A Norwegian Tragedy

9

The Book Launch

A Declaration of Independence

Anders Behring Breivik was running late. Tired. He only got up at eight o'clock. ‘Today's the day I'm going to die,’ he thought. ‘Not that keen on dying, really.’¹

He made himself a packed lunch of sandwiches and drank Red Bull for breakfast. Then it was time for the book launch. First Breivik installed a new modem on his computer. This took time. He uploaded the propaganda film accompanying the compendium and published it on two different websites. That took time too. The audio and video footage of fighting crusaders took up many megabytes. The upload slowly progressed towards 100 per cent.

He drove downtown only at about half past eleven, parking the Fiat Doblò at Hammersborg Torg just after midday. He walked past Einar Gerhardsens Plass, casting a discreet glance at the asphalted square in front of the H Block and disappearing down the street along Grubbegata. He hailed a taxi in the square at Stortorget. Back home in Hoffsveien, he sat down in front of his computer to edit out old cover stories from his compendium, the ‘declaration of independence’ that contained the justification for his ‘mission’. Hidden in the enormous mass of text, which few would probably bother to read, was not only the description of how he constructed his avatar but also the key to his hate.

The premise of Breivik's compendium is that Western civilization is at stake and can only be saved through the heroic sacrifice of a group of revolutionary knights from the mystical organization ‘Knights Templar Europe’. The extent of the ‘KT’ network is described in vague terms, and the impression given by the text is that the network may consist only of him, the consumer zombie who is transformed into ‘Andrew Berwick, Knights Templar Norway’. The compendium is made up of three parts, or ‘books’, the first of which is a kind of historical description of the problems that have led Europe into the crisis in which it currently finds itself. The second part describes the stages of the ongoing ‘European Civil War’ from 1950 to 2083, when the war will come to an end and a new Europe will emerge. The third part is the longest, and is largely a kind of practical recipe for terrorism, the main elements of which are selecting a target and arming the terrorist. In addition to political targets, Breivik mentions literature festivals and the annual journalists' conference held in Tønsberg. A diary style takes over in the final third of this last section, which is in part strangely personal.

One peculiar addition is an interview Breivik conducts with himself, spanning sixty-four pages, in which he again accounts for his political convictions, while also telling about his background and family as well as listing his favourite drinks and favourite brands. This self-administered interview sums up the compendium and forms a sort of nucleus within its 1,518 pages. He answers many of the partly critical questions he asks himself with ‘good question’, apparently pleased that somebody is finally taking him seriously. The fundamental tone of self-love, immaturity and isolation that marks the whole com­pendium is strikingly expressed in Breivik's dialogue with himself. The knight rebelling against consumer society constantly defines himself through brands: Montblanc Meisterstück, Lacoste, Breitling Crosswind and Blizzard Entertainment.

The compendium is written in a style addressing the reader, but the second person used in the text often refers not to any external reader but to Breivik himself. Sticking to the world of Tolkien, it could be said that the interview with himself is reminiscent of Gollum's discussions with himself in The Lord of the Rings, a habit the old, spiteful Hobbit acquired after having lived deep in a cave below the mountains for hundreds of years with no company but that of the ring of power and his memories of having been banished from the society in which he grew up.

Behind the consistently optimistic tone, which Breivik stressed by peppering the text with smilies and LOLs, there is darkness. He ends the interview with himself by saying: ‘Know that you are not alone […]. It's really important that you focus on enjoying life and having fun in this process [the revolutionary, cultural conservative struggle]. Being a bitter old goat behind a computer will only drive you to depression, and defeat. Convert your frustration and anger to motivation and resolve. Be positive!’²

Lurking in the background of the whole story about Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick are images of depression, anger and loneliness. ‘Know that you are not alone,’ he tries to convince himself. Breivik tries to repress his unpleasant feeling of loneliness with a message of positivity typical of self-help books. ‘[M]ake your favourite smoothie,’ he suggests elsewhere in the interview with himself, when the threat of depression and isolation emerges.³ A battle is being fought in the text between Breivik's two self-images: the ‘Perfect Knight’ vs. ‘a bitter old goat behind a computer’ plagued by ‘depression, and defeat’.

Breivik accounts for his literary and political ambitions in something he calls a ‘disclaimer’, an attempt to avoid legal responsibility that acts as a preface to ‘Book 3’ of the compendium: ‘the author, as a sci-fi enthusiast, wanted to bring and create a complete new writing style that has the potential to shock the reader with an incredibly credible fictional plot […] describing a lead character (a fictional political activist who has decided to become a so-called “Justiciar Knight”).’⁴

This disclaimer is an example of a characteristic found throughout the compendium, a kind of rational irrationality. Understandably enough, Breivik was afraid of being prosecuted for planning terrorist acts, but at the same time he was so far inside his own fantasy world that he believed, apparently in all seriousness, that he and his compendium could be spared criminal prosecution and censorship by stating that the compendium was a work of fiction. Breivik's faith in his lie is almost boundless, but at the same time he is not far off in describing the compendium as fiction, since it describes a past, present and future reality that few people will perceive as realistic or believable, and not only because his understanding of history is unfamiliar to those who do not share the counter-jihadist world-view.

It is not so clear, however, whether all the fictions he creates are delusions in a pathological sense or a form of revolutionary stratagem. Claiming to have a large and powerful network of like-minded warriors is in line with revolutionary tactics Breivik describes in his compendium when he cites Castro, who started his revolution with eighty-two men but would have preferred to do so with ten to fifteen dedicated revolutionaries.⁵ It is not a question of how many you are, but of the impression you give. Lies are a narcissist's magic wand, his method of supporting his world-view. Since everybody lies, he can dismiss opposing views as propaganda and lies from the cultural Marxist elites. He waved his magic wand and, abracadabra, there was a war between religions in Oslo. Another wave and his childhood was stable and happy; one more wave and suddenly the bitter goat had been transformed into a knight in shining armour.

At the same time, the lies in the compendium undermine one another, making it unclear what are cover stories, what is genuinely meant and what is fiction. It must have been difficult for Breivik himself to keep track of which parts were lies and which were the truth. Was Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick a cover story for a gaming-addicted and homosexual (or bisexual) Anders Behring Breivik, or was it the other way round? Knights Templar should be both poor (pauperes) and chaste, but a poor and chaste knight can also be a cover story for an unemployed, lonely man, a modern knight of an ill-favoured face, stuffed full of Tolkienesque fantasy and steroids.

Conspiracy and Castration

The rain was still bucketing down over Oslo in the early afternoon on 22 July 2011. In his room on Hoffsveien, Anders Behring Breivik sat in front of his computer. ‘I believe this will be my last entry. It is now Fri July 22nd, 12.51.’⁶ There were still a few things to do in the compendium. Some of the chapters were ‘rough drafts’, other chapters bore the text ‘feel free to complete this essay’, but it was taking too long to finish his masterpiece. Instead he started to send out the file as it was.

The time was shortly after two o'clock in the afternoon when Breivik pressed the send button. A simple click. Now there was no going back. His time spent in cellar storage rooms, chat rooms, World of Warcraft guilds and damp barns was over. Now he was heading out and into his avatar.

The Volkswagen Crafter was parked in a quiet side street. Since the fertilizer bomb smelt so strongly, he had put a piece of paper behind the windscreen reading ‘AS Avløpsrens’ [AS Drain Cleaning]. Breivik never managed to finish school or to finish his compendium, his companies went into liquidation and he lived with his mother, but when launching the event of the year there was little he did not think of.

But the minutes were ticking by and the error messages flooded into Outlook. It was as if everything was against him, and before long Breivik became ‘extremely frustrated’.⁷ Eventually he saw that some of the 8,000 messages he had planned to send were getting through. His 1,518 pages flew off through cyberspace to 1,002 selected addresses across Europe, to Finland, Norway, Belgium and the United Kingdom. The mailing list was made up of people who Breivik thought shared his views of the world, of his struggle and of history. The die was cast.

When Breivik sent off the massive chunk of text and pictures, he crossed the first of several boundaries that day. He swallowed a dose of a mixture of drugs he called an ‘ECA stack’, consisting of ephedrine and caffeine among other things. It had the effect of stimulating the central nervous system. He had been on anabolic steroids almost continuously for three months, since the end of April, which was twice as long as a normal steroid cycle. Now he had to leave. When he left his room, Outlook was still running.

If any of the addressees checked their e-mail that afternoon, they would read that the victims of the Eurabian conspiracy, according to Breivik, were white Western men. They are called racists or male chauvinists if they fight back or try to re-establish lost authority, while also ending up as sexual losers: ‘we are the one group of men who are most demonised and attacked’ – he cites Fjordman – ‘whereas non-white men get treated with much greater respect. What white men see from this is that white Western women prefer men who treat them like crap, and disrespect men who treat them with respect.’⁸ This brings us back to the sexual warfare depicted by Rustad, in which Western men are castrated in a slow pincer movement, and possibly in Breivik's own experiences as a beta male at the Palace Grill.

Castration also appears as a phenomenon and an image in the compendium, occasionally in unexpected contexts. In a discussion about the use of nuclear weapons and dirty bombs, Breivik pictures a potential collaboration between Islamist groups and Knights Templar, since the two opponents have the same enemy, namely the establishment. The problem is how the Islamists should distinguish Knights Templar from CIA agents. The difference between the ‘system protectors’ of democracies and nationalist freedom fighters is that the latter are willing to make sacrifices, including gladly sacrificing their own lives. As a result, ‘[t]he entity should demand that the alleged Justiciar Knight in question surgically remove his penis and testicles and/or execute a fixed number of civilian children. While this requirement seems morbid, absurd and unreasonable, it is perhaps the most effective method of confirming the intentions of an individual.’⁹

It is a little unclear whether ‘the entity’ refers to the Knights Templar or the Islamists, but the point remains that the Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick is willing to castrate himself to collaborate with al-Qaeda, for ‘the greater good of our cause’. He is also willing to execute ‘civilian children’, a term that might suggest there are children who are not ‘civilian’ but military or other legitimate targets in the struggle against the multiculturalist regime.

In his strange fantasy of being al-Qaeda's eunuch, there is an echo of the ‘security alliances’ into which the white taggers entered with representatives of the immigrant gangs in Oslo during the nineties. While Morg admired the alpha males in the B Gang, Andrew Berwick was interested in al-Qaeda and wanted to base the Knights Templar on them,¹⁰ more or less in the same way that the Tåsen Gang were an ethnically Norwegian answer to the Young Guns from Bjølsen. Local situations in Oslo were blown up to the scale of geopolitics, world history or civilization, because the Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick did not tag in the tunnels under Oslo's Ring 3 ring road. He had ‘contacts and many friends in England’ and acted on an international level, but it was still important to show the toughest boys in town that you were good enough, so the way to do that was through the surgical removal of the penis and testicles of the man in question.

Although this refers to co-operation between terrorist groups, al-Qaeda is not expected to undergo castration or to make sacrifices in other ways. The Islamists appear as an authority, while the Templar Knight has to prove his worth. It is like the relationship between a veteran and a new recruit, or between father and son. It may seem as if Breivik is fantasizing about a form of symbolic submission. By castrating the Templar Knight – in other words, himself – in order to gain respect and nuclear weapons from al-Qaeda, he is subjecting himself to an idea of brutal masculine authority. A psychoanalyst might say that Breivik's absent father returns in this paragraph in a fantasy of a terrorist patriarchy. He had once wanted Jens Breivik to be proud of him, whereas now he was seeking the recognition of al-Qaeda.

Perhaps the compendium's cover-story principle is in effect here too: the fact that Berwick is willing to sacrifice his ability to reproduce is, on one level, also a cover story for a sexual loser with no prospects of continuing his line. Desire and angst are closely linked. If the idea of executing ‘civilian children’ is placed on equal terms with castration, as two variants of the Justiciar Knights' ordeal by fire, it is an example of how sadistic fantasies are consistently closely related to thoughts of self-mutilation or suicide.

At the same time, this repressed and inhibited Western man is the hero of the war described by Breivik. The hero, the Justiciar Knight, is at once a ‘judge, jury and executioner’.¹¹ ‘A Justiciar Knight is not only a valorous resistance fighter, a one-man army,’ Breivik writes, ‘he is a one-man marketing agency as well.’¹² He has to market and to sell his revolutionary product ‘[i]n order to wake up the masses’.¹³ Both the term ‘one-man army’, which Breivik borrowed from his tagging and from Modern Warfare 2, and his background as a salesman and marketer take on central significance in his description of the hero, the personification of brutal masculine authority.

The ongoing war has four phases, according to Breivik. Many counter-jihadists and those who think like them put forward prophecies, often bleak ones, of imminent wars, collapses or disasters, but Breivik surpasses most of them by constructing a future for Europe in which events have been determined seventy years in advance. His historical determinism is shared with left-wing Marxist revolutionaries – for example, with the Norwegian Workers' Communist Party members in the seventies who ‘knew’ that a war would break out between NATO and the Soviet Union – but his story, with its meticulous details of how Russia will repulse a US naval invasion of France in 2040,¹⁴ is more reminiscent of a game scenario from an alternative version of Modern Warfare 2.

Breivik's version of history begins in the past, specifically in the 1950s, which for him has the status of a kind of patriarchal and culturally conservative golden age (in spite of the fact that this was also the period when the Labour Party's ‘one-party state’ was in its heyday under Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen). The years from 1955 to 1999 were a prelude to the war, the ‘Phase of Dialogue’, as Breivik calls it,¹⁵ when the Eurabia policy was adopted by EU leaders and the Islamic colonization of Europe gained speed. Phase 1 of the European Civil War broke out in 1999, when NATO attacked Serbia and occupied Kosovo. Phase 1 lasts until 2030 and includes the early cultural conservative counter-attacks. Phase 2 of the Civil War takes place from 2030 to 2070 and is characterized by increased resistance activity and an acceleration of the Muslim colonization of Europe. During the final phase of the Civil War, from 2070 to 2083, cultural conservative coups d'état in Europe will be followed by the execution of all Marxist traitors as well as the deportation of Muslims and, possibly, bloody battles.

The villains of this story come in three varieties – category A, B and C traitors – determined by their position in the cultural Marxist elite. ‘No mercy will be shown for category A, B and C traitors,’¹⁶ Breivik writes, even though he later ponders whether it might be enough to execute 200,000 category A and B traitors, deporting the rest to Anatolia.¹⁷ The estimates vary of how many traitors there actually are, demonstrating that the categories are fluid. Who will live and who will die is largely up to the individual Justiciar Knight's judgement. In 2083, precisely four centuries after the Battle of Vienna, the nations of Europe will finally be cleansed of Marxists and Muslims and united in a loose European federation. Democracies will be controlled by cultural conservative ‘guardian councils’, and the patriarchal family structure will be re-established in order to control unrestrained sexuality and divorce.

The absent father gets his historical revenge. In this connection, the ‘single most important’ change to the law will be to guarantee ‘that the father will always get the custody of the child’.¹⁸ Patriarchy will be reinstated. This means that the conclusion of Breivik's historical system – the culmination of the cultural conservative revolution – is legislation to prevent fathers from losing their children, and vice versa. Breivik said that he had forgotten his early childhood. A psychoanalyst might say that he had repressed it, blacked it out or denied it.

It is difficult not to view the compendium as a kind of massive, quasi-literary adaptation of Breivik's own childhood, with personal traumas and conflicts blown up to an enormous scale and transferred onto a broad canvas of civilization, in which their historical solutions can be arrived at with the help of the intervention and martyrdom of the Justiciar Knight.

The Suicide Note

Breivik went in the back of the large van and changed into what he called his uniform and armour – in other words, uniform-style trousers and a Skins-branded triathlon shirt (he had drawn with a black pen over the compression shirt's yellow seams). He was wearing black boots with Black & Decker countersink bits sticking out of the heels like spikes. He had drilled holes into the boot-soles and attached the tools so that they resembled some kind of spurs, allegedly because he wanted an extra weapon for close combat, or ‘melee fighting’ as it is called in World of Warcraft. One of the avatars he had used the most over the previous couple of years was Conservative, a creature from the Tauren race, which was the game's most effective and brutal melee unit. Perhaps Conservative had inspired him, because he referred to melee weapons and melee fighting techniques a number of times in the compendium:

a Justiciar Knight is armed with not only a primary and secondary weapon but melee weapons as well […].

If I were to attempt to describe the martial art form of my specific operation it would resemble that of the extremely mobile juggernaut (deployable human tank). […] As for information concerning the operatives in my cell, I cannot disclose anything that might indicate [the] number of individuals or their methods and/or tasks. [My own technique of] using light vehicles to get from one location to the other […] can be described as a ‘system protector flank buster’ technique […]. The spikes on the shield, neck, arms and boots, in addition to the bayonet would also be highly efficient against any civilians or system protectors trying to jump you from behind.¹⁹

Primary and secondary weapons are terms from Modern Warfare 2. The Juggernaut is a character from the Marvel comics, a muscle-bound hunk who would make even Morg look puny by comparison. The description of ‘operatives’ in his cell, with their own individual ‘methods and/or tasks’, is reminiscent of a discreet guild leader's description of the members of a raiding guild in World of Warcraft. The ‘flank buster’ technique is a term from the game Warhammer, another of the fantasy enthusiast Breivik's favourite games. The bayonet and boot spikes were the Justiciar Knight's melee weapons (he must have rejected the idea of spikes on his neck and arms, even though he provided models of these in the compendium). The juggernaut Andrew Berwick, weighed down by Loki's Armour and his ‘level III helmet with visor’, was a kind of real-life Tauren. All in all, Andrew Berwick was constructed by sampling comic-book and computer-game terms. When he was fully dressed and armoured as a Justiciar Knight, Breivik closed the back door and got into the driving seat. It was time to die.

The Juggernaut

What kind of person was trying to carry out one of the largest terrorist actions since the Second World War? In the diary section at the end of the compendium, called his ‘Knights Templar Log’, Breivik accounts first schematically and then in detail for his preparations over the years, from the alleged founding meeting of the Knights Templar in 2002 until sending out the compendium on 22 July 2011. In between its endless lists and instructions about how to make ‘Loki's Armour’ out of Kevlar and how to mix cocktails of drugs, the log is also a portrait of an unusually systematic person with somewhat compulsive behaviour. It is possible to recognize the ‘mildly pedantic’ and ‘extremely neat’ boy described by the SSBU in 1983. Breivik appears to depend on many fixed routines to get through the day and describes a number of phobias and fears. He chronicles what appear as excessively suspicious, genuinely paranoid reactions to strangers coming to the farm at Åsta in the last few months before he drives the bomb to Oslo, but on some level he is aware of his own fears.

Breivik writes that ‘[p]aranoia can be a good thing, or it can be a curse’.²⁰ Paranoia or fear can make the Justiciar Knight cautious, which is useful, but they can also be a hindrance if they are exaggerated or irrational. Breivik is afraid of insects in the woods where he buries his equipment; he hates the spiders in the barn where he makes the bomb and the creaking of the farmhouse at night. He is tremendously concerned about avoiding infection when his mother has the flu. The connection between women and infection/illness/impurity is one of the compendium's refrains and one of the problems to be solved in Breivik's future patriarchy.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the gardening impulse as a driving force in modern totalitarian projects: the desire to weed out dirt, infection, shades of grey, chaos and all that is unfamiliar in order to create the perfect garden. Breivik's desire to cleanse Europe of Marxist influence and Islamic presence is a variant of the gardening impulse that, according to Bauman, is especially characteristic of the Third Reich, in which the Jews were described as vermin, carriers of infection, impure blood and polluted cosmopolitan ideas. Nazism was ‘applied biology’, according to Rudolf Hess, who saw the German people as a single organism, the Volkskörper. Politics and war concerned cleansing this body of waste (Jews and Slavs), while also securing Lebensraum for the future.

Breivik's ideas about an organization of modern Knights Templar, PCCTS, is characterized by a fascination with uniforms, mystical rituals and intricate rank scales and could have been modelled on the Nazi executioners' organization par excellence, the SS. It is not only aesthetics that Breivik has in common with the SS, his idolization of the dominant, aggressive and armed man, the ultimate executioner; he is also interested in racial theory. He claims that the Nordic race is superior to other races – referring to Pamela Anderson as an example of an almost purely Nordic person – and calls for cultural conservative breeding projects to preserve the Nordic race for the future. Otherwise, the race could vanish within 150 years.²¹

On the other hand, Breivik writes that he ‘would not hesitate to sacrifice [his] own life for the English, Slavic, Jewish, Indian, Latin or French tribes in their fight against the EUSSR/US multiculturalist hegemony’.²² He is unclear about where the biological boundaries lie and what the difference is between the ‘tribes’ he mentions. It could appear as if Breivik were striving to find out who ‘the free Europeans’ are – in other words, the ‘we’ of his political project. Should ‘we’ be defined in terms of politics, religion, or perhaps biology?

Even though Breivik criticizes Nazism (writing that he would have liked to have killed Hitler), there are actually many points of contact between the compendium and Nazi aesthetics, racial theory and perceptions of history. His distancing from Nazism in the compendium is linked to large parts of the extreme right wing in Europe having abandoned racist ideology (including anti-Semitism) after September 2001, finding an anti-Islamic platform instead. This also applied to his ‘contacts and many friends in England’. With the definition of a new enemy, the old enemy Israel became a new ally in the fight against Islam, and the former heroes, the Nazis, were redefined as socialist villains.

Breivik is no ideologue or a fundamental thinker. He shops around. Just as there is a shift in his comments on Document.no from an optimistic wish for ‘conservative’ co-operation in 2009 to a dark focus on the necessity of lying in 2010, there is a shift in the compendium too. Breivik moves from aisle to aisle in the ideological supermarket, picking out things depending on where he thinks he might find friends or allies. Wolves seek out a pack. This became clear during his trial. He did not want to shoot Hitler any more but wanted to be seen as part of a crew with the Norwegian neo-Nazis Erik Blücher and Johnny Olsen as well as the Nationalsozial­isticher Untergrund [National Socialist Underground, NSU], a German neo-Nazi group that has been killing people of foreign origin and police since 2000. While he attached great importance in the com­pendium to the Kosovo War in 1999, writing that NATO's attack on Serbia was the event that radicalized him, Breivik seemed completely uninterested when the prosecutor questioned him about this in court.²³

While the ideological and political levels fall apart, the compendium can be read quite coherently as a grandiose suicide note. In contrast to the consumer zombie's short-sighted hedonism, the Justiciar Knight must ‘embrace voluntary poverty and martyrdom’.²⁴ Martyrdom, the sacrifice of the Justiciar Knight's own life, is a central element of his shock attack, intended to wake up Europe from its slumber in the early phases of the Civil War. The third part of the compendium is permeated by what emerge as images of suicide, although it is often described with other terms: martyrdom, sacrifice or self-termination.

Throughout the compendium, Breivik portrays himself as a member of the living dead: first he was a ‘zombie’ in the hands of market forces and consumer culture, then he awakened to a political life as a Justiciar Knight, making it his task to wake up the masses. But even this ‘living’ political life features a conflict, as a Justiciar Knight is also dead. The difference is only that he has already accepted it: ‘The core strength of a Justiciar Knight is that we accept the fact that we're already dead.’²⁵ This means that there is a common denominator for the consumer Anders Breivik and the Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick in that they are both dead, at least figuratively. Even if a Justiciar Knight's death is, paradoxically, what will give him life as a martyr, the personal sections of the compendium are marked by a fascination with death.

Breivik sometimes drifts into emotionally charged fantasies of his own imminent death – for example in the following extract, in which he discusses the exhilarating effect during a potential mission of the theme music from the computer game Age of Conan, performed by the Norwegian singer Helene Bøksle:

imagine fighting for your life against a pursuing pack of system protectors ([…] also referred to as the police). You try to avoid confrontation but they eventually manage to surround you. You hear this song as you push forward to annihilate one of their flanks, head-shotting [sic] two of your foes in bloody fervor trying to survive. [Bøksle's] angelic voice sings to you from the heavens, strengthening your resolve in a hopeless battle. Your last desperate thrust kills another two of your enemies. But it isn't enough as you are now completely surrounded; your time is now. This voice is all you hear as your light turns to darkness and you enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.²⁶

Even though the moment of death, when ‘your light turns to darkness’, is reminiscent of how avatars die in first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty, this quotation is one of few that also allude directly to notions of Christian faith. Neither God nor heaven occupies any considerable space in the compendium, even though Andrew Berwick is a Christian knight from the outset.

Breivik normally portrays life after death as a question of fame: ‘They may physically kill a Justiciar Knight, but your name will be remembered for centuries. […] Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come. You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.’²⁷ The Justiciar Knight's name will live on, according to Breivik, in a similar fashion to the thirty-four names carved into the memorial stone outside Ris School. Fallen resistance fighters become the role models of the future. Even though the prospects for the Justiciar Knight personally are poor, he knows that his sacrifice will contribute to final victory. Besides, a martyr is never alone. Through his death, a martyr becomes mys­tically united to his ‘people’ – in other words, the community for whom he sacrifices himself. In death, he makes a name for himself and becomes part of a group, or he gets an identity and a sense of belonging.

In macabre tandem with these images of suicide, the focus on execution flows through the compendium like an undercurrent. The words ‘execute’, ‘execution’ and ‘executioner’ can be found throughout, describing Justiciar Knight Andrew Berwick's main purpose. In that respect, he is an echo of Breivik's first avatar, Morg, who was known in the Marvel Universe as the executioner, the one who had butchered his own people. Perhaps there was also a component of sexual desire in this executioner fantasy: Morg, with his enormous, phallic double-headed axe, is the very image of aggression, control and total violence. The repeated focus on executions, on taking the lives of defenceless and captive people, including children, gives the compendium a sadistic tone.

When the Civil War comes to an end, writes Breivik, all category A and B traitors will be immediately arrested and executed in a comprehensive operation, but ‘[c]ertain category A and B traitors may be incarcerated during the operation (if there is sufficient capacity and manpower) with the intention for an official celebratory lynching at a later point (to boost moral[e] for our forces etc.).’²⁸ An execution is an extreme situation. The victim is completely powerless and the executioner all-powerful. When the executioner is also the judge and jury and operates alone, the person in question is the supreme master of life and death. It can appear as if executions are not only a political instrument for Breivik but an aim in themselves.

The ‘official celebratory lynching’ to strengthen morale takes place after the end of the Civil War, so it is neither a wartime measure nor a peacetime method of punishment but a form of social ritual in the future political society he envisages. Breivik's radiant future is a society with the character of a sadistic mass cult.

Hatred of Women

After having started the Crafter van and got it in gear (he had needed to phone the rental company, Viking, the week before because he was not able to get the van in reverse), Breivik drove down Hoffsveien towards Skøyen. In addition to his black uniform-like clothing, he was wearing a handgun holster and a bullet-proof vest. He had carved the name ‘Mjolnir’ onto the Glock in the holster with runic letters, after the name of the hammer of Thor in Norse mythology. The motorbike in the back of the van was called ‘Sleipner’, after Odin's eight-legged horse. His helmet was on the seat next to him. At Skøyen, policemen were standing next to a car that had come off the road. The Crafter drove past them on its way towards the city centre.

Breivik had made it so far partly because he acted alone, but his fantasies of collaborating with al-Qaeda are also an example of how the extremes meet. This is the key to the ideological tradition to which Breivik belongs, with one important exception. There is an occidentalist logic in Breivik's compendium containing many quotations, not all of which are credited, by a number of the Islamists and Marxists to whom he was so hostile from the outset. They all hate modernity.

There is also a revolutionary logic, because Breivik admires revolutionary terrorists of the past. He is citing Ulrike Meinhof when he writes that ‘[p]rotesting is saying that you disagree. Resistance is saying you will put a stop to this.’²⁹ Breivik mentions Muhammad, Fidel Castro and Mao in positive terms, and his critique of consumer society sounds like an echo of the Red Army Faction, which claimed that ‘the system in the metropole reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people's psyche […] through the market’.³⁰ Breivik is anti-democratic, against globalization and in favour of a corporative state but, at the same time, he is not consistently fascist. For example, he would accept segregated liberal zones within the new Europe with their own more liberal laws on the freedom of expression, substance abuse and sexuality, in an idea he called ‘a doctrine of “Las Vegasism” ’.³¹

Professor of history Øystein Sørensen points to similarities between Breivik and Ayatollah Khomeini in Breivik's call for a conservative ‘guardian council’ to administer a new, totalitarian Europe. The totalitarian nature of Breivik's notions of Armageddon, revolution, mass murder and a future ‘conservative’ ideal society link him to other totalitarian ideologies, with red, brown and green (Islamist) tendencies. The gardening impulse emerges in his need to clean up and to control, his view of the contemporary age as an apocalyptic lake of fire, in his need to cleanse Europe with blood and his dream of a hygienic future.

Although Sørensen characterizes Breivik as a right-wing extremist or extreme right-wing authoritarian, he also writes that ‘neither of these expressions totally makes sense of the elements of armed rebellion and revolutionary rupture to be found in his manifesto’.³² This aggressive and sadistic impulse is the motor of the compendium, the force driving him from shelf to shelf in the extremism and totalitarian departments of the ideological shopping centre.

In ideological terms, not only does Breivik transcend categories such as right wing and left wing, he also mixes ideas from Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions together with ideas from political Islam. It can appear as if he got lost in the religion department, but then he also writes that he is ‘not an excessively religious man’.³³ In Breivik's contradictions there is still a coherence, some basic notions that are also characteristic of many other violent groups on the fringes of society, irrespective of their religious or political labels.

Breivik belongs to the occidentalist tradition: his hatred is directed towards the city (in court he said that Oslo is a ‘multicultural hell’), the bourgeois (or the consumer zombie, the antithesis of the heroic knight) and politically correct reasoning (secularism, egalitarianism and social democracy). Regarding the lack of heroism in the bourgeois West, Breivik writes that ‘[t]he mass-democracy model of Western Europe […] has cultivated the principle of mediocrity instead of continuing to pursue excellence.’³⁴ Regarding the West's soulless regimes of rationality, he writes that ‘[s]piritually bankrupt nations without civilizational visions are nothing more than devastated wastelands of meaningless noise and excessive consumerism.’³⁵

Breivik's hatred of the city is not only directed towards Oslo. In his compendium, it is often translated into hatred towards supranational institutions such as the EU or the European Court of Human Rights, which is a ‘racist and genocidal political entity’.³⁶ He is inspired by ideas of anti-globalization – for example, in his desire to nationalize global companies and to establish protectionist tariff barriers. Since global capital forces at a supranational level support the conspiracy between the ‘cultural Marxist’ elite and the aggressive Muslim minority, ‘capitalist globalists’ are also on Breivik's list of traitors to be executed.

With his rose-tinted notion of mono-ethnic Japan, respect for Japanese kamikaze pilots and practice of Bushido meditation, Breivik could have been a fly on the wall at the conference in Kyoto in 1942 that Buruma and Margalit used as a starting point for their exploration of Occidentalism.

What distinguishes the compendium from other occidentalist texts is its focus on women. In the occidentalist tradition, modernity is often linked to women, and hatred towards women is part of the mixture, but for Breivik, feminism and Marxism constitute his main enemies. He was to some extent inspired by counter-jihadists such as Fjordman also with regard to his notion that women represent the threat of modernity to an even greater degree than the four symbols of the West brought up by Buruma and Margalit: the city, the bourgeois, reason and the infidel. Breivik's violent attack on feminism, his desire to re-establish patriarchy, his metaphors of rape and the underlying connection between women and infection concern more than ideology alone.

Breivik is worried about the feminization of society, claiming that ‘the forced ordination of female priests ravaged the very fundament of the Church’, and that ‘women's emotionally unstable nature quickly [led] to the propagation of gay marriage, the ordination of gay priests, ignoring chastity, ignoring people's duties in relation to procreation, the support for mass-Muslim immigration and even the inter-religious dialogue with the Muslim community [which is] in fact no more than a formal discussion for the terms of total surrender’.³⁷ Not only are women unstable, they also contribute to regression in terms of reproduction. They open the door for homosexuality. They seem to be susceptible to treason, or at least ‘total surrender’ to the hostile, sexually aggressive and colonizing masculine Islam – the Islam with which Breivik, al-Qaeda's eunuch, identified on some level when he dreamt of collaborating with Islamists.

This thought leads us to Oslo in the nineties, to Breivik's background, where researchers found that Norwegian girls often preferred the immigrant boys, and to Rustad's notion of a pincer movement in which Western men end up as castrated sexual losers. Women and their bodies must be controlled, and not by women themselves.

Femininity is penetrating everywhere, and ‘the feminisation of European culture is nearly completed’.³⁸ Europe is a woman who would prefer to ‘be raped than to risk serious injuries while resisting’, writes Breivik, quoting a German author and falling back on rape as an image once again.³⁹ Breivik himself was also feminized by his matriarchal upbringing, which was ‘super-liberal’ and without discipline: ‘I do not approve of the super-liberal, matriarchal upbringing […] as it completely lacked discipline and has contributed to feminise me to a certain degree.’⁴⁰ Perhaps he was worried because his friends saw him as vain and ‘metrosexual’, or perhaps he was ashamed of the incidents of ‘homosexual contact’ described in the court-appointed psychiatrists' report.

On one level, Breivik's construction of avatars appears as a wish to purge himself of female influence, just as his revolutionary struggle is largely a struggle against women. ‘60–70% of all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists are women,’⁴¹ he writes, and traitors are to be executed. The struggle against women is both an external and an internal battle, as the female forces of chaos have penetrated not only Europe or Norway but also Breivik himself. For Breivik, the very symbol of decline in Norway is the former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, whom he described on Document.no in January 2010 as ‘the murderer of the nation’, as opposed to her established nickname ‘the Mother of the Nation’. She personified the Norwegian Labour Party state while Breivik was growing up in the eighties and nineties, and she was on Utøya on 22 July 2011. The occidentalist Breivik fundamentally saw the West as a woman and Norway as a vaginal state, to borrow an expression from the author Nils Rune Langeland, a kind of depraved Whore of Babylon and suffocating Freudian mother all in one.

The problem of women is to be tackled in several ways in Breivik's future state. With limits on the freedom of expression and women's rights, the state will take control of procreation and ensure that ‘Sex and the City lifestyles’ do not gain ground.⁴² Women are to return to the home and to leave working life and academia. But Breivik does not stop at that; he also fantasizes about removing women altogether, first by ‘outsource breeding’ – in other words, making use of available wombs in poorer countries.⁴³ By planting ready-fertilized eggs in the wombs of surrogate mothers, genetically Norwegian children can be carried by mothers in the Third World and taken home to an upbringing in which the state has full responsibility for care, providing quality-controlled foster parents, nursery schools and boarding homes. In such a way, Breivik would solve the problems of boundless female sexuality and ‘super-liberal’ upbringing by mothers.

He also envisages a society in which artificial wombs will eventually support reproduction.⁴⁴ In the end, he imagines a society in which women are practically non-existent, in which the sexual market is regulated by the state – in other words, by a cultural conservative guardian council, which appears to be a euphemism for himself. The mother/murderer coupling perhaps had a particular significance for Breivik, who in his compendium wants to remove mothers completely. Perhaps this is the central project of his declaration of independence.

In reality he struggled to free himself. Breivik moved back in with his mother, and he formulated the thoughts above while living with her. He called his mother his ‘Achilles' heel’, his weakness. ‘She is the only one who can make me emotionally unstable,’ as he told the court-appointed psychiatrists Husby and Sørheim.⁴⁵ To the second team of psychiatrists, Aspaas and Tørrissen, he recounted an incident in 2007 when he felt that his mother ‘did not appreciate his capabilities’. He cried for several minutes afterwards, he explained.⁴⁶ When his mother makes him ‘emotionally unstable’, then in a way she also turns him into a woman, as to him the nature of women is precisely to be ‘emotionally unstable’. His mother had infected him with femininity or, as he wrote, she had contributed to feminizing him.

Breivik's mother fixation had an aggressive dark side that also emerged over the years in their everyday life in Hoffsveien. In his mother's conversation with the court-appointed psychiatrists, she said: ‘We had been so happy together, but now it was just politics and negativity towards me.’⁴⁷ In the diary section of the compendium, his aggression towards his mother is expressed in many ways, including accusing her of infecting him. ‘On April 9th, I was inflicted with a virus by my mother and I came down with something that later appeared to be a very resilient throat infection. […] It was the third time she had infected me the last two years and I was very pissed off and frustrated.’⁴⁸ This was the reason for his sporadic use of a face mask at home. He was afraid of being infected by his mother and perhaps also of being further feminized.

The narcissistic shame he felt about his own inadequacy, about the gulf between the ‘bitter goat behind a computer’ and the ‘Perfect Knight’, is apparently attributed by him to his feminine side. Had he not been feminized, he would have been perfect. Female influence had, in the same way, brought Europe to its knees if not even lower at the feet of the Muslim invader. Even though he claims that he cannot remember his own early childhood and that the rest of his upbringing was happy and harmonious, the most violent attack in his text is reserved for the women closest to him: his mother and his sister (whom one source described as his mother's ally in her conflicts with the young Anders).

As previously mentioned, Breivik condemns their sexual morality and behaviour in a detailed and violent tirade, concluding that they have brought shame on him. Sending the compendium out into the world with such accusations against them, even if this was not done consciously or deliberately (and perhaps rather out of emotional instability), carries a note of revenge. The avatar Andrew Berwick is the male avenger. The question that remains is perhaps what he needs to avenge so urgently: what did the deficit of care really amount to?

Revenge on women is a motif that can be found on many levels in the text. Women are purged from his utopian state. His closest family is exposed to criticism. The murder of female cultural Marxists is legitimized. There is a constant use of rape as a metaphor. The idea of revenge on women sometimes also bears traits of sadistic fantasy. Even though ‘cultural conservatives’ are more chivalrous than others, according to Breivik, they must also ‘embrace and familiarise [themselves] with the concept of killing women, even very attractive women’.⁴⁹ The compendium is an unfinished patchwork, a rough draft, as he said in court,⁵⁰ full of cover stories, lies and contradictions.

If the text is seen through the lens of psychoanalysis, it is easier to find meaning in the chaos. In the compendium, Breivik exacts revenge upon his mother. His father is placed back on the throne, and he overpowers ‘depression, and defeat’ in both social and sexual fields. Last but not least, the compendium liberates him. It is a ‘declaration of independence’, as the title says; the compendium gives him the excuse he needs to live out his sadistic fantasies. Finally he can dedicate himself to his hate. Breivik prepared himself ‘by looking at terrible pictures and trying to visualize what was going on’.⁵¹ ‘Killing women, even very attractive women’, was not just something he wrote about and visualized. On 22 July 2011, he went out as his avatar into the real world to live out his fantasy.

Shortly after half past three, Breivik reappeared at the roundabout at Skøyen. This time he was driving a silver-grey Fiat Doblò. He left behind eight dead and dozens of casualties in the city centre. Breivik drove into Hoffsveien, turned left before the tramlines and carried on westwards along Harbitzalléen, heading in the direction of Vækerø and Lysaker.

At 15:56, the Doblò passed the city boundaries heading west. Seven minutes later, the car was in Sandvika.

At 16:05, the Oslo Police requested neighbouring districts to look out for a silver-grey Fiat Doblò. They gave the registration that the surprised man at Hammersborg Torg had the presence of mind to note down.

In the back of the Doblò was a Pelican case containing, among other things, wrist ties. The Ruger was also there, with a bayonet mounted. The rifle bore the inscription ‘Gungnir’, the name of the Norse god Odin's spear.⁵² Breivik had an iPhone with him that could be used both as a video camera and to upload video clips.

The plan was to capture Gro Harlem Brundtland on Utøya, cut off her head while he read a prepared text and post the video online. Al-Qaeda had been beheading people for years in order to instil fear. There was also a tradition of beheading in Norway. Why else would the lion in the badge of the Norwegian Police Service be holding an axe?⁵³ This lion also features in the coat of arms of Norway and was really just another version of Morg and his axe.

The question was whether he would get as far as to Utøya and whether he would be in time to kill ‘the Mother of the Nation’. At 16:16, the Doblò passed Sollihøgda, the last village before Utøya.

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 According to Breivik's testimony in Oslo District Court, 19 April 2012.

2 2083, pp. 1411–12.

3 Ibid., p. 1409.

4 Ibid., p. 767.

5 Ibid., p. 1164.

6 Ibid., p. 1472.

7 According to Breivik's testimony in Oslo District Court, 19 April 2012.

8 Fjordman, ‘The Failure of Western Feminism’, Gates of Vienna, 31 August 2008: http://gatesofvienna.net/2008/08/the-failure-of-western-feminism/, cited in 2083, p. 343.

9 2083, pp. 959–60.

10 See, e.g., 2083, p. 1261. In court, Breivik described al-Qaeda as the world's most successful terrorist organization.

11 Ibid., pp. 820, 931, 1115.

12 Ibid., p. 1065.

13 Ibid., p. 836.

14 Ibid., p. 1298.

15 Ibid., p. 802.

16 Ibid., p. 806.

17 Ibid., p. 1435.

18 Ibid., pp. 1144–5.

19 Ibid., p. 894.

20 Ibid., p. 1457.

21 Ibid., pp. 1158–9.

22 Ibid., p. 1155.

23 From cross-examination in Oslo District Court, 17 April 2012.

24 2083, p. 820.

25 Ibid., p. 935. This quotation is perhaps also inspired by Bushido, the way of the warrior, a form of life philosophy or practical faith that was popularized in the Tom Cruise film Samurai. According to William Scott Wilson's translation of Tsunemoto Yamamoto's Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979), a description of Bushido from the 1700s, a warrior must meditate frequently in order to overcome his fear of death: ‘If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling’ (p. 18). Breivik explained to Aspaas and Tørrissen that his Bushido meditation could be compared to the five daily prayers of Salafi terrorists.

26 2083, p. 849. The trial demonstrated how strongly this music affected Breivik. In court on 16 April 2012, during the prosecution's presentation of the propaganda film he had uploaded on the morning of 22 July 2011, which features Bøksle's song as part of the soundtrack, Breivik burst into tears.

27 Ibid., p. 940.

28 Ibid., p. 1276.

29 Ibid., p. 1378.

30 Red Army Faction, ‘The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle’, November 1972, trans. André Moncourt and J. Smith, in The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, vol. 1: Projectiles for the People, ed. J. Smith and André Moncourt (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2009) pp. 205–36 (at p. 223).

31 2083, p. 1168.

32 Øystein Sørensen, ‘En totalitær mentalitet’ [A totalitarian mentality], Dagbladet, 1 August 2011: www.dagbladet.no/2011/08/01/kultur/debatt/kronikk/2083/breivik/17511868/.

33 2083, p. 1404.

34 Ibid., p. 1219.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., p. 338.

37 Ibid., p. 1219.

38 Ibid., p. 29.

39 Ibid., p. 697.

40 Ibid., p. 1387.

41 Ibid., p. 1177.

42 Ibid., p. 1181.

43 Ibid., p. 1182.

44 Ibid., p. 1187.

45 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. 200.

46 Agnar Aspaas and Terje Tørrissen, ‘Rettspsykiatrisk erklæring’ [Forensic psychiatric report], 10 April 2012 (the second psychiatric report), reproduced by VG: www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli/psykiatrisk_vurdering/, p. 199.

47 Husby and Sørheim, p. 80.

48 2083, p. 1454.

49 Ibid., p. 933.

50 From Breivik's testimony in Oslo District Court, 19 April 2012.

51 From Breivik's testimony in Oslo District Court, 25 April 2012.

52 Thor, his hammer Mjölnir (or ‘Mjolnir’, as it was inscribed on Breivik's pistol), Odin and his spear Gungnir all make extensive guest appearances in the Marvel Universe too, for example in the 2011 film Thor.

53 See Aspaas and Tørrissen, p. 38.