims like to claim that jihadi terrorists have nothing to do with islam. It is true that the Islamism promoted by Islamist revolutionaries is not what most Muslims believe in, but it is also true that elements of their faith are used to promote extreme violence. Islam cannot be blamed for this. but those who incite young people to commit murder by preaching hate may be.
if this is so, what about the ideas that inspired breivik? To be sure, the likes of Spencer, Wilders, or Bawer do not preach violent revolution. they never told anyone to kill a Muslim, let alone a “cultural Marxist.” But his talk of war, of a Muslim threat to our civilization, “eurabia,” and of the complicity of cultural elites in our impending downfall, creates a toxic climate in which fantasists like breivik can find justification for their horrible deeds. .
breivik may or may not be crazy. Court psychiatrists in Oslo disagreed. in the end it was decided that he was not. but it cannot be denied that ideas have consequences. This book sheds a lot of light on the life and times of a miserable murderer. that he had a sick imagination is clear. there is more to say about the ideas that fueled it.
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