A Norwegian Tragedy

7

Andrew Berwick and Avatar Syndrome

The Entrepreneur

He wanted to be big, he wanted to be famous – and that required money. Breivik was finished with hip-hop, and the nineties were coming to an end. It was 1998, and now he had to conquer the adult world.

While he attended the Commerce School, he worked booking meetings for the company Acta Dialog. He made lots of phone calls and not much money. From 1997 to 2003, he worked for the telemarketing company Direkte Respons-Senteret (DRS), first as a telemarketer and later as a team leader in the DRS technical support department's customer service unit. He was earning money and had responsibility. Rather than being a salesman, though, Anders wanted to be an entrepreneur and self-made businessman like Kjell Inge Røkke, the former co-owner of Wimbledon Football Club, or the property investor Petter Stordalen.

He founded his first company in the cellar of his home in Konventveien at the age of eighteen. Together with a friend, he was going to sell cheap phone call packages to people in Oslo from minority backgrounds. The same idea was about to make a Norwegian businessman of Sri Lankan origins into a millionaire with the Lebara Group telecommunications company, but Anders and his friend ended up quarrelling and their company folded at a loss one year later.

Breivik's next idea concerned making money out of the knowledge he had acquired of Oslo's walls during the years he had written on them. The company Media Group was founded in September 1999 with an office in Nedre Slottsgate, in the city centre. Anders shared a canteen with the lawyer Geir Lippestad, the man who defended Ole Nicolai Kvisler, one of the neo-Nazis who was convicted for the murder of Benjamin Hermansen in 2001. Media Group was intended to sell spaces on walls to companies that used billboard advertising, but this plan did not go very well either, and the company was wound up in 2001 without having made any money for Breivik.

In April 2002, Breivik travelled via Ivory Coast to Liberia, which was ravaged by civil war. The twenty-three-year-old was still a restless wanderer and a dreamer. Liberia's so-called blood diamonds combined elements of violence and money and had a dark, sadistic appeal that had made headlines all the way to Oslo.

In 2001, American authorities banned imports of diamonds from Liberia, since President Charles Taylor was using the diamond trade to finance warfare in neighbouring countries. Accounts came from Sierra Leone of slavery, rape and the massacre of thousands of people. The following year, Breivik told his best friend that he was going to travel to Liberia to smuggle blood diamonds and gave him a letter to his mother in case he did not return. His friend could not resist opening the letter, which said that his mother should not feel sorry for him and that Anders had only gone there to seek his fortune.

It was a slightly riskier plan than going to Copenhagen to buy spray cans, but Breivik followed his dramatizing modus operandi with a cover name, cover stories and a somewhat exaggerated air of mystery. ‘My name's Benson, Henry Benson,’ Breivik introduced himself to the fixers who waited for him in Monrovia.

The Liberians drove him in a BMW through the small, ruined capital to the Metropolitan Hotel. The fixers saw a polite young businessman from Norway. The war was looming ever closer at that time, with rebel forces supported by neighbouring countries advancing in northern Liberia. The rebel leaders had names like Cobra and Dragon Master. Mercenaries were fighting on all sides in the conflict. Charles Taylor's government army was about to lose control of the diamond mines, so there were fewer diamonds on sale in Monrovia. War profiteers from all corners of the world, journalists, mercenaries and people from humanitarian organizations gathered in the bars of Monrovia to drink and tell stories. Was it true that the rebels were now only 40 kilometres from Monrovia? Did you know that in Sierra Leone Taylor's people were cutting off arms and legs, noses and ears? Soviet weapons and helicopters were coming in from Central Asia, and veterans of wars in Congo and the Balkans were looking for work in the jungle of Western Africa. The setting could have been from a novel by Graham Greene.

Morg had been resurrected as Henry Benson, international man of mystery, perhaps a step on the way towards being Andrew Berwick, Justiciar Knight. Breivik did not buy any diamonds in Monrovia but did later send his fixers around 40,000 kroner from Norway, an astronomical sum in Liberia. Perhaps he was unusually generous, or perhaps he wanted diamonds but was swindled. According to Breivik's own account, he met a Serbian veteran in Monrovia by the name of ‘the Dragon’. The Dragon included him in the network of militant European nationalists that he called the Knights Templar network.

It is more likely that the stories the boy from Skøyen had heard in the bar on the ground floor of the Metropolitan Hotel, rumours of Serbian mercenaries and rebel leaders with colourful noms de guerre, grew over the years into a fantasy story in which Breivik himself was the protagonist. It was allegedly in London, on his way home from Monrovia, that Breivik started on the path to becoming a knight. The Serb supposedly sent him to a meeting there in early May 2002. The real story was less exciting. On the way from Monrovia to London, Breivik bought an expensive souvenir, a Montblanc Meisterstück pen. He stayed the night at the St George's Hotel in London before going home to Oslo.

While he was trying his luck as a businessman, Breivik also tried out politics. In 1997, at around the same time he had to leave the Tåsen Gang, he turned up as a newly fledged member of Frem­skrittspartiets ungdom [the Progress Party's Youth; FpU] – a new group with new opportunities. There was a certain class logic in the fact that a boy from Ris School who belonged to neither the financial nor the cultural elites of the West End would end up in the Progress Party, a party of angry shopkeepers. He was in favour of a restrictive immigration policy, but not especially critical of Islam at that time. In his 231 posts on the FpU online forum, he wrote mainly about economic policy, as it was money that interested him most.

Breivik joined the mother party, the Progress Party, in 1999 and spent March and April of that year on the Party's course for aspiring politicians, at the same time as the eyes of Europe were on Kosovo and Serbia, with NATO bombing and Serbian forces carrying out ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population. He was given some minor local duties in both the youth wing and its mother party, including being deputy leader of FpU for the West End of Oslo. In spite of his extensive activity on the online forum and his ambitious idea to establish a centre-right youth platform consisting of the youth wings of Venstre [the Liberal Party], Høyre [the Conservative Party] and Kristelig Folkeparti [the Christian Democratic Party], as well as FpU, he did not succeed in being nominated to the party's list of candidates in the local elections of 2003. Breivik's strategic proposal of a centre-right youth platform was a new, expanded version of his notion of being the glue holding the taggers together, not a figurehead but the organizer behind the scenes. Breivik was thinking bigger and bigger, but little came of it. He left the Progress Party and the FpU in 2004.

During his trial, he said that he had kept his radical views on Islam, multiculturalism and the ongoing European Civil War hidden during his time in FpU, and that he was only interested in having something to put on his CV and advancing in the party. Taqiyya. He thought that conformism and politeness would take him to the top. His friends also thought that the most important thing for him was not politics but climbing through the party ranks. People from the tagging community called him socially overambitious, always wanting to be in charge. For Breivik, apparently the main thing was being seen. Beyond that, he tried to fit in with the rest of the pack.

Breivik remained a lone wolf, but perhaps he did not leave the Progress Party and the FpU with a heavy heart, as it was at the same time he left politics that he first began to make real money. In 2001, he established a third company, City Group, and in 2002 his turnover started to pick up. Breivik sold fake diplomas, including various degree and exam certificates. In 2003, he claimed to have made his first million kroner. Over the course of the three or four years the company existed, he made approximately 4 million kroner, according to himself. 3.6 million were transferred to the fourteen bank accounts he had in seven different countries, according to the police.¹ The earnings he buried in banks in Caribbean and Baltic states were not declared to the tax authorities.

Slowly and systematically, Breivik brought the money back home through cash withdrawals from foreign banks, withdrawals with foreign cards from Norwegian cash machines, and payments into his mother's bank account that she then transferred on to him. In such a way, his mother helped him to launder around 400,000 kroner. According to Breivik, the newspaper Aftenposten began to show interest in his company, which was in a legal grey area with its sales of false documents as well as money laundering and extensive tax evasion. He folded the company in 2006 because he was worried about media attention and potentially being investigated, he later claimed, and moved home to his mother, his partner in crime.

In the two safes in his bedroom there were hundreds of thousands of kroner. He had acquired experience in the production of false documents as well as in the use of the Internet for criminal purposes. The boy who wanted to be a big name made his first million at a younger age than other entrepreneurs such as Petter Stordalen or Kjell Inge Røkke, as he pointed out during his trial, but still he did not behave like a winner. He practically went into hiding. Throughout the decade, he stayed in touch with a group of friends from his time at the Commerce School, but, after 2006, they all described it as if Breivik went underground. Breivik was never without friends, but he spent the next few years in front of his computer screen.

Andersnordic, Conservatism and Conservative

Breivik was a keen gamer. He had always liked computer games, according to Tove. Back in his ‘fart room’, as he cryptically called it, in Hoffsveien, he now began a period of hardcore raiding in World of Warcraft, the biggest and most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Fantasy-based role-playing games emerged as a genre in the seventies, as a by-product of the cult surrounding Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and went online in the nineties. World of Warcraft entered the market in November 2004 and became the greatest commercial success in the genre. The game had 10 million subscribers by January 2008. The players are distributed over a number of servers (each with up to 20,000 subscribers), offering three different types of play: player vs. environment, player vs. player and role-playing.

For a period from 2006 to 2007, Anders was almost constantly logged on to World of Warcraft, carrying out quests such as killing monsters and finding treasure in a universe of wizards, castles, vampires and magical spaceships. Players control an avatar, and they can see that character either externally (in third-person view) or from its own viewpoint (first-person view) while they explore a whole world made up of several continents, medieval-style towns and other planets, as well as interacting with a number of non-player characters, fellow guild members and avatars from other guilds. The quests carried out by players include fighting with other players and slaying beasts.

World of Warcraft is largely about constructing an avatar. Breivik's avatars were called Andersnordic, Conservatism and Conservative. Andersnordic belonged to the ‘mage’ class, was male by gender and human by race, one of fifty-two possible types of avatar combination. On screen, Andersnordic looks quite robust and threatening, more of a warrior than a mage. Andersnordic was an avatar he mainly used early on, while Conservatism and Conservative were female avatars he developed later. Conservatism was a beautiful, blonde mage. In the compendium Anders was working on in parallel with his gaming, he mentioned that attractive women could help to increase the impact of messages. Perhaps that was why he created female avatars, because it is easier to receive help and tips from other players (who are approximately 85 per cent male in World of Warcraft) if they believe you are a woman.

The avatars in World of Warcraft have five different kinds of primary attributes, or stats, that affect characters' performance and are given as percentages: strength, intellect, stamina, spirit and agility. While playing, the player builds up these traits, so the avatar's strength, intellect and other attributes increase. As you carry out quests and gain experience, your avatar reaches higher levels. You rise up through the game's levels and achieve higher ranks, as in a Masonic lodge. An avatar is a player's representative in the game, his or her alias or alter ego. The avatar is not only present in the game but is also used when the players have discussions among themselves in chat rooms or forums. In February 2011, going by the name of Conservatism, Anders wrote on a gaming forum: ‘Better hated than forgotten, or what?’²

In World of Warcraft, you can play alone, questing, or you can go raiding, which means carrying out larger missions together with other players. The missions can vary from fetching an object from an unexplored area to killing the biggest monsters on the server, so-called raid bosses. World of Warcraft is not really a difficult game, but it takes a lot of effort. Faltin Karlsen, a game researcher, stresses that the missions in World of Warcraft require players to plan and to be systematic: ‘The quests are not so much intellectual challenges as logistical ones.’³ The game requires a lot of time. While you progress quickly through the levels to start with, it takes a long play time to go from one level to the next when you get further towards the top of the ladder, perhaps as much as twenty hours. If you want to join in raiding, you will only be allowed if you are on one of the higher levels.

To go raiding, the players organize themselves into guilds made up of avatars with various complementary attributes, in a similar way to how taggers in a crew might have different tasks and specialities. In order for a raiding guild to work optimally, its players' avatars need not only to be at top levels but also to be equipped with the best weapons, magic spells and healing abilities. In World of Warcraft, hardcore raiders are in a kind of top-level sport. You could also say that the highest-ranked guilds were the gaming world's equivalent to the B Gang, Oslo's toughest criminals. Raiding has a social dynamic that forces the players to spend enormous amounts of time playing. If you do not play enough, you can become a burden for the guild, a weak link. If you are not logged on enough, you might risk being thrown out by the guild leader.

Anders' avatars reached the highest levels. Level 70 was as far as you could get in early 2007, and he later reached level 85 with Conservatism, the highest level when the game was expanded the following year. With Andersnordic, he became the leader of a guild called Virtue, which raided on the Nordrassil server. Having such a role in a guild of hardcore raiders (hardcore guilds seek to be the first on their server to kill the raid bosses) is very demanding. According to Breivik, Virtue was the highest-ranked guild on the Nordrassil server. This was high-level logistics, which required the guild leader to spend almost all his time on the game. Such a person has to keep making sure that the other players have the necessary equipment for the mission at hand and organize them in order to be able to carry out their difficult tasks and acquire ‘epic’ loot, while also listening to the other players' thoughts and complaints, as World of Warcraft is a social game in which the chat logs are a central part.

In the Virtue guild's discussion threads, the other players remembered Andersnordic both as a good leader – ‘businesslike, organised and good tactically’ – and as ‘arrogant and a bully’, kicking other players out of the guild when they were logged off and offending or irritating the other players.⁴ Several people remember long discussions with him, some of them personal. Offler, one of his guildmates from Virtue, thought that for Andersnordic World of Warcraft ‘was like a tonic to his depression’.⁵ Another of Breivik's guild colleagues who read the recollections of World of Warcraft in his compendium thought that Breivik exaggerated his role in the gaming world too:

To clarify, the only guild that Breivik ever led was Virtue who were never close to being a rank 1 guild on Nordrassil EU. They were a social group who played the game in a social, non-competitive atmosphere. Breivik was able to gain influence in that guild and attempted (quite ruthlessly) to change the guild outlook to that of a competitive guild but ultimately failed with many members abandoning him. He joined Unit, the rank 1 guild, but was never in a position of leadership at any time during his membership.

After the latter guild moved to Silvermoon EU, he left them to join a guild called Nevermore. He, again, never held any kind of leadership position with them (that guild still exists and is led by the same person who has led it throughout it's [sic] entire 6 year history).⁶

Breivik evidently ended up in the same situation in World of Warcraft as at Ris. ‘Anders used to be a part of “the gang”, but then he fell out with everyone,’ as it said in the yearbook from 1995.

Many old raiders have an ambivalent relationship to their gaming achievements, with some describing them as a waste of time and flights of fantasy. The gaming world consumes a lot of time but also gives a lot back. With a couple of keystrokes you can construct a new identity; another couple of keystrokes and you can join a new gang. In the gaming world, you overcome difficult situations, complete demanding missions and make friends with the other players. You feel happy when their avatars appear, and you are proud of your own avatar. What a guild we make! Once you have spent maybe a year or more in front of the screen, real life, or RL, becomes just one of many parallel worlds, another window on the screen – a window that might not be especially tempting to click on and open.

Anders also went on playing World of Warcraft after his most intense period in 2006 and 2007, when he would play for up to sixteen hours a day. At the same time, he was active on a number of other websites and blogs, as Anders communicated with the world even though, in a way, he had gone underground. According to the police, he operated around twenty different e-mail addresses and thirty different nicknames or nicks on around forty favourite websites and discussion forums, from the website of the tabloid newspaper VG to neo-Nazi websites such as Stormfront and Nordisk.nu.

Breivik preferred fantasy games, but in the last couple of years leading up to 2011 he also spent a lot of time playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In his compendium, he wrote that the game made for excellent training. Modern Warfare 2 is a first-person shooter game in which the player sees mainly through gun-sights and sneaks through Russian bases in Central Asia, Afghan towns, Brazilian favelas and the new airport in Moscow, where the player infiltrates a terrorist group and joins in a massacre of ordinary civilian passengers in transit. Dying civilians crawl along the floor, leaving trails of blood, while the terrorists run round executing them.

The airport level was controversial in many countries. It was discussed in the British House of Commons, while in Japan and Germany the game was modified so that players lost (and saw a ‘game over’ on-screen message) if they themselves were tempted to shoot civilians. Others thought that the game was made more realistic by introducing this aspect of moral ambiguity and not just being about killing baddies. While the heroes are American, the enemies are mainly Russian – a remnant of the Cold War perhaps, or because the game would have been accused of racism if the opponents were Chinese or Arab. The game is set in a future in which an ultra-nationalist coup in Russia commanded by the game's villain (who for some unfathomable reason has a Chechen-style Muslim name, Imran Zakhaev) leads to a Russian military attack on the USA.

The graphics make the game very realistic. You have to look for cover and good observation points all the time while also not getting lost in labyrinthine open-plan offices and confusing outdoor settings. The game is frustratingly difficult for a beginner, who will get killed all the time, but proficient gamers can obtain a number of so-called perks – for example, becoming a ‘one-man army’, or OMA, after having killed a certain number of people. The advantage of being a one-man army is that players can quickly switch characters. The disadvantage of doing so is that players lose their secondary weapons and are left with only their primary weapons. Whether you are a complete beginner or a shrewd gamer, you will eventually get shot, but this is not especially realistic in the game, as you immediately ‘respawn’ and continue your journey, which ends with saving the USA from the Russian invasion.

The former tagger and petty-criminal businessman had always been keen on cover stories. Computer-game addiction was one of Breivik's recommended cover stories during this period. The stigma associated with computer-game addiction would stop people from asking questions about any peculiar behaviour, he wrote. But gaming also had other functions. Breivik claimed that he played World of Warcraft to make a break with his old life. Inspiration and lingo from the games permeated the compendium on which he was working.

He constructed ingenious rankings and military and civilian orders to reward various achievements, such as eliminating buildings and traitors or writing political works, almost in the same way that players are rewarded for carrying out missions in games. Gaming terms such as primary weapon, secondary weapon and one-man army made their way into his compendium. Breivik consistently quantified everything, from strength and agility, through his preferred cocktail of steroids, ephedrine and aspirin, to how ‘hostile’ countries were with percentages, almost in the same way as statistics and probabilities of success are shown on screen in computer games, such as a health level in World of Warcraft or a kill/death ratio in Modern Warfare. He describes terrorist scenarios with the same kind of percentages as a gamer would use discussing a raid in World of Warcraft:

I know there is a [sic] 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven't been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second, 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission.⁷

*****

When Breivik took ‘a year off’ to play World of Warcraft, he was a less atypical twenty-seven-year-old than might be imagined. As previously mentioned, the game had 10 million users in 2008, many of whom spent several hours daily playing the game for periods that might last for years. Breivik played a lot, but not to an exceptional degree, and computer-game addiction is a concept that is difficult to define. Extensive gaming that has an effect on players' social, professional and family lives is not necessarily a result of addiction as such. Excessive gaming can also be a symptom of withdrawal, depression or other problems, whether these are situational or fundamental, social or mental problems. To say that Breivik became isolated at this time is also slightly inaccurate, since he played World of Warcraft in an essentially social way.

Gaming is an interactive and often social culture that is especially appealing to boys. In Modern Warfare, you choose an avatar, a weapon and operational tactics, and you control your own movements. Should you shoot or duck? Your enemies fall in front of you, sometimes in piles. Should you run or wait? The choice is yours. In reality, players are of course subject to a number of rules and restrictions and move about in a landscape that other people have designed and produced for them, but the experience of being an individual acting independently is one of the game's attractions. If real life interferes in the form of your mother suggesting that you are a passive consumer – both of popular culture and of the food she makes – and that you should get out in the sunshine and get an education, a job and a love life, then it is tempting to shut the door. What has RL really got to offer that games cannot do better?

As recently as 2010, the thirty-one-year-old Anders Behring Breivik played computer games for an average of seven hours a day. Perhaps his work on the compendium, which he told many people about, was also a cover story over those years. His work putting together the compendium and preparing the ‘event of the year’ could in a way serve to camouflage his gaming, while also justifying it as ‘training’ and as a method of breaking away from ‘the game’ – in other words, his former reality. Games and cover stories were Breivik's world: layer upon layer of false identities, secret accounts, white lies and black lies. Beneath all those layers was one single burning desire: to be big, to be famous.

Avatar Syndrome

James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time and was ground-breaking in its use of technology and visual effects. Audiences gasped from behind their 3D glasses. How realistic, how close; what incredible scenery! True enough, Avatar was closer to the three-dimensional aesthetic of computer games than to any landscape on earth or in space, but still, imagine if such a world really existed …

The story takes place in the mid-twenty-second century on the planet Pandora. Owing to a lack of resources on the planet Earth, humans are trying to colonize Pandora. The problem is that the planet is inhabited by a humanoid indigenous population, the Na'vi, who must either move of their own accord or be cleared by force. In order to communicate with them, the film's hero, the disabled former soldier Jake, is linked up to a Na'vi–human hybrid, an avatar. Among humans, Jake is a neglected cripple with no future, but his avatar is fully mobile, falls in love with the Na'vi princess, carries out incredible feats and eventually saves the entire planet of Pandora. Jake turns out to be the chosen one, the saviour who turns against his masters.

While the humans live in tired space stations, the planet Pandora is like a collage of National Geographic's top-ten list of natural wonders. Mountains float in the sky like clouds, while the landscape combines the vivid colours of untouched coral reefs with lush rainforests. Strange organisms float past that could have been fished from the bottom of the sea, and Jake whirls around the skies on the back of enormous dragon-like birds. He is no longer underestimated or overlooked.

‘I see you,’ the Na'vi princess tells Jake.

The film ends with Jake leaving his human body for good and being resurrected in the form of his blue avatar.

The film Avatar was controversial in places such as China, where some people saw it as an anti-colonialist film with reference to China's policy on Tibet. Others saw it as an epic for the environmental generation: a warning against tampering with nature. One day, Gaia will strike back. But, beyond the political analogies, the film also tells another story, or rather it describes a cultural concept. Avatar expresses the dream of a generation of gamers longing to become their avatars.

On some level, most of us can identify with wheelchair-bound Jake being resurrected as a blue giant. You can log on and assume an avatar too. Perhaps it is especially male gamers who fantasize about going from a demanding and complicated human culture back to a beautiful, simple and honourable idea of nature. While reality is made up of homework, demands, everyday work and complicated rules, the game world is simple, elegant and heroic. People who work hard at school or in the office are reborn as superheroes in online games. Which would you rather be, an unskilled worker on benefits or a wizard on level 70? Even though there are arguments and conflicts in the game world too, it is at the same time sanitized, without beetles, creepy-crawlies, smells, infections or ironic comments, without any bodies and without any other expressions than smilies and LOLs. Not only do the women on the Internet look good, they are also easier to relate to. Online, being a man is cool. There is room for all kinds of sexual preferences and all kinds of fantasies. Anything goes. Al-Qaeda's execution videos in which the helpless hostages' heads are cut off for real are only a click away.

As a teenager, Anders searched on the streets for a name and a gang. After five years on the Internet, he had found ‘friends and contacts’ in England. He had a European network, he thought. He was no longer Morg from RTM and the Tåsen Gang, to the extent that he ever had been. Neither was he the Progress Party's delegated member on the board of directors of Majorstua Retirement Home, one of the duties he had taken on as a member of the party's youth wing. In his compendium, he was resurrected as ‘Andrew Berwick, Justiciar Knight Commander, Knights Templar Europe’.⁸ The world was in crisis. Only a hero could save European civilization from destruction. Enter Andrew Berwick, a knight with spurs, an intellectual mage and part-militant Tauren. In a way, Breivik underwent the same transformation as Jake in Avatar. When he left his ‘fart room’ in Hoffsveien, he stepped into his own avatar.

The Counter-Jihadist Avatar

The Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick came into being in the years between 2006 and 2011, at the intersecting point between tagging, freemasonry, Tolkienesque fantasy, sales techniques, first-person shooter games and apocalyptic notions from websites critical of Islam. This avatar was not created by joining human and Na'vi genes; it was stitched together using the cut-and-paste method. The noughties were a decade marked by sharp contrasts, fear and war, but it was hardly Occidentalism alone that made Breivik's knight so exceptionally brutal. Neither was it Modern Warfare 2. His murderous impulse may already have been there, and perhaps the blueprint was to be found in the fantasy executioner Morg. All the other elements – the European Civil War, jihad in Oslo, hatred towards modernity, the idea of a network of Knights Templar and the cultural Marxist enemy – were props and background material found by shopping around online.

As mentioned above, Breivik was not really isolated either in the years from 2006 to 2011. He sought out a lot of information on the Internet, particularly from the English version of Wikipedia. He also wrote on many online forums and political blogs. He no longer concentrated on FpU's website but on much more right-wing and in some cases extremist websites. He abandoned Norwegian websites to seek out international bloggers. For Breivik, Norway was small and uninteresting in the bigger picture and, besides, nobody had ever managed to become a prophet in their own land.

In the Document.no comment section, Breivik listed his favourite political websites: ‘The pan-European/US community around Robert Spencer, Fjordman, Atlas, Analekta + 50 other EU/US bloggers (and Facebook groups) are the epicentre of political analysis […].’ These are central points of reference in what is known as the counter-jihadist community. These websites, together with some other blogs such as the racist Stormfront.org, made up Breivik's ideological superstructure and were where he collected the largest portion of the material for his compendium. Among other things, Breivik cited heavily from Wikipedia and plagiarized the ultra-conservative Amer­ican historian William S. Lind's pamphlet Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology. Breivik probably picked up the term ‘cultural Marxist’ from Lind.⁹

Most of us respond to the anti-Islamic blogosphere by shaking our heads and clicking away to another page when extremism seeps into the comment sections of online newspapers or appears in the form of fanatical readers' letters to the editor. Few newspaper editorial staff paid much attention to what was regarded as a marginal extreme right-wing phenomenon, with weak empirical data surpassed only by its lack of democratic sentiment and the awkwardness of its language. When the media did show interest in extremism in the noughties, this was primarily in terms of radical Islam.

While the media and the general public trailed Islamist cleric Mullah Krekar from his flat in the Grønland neighbourhood of Oslo to various bizarre websites, the ‘epicentre’ described by Breivik was an isolated phenomenon that few people cared about, even if ideas did seep out from there to the wider public. Pamela Geller from AtlasShrugs.com, for example, is a frequent guest on Fox News in the USA, while some Norwegian politicians have stated that the Labour Party is guilty of ‘sneaking Islamization’ and cultural treachery. ‘Do we want to help the Labour Party to replace Norwegian culture with “multiculture”? Never! Do we want to contribute to their cultural betrayal? Not even at gunpoint! Will we ever feel “multicultural”? Not on your life!’ wrote Kent Andersen and Christian Tybring-Gjedde of the Progress Party in Aftenposten in 2010.¹⁰ The Russian President Vladimir Putin said that France was in the process of being colonized by its former colonies. In Serbia, nationalist leaders discussed the conspiracy of the EU, USA and Muslims against the Serbs. The anti-Islamic blogosphere was largely left alone and was able to grow and develop in peace over many years. Like most sects, it was to some extent a self-sufficient machine that read itself, cited itself and eventually congratulated itself for its insightful contributions.

The paradox of the informational revolution is that misconceptions survive even if people have access to more information. In Europe and the USA, people are seeking out news as never before, not least thanks to the Internet. It might therefore be imagined that poor information would disappear as a result of natural selection, but the belief that Barack Obama is really a Muslim and a foreigner is still alive and kicking among many Americans who should know better. In Norway, the organization Stopp islamiseringen av Norge [Stop the Islamization of Norway; SIAN] claims that there will be a Muslim majority in Oslo by 2026, in spite of the statistics produced by Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway] and objections from the Human Rights Service website Rights.no, which SIAN gave as its source. An explanation can be found in a phenomenon called audience fragmentation. People will look at news sources that are on the same political wavelength as they are (whether these are TV sources, newspapers or websites). As a result, parallel news niches develop, parallel media realities.

With informational self-pollination in these niches, people are split up into political tribes: the Fox News tribe, the Huffington Post tribe, or the Document.no tribe, to cite an example close to Breivik. Left to themselves and full of mutual admiration, members of such a tribe breed a whole variety of notions, extending what Breivik called an ‘epicentre of political analysis’. SIAN is not exactly a huge popular movement, but its website still has quite high traffic, with often around a hundred comments on each article published. It is not a group that should be written off as entirely marginal or uninteresting.

These ideological, religious and political niche communities exist online almost like isolated rainforest tribes, hidden from one another and from the societies of which they are part. The dynamics of these online written cultures, often anglophone, may be reminiscent of subcultures such as the neo-Nazi group Jens Erik joined in the eighties or isolated religious sects, but the difference is that they are far-flung and international. Such communities are sometimes described as electronic tribes, thought ghettos or echo chambers. Informational in-breeding can lead to extremism by increasing hostility towards those with different beliefs.

Extremism is perhaps best defined as a drastic approach to brush aside those who disagree with you. In the USA, where the political fronts are often uncompromising, media scholars consider online echo chambers to be one of the major new challenges for democracy. In the early twentieth century, the Scandinavian social democracies bridged deep class divides through the creation of institutions and arenas for negotiation and debate, thereby steering their way through times of economic crisis without ending up in the ditch of fascism. What kind of institutions or arenas can tackle this new form of tribalization in which people are isolated in their own media and information reserves? The phenomenon of online radicalization, which in the last decade has been linked to the growth of a generation of European jihadists, brought this question to the fore.

The Online Prophets of Doom

Breivik's great hero, Fjordman, was the anti-Islamic niche public's articulate golden boy, known as ‘the dark prophet of Norway’. Fjordman was also a kind of avatar: bleak, fierce and learned – an eerie prehistoric Norse sorcerer resurrected online. Who was hiding behind his username? It was claimed that he had hundreds of thousands of readers. The mystical Fjordman was a sensation in the second half of the last decade.

Fjordman had published essays on the blogs Gates of Vienna and The Brussels Journal since 2005; he was a central figure in the international counter-jihadist online community and was distinguished by his extreme scepticism towards Islam. Fjordman belongs to almost the same generation as Breivik and cites 9/11 as a key landmark in his political development. He blogged in English, using some of the same references to popular culture as Breivik – for example, referring to the film The Matrix and claiming that Muslims are like orcs, the repulsive creatures from The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Manichaean universe, in which beautiful elves come up against hideous orcs, did not only give rise to the fantasy industry but also has offshoots in the counter-jihadist community.¹¹ Breivik's compendium contained forty-five essays by Fjordman,¹² and the compendium's subtitle, A European Declaration of Independence, was drawn from Fjordman.

For Breivik, Fjordman appeared as a kind of intellectual big brother, the man who tells it as it is. For outsiders, Fjordman's dead seriousness is the most striking aspect of his online reality. He exhibits no doubt, no irony and no attempt to seek out other perspectives. No nuance, just clear answers. A Tolkien-inspired, flat reality in which good comes up against evil, Muslims against Christians, black against white, doom and gloom in abundance. Perhaps this was Fjordman's forte.

In his ‘European Declaration of Independence’, Fjordman demands on behalf of European citizens that the EU should be dismantled, that the ‘Eurabian’ policy must cease and that those responsible for it should stand trial, that support for the Palestinians should be given to Israel instead, that the multicultural hate ideology must be weeded out of the state and schooling, and that Muslim immigration must be stopped, as Europe is being subjected to Islamic colonization. Fjordman often adopts a belligerent tone. ‘We are being subject to a foreign invasion, and aiding and abetting a foreign invasion in any way constitutes treason,’ he states. ‘If non-Europeans have the right to resist colonization and desire self-determination then Europeans have that right, too. And we intend to exercise it […] and take the appropriate measures to protect our own security and ensure our national survival.’¹³

Fjordman states strictly that the ‘enemy number one’ is not Muslims but traitors among his own people, ‘those who fed us with false information, flooded our countries with enemies and forced us to live with them. They constitute enemy number one. We should never forget that.’¹⁴ In his compendium, Breivik sounded like an echo of Fjordman when he asked: ‘When the pipe in your bathroom springs a leak and the water is flooding the room, what do you do?’¹⁵ Should you fix the leak or mop up the water? First you must fix the leak, Breivik concluded, before going further than Fjordman by saying that all actions should be directed against traitors – in other words, the cultural Marxist elites. Not only did Breivik endorse Fjordman's analysis or appropriate it, his own texts also adopted the same imaginary ‘we’ used by Fjordman.

The counter-jihadist ‘we’ included not only counter-jihadists themselves but also European citizens who had not yet woken up and realized the seriousness of the situation. Fjordman's ‘we’ is slightly reminiscent of how the revolutionary minority among Russian socialists called themselves Bolsheviks, meaning the majority faction, inflating themselves like an animal does when it wishes to appear more fearsome than it is. Breivik's corresponding use of ‘we’ appears as partly revolutionary stratagem and partly wishful thinking. If most people do not realize how serious things are, somebody has to take the lead and wake them up. In the compendium, Breivik's ‘we’ is a cover for ‘I’, while ‘I’ is a cover for a question mark, as who was the real Anders Behring Breivik?

The uncompromising attitude of Fjordman's texts is clearly expressed in his view of Islam and Muslims: ‘Are Islamic teachings inherently violent? Yes. Can Islam be reformed? No. Can Islam be reconciled with our way of life? No. Is there such a thing as a moderate Islam? No. Can we continue to allow Muslims to settle in our countries? No.’¹⁶ It also emerges in his description of Breivik, whom he considered ‘as boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman’.¹⁷ Fjordman's apocalyptic notions are based on a simplification of the world into a few manageable quantities: Islam is only one thing, while co-existence of races and religions is impossible. Full stop. For Fjordman, history is flat and two-dimensional, like a plain on which a single great battle is continuously being fought. Europe today is in the midst of the same conflict as when Charles Martel fought against the Saracens near Poitiers in 732.

The fundamental premise of Fjordman's analysis is the conspiracy theory of Eurabia, which is linked to the Egyptian-born Jewish writer Bat Ye'or, also known as Gisèle Littman. With her book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Ye'or intends to document the existence of an agreement between Arab states and the EU to undermine Israel while also Islamizing Europe, so that the original population is reduced to a second-class citizenry, so-called dhimmi, who will live in fear and under oppression. For evidence, she refers to the ongoing dialogue between the EU and the Arab League, as well as a number of other initiatives for dialogue and co-operation across the Mediterranean, including the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, or Barcelona Process, which started in 1995.

While Ye'or's conspiracy theory is based on a grain of truth, as these dialogue frameworks do exist, it also serves to blow things completely out of proportion. The EU's neighbourhood policies towards the Middle East can be accused of being ineffective and full of empty rhetoric (as many who have been involved in the Barcelona Process will be able to confirm), but to accuse them of being the opposite, of being an effective cover for an ongoing Arab colonization of Europe, is far-fetched. It is almost like claiming that the Channel Tunnel is an attempt to carry out a second Norman invasion of England, or that the intention behind the ferries plying between Norway and Denmark is to restore the absolutist royal state as it was governed from Copenhagen in 1660.

Nonetheless, among the adherents of counter-jihadism the Eurabia theory is a central concept and a decisive factor for interpreting everyday phenomena large and small. In the light of this theory, even minuscule matters can achieve great significance, skewing proportions in a way that can appear quite comical to an outsider. Among the Eurabian niche public, as in Alice's Wonderland, things can assume tremendous new proportions. Matters that seem trivial to most people become loaded evidence for the initiated that Europeans are being turned into slaves in their own countries.

Critics of Islam and Their Norwegian Godfather¹⁸

The other Norwegian blogger Breivik looked up to was Hans Rustad, the man behind Document.no. Rustad would never dismiss Muslims as orcs. Document.no is an intellectually orientated website dealing with international politics and matters of integration and immigration. Rustad is critical of Islam but also critical of the militant rhetoric of counter-jihadists, of what Rustad describes as Bat Ye'or's ‘conspiracy’, and of right-wing sectarianism. While the website is critical of Ye'or, Document.no interviewed her in March 2011 about the Arab Spring (she used the opportunity to warn about the Muslim Brotherhood's intentions in Egypt). On the website's homepage, a pensive Pallas Athena rests her forehead on her spear, but otherwise the blog is free of pictures, video clips and sound files. No flippant nonsense. There is no fantasy silliness, no crusader kitsch or Viking symbols here. The aesthetic of Document.no is intended to turn the spotlight on the texts and on the thoughts therein.

Hans Rustad belongs to the same generation as Breivik's parents and is a kind of eternal dissident in Norwegian public life. He is an elegant and articulate man in his early sixties, resident at Eidsvoll, the birthplace of Norwegian democracy, where the constitution was signed in 1814. It can never be predicted whether he will turn up in Oslo wearing a suit and tie, an artist-like linen suit, or a fleece jacket, mountain boots and a traditional broad-brimmed felt navvy's hat. There are many people who refer to Document.no and many people who look up to Hans Rustad. In November 2011, the website had 52,000 individual users: a considerable number of readers for a Norwegian online publication.

Rustad has had a long journey as a public intellectual and media entrepreneur. A former journalist with Norsk Telegrambyrå [the Norwegian News Agency; NTB], he was one of few Norwegians involved in the Bosnian War of the early nineties. While trend-setting media outlets and significant elements of the Norwegian political elite described the armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia as a civil war that required neutrality, Hans Rustad agreed with the French New Philosophers who viewed events in Bosnia as a moral cause. In his spare time, Rustad published books and printed Primo Levi's memoir of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, a key text in post-war European humanism. There was a close link between Rustad's publication of books about the Holocaust and the activist attitude he took on in connection with the conflicts in the Balkans. He argued that the West could not sit by and watch while Serbian and some Croatian leaders led a fascist genocide against multicultural Bosnia and its Muslim majority.

For many intellectuals in Europe and the USA, Bosnia became a political and moral issue in a similar way to the Spanish Civil War almost sixty years earlier, a confrontation against fascism in our own time and against the compliance of Western democracies. For large sections of the European left – for example, the Greens in Germany – the situation in Bosnia changed their views of power, the use of military force, NATO and the USA. When the pacifist NATO opponents of the eighties moved from opposition to taking part in government, they ended up in the late nineties arguing for humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, Liberia and East Timor. The British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens represented the Bosnia generation when he said: ‘That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the [reinstitution of] torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent – or even take the side of the fascists.’¹⁹

Although he was not a Norwegian Hitchens, Hans Rustad stood for the same view. It was not a normal or straightforward position to adopt in Norway. The left was used to using the USA as a moral and political compass: whatever the USA favoured doing was bound to be wrong. In the Balkans, the Americans stood for the interventionist and ‘idealist’ line, while the Europeans (including the former Norwegian foreign minister Thorvald Stoltenberg, in a central role as the UN peace negotiator) attempted to resolve the war with ‘realistic’ negotiations.

Bosnia never became a campaigning issue in Norway; the left and the political elite shared the same view, while the right barely had a view at all. The conflict did not fit into the parameters of the Cold War. It was difficult to understand. As a result, there was no real political engagement until the USA and NATO became seriously involved by bombing Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovo War. At that time large sections of the Norwegian left protested against Norwegian participation in the US war, in some people's eyes accepting the genocidal Serbian policy that led to the Srebrenica massacre and the deportation of almost a million Kosovo Albanians. Rustad was one of very few Norwegians who were concerned about the Bosniaks and Kosovo Albanians (both mainly Muslim groups) being subjected to systematic acts of tyranny. How could it come to pass that Bosnia's advocate from the nineties became the godfather of critics of Islam in the following decade and a role model for Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed in his compendium that the bombing of Christian Serbia was what ‘tipped the scales’ for him?

In the autumn of 2009, Breivik was active on Document.no, writing a number of comments in which he criticized the MSM (‘mainstream media’) for not covering crime committed by Muslims. He suggested that multiculturalism was an ideology of hate along the same lines as Nazism, communism and Islam, and stated that the stigmatization of ‘cultural conservatives’ like himself was ‘just as bad as the persecution of the Jews in the thirties or during the Inquisition’. He went on to state that ‘98 per cent of all Norwegian journalists’ were ‘cultural Marxists’ with no credibility or legitimacy. Breivik then presented a comprehensive plan for how Document.no could be developed into a culturally conservative printed newspaper, collaborating with the Progress Party and becoming a right-wing political actor.²⁰

While Rustad reacted negatively to Breivik's suggestion of establishing a Norwegian counterpart to the English Defence League in order to have a response on the street when Islamic extremists and ‘Marxists’ were harassing cultural conservatives, there was little else about Breivik that made any particular impact. At Document.no there was a high level of tolerance for what most people would perceive as paranoid, alarmist or ridiculous assertions (‘just as bad as the persecution of the Jews in the thirties or during the Inquisition’). Breivik was one of many young men who were sceptical of Islam and the Norwegian authorities and who looked up to Hans Rustad as a kind of intellectual father figure. There was nothing extraordinary about that. Breivik also mentioned that he was working to finish a compendium in which even Fjordman would find something of interest. ‘Incredibly well written, Hans :),’ Breivik wrote in a comment on one of Rustad's posts. It was unclear whether this praise was coming from an admiring disciple or a slick salesman. Breivik characterized himself quite ceremoniously as a ‘cultural conservative intellectual’ and asked the other participants in the comment threads, especially Rustad, a number of questions about how a ‘coup’ had taken place in Aftenposten in 1972, causing it to move from being culturally conservative to becoming a ‘cultural Marxist politically correct rag’.

Rustad is a product of the sixties counter-culture and also belongs to the Norwegian 1968 generation. He began his cultural formation by listening to ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ and ‘Nowhere Man’ on the pirate stations that broadcast uncensored radio from ships in the North Sea. At the end of the sixties he took part in the youth camps organized by Sosialistisk Ungdomsforbund [the Socialist Youth League; SUF]. The summer, swimming, youth and politics were a winning combination back in 1968 too. In 1969, the SUF broke away from its mother party, Sosialistisk Folkeparti [the Socialist People's Party], taking a turn towards communism and becoming Sosialistisk Ungdomsforbund (marxist-leninistene) [the Socialist Youth League (Marxist-Leninists), SUF (m-l)]. When Stalin was brought on board, Rustad got off the SUF (m-l) train. He was critical and anti-authoritarian. In the seventies, he admired the anarchist author Kaj Skagen, who handed out leaflets at the 1 May procession saying that the communists had more blood on their hands than the right did.

‘The Marxist-Leninists were furious,’ Rustad recalled, ‘but historical facts have a corrosive effect over time, eating into shining models.’

The Marxist-Leninists changed course over the seventies, eighties and nineties, quietly and calmly disappearing into Norwegian academia, journalism and politics. Rustad was left outside. Publishing his own books, and eventually his own website, he continued where Skagen left off, like a kind of pirate radio ship on the high seas of the media, sending out uncensored ideas and uncomfortable truths to the politically correct mainland. He saw how criticism of the authoritarian aspects of the 1968 generation and of the authoritarian inheritance of the Labour Party came up against a brick wall. Anybody who wanted to discuss such things did not get a chance. The Norwegian elite have a collectivist attitude. They confine and conceal difficult issues such as the Chinese attack on Vietnam in 1979, the Bosnian War in the nineties and the rights of immigrant women today. There was a connection between the left's lukewarm support of Salman Rushdie in the eighties and the Labour government's weakness in the caricature controversy.

‘Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre is trying to square the circle by launching the “new Norwegian we” concept,’ Rustad said.

The truth is that a number of immigrants do not want to be part of the community. If integration is as successful as the official statistics suggest, why are ethnic Norwegians moving out of eastern Oslo? This mishmash of good intentions cannot conceal real problems such as Muslims bullying Jews in schools in Oslo. And when Støre said that the right was to blame for all terrorism on Norwegian soil, he was lying. What about the Workers' Communist Party plans to wage war in Norway in the seventies?

Rustad thought that things had been swept under the carpet, and that the left's failure to confront the glorification of violence was the direct cause of erratic moral relativism. If such things were not brought to light, Norway would become like Germany was in the ten years from 1968 to 1978. After the war, the West Germans did not speak about their connections with the Nazi state. This silence made the youth rebellion there especially bitter. In the vacuum that emerged, in the silent lack of any coming to terms with history, the German 1968 generation constructed a monster. They claimed that the Federal Republic was Nazi Germany, and the Red Army Faction began its shootings and bombings. Silence, suppression and weakness provided a breeding ground for violence.

‘This is where the connection between the bombing of the government district in Oslo and the silence about the 1968 generation's background emerges,’ Rustad reflected. ‘Breivik came out of the vacuum the ’68ers left behind. That's why there is a historical logic in Breivik citing Ulrike Meinhof in his manifesto.’

The parallel between the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968 and Norway in 2011 might not be immediately clear to everyone. There is a difference between having a German father who was a concentration camp guard during the war and having a Norwegian mother who visited Enver Hoxha's Albania in the seventies. Furthermore, involvement in the Third Reich was a widespread experience in Germany, while the Norwegian Maoists were a niche group, a political sect without any real significance or influence beyond the fact that many resourceful people later rose up from the Maoist hole they had dug for themselves to reach the top of Norwegian society as artists, media executives, academics and leaders of organizations. Breivik must have identified with the criticism of the ’68ers, however, and with Rustad's views of rape in Oslo. In Rustad's opinion, rape is a matter not of criminal behaviour but of war. In his article ‘Sex som våpen’ [Sex as a weapon] from December 2009, Rustad writes:

Sex is the most transcultural currency of all […].

Women were the greatest challenge for Muslims when they started living among secular Europeans. How could they avoid losing them to modernity? […] The hijab was the answer, because with it the woman marks her contempt for Western emancipation and establishes that she is not available […] to non-Muslims. […]

The other side of using sex as a weapon […] concerns Muslim men's views towards and treatment of Western women. […] Why do Muslim men rape Western women? Is it because they are unable to control themselves? People often turn to this old sexist cliché, which conceals the aggressive nature of Muslim men's treatment of Western women […].

This is not a matter of cultural differences. It is a matter of warfare […].

It is a classic pincer movement in which rights and women's freedom are being crushed from both sides, and Western men are being subjected to a slow castration.²¹

Rustad's use of imagery is interesting. Sex is a ‘currency’ on a market in which it may seem as if he would like to see quota arrangements to save Western men from a ‘slow castration’. Here, Muslims are treated as a monolithic entity, as with Fjordman, and as the opposite of ‘Westerners’, which means that a ‘Western Muslim’ would be a contradiction in terms. Is this the same Rustad who, in the nineties, defended Bosnia, with its many intermarriages between Muslims and Christians? Women are described in quite an objectifying manner as a ‘challenge’, and the female body is a battleground in the Muslims' ‘pincer movement’.

Rustad constantly used military images and concepts in his article about sex. Sex and sexualized violence are lifted above the personal onto a group level. As for the notion that ‘Western men are being subjected to a slow castration’, it is unclear how that comes as a result of the war he describes before that. Can Western men no longer have sex because Muslim men are not showing respect for women? Can they no longer have children? Has their sperm count been weakened? The article illustrates a kind of underlying sadomasochistic tendency that exists in some anti-Islamic discourse. The encounter between Islam and the West is violent, but also erotic. The conflict Rustad describes between Muslims and the West has a strangely sexual element in which the combination of sexual denial and rape constitutes a pincer castrating Western men.

‘Incredibly well written, Hans :),’ Breivik wrote about the series of articles incorporating this one. He drew inspiration from the site Document.no and was interested in the idea of sex as warfare and the image of castration. Breivik also saw the female body as a battleground in the struggle between Islam and the West. In his compendium, he wanted to punish the ‘traitor whores’ who had relations with the Muslim enemy. Rumours of the rape of Norwegian girls in the West End of Oslo in the nineties reappeared in an inflated format. Rape became religious warfare and proof that co-existence was impossible. Rustad referred to the Canadian author and critic of Islam, Mark Steyn, when he asked the question: ‘If Muslims, making up 3–4 per cent of the population, are creating problems today, how big will the problems be when their share becomes 13–14 per cent, or 30–40 per cent?’

‘I don't want to live in a country where I'm forced to take my children out of school because of religion,’ Rustad said. ‘Look what happened in Bosnia!’

While, in the nineties, Rustad had defended the Bosnian government's multicultural project against the nationalists, now Bosnia has become the symbol that co-existence is impossible. He seems to have performed an intellectual and moral back-flip, from a humanistic focus on individuals to collective thinking. In so doing, Rustad represented a broader tendency. The great political awakening of the last twenty years did not happen with the war in Bosnia, but on 11 September 2001 in New York. The media revolution of the nineties, in the form of satellite news channels such as CNN International and BBC World Service Television, coincided with the end of the Cold War, creating a new international political paradigm, in which stories from human rights groups suddenly went straight on the front page, forcing political and occasionally military action that would have been unthinkable a few years previously. The nineties were the decade that shed light on the victim's story. But that light was switched off when George W. Bush moved into the White House and the twin towers came down. After 9/11, the focus shifted from the victim to the terrorist's bearded face.

The following years became a decade of fear driven by the War on Terror. The West is under attack! They hate our freedom! Liberal interventionists from the nineties occasionally allowed themselves to get carried away by these tempting generalizations. Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote gloomily about Islamic fury in Pakistan, and Christopher Hitchens ended up supporting the Iraq War, which many saw as a betrayal of the ideals he had earlier upheld. War without a UN sanction against a tyrant can possibly be justified by ongoing serious violations of human rights and in order to prevent mass murder, but can it be justified based on weakly grounded allegations concerning weapons of mass destruction? Is it morally defensible to carry out ‘preventive warfare’? The focus on Islamic fascism was in itself commendable, but it led to turning a blind eye towards abuse at Guantánamo and Western extradition of prisoners for torture in Syria and Egypt. Other conflicts also disappeared completely from the radar screen or were used as proof of the conflict between Islam and the West, even when that factor was less significant.

It was at that time that warblogs appeared in the USA and Europe, blogs focusing on terrorism and the conflict between Islam and the West. In Norway, these blogs were closely concerned with the fact that the authorities were willing neither to take the problem seriously nor to do anything about it. Document.no emerged in 2003 at almost the same time as the US occupation of Iraq. The Norwegian blogger Bjørn Stærk wrote about how this phenomenon in turn gave birth to the counter-jihadist websites that appeared between 2004 and 2006, at the same time as the major terrorist attacks in London and Madrid and the beginning of the caricature controversy.²² It may appear inexplicable that Rustad's defence of Bosnia has become a struggle against Islam in which Bosnia serves as an example that co-existence is impossible, but there is coherence in his project. He always situates himself where he can generate as much opposition as possible against the ‘compact liberal majority’, to use Ibsen's term from An Enemy of the People.

The struggle against the 1968 generation is the leitmotif of Rustad's journey via Bosnia to his more recent fight against the elites' deception of ordinary people with their integration policies. In the nineties, Rustad was opposed to Radovan Karadžić's Serbian ethno-fascism, and in the noughties he was opposed to bin Laden's Islamist fascism, but all that time – and most of all – he has fought against the 1968 generation's fuzzy hegemony.

In December 2009, Breivik turned up in person at a meeting about Israel held by ‘Documents venner’ [Friends of Document.no]. The thirty-year-old Breivik was one of the very youngest at this gathering. Rustad led the discussion, and Breivik wanted to talk about his plans to transform Document.no into the cultural conservatives' answer to Aftenposten. Breivik had introduced himself online as a ‘cultural conservative intellectual’ and a ‘martyr ideologue’, but he did not make an especially good impression on the others at the meeting. One participant described him as a ‘meeting hog […] like the little boy at the dinner table who is neither heard nor taken entirely seriously when he speaks and from whom people keep a distance’.²³ Rustad did not take him seriously either. ‘He took the floor and had a lot to say, practically no holds barred,’ Rustad said. ‘You felt as if there were some inhibitions missing in his head.’²⁴

There were not many occasions during this period when Breivik sought out new groups or met people at all. In a way, this meeting was his last attempt to be the glue holding the conservative gang together, the strategist organizing a raid against the Labour bosses. If he had gone to the meeting to make his name as an intellectual or to make new friends, he failed. Again. Rustad, the Document.no group, the Progress Party: none of them were turned on by his idea for a newspaper to take on Aftenposten. Apparently he also failed to find sponsors through his contacts in the Masonic lodge, a club that actually wanted to have him as a member. Breivik contributed more and more infrequently to the debates on Document.no. The weeks passed and 2010 came. Breivik wrote his last regular post on Document.no in October 2010. He was far from an extreme online debater, but a change can be seen over the course of the year he wrote comments on the website.

Having initially taken up a lot of space to describe his vision of a broad ‘cultural conservative’ alliance including newly established organizations, investors and the Progress Party, with a newspaper edited by Hans Rustad as the jewel in the crown, he later spent more time describing the impossibility of penetrating media society. The difficult climate for ‘cultural conservative’ social criticism meant that direct and ‘honest’ ways of confronting the ‘cultural Marxist’ hegemony were impossible. ‘We were honest once, but Marx and Muhammad have forced us to become more like them, unfortunately,’ Breivik wrote.²⁵ The circumstances forced Breivik into lies and double-dealing, which occupied more and more of his time. Cover stories. ‘War is deceit,’ as he quoted Muhammad.²⁶

One of Breivik's keywords is taqiyya, an Islamic concept implying that Muslims can hide their real intentions and religious convictions if the circumstances force them to do so. The concept has been important to, among others, Shia Muslims, who have been subjected to extensive persecution throughout history. For Breivik, this was a form of institutionalized lying that meant that you could never trust Muslims. At the same time, taqiyya also signified for him a world of hidden motives and double-dealing in which cultural Marxists, the ‘Stoltenbergjugend’ (not the AUF, but various radical and state-subsidized youth groups) and Aftenposten joined forces with Islam to finish off cultural conservatives and the nation-state.

Taqiyya isolated Breivik in his own world of ideas: since society was full of lies, he had nothing to learn from it. Since he himself was playing a double game, he never allowed for any dissenting views. Breivik excelled in making up cover stories in his compendium and felt that the rest of the world was also hiding its true face.

Breivik sounded like an echo of Fjordman when he likened Islam to ‘hate ideologies’ such as communism, Nazism and multiculturalism, the aim of which was the ‘complete destruction of Western civilization’ and the creation of ‘a Marxist superstate (EUSSR)’. He tersely brushed aside the established church as ‘priests in jeans who march for Palestine, and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres’.²⁷ His posts on Document.no appear in part as an attempt to camouflage his criminal plans behind a modest political goal of ‘strengthening the Progress Party and the Conservative Party’ and partly as an attempt to gain the recognition and respect of his father figure Rustad, almost thirty years his senior. This development from hoping to create a common platform to a resigned belief in lying coincided with the development of his terrorist plans.

Breivik made his first equipment purchases during this period – ‘the acquisition phase’, as he calls it, using lingo from World of Warcraft. Just as he used to go to Copenhagen looking for art supplies, in the autumn of 2010 he travelled to Prague to buy weapons and fake police badges. Back home in Hoffsveien, Breivik pondered over why his suggestion to Document.no was not leading anywhere, in spite of all the volunteer work he had done for them in an attempt to transform the website into the new Aftenposten.

Hans Rustad, the leader of Document.no, seems like an odd fellow. I'm usually excellent in psychoanalyzing people but I haven't figured him out at all. I know he has a Marxist background and I believe he is in fact something of a rarity – an actual national Bolshevik, and thus not a real nationalist. He likes to criticise the multiculturalist media hegemony in Norway but is completely unwilling to contribute to create any form of [alternative] political platform or consolidation. He seems extremely paranoid and suspect of most people and he likes to attempt to ridicule and mock Fjordman, every time he writes a comment.²⁸

Breivik's psychoanalytic diagnosis of Rustad is characterized partly by disappointment and partly by strange terms: ‘an actual national Bolshevik’. Does that mean Rustad's orientation is neither nationalist nor communist? The terms ‘extremely paranoid and suspect’ may be descriptive more of his own inner world than that of Hans Rustad. Breivik is always on the watch for attempts to ridicule him, but also to ridicule his adopted intellectual big brother Fjordman. At the same time, he captures some of Rustad's stance as the eternal dissident of Norwegian public life. Breivik was enthralled by his father figure Rustad, but, just as with his real father, the interest was not mutual.

Home to Mother

But Anders always had his mother. They lived apart only for a few short years. In 2001, when his mother moved out from Konventveien and into a modest flat in Hoffsveien, the twenty-two-year-old Breivik went in the opposite direction, towards the city centre. He started sharing a flat in Majorstua, without making any particular impression on his flatmates. ‘Reserved, but nice,’ one of them said about him.²⁹

Then Breivik rented his own flat in Tidemands Gate, in the Frogner area. His friends noticed that he would not always answer the telephone or return calls. They described a bachelor's den dominated by two large computers surrounded by pizza boxes and empty cans. Sometimes he sat down to play while they were visiting. He played or worked at night and slept into the morning. His mother came to do his washing. This was at the time he was making money. When his mother and her partner broke up in 2004, Breivik took care of her. He bought three presents for his mother: a trip to Malta together, a dog and a ‘joke gift’.

2006 was a year to be remembered. Breivik's friends described how he isolated himself and disappeared ‘into his cave’.³⁰ Breivik moved back in with his mother. Why? He said that he wanted to save money and play computer games. His mother explained that she was the one who had asked him to move in and that this had to do with the difficulties he was having with his last company, E-Commerce Group AS. ‘Nothing worked out for him,’ she told the court-appointed psychiatrists.³¹ Breivik had lost a considerable amount of money on the stock market, and most of the money he had made was disappearing. He had also speculated unsuccessfully before, perhaps because he was ‘risk perverse’, as he later put it, someone who loved to gamble.

Anders spent that year ‘almost entirely in his room’, according to his mother.³² E-Commerce Group was eventually liquidated in 2008, and an official receiver turned up in Hoffsveien to speak with Anders. The receiver reported him for violating not only the Taxation Act but also the Limited Liability Companies Act, the Accounting Act, the Auditors Act and the regulations on employers' contributions. From Breivik's tagging, via the blood diamond fiasco and his business activities, up to his more recent years of fraud with false payslips to get credit, he had always considered himself to be above the laws and rules that applied to the general public. According to the receiver, in 2007 he took funds and a BMW belonging to the company. The case was dropped by the police, apparently due to limited capacity. Anders continued dealing in shares but failing to make it big. Between 2003 and 2010 he reportedly lost over 350,000 kroner.

On the evening of 13 February 2007, Breivik's friends stood outside the door of the flat in Hoffsveien. It was a grey Tuesday with light snow falling. The frost the city had been experiencing over the previous sparklingly clear days had abated, and the snow came with the milder air. Breivik was turning twenty-eight years old that day, and his friends wanted to take the birthday boy out for a beer. They came to fetch him physically so that he could not dodge them again. They peered through the windows and saw that the lights were on. They rang the doorbell, and Breivik's mother let them into the flat. She went into his room. When she came back out, she said that Anders was too busy to go out. His mother was a peculiar gatekeeper, an eccentric lady, known in the area for her strange and often caustic remarks. In the end, all the friends could do was leave.

Breivik's closest friend, ‘Paul’ (who, like Rafik, was from an immigrant background, the son of Eastern European refugees), was affected by his friend's withdrawal. He felt sad and gradually became worried. To begin with, he thought Anders was ‘kind and considerate’, but also ‘very, very stubborn’.³³ Now he had obviously decided not to meet people any more. His friends did get hold of him a couple of times in 2007, though, and they thought he had changed. He had become thin and pale, spoke less than before and was less intense. They described something that resembled depression, not unlike Breivik's guildmate Offler from Virtue, who said that World of Warcraft was like an anti-depressant for Andersnordic.

Paul and his girlfriend thought that Anders needed help. Paul got in touch with Anders' mother and told her that she was not doing her son any favours by letting him stay at home. She reportedly answered that she was happy to have him living with her and did not see anything unusual about the situation. From the USA, Anders' sister also reacted negatively to her brother's situation and tried to get her mother to do something: ‘It's not normal you know, Mum!!’³⁴ Although Breivik's mother had sought help on several occasions during his childhood, she had more often rejected external interference. Now the small family in Hoffsveien put up a united front against the outside world.

Behind the brick-wall façade, however, it was not all joy and happiness, if we are to believe Breivik's mother, but even though she is the only witness apart from Breivik himself, it is uncertain whether we should believe her. In conversation with the court-appointed psychiatrists she spoke about her life with Breivik, but in a conspicuously imprecise way. She said that there was no history of mental illness in her family, which was false. She said that there were ‘no particular concerns about her son's childhood development’,³⁵ which was false. She claimed their stay at the SSBU in 1983 was a result of the custody case that his father initiated, while it was actually the other way round. She said that her son was caught for tagging once, but the truth is that he was caught three times (including once at Oslo Central Station), and she generally embellished both his childhood and his adolescence. She could not remember her son having gone to Nissen Upper Secondary School and thought that he had paid tax on the earnings from his company. It is a little unclear whether she knew about his crimes, but she generally had a relaxed attitude towards the moral aspects of selling fake diplomas. She called the business ‘a great idea’.³⁶

Her forgetfulness and misunderstandings may be partly due to a period of illness in the mid-nineties, which she also mentioned to the psychiatrists, but Breivik's mother generally emerges as not especially reliable.³⁷ She was unreliable in 1983 and again in 2011. When she said in 2011 that she thought it was ‘awful’ and that she ‘panicked’ when Breivik wanted to take ‘a few years off’ in 2006,³⁸ this might be something she arrived at later. In any case, Paul apparently thought that ‘she would not accept’ that Breivik had problems and needed help during the year he played World of Warcraft.³⁹ Even if she spoke convincingly and concretely about her son's peculiar behaviour more recently, it could be thought that her account was coloured by a desire that his actions were due to madness, that he was therefore insane and not responsible, and that she would not be blamed either.

In the meantime, things ran their course at home in Hoffsveien. Breivik's mother claimed that she would ‘drag him out of bed’,⁴⁰ but her son rarely made it any further than the office chair in front of his computer screen. He never made it as far as the local job centre anyway. Anders' mother remembered him from earlier years being ‘incredibly kind and caring’, and only moderately interested in politics.⁴¹ Behind his bedroom door, however, something was happening. The years went by. Anders was writing a book, he proclaimed, about ‘the world picture’.⁴² He spoke about Christian IV, king of Denmark–Norway from 1588 to 1648, his mother mentioned. He was considering having more plastic surgery, perhaps something to do with his teeth, and grumbled about not being handsome any more. In the autumn of 2009, there was a general election.

‘You're a petty Marxist’, he told his mother harshly, ‘a feminist.’

He accused her of supporting the Labour Party, even though she voted for the Progress Party, ‘with his persuasion’.⁴³ Perhaps he saw her as a part of the 1968 generation Hans Rustad cursed on his website. The Labour Party and its red–green coalition won again, in spite of Fjordman's bleak predictions and the school election result at Ris, where the Conservative Party received 43.9 per cent of the vote and the Progress Party 19.4 per cent. Anders could get unreasonably angry when his mother knocked on the door. She said that small things irritated him. He ate dinner in his room, with his eyes glued to the screen.

The man who finally emerged from the room in 2010 was a different person. According to his friend, he showed up in town more often and was more like the old Anders. By this time, his flirtation with Document.no was practically over. His compendium was about to be completed, and his avatar would soon be ready for use. Breivik complained about his food and became unpleasantly intense when he spoke about politics. Strange things started appearing in the flat. A big, black trunk stood in the corridor, apparently bullet-proof. Anders explained it was needed to prevent his car from being broken into. He had a shotgun in his room. ‘The Civil War is coming,’ said Anders in a loud, intense voice.

In the autumn of 2010, he announced that his book was finished and that he was going to a book fair in Germany. He went away for a few days, and his mother thought no more about it. He had often run off before. This time he was not going to Copenhagen shopping for spray cans, but to the Czech Republic to buy an AK-47, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, which he did not succeed in doing. Instead he ordered a hunting rifle, a semi-automatic Ruger Mini-14, which is a legal weapon in Norway. He had licences for all his firearms, and the bedroom general decided to make most of his preparations legally.

Just before Christmas, Anders was receiving one parcel after another, filling up the cellar storage rooms with all kinds of strange things. Breivik hoped that the customs officials would not check parcels that came at Christmas. Heavy objects in black plastic bags disappeared into dark storage rooms. His needlework classes at Smestad Primary School came into their own when he had to design, develop and sew together his knight's body armour, made from Kevlar and ceramic plates, which he called ‘Loki's Armour’, after the Norse god of deception.⁴⁴ A weaponsmith, an artist and a knight: the project freed his talents. In the New Year, a large, black pistol appeared.

Then one evening he came out of his room dressed in a stately red uniform, covered with badges. His surprised and perplexed mother witnessed Andrew Berwick's birth and first tender steps. The Knight of the Ill-Favoured Face. The badger in his sett had become a copy-and-paste peacock.

Anders had become ‘completely out of it and believed all the rubbish he said’, his mother thought.⁴⁵ In the winter of 2010–11, he began to work out again, he ate nutritional supplements and his mother thought he was exaggerating and had gone ‘all Rambo’.⁴⁶ He went to the fitness centre but otherwise did not spend much time outside the house.

Breivik's mother claimed that life together in the small family felt ‘unsafe’ and ‘as if I no longer knew him’.⁴⁷ Anders also became ‘so strangely moralistic’, his mother said, with ‘various ideas about how there should not be sex outside marriage and so on’.⁴⁸ During his last year at home, she also thought that he was not able to keep an appropriate distance from her, either not wanting to come out of his room or sitting right up next to her on the sofa, and once he kissed her.

After his sister disappeared, the small family eventually consisted of just mother and son. The two strangers on planet Earth only really had each other. Nobody else understood them, and they did not understand anybody else.

‘Seriously,’ Anders said to his mother, ‘get a hobby.’

‘You're my hobby,’ his mother answered.⁴⁹

In 1983, the SSBU observed how Anders' mother pulled him towards her and then pushed him away, but they also described the relationship between them as ‘symbiotic’. It was as if they were one body.

Throughout his thirty-two years, Anders had never been in a long-term relationship. The question of Breivik's sexuality is a difficult one to answer. His friends confirmed that he had few relationships with girls, and none over his last few years at home. It was a standing joke among them that Anders was really gay. His best friend did not believe that and thought that Anders was just ‘metrosexual’.⁵⁰ Anders' own statements were contradictory. He told the police that he had not had sex since 2001, since he saw his body as ‘a temple’. In his compendium, on the other hand, he wrote about relations with women as recently as in Prague in the autumn of 2010. Perhaps he felt that Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick also needed some women on his record, even though he was supposed to live an ascetic life. It was practically required for an international man of mystery like him. He was insistent towards the women at the Palace Grill one evening, but it was a little unclear whether he was really trying to chat them up.

According to the court-appointed psychiatrists, in police interviews some people had independently confirmed having had ‘homosexual contact’ with Breivik.⁵¹ At the same time, Breivik liked Pamela Anderson and wrote messages on Facebook to the Norwegian glamour model Monica Hansen. He emerges as ambiguous on a sexual level too, ‘metrosexual’, capable of going in various directions, but without any major inner motivation to choose any particular way or without the ability to establish sexual relationships. The compendium he was working on contained what appear to be sadistic fantasies. There are not many grounds to describe the young Breivik as a sadist, but one of his friends said that Anders had told him that as a child he had put mustard in a cat's anus. In the spring of 2011, Breivik was planning to behead prisoners and purchased the equipment he would need. His inspiration came from al-Qaeda's execution videos, which he had probably watched in his bedroom in Hoffsveien. Those videos are among the most shocking things to be found on the Internet and would be difficult for most people to watch, entirely in another league compared to Modern Warfare 2. His sadistic side was something that he was able largely to hide from others but that, left to himself without any corrections from the rest of the world, he could still develop freely. In his compendium he appears completely without any filter. As his mother put it, he was ‘completely out of it and believed all the rubbish he said’, and she was unable to help or correct her son.

What was the reason for his cryptic withdrawal in 2006? One of the riddles behind Breivik's construction of an avatar and the execution of his gigantic project is why he moved back in with his mother. While his mother thought this was down to his setbacks as an entrepreneur, Paul's girlfriend spoke in a police interview about an incident in 2005. That spring, Breivik flew to Minsk to visit a young woman with whom he had come into contact through a dating website. The Belarusian girl later came to visit Breivik in Tidemands Gate. She was blonde and beautiful, just like his mother, his sister, Pamela and the girl he went after at the Palace Grill. But nothing came of it. The girl ostensibly thought that the well-dressed Norwegian was a male chauvinist who did not take her seriously.

Paul's girlfriend thought that Breivik's withdrawal from the world stemmed from this incident. The fact that the twenty-seven-year-old Breivik went as far as to travel to Minsk, as well as to pay for the girl to come to Oslo, suggested that he was extremely motivated and hoped that things would work out. When he was rejected again and failed to establish a relationship even with a mail-order bride, things went downhill for him, and his bedroom in Hoff was the end of the line. Perhaps there was a parallel here to his departure from the Tåsen Gang. When his relationship with Elin came to an end in the autumn of 1997, there followed a period in which Breivik was often absent from school and eventually dropped out.

Breivik reacted strongly to being rejected by women. He threatened women at the Palace Grill, and his mother made him cry when she criticized him, but it is difficult to establish any causal connection. He allegedly explained to Paul that he retreated in 2006 because he was tired of ‘the rat race’ in which ‘people went out on the town and had to make as much money as possible’, and perhaps in a way it really was that simple. He was tired of putting on airs, of conforming to rules he did not really understand. For years Breivik had tried to fit in, but he did not. He was a stranger on planet Earth, and perhaps this knowledge occasionally caught up with him.

While the Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick intended to save the European people from the Asian hordes, Anders Behring Breivik was an empty shell eternally running away from self-knowledge that could crush him. On the screen he must have occasionally seen his own reflection. World of Warcraft was not enough. The compendium was his last resort. In it, he could re-create himself and the world as he saw it. He isolated himself in order to escape the rest of the world's correcting functions. Far away from the ironic Oslo smirk he had lived under for almost thirty years, he put on uniforms, looked in the mirror, posed and took photographs of himself with white gloves and combed hair.

‘It's Going to Be the Event of the Year’

The winter of 2010–11 was long, cold, clear and snowy in the capital. The frost on dark branches and the snow crystals on the pavements glistened in the sun, while the inhabitants of Oslo trudged along, wrapped up well in their scarves, hats and big coats, with their breath hanging in the air. It seemed as if an old-fashioned winter from the fifties or sixties had overslept and ended up at the back of the queue with the slushy, mild winters that had been seen in eastern Norway over the previous twenty years. But by the middle of March it was over. Over the course of a few warm days, the winter wonderland came tumbling down like a house of cards. The thin layer of snow had remained constant throughout five months of freezing temperatures, but it was neither compact nor robust.

At the same time that the snow was disappearing from the city, a man came walking up a hill a few hundred metres from the Palace Grill and Oslo Commerce School. The grit on the pavement was wet, and the afternoon sun warmed the walls of the buildings. Streams of meltwater ran down the street where the tram clattered past on its way towards Frogner Plass. The man was carrying a large, flat cardboard box smelling of pizza. The man was Anders Behring Breivik. He was going to visit Tove in her studio flat in Frogner. Many years had passed since their Easter holiday in Cyprus, but Tove and Anders had stayed in touch not only after the divorce, but also after Breivik was no longer in touch with his father.

‘I've given up now,’ Anders told her. He had eventually realized that his father did not want to meet him. Tove did not see Anders often, but she was glad when he contacted her. She still had the pictures of him as a child: his white skin and white hair framed his wide grin as he sat on her lap. She also had the pictures from his time at lower secondary: a good-looking boy, pale-skinned and blond, posing in a blue shirt and with a slightly artificial smile.

For a few years it had seemed as if Anders were following a normal route to adult life. He moved out from home after school, sharing a flat to begin with and then living in his own flat. Even though it was a little unusual that he did not continue his education, it did not appear that he was lazing around or lacking money. His business ideas were a little odd, but life is all about trial and error. Every time Tove asked him about girlfriends, he brushed the question aside with a smile, saying that he did not have time for things like that. A few years before, he had suddenly moved back in with his mother in Hoffsveien, and now he was thirty-two years old. He was back at the start. What had he been doing in his room over the past few years?

Tove did not want to dwell on any difficult questions. She was not his mother, and besides it was not unusual for people of Anders' age to take a few years to settle down. It seemed as if people were taking longer to grow up with each generation that passed. It was like that joke about the young people of today being like Jesus: they live at home until they are thirty, and if they do something it is a miracle.

Tove had laid the small table in front of the window looking out to the back, and she put the pizza in the middle. Her flat was on the third floor, and from where Anders was sitting on the low sofa bed he could see the white verandas and the roofs on the other side of the backyard and the black branches of the large maple tree outside. The low sunlight shone in his eyes. Anders moved away from the light and into the corner of the sofa. ‘Click’: Tove took a picture of him. An elegant man, his hair thinning but well dressed and with a confident colour sense. On top of his lime-green shirt he was wearing a matching striped Lacoste jumper with orange, yellow, brown and mint-green horizontal stripes. His trousers were dark beige. Anders moved back into the sunlight when the camera came out, posing seriously for the last picture. He straightened his torso, put his hand on his knee and put his face in semi-profile. His eyes disappeared in the shadow. Tove put the camera aside. Another two moments in the story of their good relationship were recorded on the memory card. Tove noticed that the boy, or the man as he now was, seemed in high spirits, optimistic, even happy. He told her that his book was almost finished and that he had written it in English because he had contacts and lots of friends in England. It was important to reach as many people as possible with his message.

She would have to hear about the book's contents this time too. Tove tried to wriggle out of it. She had just been to a lecture about Saladin, the poor Kurdish boy from Tikrit who would become the crusaders' nemesis and the superior of Richard the Lionheart. If it were to be discussed which out of Saladin's Muslim soldiers or Richard's Christian knights were the most barbaric, Tove thought that it was not at all certain that the Muslims would come out worst. King Richard executed over 2,000 Muslim prisoners after his first battle in the Holy Land.

‘But don't you see it's the same war that's still going on?’ Anders asked. He preferred to ask questions when he wanted to persuade someone. He thought that the best arguments are often questions,⁵² an idea that was perhaps based on his many years as a telemarketer and online debater. At the same time, his questions often became a little rhetorical and know-it-all.

‘Imagine what will happen when the Muslims take over,’ he continued. ‘What will we do?’

‘I won't answer hypothetical questions,’ Tove said, dismissing his remark. She wondered whether the boy was making fun of her. It was uncomfortable when he set off on his tirades. Tove's attitude, which she did little to hide and of which he was perfectly aware, had always been that adult life was about getting an education and a job. Every time he started lecturing about politics and Islam, she would interrupt him. Just as she would interrupt him with a short ‘Yeah, yeah’ when he used to tell her a few years before about his plans to become a millionaire – selling advertising online or importing mobile phone covers. He always took it in his stride, as he apparently did this time too. He was impressed by her knowledge of the crusades in the late twelfth century. In his compendium, he described Tove as a former director of Utlendingsdirektoratet [the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration], which she never was. Perhaps he wanted to highlight his own successful background, or perhaps he was expressing how significant and important Tove was in his eyes.

Like a kind of human larva, Anders had ensconced himself in his cocoon since 2006 and moved away from the sunlight. Now he would soon break his shell. His self-imposed isolation was coming to an end and his book launch was imminent. Anders did not mention anything about the fact he would be moving out of his room in a couple of months and into a farm at Åsta, near Rena in Hedmark county. When they had finished the pizza, Anders put on his jacket and his shoes. They had known each other for twenty-eight years and, in a way, Tove had been his third parent – in a way, perhaps his only parent. Tove thought she knew Anders, and he thought that he was fond of her. Breivik wrote many nice things about Tove in his compendium, but he also wrote that he would not criticize his brothers in the Knights Templar if they executed her as a ‘category B traitor’, a supporter of the multiculturalist regime.⁵³ The hatred that had been simmering under the surface all those years was about to take shape. Execution was the fundamental image of his compendium, and perhaps especially the execution of women.

‘It's going to be the event of the year,’ said Breivik. ‘Believe you me.’

‘Oh really,’ said Tove.

Notes

All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.

1 Morten Hopperstad et al., ‘Moren hvitvasket penger for Breivik’ [Breivik's mother laundered money for him], VG, 1 April 2012, www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/artikkel.php?artid=10072811.

2 Conservatism [Anders Behring Breivik], Forum post under topic ‘Lemasive, internet famous!’, World of Warcraft Silvermoon Realm Forum, 5 February 2011: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1622897808#6.

3 Faltin Karlsen, ‘Emergent Perspectives on Multiplayer Online Games: A Study of Discworld and World of Warcraft’, PhD thesis (Oslo: University of Oslo, 2009), p. 174. Karlsen's thesis includes a clear description of World of Warcraft (as well as hardcore gamers) and how the game from Blizzard Entertainment developed from 2006 to 2008.

4 See the threads ‘Just for those who didn't know’, World of Warcraft Nordrassil Realm Forum: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2423044016; ‘Andersnordic’, Last Legion Forum: http://lastlegion.shivtr.com/forum_threads/877599.

5 Offler, forum post under topic ‘Andersnordic’, 24 July 2011, ibid.

6 Cited in Jason Schreier, ‘Norway Mass Murderer Was “Unremarkable”, Says Former World of Warcraft Guildmate’, Kotaku, 23 April 2012, http://kotaku.com/5904338/norway-mass-murderer-was-unremarkable-says-former-world-of-warcraft-guildmate.

7 2083, p. 1344.

8 Ibid., p. 1472.

9 ‘If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. It is an effort that goes back not to the 1960s and the hippies and the peace movement, but back to World War I.’ From a lecture by Bill [William S.] Lind, ‘The Origins of Political Correctness’, Accuracy in Academia: www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/.

10 Kent Andersen and Christian Tybring-Gjedde, ‘Drøm fra Disneyland’ [Dream from Disneyland], Aftenposten, 25 August 2010, www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article3783373.ece.

11 Even though the three-volume epic The Lord of the Rings has been loved and revered for over fifty years, the books also have their critics. ‘[A]ll the characters […] are boys masquerading as adult heroes. [… H]ardly one of them knows anything about women [and they] will never come to puberty,’ wrote the poet Edwin Muir in his review of The Return of the King: ‘A Boy's World’, The Observer, 27 November 1955, p. 11.

12 According to the report by Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste [the Norwegian Police Security Service; PST] delivered in Oslo District Court on 30 May 2012.

13 Fjordman, ‘Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence’, The Brussels Journal, 16 March 2007, www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1980.

14 Fjordman, ‘Defeating Eurabia, Part 5’, Gates of Vienna, 31 October 2008, http://gatesofvienna.net/2008/10/defeating-eurabia-part-5/.

15 2083, p. 1254.

16 Fjordman, ‘Fjordman – The First Five Years’, Gates of Vienna, 20 February 2010, http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/fjordman-first-five-years.html.

17 Cited in Morten Hopperstad et al., ‘Peder Jensen er drapsmannens forbilde “Fjordman” ’ [Peder Jensen is the killer's role model ‘Fjordman’], VG, 5 August 2011, www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/artikkel.php?artid=10089389.

18 The following is based, inter alia, on an interview with the editor and journalist Hans Rustad in October 2011.

19 Cited in Johann Hari, ‘In Enemy Territory? An Interview with Christopher Hitchens’, 23 September 2004, http://johannhari.com/2004/09/23/in-enemy-territory-an-interview-with-christopher-hitchens/.

20 All Breivik's comments on Document.no are presented here: www.document.no/anders-behring-breivik/.

21 Hans Rustad, ‘Ekstremistan IV: Sex som våpen’ [Extremistan IV: Sex as a weapon], Document.no, 18 December 2009, www.document.no/2009/12/ekstremistan_iv_nye_ekstremist/.

22 Bjørn Stærk, ‘En nettreise gjennom islamkritikkens tiår’ [A decade of Islam critique on the web], Samtiden, 4 (2011), 32–49. Bjørn Stærk's own blog took another direction, becoming one of the most prominent sites for criticism of conspiracy theories and of right-wing fear and hate rhetoric.

23 Cited in Ørjan Torheim, ‘– Som en liten gutt’ [‘Like a little boy’], Bergens Tidende, 23 July 2011, www.bt.no/nyheter/innenriks/–Som-en-liten-gutt-2542176.html.

24 Ibid.

25 See note 20 above.

26 2083, p. 666.

27 See note 20 above.

28 2083, p. 1416.

29 Torgeir Husby and Synne Sørheim, ‘Rettspsykriatisk erklæring’ [Forensic psychiatric report], 29 November 2011 (the first psychiatric report), reproduced by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/, p. 40.

30 Ibid., p. 39.

31 Ibid., p. 78.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., p. 36.

34 Ibid., p. 68.

35 Ibid., p. 74.

36 Ibid., p. 76.

37 Perhaps the most striking aspect of Breivik's mother's conversation with the court-appointed psychiatrists, as it is reproduced in Husby and Sørheim's report, is that she never mentioned anything about her son's deeds or victims. It is as if that part of the story did not exist. On the other hand, she said that the case had been ‘a terrible strain’ on her (p. 73) – after 22 July 2011 she was admitted to a psychiatric unit for some time – and said that she was ‘upset and angry’ (ibid.) because of inaccurate reports by journalists. A picture emerges from the report, as in the SSBU reports from 1983, of a person who has difficulties understanding and taking seriously other perspectives than her own, including her son's, and who sees herself solely as a victim. ‘He lied and deceived me,’ she said, crying (p. 82), but she said nothing of the suffering her son had caused to others.

38 Husby and Sørheim, p. 78.

39 Ibid., p. 41.

40 Ibid., p. 78.

41 Ibid., p. 77.

42 Ibid., p. 79.

43 Ibid.

44 2083, p. 856.

45 Husby and Sørheim, p. 80.

46 Ibid., p. 82.

47 Ibid., p. 81.

48 Ibid., p. 77.

49 According to Breivik's testimony in Oslo District Court, 20 April 2012.

50 Husby and Sørheim, p. 37.

51 Ibid., p. 44.

52 2083, p. 1154.

53 Ibid., p. 1434.