A Norwegian Tragedy

14

Hatred

The Utøya Generation

‘It's interesting that he's so preoccupied with 9/11,’ said Arshad.

On 17 April 2012, the trial of Anders Behring Breivik was just beginning. Arshad, wearing washed-out jeans, a white jumper and brown shoes, looked up at the big screen in Room 269 of Oslo Courthouse. His accreditation card hung round his thin neck. On the back of the card was a sticker with ‘No interviews, please’ written in English. Again Arshad saw the murderer he had glimpsed outside the Little Hall and had heard in the corridor in the Café Building. Prableen was sitting next to him. The room was full of lawyers and AUF members, many of whom were still wearing their red wristbands from Utøya.

‘And his admiration for al-Qaeda. As for the rest … ,’ Arshad smiled and shook his head.

As early as the evening of 22 July 2011, shortly after Prime Minister Stoltenberg had made his declaration about responding with ‘more democracy and more openness’, it became clear that the culprit had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Gaddafi or ‘Norway's foreign military adventures’.¹ When Tove had finished cleaning up after spending the evening with her friends, an evening which had been marred by the attacks in Oslo and on Utøya, she turned on the television. It was after midnight, and she wondered who was behind the tragedy. A man had been arrested on Utøya, after all. A picture of Anders appeared on the screen. He was posing in an orange shirt. Tove felt it like a hammer-blow to the head. She sat paralysed in front of the television. The questions came only some while later. Why did you do this? Where did your hatred come from? What kind of person are you, Anders Behring Breivik?

‘I'll never have any more contact with him,’ Jens Breivik said from France. ‘Instead of killing so many people, he should have taken his own life.’

Tove deleted the pictures of Anders from her camera.

When the trial began, the prosecutors played Breivik's YouTube film. Helene Bøksle sang during the film's third part, ‘Hope’, which was about the Justiciar Knights – in other words, about Breivik himself. Breivik was moved and started sobbing in the dock. The next day began with his reading out a self-written text keenly and enthusiastically. An ‘unbearable injustice’ had led him to Utøya. He was a cellar man by disposition and had settled into the prison regime well. He spoke of Ila Detention and Security Prison as his ‘home’. But as the prosecutor, Inga Bejer Engh, dissected the story he had made up about himself, he turned pale and crumbled, almost like the punctured wreck of the Hindenburg. According to the police, there was no such thing as the PCCTS or a Knights Templar network. Muslims had not broken his nose.

‘Trying to make fun of me,’ said Breivik. ‘Asking trick questions.’

He had been ‘pompous’, he explained, modifying his avatar. Andrew Berwick disappeared. The knight became a ‘foot soldier’, the ‘masterpiece’ compendium was ‘a rough draft’, ‘Commander Breivik’ was reduced to a ‘militant nationalist’, and the PCCTS was just ‘four sweaty men in a cellar’. As Breivik's self-dramatizing traits were gradually ground down, his paranoid side emerged more clearly. ‘Asbjørnsen and Moe’ was what he called the first pair of court-appointed psychiatrists, after the famous Norwegian collectors of folktales and legends, accusing Husby and Sørheim of malicious lies. Even though he appreciated humour and could be witty, Breivik's garish narcissism was constant, unchanging and completely beyond the control of his intellect. His defence counsels cited his best friend's brother's funeral as an example that Breivik did have feelings, and he answered the question as if it were a kind of competition. ‘I probably cried more than anybody else at that funeral,’ he said.

In the functional layout of Courtroom 250, the psychiatrists had a prominent position on the bench in front of the judges. The question of Breivik's soundness of mind was central, and it occasionally appeared as if the four forensic psychiatrists were also standing trial. Husby and Sørheim insisted that Breivik was a paranoid schizophrenic, psychotic and criminally insane. Aspaas and Tørrissen thought that he was criminally sane, but that he had a complex personality disorder, narcissistic, antisocial and with elements of paranoia. How could the experts arrive at such contradictory conclusions? It was reminiscent of the difference between how the SSBU and child welfare had interpreted Anders' smile twenty-eight years earlier. According to the SSBU, it was feigned and aversive; child welfare concluded it was warm. A split personality, but which side was a façade, and which was real?

Behind the psychiatrists towered the lead judge, Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, whose grandfather was director of public prosecutions and a central figure in the trial of Vidkun Quisling. Her eyes gleamed sharply behind her glasses, but she let Breivik make his monotonous defence speeches largely without interruption. At her side sat the judge Arne Lyng, grandson of John Lyng, who acted as the prosecutor in the trial of Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Gestapo agent who operated around Trondheim. Breivik had already taken his place next to Quisling and Rinnan in the pantheon of Norwegian supervillains long before the trial. In a way, he combined the qualities of the fantasist Quisling and the sadist Rinnan. Around him, the judges, prosecutors, counsels for the aggrieved and defence counsels all struggled to keep a cool head. The sweat glistened on the forehead of the lead defence counsel, Geir Lippestad, while Bejer Engh stared listlessly into space.

Trials are supposed to have two sides, but in Courtroom 250 there was a unity between the legal practitioners in their black robes, whether they were judges, defence counsels or prosecutors. Everyone who was in the courthouse that spring felt fear and compassion, and even the experienced lawyers stared down into the abyss with disbelief. Sometimes their eyes glazed over while evidence was given about the dead and the survivors. Other times, the court turned a collective shade of pale when seeing pictures from Utøya: dead youngsters, sometimes in groups, with horrible wounds. Only Breivik sat calmly, apparently unmoved in his nature as a radical outsider, an alien on planet Earth. Making slow movements, he filled his glass with water from the jug in front of him and held it up to his lips, gazing into the distance, but he pricked up his ears when the experts on forensic medicine described how the lead-tipped bullets had fragmented inside the bodies of the dead before criss-crossing through tissue and bones. It is the functioning of the till that interests him, as the SSBU once observed, not relations or emotions.

The 189 minutes of hell, from the explosion in Grubbegata to the arrest outside the Schoolhouse on Utøya, were turned inside out and relived in detail. The post-mortem reports were illustrated by the forensic experts indicating on a mannequin where the bullets struck. Some of the young people were shot through their hands when trying to shield their heads. One of the victims had been shot through her open mouth, with the entry wound going through her palate. Perhaps she had been pleading for her life. The survivors told about how loud noises startled them, how they had difficulty sleeping and were trying to adjust to living with the injuries the bomb and Breivik's lead-tipped ammunition had inflicted on them.

‘If the number 20 bus stops where the number 26 bus should stop, then I react very badly,’ one girl said.

For most Norwegians, those 189 minutes were an interruption to their normal lives, but many of the survivors struggled to return to normality. They had lost that invisible trust that holds up Norwegian society. But, for the rest of Norwegian society, the opposite applied. Trust between people and people's trust in the state, which were already very high in Norway, grew even more. People were roused by the violent events and joined together in rose marches and Facebook campaigns.

‘The community we had after 22 July was not a state-organized collective, but a spontaneous civil society,’ as Jonas Gahr Støre summarized the response. ‘The group feeling that manifested itself in the rose marches and on social media was an expression of social capital.’

Norway was rich in more than oil, and 22 July 2011 became a symbol – not of division or weakness, but of strength and solidarity. At the same time, many people wondered how this community would have reacted if the culprit had been a Muslim from a foreign background: would Norwegians have had enough social capital to avoid conflict and suspicion then?

Arshad was one of those who had moved on since Utøya, even if not entirely without repercussions such as difficulty with sleeping and concentrating. He still thought that 2006 had been worse for him than the period after 22 July 2011. The point of being involved in politics became even clearer, and at university he immersed himself in King Harald Fairhair's journey towards power. The boy from the family of migrants was about to put down roots in Norway as deep as the sword sculptures in the stone at Hafrsfjord. In February 2012 he wrote a piece for Stavanger Aftenblad after Arfan Bhatti's demonstration in Oslo in January, when the old thug demanded in front of a handful of people that Norwegian soldiers should be pulled out of Afghanistan ‘for the sake of Norway's security’. Arshad felt it was important that extremists should not have a monopoly on defining Islam and Muslims. ‘What some of these bearded brothers and veiled sisters have in common is apparently their ability to judge who are devout, practising Muslims, and who are infidels,’ Arshad wrote.²

Breivik's terrorist acts changed Norway in several ways that were, above all, contrary to his declared intentions. In the months after 22 July 2011, debates about Islam took place mainly between Muslims, in contrast to the previous decade, when Mullah Krekar and the Progress Party politician Carl I. Hagen were often each other's best enemies. It became clear to most people that Fjordman's assertions that Muslims were like orcs might be slightly inaccurate. At Bano Rashid's funeral, her coffin was followed to her grave by both a priest and an imam, while a whole nation watched on.

‘This girl, who came to Norway as a refugee, had enough within her to fill Gro's shoes,’ Jonas Gahr Støre said in his eulogy in church, ‘just as Gro gladly filled hers.’

On television, Muslims discussed one another's views on democracy and religion in the same hot-tempered fashion as other groups in society. A girl with an Algerian surname came forward in the newspaper VG as a victim of rape, breaking with the expectations of girls from Muslim and Arab backgrounds. When she later received threats, she infiltrated her critics' Facebook groups and shared their threatening, insulting and bizarre religious statements publicly. ‘You deserve to be raped hard, you murtad [apostate] trash woman!’ was one of the messages she received.

The ‘bearded brothers’ came under pressure from all sides, and only a handful turned up at Bhatti's demonstration in the snow outside the Storting. The winter of 2012 was quite simply not a good time to be an extremist in Norway. Krekar ended up in prison for making threats, while Fjordman, ‘the dark prophet of Norway’, lost some of his mystique when he turned out to be quite a normal thirty-six-year-old with curly hair and glasses who wrote letters to the local newspaper. Who was leading the struggle against the extremists? Even the girl with the Algerian surname was affiliated to the AUF and the Labour Party.

The year that followed 22 July 2011 showed that the youth organization was something more than a saccharine, state-subsidized utopia in the Tyrifjord. The old action group stepped into the breach in the battle against extremism and hatred. It seemed as if the Norwegian labour movement was still able to offer a standpoint for the oppressed of the world even in the modern age of migration, while at the same time drawing renewed energy and fresh talent from the growing pains of society. Norway changed in such a way that new groups of Norwegians took a definitive step into the ‘new Norwegian we’ about which Støre had written. 22 July 2011 is perhaps the one single incident that will be associated with what in reality was the result of ‘long-term hard work’, to quote Stine Håheim.

During the long days in the courthouse, the portraits of the dead were shown and their eulogies were read out. The same faces had been smiling at the nation from the newspapers ever since 22 July, and their names were read out during the national memorial ceremony at the Oslo Spektrum arena on 22 August 2011, in a television sequence that moved the whole country – faces of typical Norwegians and other happy faces with Caucasian, Arab, Kurdish, African, South-East Asian and Polynesian features. Jens Stoltenberg had the support of over 90 per cent of the population in the weeks after the massacre.

‘In a way, it's as if all those who were killed […] represented all of us,’ as the widower of the administrative secretary who died in Einar Gerhardsens Plass put it.

The parade of faces with backgrounds from around the world represented today's Norway, just as the names on the memorial stone at Ris had represented Norway in the post-war era. The death announcements reflected the same tendency. One of those killed ‘gave his life for his ideals and for democracy in the tragedy on Utøya’, as it said in a local newspaper.

At the courthouse, they stood across from each other again, Breivik and Arshad, ‘the old and then the new time’, as the poet Per Sivle once put it, ‘that which would fall, against that which would rise’.³ Arshad himself represented the new national unification, the forerunner of which he was studying at the University of Oslo. Bano died on the island's Love Path, but perhaps the day was approaching after all when the prime minister of Norway would be a woman in a turban or a man with a Chechen surname.

The Heart of Darkness

There did, however, still remain a fragment of doubt as to where this eruption of hatred had really come from. Something was clearly rotten in the state of Norway. One of ‘our own’ had attacked us. Some people discussed the destructive effect of computer games, while others thought that extreme right-wing ideologies and anti-Islamic doomsday rhetoric were to blame, that the Internet and social media could radicalize people, turning them into monsters, or that there was a hidden class of hateful male losers in Norway. Were there invisible rifts in Norwegian society that could reopen and spit out the glowing red lava of hate again?

Different psychiatric diagnoses were discussed in court. Breivik's abilities to make thorough plans and handle various practical challenges, his largely quite ordinary political views (for the counter-jihadist community), and his ability to control himself in order to avoid being ridiculed all weighed against his being seriously detached from reality with a form of paranoid schizophrenia. Since very few people could see any psychosis in Breivik, narcissistic personality disorder was the description that most experts endorsed: mad, but not criminally insane.

As I saw him in court while I followed the trial from the benches of Courtroom 250 or via a screen in other rooms in Oslo Courthouse, he was continuously making reassessments and constantly making decisions. He chose his words, he chose his tactics, and he had chosen a strategy that he carried out over ten long weeks. The question of whether people have free will becomes particularly acute in the case of a traumatized and disturbed person such as Breivik. He is clearly damaged, clearly different, but a person who can make judgements, explain himself and adjust his behaviour according to his surroundings does appear to be sane. The doubt to which Husby and Sørheim gave rise with their diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia was still of such a nature that the prosecution argued, perhaps a little half-heartedly, that he was criminally insane. This meant that the parties were at least able to engage in a process of contradiction, since the defence counsel Lippestad argued that Breivik was criminally sane and (without much hope or enthusiasm) that he should be acquitted.

When the court ruled that Breivik was sane at the moment of the crime, rejecting Husby and Sørheim's evaluations point by point, Norway breathed a sigh of relief. The 22 July Commission's report and the judgement put things in their place and determined where the responsibility lay. It was time to move on. At the same time, the question remained: who was Anders Behring Breivik?

The experts who did not believe that Breivik was psychotic explained his avatar and the PCCTS on the basis of his self-dramatizing personality. ‘Pseudologia fantastica’, said Terje Tørrissen, going on to refer to a German textbook:

manifests itself in incredible accounts of major occurrences and particular strokes of bad luck. Only a fraction, at most, of what is included in these accounts has actually taken place. The events described are elaborated in a fantastical style, and the depictions become increasingly dramatized with each repetition. The desired notion is so vivid and suited to confirmation by the personality in question, and eventually so indispensible, that the hysterical individual half believes in it themselves.⁴

A psychologist at Ila Prison suggested that Breivik might have acted out of a motivation of jealousy ‘that the Labour Party epitomizes a degree of power and community that [Breivik] desires, and Utøya represents a degree of social belonging in which enthusiastic young people can share their political ideas and passions.’⁵ It was not a major surprise that Breivik rejected this. Even though he was not schizophrenic, he could have other kinds of congenital mental disorder: was his smile perhaps a tic?

Just like one of Breivik's former tagging colleagues, Professor Ulrik Fredrik Malt, an expert in psychiatry, also speculated about whether a general developmental disorder, Asperger's syndrome, might explain parts of his story. Asperger's syndrome (a high-functioning form of autism) is a developmental disorder that begins to manifest itself at the age of two or three – in other words, at the time Breivik's mother was complaining about his unpredictable, hyperactive and aggressive behaviour. People with Asperger's syndrome are mentally reproductive but not reflective, which might explain the compendium's cut-and-paste feel. His slightly peculiar language, characterized by repetition and frequent quantifying of everything in percentages, his aptitude for logistics, his monomaniacal interest in certain topics (such as bomb recipes and orders of Templar knights) and compensating conformism: Malt related all these things to developmental disorders – in other words, genetically determined disturbance of the mind.

Malt also thought that there might be a connection between Asperger's syndrome and Breivik's puzzling, possibly unique ability to kill mechanically. But, even though Breivik exhibited these traits, his friends and the SSBU concluded that he had ‘contact abilities’. Even Malt did not try to determine where Breivik's hatred came from: people with Asperger's syndrome have no documented inclination to kill and are, on the contrary, generally very moral people.

The white flash of the explosion was followed by a cloud of smoke. At times, the trial fumbled through a haze, as if the smoke were still hanging over the centre of Oslo. When I walked home through Marienlystparken during the afternoon of 22 July 2011, before it was known who was responsible for the bomb, I assumed that it was a political attack that had struck my city. I later wrote in Aften­posten about Occidentalism, online radicalization and the danger of ‘monsters from the blogosphere’.⁶ In September 2011, in my app­lication to Fritt Ord [the Freedom of Expression Foundation], I described this book project as starting from the assertion ‘that the disaster was not only the result of an individual's mental illness (as the former editor of The Times, Simon Jenkins, had claimed in The Guardian), but also an expression of a reaction to globalization and modernity’.

In my effort to work out 22 July 2011, I headed in several directions. I have been charting human rights violations and war crimes abroad for almost twenty years and have spoken with many refugees, survivors and eyewitnesses to serious crimes. Even though the Norwegian victims saw the criminal arrested and put in prison – criminals elsewhere have been appointed president – I encountered the same rigid expressions, drifting gazes and dark powerlessness in the survivors of Utøya as I had previously seen in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Their anger leaked out and looked for accomplices in the massacre of their friends. The Labour Party were the ‘victors’ of the twentieth century, to cite the Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen. The multicultural Utøya generation are the victors of the twenty-first century. But the victors carry a burden of sorrow and anger which may not yet have been fully declared.

I interviewed former taggers and people who were young lads in the West End of Oslo during the nineties to get closer to Breivik's adolescence. It was not easy. The same haze descended over the West End as soon as Breivik's name was mentioned; people did not want to talk about him or to be connected to the case. Omertà at Ris: the manor house locked its doors, but some people did talk. Some witnesses were able to tell me about Breivik's childhood and family. At the same time, I immersed myself in his compendium. This peculiar mammoth of a text was the very key to my work. I read it several times. I eventually realized that the compendium really made sense only if read as a response to experiences and conflicts in his own life, especially in his childhood. 1,300 years of conflict between the West and Islam emerged as a cover story, and the trial confirmed this impression. Breivik fumbled and appeared unenthusiastic when accounting for the political and historical sides of his project but came around as soon as there was talk of terrorism. His radicalization emerged as a manifestation of his pseudologia fantastica: accounts of fictional confrontations with Muslims mixed with merely trivial incidents. His childhood, on the other hand, was not something he wanted to talk about.

There are many people with whom I would have liked to speak but have not met. There are many police interviews, records and case papers to which I would have liked to have had access. All the same, when I eventually read the reports by the two teams of court-appointed psychiatrists in their uncensored versions, they answered many of the questions I was left with after reading the compendium and studying Breivik's 189-minute-long killing orgy. If the fundamental story in the compendium concerns constructing an avatar to bring back an absent father and dispose of mothers for good, why was it essential to control women's sexuality and bodies? And why did Breivik assert in Oslo District Court that ‘the media and the prosecution […] have claimed that I have an incestuous relationship with my own mother’,⁷ when no such claims had been made?

A person is not an island. It is impossible to write the story of a person without including the individual's immediate family. The problem with trying to explain Breivik's hatred is that the explanation inevitably has to touch on the deficit of care to which he was subjected in his early childhood. ‘Irrespective of the eventual formal diagnoses, formal diagnostics will be insufficient to understand ABB and his actions on 22/07,’ Professor Malt wrote in a memo to the defence counsel in June 2012. ‘An understanding requires the addition of a psychiatric-psychological analysis stressing his upbringing and family relationships.’ Breivik's mother did not want this story to be known. The question is whether her wish to protect her private life weighed more heavily than the public interest in understanding what formed Anders Behring Breivik. The media has been cautious in this regard, even though the newspaper VG published the psychiatrists' reports in almost complete versions, censoring only a few pages that they thought went too far into the private sphere of Breivik's family, primarily concerning his mother. NRK published an article in November 2011 saying that former neighbours from Silkestrå thought that he had been exposed to experiences of a sexual nature.⁸ The article went on to say that ‘two independent sources have confirmed to NRK that the psychological report suggested abuse of a sexual nature’ towards Breivik when he was a little boy. But no more was heard of this shocking information.

Norwegian news desks probably felt that the story of child abuse depicted in the censored pages is not significant enough in the court case for its publication to be justified. Furthermore, some of the details are so extraordinary and unusual that it is a journalistic challenge to describe them without appearing sensationalist. As a result, even after seventy-seven funerals, the details of Breivik's deficit of care and the mental problems that affected his childhood are still unmentioned. In a way it is commendable that the Norwegian media protects individuals, even in the most extreme cases. At the same time, it can be queried whether the media is working as it should in the interests of the public if this information is central to the case. Shedding light on this story is not really a matter of exposing Breivik's mother to criticism, but of asking why she did not receive help when she asked for it.

In the material the media (specifically the VG website) published, there were descriptions and conclusions about the deficit of care to which the SSBU believed Breivik had been subjected, as well as references to his maternal grandmother's mental illness. The censored parts of the report concerned his mother's medical history and the evaluation of her as well as descriptions of how she harassed the young boy – in other words, a detailed depiction of the deficit of care. Hundreds of policemen, reporters, lawyers, bereaved family members and people directly affected have access to this information. People whisper in Oslo Courthouse and at late nights in town. Perhaps it is a classic West End story: blacked-out family secrets living their own lives and growing into a monster of rumours and theories. Perhaps the ‘truth’, as it appears in the SSBU's records, is less spectacular than the speculations fed by silence.

The publication of the report by the first team of psychiatrists had consequences. The criticism of the report contributed to another team of psychiatrists being appointed, which was a good example of Stoltenberg's wish for openness meaning that public discourse could indirectly become part of the legal process, as well as of the attempt to understand what had happened. Without the public debate, there would probably have been only one psychiatric report, and Breivik would have been found criminally insane.

As the trial progressed, it had little to do with ‘a psychiatric-psychological analysis’ of Breivik. It was only the question of sanity that was of direct significance to the criminal proceedings, and Breivik and his mother did not give their consent for access to the confidential SSBU material. Witnesses from the SSBU were called, but none were heard in court. Furthermore, the four forensic psychiatrists did not even read the whole compendium, with even the otherwise very scrupulous Aspaas and Tørrissen relying on the PST's quite telegraphic summary of the document that had been Breivik's great passion over the past few years. As a result, the judgement on 24 August 2012 said little about where the hatred stemmed from, even if it indicated that the unclear distance between mother and son did not necessarily constitute an expression of psychosis, as Husby and Sørheim claimed, but could be a feature of their relationship. Perhaps it is easier to address this problem in the context of a book in which the deficit of care is part of a larger story or analysis, and so an author's evaluation differs from that of a news editor. The decisive difference is perhaps mainly that I believe there are traces of Breivik's childhood trauma in the compendium and therefore also in his crimes.

22 July 2011 was a tragedy of such proportions that it takes a lot to remain silent when you are in possession of information shedding light on the case. It is difficult to live with uncertainty and conjecture about a case that is being discussed around the world, which shook Norway and which directly affects so many people and families. Many of the parents who are left without children, and some of the children who will grow up without parents, want or will want to know why they were targeted. I believe that the elements of the deficit of care to which Breivik was subjected in his first years (if not every single detail) do belong in any serious attempt to explain why things happened the way they did. That is why I have chosen to describe and to quote some of the material that is not generally known and which concerns Breivik's relationship with his mother and her background. This entails entering the private sphere of Breivik and his immediate family, but I believe some of this information is so important that the picture of the case is incomplete if it is left out. I believe there is a justified need for information about Breivik's childhood. I have, however, omitted or altered information describing indirect relatives or third parties, as this is less important for the case at hand.

Many people are subjected to a deficit of care, and few of them become mass murderers. There is no psychological determinism meaning that Breivik's background had to lead him to Utøya, but when his story is plotted back in time with the evidence to hand of how it ended, and especially if the compendium is used as a key, you end up in his early childhood. It will take a long time to establish a complete explanatory hierarchy in which the various circumstances that made Breivik into a terrorist are accounted for and the key factors highlighted. This book is merely a contribution to that process. Explaining Breivik does not mean defending him. Denouncing him as a monster is a natural reaction, and many people want to forget him and move on, but understanding is important, not only to offer answers to the victims. Knowledge can mean that society learns from the tragedy, while at the same time preventing a moral panic from gaining ground and accusations or aggression being misdirected.

The censored extracts from the SSBU dossier on the Behring Breivik family indicate that Breivik was subjected to a far-reaching deficit of care. He was seriously mistreated, and this appears to be linked to some of the darkest themes of the compendium.

The SSBU carried out reports on children with a view to improving the situation of the children and of their families. Would things have gone differently if child welfare or the court had listened to their recommendations and placed Breivik in a foster home when he was four years old? Or with his father and Tove? His attachment disorder would probably have had consequences anyway, one member of the SSBU team thought, while his colleague answered that things would probably have gone better for the boy. The question is compelling, even if it cannot be answered.

The SSBU's sources were first and foremost their own observations, followed by information from the mother and from the family welfare centre in Christies Gate, including information from the respite care family and concerned neighbours at Silkestrå. The SSBU described the mother as ‘a woman with an extremely challenging upbringing […] a borderline personality structure and extensive if partly negative depression’. In their descriptions, it appears as if the mother made a deep impression on the observation team, who occasionally used terms to describe her that do not appear to have a professional basis, such as ‘primitive’.

What is most striking about her treatment of the four-year-old Anders, based on the extracts from the SSBU case papers, is how she sexualized him and told him that she wished he were dead. In the case summary, the mother is described as ‘confused’ and ‘uncritical’, in actuality a woman with an unsound grasp of reality and everyday life:

While in the unit [at SSBU], she spoke somewhat uncritically about sexualized and aggressive fantasies and fears and exhibited a very ambivalent attitude towards the male staff. During her stay, she composed herself and became considerably calmer. Psychological testing of the mother (Rorschach) indicates a woman living in her own inner, private world with poorly developed relationships to fellow human beings. She is highly anxiety-ridden in her close relationships and emotionally affected by negative depression. She is threatened by chaotic conflicts and shows signs of illogical thought in pressured situations. She has a borderline disposition as a woman who functions very unpredictably. Given structured external circumstances in life, she can function well, but she becomes very vulnerable in crises.

The background to Breivik's mother contacting the family advice centre was that her problems had been piling up during 1982 in connection with the move to Nedre Silkestrå. She had made some scattered attempts to work after she had become single, but had given up, and in their small flat it became too much for her to cope with the children as well as her own needs. The SSBU did not link her problems primarily to stress in connection with the move or to long-term post-natal depression, but to ‘the highly pathological [abnormal] relationship between Anders and his mother’.

A large part of the reason that the mother has had increasing difficulties over the past few years is connected to her extremely unusual relationship with Anders. She projects her primitive aggressive and sexualized fantasies onto him, everything that she perceives as dangerous and aggressive in men. Her daily interaction with him is characterized to a great degree by double communication; on the one hand she is symbiotic, while at the same time rejecting him with her body language and can suddenly shift between speaking with him in an overly sweet manner and openly expressing death wishes.

So, according to the SSBU, Anders was a ‘victim of his mother's projections of paranoid aggressive and sexualized fear of men in general’. Of course, it is impossible to establish any entirely clear connections, but perhaps there is an echo of his mother's ‘aggressive and sexualized fantasies’, into which Anders was unwillingly drawn, in his own sadistic notions and behaviour. The double communication between them also had a physical side. ‘Symbiotic’ was how the SSBU characterized their relationship. It was as if mother and son were one body: ‘In the period since they became alone, Anders has slept in his mother's bed at night with close bodily contact. His mother has made small, sporadic attempts to end this, but perhaps she does not really want to.’

Unclear distance, rejection one moment and intimacy the next. This feature of their relationship did perhaps continue in a certain form later in life. The joke gift Breivik gave his mother in 2004, when she and her partner broke up, was allegedly a vibrator.⁹ After Anders moved home in 2006, his mother complained that he either would not want to come out of his room or would sit right up next to her on the sofa, once kissing her.

Psychiatric definitions of child sexual abuse often focus on the culprit drawing the child into acts or ideas in order to get sexual gratification. Other definitions are broader, focusing more on the child's experience of being unwillingly sexualized. The Norwegian Penal Code's focus on the molester's own satisfaction and concrete sexual acts does not quite fit into the picture painted by the SSBU, even though they referred to an incident when his mother allegedly asked Anders to perform a sexual act on a person from outside the family.

The SSBU did not really describe a woman using her child to seek sexual satisfaction, but instead a disturbed and depressed woman incapable of setting boundaries between fantasy and reality or between herself and her son. Children who have been subjected to sexual abuse are generally at a higher risk of developing psychiatric illnesses, and, if the abuser is the mother, there is an increased chance of being damaged. ‘When the mother performs the abuse, it appears to cause more damage,’ write the psychiatrists Grøholt, Sommerschild and Garløv. ‘This is probably because children are, as a rule, more dependent on women, and because female abusers as a group are more psychiatrically disturbed. They are often infantile with extreme dependency needs and are frequently alcoholics. A mother's abuse of her child might entail embraces with sexual overtones or intense body contact, but it might also include genital manipulation or mutual masturbation.’¹⁰ There does not appear to be anything in the SSBU material resembling concrete abuse of that nature, but Breivik was without doubt subjected by his mother to an invasive and confusing sexualization. She held the four-year-old tightly at night and, during the day, accused him of being a threat towards his sister. According to police interviews, neighbours at Silkestrå were also concerned that the mother's sexualized language and ideas were being transferred to her children, that she did not always take care of Anders, and that there was noise in the flat that sounded like sexual activity while the children were at home.

It is difficult not to see some connection here too between the SSBU's description and Breivik's attack in his compendium on his mother's sexual morality, which had brought shame on him. His wish to control female sexuality and the female body, as well as replacing mothers with artificial wombs, may have to do less with his career as a loser on the sexual market and more with traumatic experiences from his childhood of being unwillingly sexualized by his only care-giver. Perhaps the problem was not his lack of access to the female body in adolescence or later but his experience of having been invaded by it as a child.

In the early eighties, attention to child sexual abuse and views on incest were of a different nature from today. There was less focus on this in society and less knowledge among academics. In spite of their great professional expertise and modern focus on the child, the SSBU had no methods for charting sexual abuse or procedures for alerting the police when violations of the law in this regard were suspected. ‘We had no idea, and we didn't think about it like that,’ said a former SSBU employee who participated in the report on the Behring Breivik family.

It was only in later years that the SSBU seriously began to focus on this field and that psychiatry began to have an idea of the consequences of sexual abuse. The connection between childhood abuse and personality pathology, as pointed out by Karterud, Wilberg and Urnes, is especially pronounced in connection with sexual abuse. Mentalizing ability (in other words, the ability to think about oneself and others) can be impaired, leading to an ‘estranged self-experience’, a kind of splitting of the self, in which ‘there is an attempt to cast loose [negative] experiences, so that they can live their own lives as disturbing and frightening presences in the psyche. […] With an estranged self-experience that is burdened with destructiveness and cruelty, there can also be an attempt to externalize it through projective identification. […] This entails the individual trying to find somebody else to bear the burden of the cruelty for them.’¹¹ The term ‘projective identification’ is related to Ronald Holmes and Stephen Holmes’ research on serial killers and the ‘power-control’ behaviour they described: violence against others becomes a method of alleviating the person's own feelings of shame and self-contempt.

According to the SSBU's case history – the mother's own account of her medical record – she wanted an abortion when she was pregnant with Anders because of problems in her marriage, but she could not make up her mind to apply before the time limit was up. During her pregnancy, she already ‘perceived Anders as a difficult child who was restless and kicked her, almost deliberately. […] Jens was present [at the birth], which she felt was unpleasant and loathsome. “Anders was hers!” […] She breastfed the child for ten months, before stopping because she felt that his sucking was so strong and aggressive that it was destroying her.’

Anders was a normal child in terms of his motor and linguistic development, but after they moved back to Oslo his mother thought he became ‘very demanding. [She] lived/lives in constant anxiety about what bad deeds he might get up to, both alone and with regard to his sister.’ It seems strange that a mother should be afraid of what a two-year-old boy might do to his eight-year-old big sister, but she consistently expressed herself with little sense of proportion. It seems as if, in a way, she saw the boy as a grown man with sinister intentions. Thirty years later, this fantasy would become reality, but there is little to suggest that Anders had always been as difficult and aggressive as his mother described him. The mother's fantasies and reality seemed to run into each other, her mentalizing ability had apparently collapsed, and she occasionally described the little boy as a kind of manipulative and invulnerable villain.

Indeed it was also clear to the SSBU that she did not have control of her wandering little boy. ‘Anders’ reaction to his mother's relatively ambivalent attempts to set boundaries is to smirk and laugh,’ the SSBU wrote. ‘His mother says that “he just tip-toes around and smirks slyly”. When she smacks him, he says: “It doesn't hurt, it doesn't hurt.” ’ Breivik's unusual smile was clearly something else to which his mother reacted negatively. The fact that he said it did not hurt when she hit him could be a reaction of defiance, but it could also be true. At his nursery school, they were concerned that Anders did not cry or show any signs of pain even when he fell down hard. This could suggest that Breivik had a form of analgesia, an absence of the ability to feel pain. This condition, or its symptoms, is normal among traumatized children, especially among those who have been subjected to physical abuse.

To the caseworker at the social care office, Anders' mother said that she wanted ‘to get rid’ of him. It is a little unclear as to whether that meant she wanted him to be adopted or whether she meant he should disappear in another way. She told the SSBU that she felt ‘like peeling him off me’. The mother's view of a boy who ‘kicked her’ before he was born, ‘destroyed her’ as a breastfeeding baby and grew up to be ‘aggressive’, ‘hyperactive’ and ‘clingy’ seems to have been accompanied by a pattern of declared wishes to have an abortion, ‘to get rid’ of the boy and to ‘peel him off’, as well as expressions of ‘death wishes’. The little boy would have heard at least some of this.

If empathy is developed by imagining what our primary care-giver feels and thinks, as attachment theory claims, and if it is correct that children will not develop empathy or an understanding of others if they are not safe to imagine what their care-giver thinks or feels, perhaps it is not so puzzling that all the psychiatric experts thought Breivik was characterized by a total lack of empathy. Since his only care-giver said that she wanted him dead, neither is it perhaps strange that his adult perception of himself is as a zombie, one of the living dead, or that his great project is a kind of masked suicide attempt in the form of a spectacular act of terrorism.

The abuse to which Anders was subjected by the only care-giver he had, in the critical attachment phase during the second and third years of his life, was of an emotional nature and also contained a sexual component. Even if the SSBU mentioned that Anders was ‘smacked’ and repeatedly used the word ‘aggressive’ about his mother, and even if some of the details about Breivik might suggest that he had analgesia, it is not possible to conclude that he was also abused physically. Analgesia can have other causes, and in the material to which I have had access there are no grounds to suggest that Breivik was subjected to physical abuse. It could be expected that the nursery and child welfare, which were following the case after all, would notice if that had been happening, but of course it is only a morsel of Breivik's childhood that emerges in the documents from the SSBU and child welfare. Probably nobody will ever tell what really went on behind the walls in Fritzners Gate and at Silkestrå in the early eighties. It was difficult to work out even at the time.

One of the mysteries is how differently the SSBU assessed the case compared to child welfare, who perceived the problems as situational. It could be envisaged that the SSBU might have seen a distorted image of the family and let their assessment be influenced by their experience of poor co-operation with the mother, who had ‘a very ambivalent attitude to the male staff’. It could be imagined that they saw the family when they were at rock-bottom, and that the situation at home was different and better than in the unfamiliar SSBU premises at Gaustad. Still, there are a number of reasons to opt for the SSBU version.

The observation was carried out over time (for three weeks) and not based on three short home visits and some office consultations with the mother (which was the sum total of child welfare's oversight of the case during the period from the custody trial in October 1983 until they shelved the case in June 1984). The SSBU observation was carried out by a team of eight specialists, while child welfare based their report on the impressions of a home visitor from the social care office at Vika. The SSBU had access to quite a wide range of material when making their evaluation and reviewed the family's situation and background a lot more thoroughly than the home visitor's slightly superficial description of a ‘harmonious’ family with a ‘calm’ mother, a ‘well-mannered’ daughter and a ‘pleasant, relaxed’ son. In a way, the family depended on putting up a strong façade, as there was no internal framework to keep them together, and perhaps the façade was so well tended that it convinced not only child welfare but often the mother herself too. Some of the neighbours at Silkestrå, on the other hand, shared the SSBU's views of the family and their concerns.

Behind the SSBU's alarm call is the mother's own ‘extremely challenging upbringing’, which they believed was now having consequences for her son, in line with the theory about attachment disorders as a kind of psychiatric ancestral sin. The SSBU ostensibly based their description of the mother's upbringing on information she provided herself. Since she often appears imprecise, perhaps we should be cautious in believing all the details of her case history. Maybe she also felt a need to construct her past, in a similar fashion to her dramatizing son. But the key points were emotional and physical abuse, bullying, a father who died early and an extremely difficult relationship with a mother afflicted by polio, who apparently fell ill while she was pregnant, blamed Breivik's mother for her physical disability and was controlling, spiteful and jealous of her daughter.

She describes her relationship with her mother as a version of the tale of Snow White. The evil queen became jealous of Snow White as she grew up and entered puberty. Wenche ‘never had the feeling of belonging to a family’, according to the SSBU report. The story of Breivik's mother appears to reflect that of her own mother. Just as Breivik's mother broke away from her family and fled from Kragerø to Oslo when seventeen years old, her own mother had travelled in the opposite direction many years earlier. Apart from her relationship with her father, her association with men was very difficult. A man in her life allegedly abused her physically, while another ‘forced himself on her’.

Keeping up their façade was important, and there were many family secrets that Breivik's mother came to learn only later, including that she herself had spent a couple of years in a children's home and that there were half-siblings in her family at a time when decent people did not get divorced or have children outside marriage. ‘The family [in Kragerø] bore traces of mystification and downward social mobility,’ the SSBU wrote. ‘As a result of this, she developed defective abilities in contact and attachment.’ ‘Mystification’ was the SSBU's word for suppressed secrets. Breivik's mother broke off contact with her mother, who towards the end of her life developed ‘paranoia and hallucinations’.

Mystification, maintaining a façade and downward social mobility are terms that could also describe the small family in Hoffsveien after 2006. Themes are repeated in the family across decades and over generations. How many generations back in time have poor attachment patterns persisted? To what extent is this generational transmission of trauma and mental illness due to genetic factors or to a repetition of poor attachment patterns?¹²

The SSBU saw this as an important case and recommended that Anders should be taken into care. Perhaps those in the SSBU were ahead of their time; perhaps they were regarded by other state agencies as a group of left-wing windbags. Both child welfare and the court ignored the SSBU's repeated warnings, notes of concern and reports. The judge asked for another review to be carried out, postponing the clearly difficult case. Child welfare concluded that the family's home situation had changed and closed the case just half a year after the SSBU's last letter on the matter. This could certainly not be called technocracy if the professionals' views were disregarded time after time.

The presumption of maternal custody, and what we now call the biological principle, apparently overrode the professionals' evaluation. Consideration of the family's unity, the belief that the mother has a particular significance for the child, and perhaps the notion that a mother could not commit abuse weighed more heavily than attachment theory and the SSBU's passionate report and dramatic conclusions. In most people's eyes, Breivik's mother appeared strange and pitiful, but, of the witnesses in Oslo District Court in 2012, it was only Breivik's best friend who saw her as a directly negative influence in connection with what he thought was Anders' depression, and it was only the SSBU who described her as dangerous. This was a ‘very important case’, the SSBU insisted, but this fell on deaf ears. Anders stayed with his mother. The family was more important than the child. Mothers want only what is best for their children. Wenche Behring certainly wanted the same for her children, but could she manage?

The Lost Child

‘The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,’ Breivik told Husby and Sørheim in a conversation at Ila Prison, illustrating his world of thought and his most important concern.¹³ Husby and Sørheim asked him to comment on the SSBU papers and the custody case. Breivik apparently had no memory of his earliest years but still ascertained that ‘it would have been best if my father and step-mother had won’ the case.¹⁴

The subject then begins a long discussion concerning potential changes to the law in terms of ‘parenting rights. My mother is not intellectually capable,’ he says. ‘She is average, and against Islamization. But women do not understand codes of honour, and 90 per cent of them are emotionally unstable. That's why we support a change in the law so that fathers will automatically be given parenting rights,’ he says. ‘The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. It will reduce the divorce rate.’

The psychiatrists ask the subject to explain further. ‘I detest Marxism for my own parents’ divorce and for matriarchy. That's why women's role should be in the home. […] They should not be allowed to divorce, and fathers should have parenting rights.’¹⁵

It is typical of Breivik how he projected his individual experience to apply to the whole world. His mother was ‘emotionally unstable’, so it followed that all women, or at least 90 per cent of them (perhaps the former salesman cut off 10 per cent so as not to offend Sørheim), were ‘emotionally unstable’ and did ‘not understand codes of honour’. The opposite of honour is shame, and for Breivik women were linked to shame. He was unable to distinguish between his own inner world and the external world, between his own, possibly forgotten, trauma and the varied and nuanced landscape that is society. Everything was equal, and nothing existed outside his own mind.

The compendium appeared as an adaptation of his own upbringing, with personal trauma and experiences blown up to an enormous scale, projected onto a broad canvas of civilization and finding their historical solutions through the intervention of his avatar, which reflected the isolated world of his thoughts. Superficially, the compendium appears to be a political text, and perhaps Breivik saw it as such, but it was also an expression of an intense focus on the brutal, boundary-transgressing and frightening experiences to which he had been subjected as a child.

The final volume in Johan Borgen's trilogy of novels about Wilfred ‘Little Lord’ Sagen is entitled Vi har ham nå! [We've got him now!]. The bombastic title is, on one level, a warning against believing that it is possible to define and understand a person entirely. The Little Lord defies simple categorizations or analyses, and so does Anders Behring Breivik, as was demonstrated during the trial by the confusion of the two forensic psychiatric reports. Still, there are some perspectives on Breivik's hatred and rage that appear more fruitful than others. Perhaps the hatred that hung over the city that Friday afternoon did not stem mainly from online aggression and doomsday notions, from violent computer games, the structural violence of consumer culture, class angst in the West End of Oslo, the gang culture of the nineties, friction in a multicultural society or a male feeling of frustration in the vaginal state. I believe that the dark impulse came from his childhood, not from counter-jihadism.

Through my work on this book I have moved away from seeing 22 July 2011 as a reflection of a greater ‘reaction to globalization and modernity’ and far in the direction towards seeing the acts of terrorism that day as the outcome of a deficit of family care, the intergenerational transferral of poor attachment patterns and a resultant individual mental illness. I no longer believe that Breivik's radicalization, his hatred, was due mainly to mass suggestion or to the ideological greenhouse effect of the counter-jihadist online community. That does not mean that the terrorist attacks were not a political act, or that we do not all have a responsibility as citizens to react against extremist remarks and acts in our own society. Mental illness and politics have been closely linked to each other from Caligula to Hitler. Breivik used his extreme right-wing ideas of an ongoing civil war, in which the Muslims were the enemy and the elites were traitors, primarily to justify his bloody vision and deeds. He probably felt part of a collective as he sat by his screen, constructing his avatar.

During the trial, it became clear that Breivik was capable of adapting his avatar to quite a significant degree. This shows that he was sensitive to influence from others, so it is easy to imagine that he was equally keen to find support and a firm foundation when he was constructing his avatar too, and that the fervour of politicians about the dangers of multiculturalism and ‘sneaking Islamization’ strengthened his belief that he was about to create a ‘masterpiece’. As the blogger Bjørn Stærk articulated it the week after the attacks: ‘There are many of us now who have thought long and hard over the past few days about whether anything we might have written about Islam or immigration might have made the terrorist feel less alone while he sat there for years, planning this evil deed. The honest answer: probably.’¹⁶ In his New Year speech, Prime Minister Stoltenberg urged people to be ‘digital watchdogs’ in order to counteract the growth of online hatred and aggressive subcultures.¹⁷ The AUF girl with an Algerian background who infiltrated the Muslim extremist groups on Facebook embodied the new public spirit.

At the same time, there is an old adage among online debaters: ‘Don't feed the troll.’ Trying to argue against hateful outbursts by replying online or in readers' comments sections is not always productive. If you give the online trolls your attention, they only get angrier. The counter-jihadists are close to a genre in which exaggeration is key: the genre of tirades. A rapper in a dissing battle might tell his adversary that he plans to shove fifty baseball bats up his backside without necessarily meaning it literally. Even if they are not meant to be comical, exaggerations are an important part of anti-Islamic tirades too; on Document.no, Breivik wrote that the branding of ‘cultural conservatives’ was ‘just as bad as the persecution of the Jews in the thirties or during the Inquisition’.

When Fjordman writes that there is a civil war, that Europeans have the right to defend themselves and should consider procuring weapons, the impression comes across that the statement might have more to do with creating a mood of elevated and epic gravity than being an actual declaration of war. But, even if for most people Occidentalism is a matter of sticking their tongues out and saying a heartfelt ‘Bleah!’ to the elites, the Zeitgeist and society in general, it is from this field that political violence has come to Norway in the years since the Second World War. Unfortunately, it is not a bold prediction to say that Norway has probably not heard the last of the occidentalist tradition.

In my opinion, however, the most important lesson from this tragedy is not about integration policy, the Internet, ideology or the police's operating methods and resources, in spite of the harsh and far-reaching criticism of the police by the 22 July Commission. It is about child and family welfare policy.

The 22 July Commission concluded that the ‘perpetrator could have been stopped earlier on 22 July’.¹⁸ But could Breivik have been stopped before that fateful day? Yes, maybe he could. Not by the police security agency, the PST, who acquitted themselves in their own comprehensive evaluation of the case, even though they were also criticized by the 22 July Commission for not following up tip-offs on Breivik. But perhaps child welfare could have intervened in the years 1983–4. The banality of evil in the case of Breivik is the significance of childhood trauma in the hatred of a grown man. Countering hatred, radicalization and terrorism is also a matter of preventing children from being abused by their parents – a banal insight, perhaps, possibly so banal that it has been overlooked. The wide-ranging report by the 22 July Commission did not look into this: ‘We have foregone issues related to the perpetrator's motive, childhood and state of health, and we have not explored the measures society puts in place for the early prevention of radicalisation.’¹⁹

Nevertheless, this is an important matter for debate, not least in this case. The question of where the boundary lies between the state and the family, and how society can best protect children growing up in broken homes is also just as topical now as it was in 1983.

In the summer of 2012, the Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion published the report ‘Bedre beskyttelse av barns utvikling’ [Better protection of children's development]. The official report summarizes the massive consequences of deficit of care (defined as physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional torment and neglect). Research indicates that a deficit of care causes extensive damage to the brain and nervous system and a series of lifelong psychological problems such as aggression, anxiety and a lack of social skills. ‘An American study demonstrates that traumatic experiences from childhood through adult life cost society as much as HIV and cancer put together, but that the ratio of resources allocated is 1:100. [… C]hildhood trauma is perhaps the greatest health problem of our times, and probably the main cause of mental problems while growing up and in adulthood.’²⁰

Attachment theory and neurological research are changing our views of the family. The most important thing for children is to have a good basis for attachment. Whether the care-giver is a biological parent or not, man or woman, homosexual or heterosexual, is less relevant. The report investigated how the biological principle is administered by child welfare and concluded that child welfare may have too high a threshold for presenting cases to put children into care. The biological principle still weighs heavily, the committee thought, meaning that the child's interests are perhaps not always seen as the most crucial element in difficult cases.

The committee therefore recommended introducing a new principle, defined as ‘the principle of developmentally beneficial attachment’, which should contribute to governing the work of child welfare and ensuring that children are not left in intolerable situations just because their tormentors are members of their family. ‘The principle of developmentally beneficial attachment’ might not exactly be a catchy term, but it can have major consequences. If this principle is added to the Children Act, it will be applied when assessing whether to place children into care.

The committee recommends that the threshold for taking children into care be assessed according to the following three factors:

a. whether or not the quality of attachment and relationships between the care-givers and the child supports the child's development;

b. how serious and stable the deficit of care is (omission of care, failure to undergo therapy or instruction, maltreatment or abuse);

c. whether the care-giver's personal traits (mental impairment, mental illness, intoxication) are of a long- or short-term nature.²¹

In Anders Behring Breivik's case, there is little doubt that, if ‘the principle of developmentally beneficial attachment’ and the method of assessment based on it had been in use in the early eighties, this would have meant that child welfare had to support putting him in care, in line with the SSBU's recommendation.

With the evidence to hand of how it all ended, it is easy to feel indignant towards child welfare and the court. How could they let the little boy stay with his poor, sick mother?! Why did she not receive help when she asked for it? It is important to remember that it was a different time. Views of mental illnesses and abuse in the family were different. Gro Harlem Brundtland had just become Norway's first female prime minister a few short months earlier, but the long-term hard work needed to redefine gender roles – so that men could also be care-givers in the family and women could also be leaders in public life – was far from complete.

Nevertheless, the system did realize that Breivik was at risk of ending up as an outsider. Owing to the judgement of individuals leaning on judicial precedent and contemporary views of the family, the state let go of him again. Doors were still open for Breivik. Another life was possible. One by one, those doors were locked. He did not want to conform, or was unable to do so. He was unable to ask for help either. ‘Nothing worked out for him,’ as his mother said. He turned thirty. As he hardly had a life at all, he had nothing to lose. Finally he decided to construct a grotesque avatar and take the route to Utøya.

Today, Anders Behring Breivik is sitting in his cell, convicted, isolated and under guard. He may never get out, but paradoxically he may nevertheless be in a better situation now than he was before 22 July 2011. He was isolated then too, and was laughed at when he went out on the town. Now he has become famous and exchanges letters with like-minded people and admirers from across the world. In that regard, his operation was a success, as he claimed, like other Herostratic crimes: politically counter-productive, but on a deeper, darker and personal level a success just the same. While the zombie has acquired some kind of life, the bereaved will never see their dead children, brothers, sisters, partners or parents again. Many of the survivors will be forever affected by the catastrophe. There is no justice in this.

No punishment in the world would have been proportionate to the harm Breivik caused, but perhaps what constitutes the strength of Norwegian society has become clearer. Over the course of the year I have been working on this book, I have spoken with many people. One quotation in particular stays with me, to do with trust.

‘Maybe we have been naïve,’ Allan Søndergaard Jensen said. ‘But it's not wrong to see the best in people.’

The ‘Morg’ tag on Kirkeveien in Oslo

If I had looked left up the street in Kirkeveien while I was on my way home on the afternoon of 22 July, wondering who had attacked my city, I would have seen an old, almost completely faded piece of graffiti beneath a window with a mesh grating in front. If I had gone closer, I would have been able to make out the large, unattractive and irregular letters. At the foot of the ochre-painted block of flats facing out towards Kirkeveien and the number 20 bus, there was the tag in thick black ink: ‘Morg’.

Sometimes the solution is closer than you think, and the warnings are written on the wall where nobody notices them. A hesitant smile, narrow eyes beneath his light-coloured fringe: it was the guy who used to write ‘Morg’.

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 Helge Lurås, cited in Kamilla Simonnes, ‘Analyse i kaos’ [Analysis in chaos], Morgenbladet, 5 August 2011, http://morgenbladet.no/samfunn/2011/analyse_i_kaos.

2 Arshad M. Ali, ‘Skjeggbrødre og plaggsøstres dom over andre’ [Bearded brothers and veiled sisters' judgement of others], Stavanger Aftenblad, 7 February 2012, www.aftenbladet.no/meninger/kommentar/Skjeggbrodre-og-plaggsostres-dom-over-andre-2926934.html.

3 Per Sivle, ‘Tord Foleson’, in Olavs-Kvæde (Oslo: Bogvennen, 1901).

4 In Oslo District Court, 18 June 2012.

5 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. 128.

6 Aage Storm Borchgrevink, ‘Fra bloggosfæren med hat’ [From the blogosphere with hate], Aftenposten, 24 July 2011, www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/article4182214.ece.

7 In Oslo District Court, 17 April 2012. See, for example ‘Her er Breiviks ordrette forklaring’ [Here is Breivik's testimony word for word], TV2, 17 April 2012, www.tv2.no/nyheter/innenriks/22-juli-terror-oslo-og-utoya/her-er-breiviks-ordrette-forklaring-3757760.html.

8 Annemarte Moland, Ingunn Andersen and Øyvind Bye Skille, ‘Breivik kan ha blitt utsatt for overgrep’ [Breivik may have been subject to abuse], NRK, 28 November 2011, http://nrk.no/nyheter/norge/1.7894111.

9 This has emerged in police interviews, according to two independent sources.

10 Berit Grøholt, Hilchen Sommerschild and Ida Garløv, Lærebok i barnepsykiatri [Child psychiatry textbook], 4th edn (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2008), p. 373.

11 Sigmund Karterud, Theresa Wilberg and Øyvind Urnes, Personlighetspsykiatri [Personality psychiatry] (Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, 2010), p. 63.

12 The personality disorder with which Breivik was diagnosed is a serious mental illness, and the mother's ‘borderline personality structure’ can be interpreted as if the SSBU believed they had identified in her a borderline personality disorder.

13 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. 187.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Bjørn Stærk, ‘Det er en annen tid nå’ [It is another time now], VG Debatt, 29 July 2011, http://vgdebatt.vgb.no/2011/07/29/det-er-en-annen-tid-na/.

17 Jens Stoltenberg, ‘Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's New Year's Address’, 1 January 2012, www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/smk/Whats-new/Speeches-and-articles/statsministeren/statsminister_jens_stoltenberg/2012/prime-minister-jens-stoltenbergs-new-yea.html?id=667848.

18 22. juli-kommisjonen [22 July Commission], ‘Rapport fra 22. juli-kommisjonen’ [22 July Commission Report], ‘Preliminary English Version of Selected Chapters’, 13 August 2012, http://22julikommisjonen.no/en/content/download/472/3668/version/2/file/Complete_combined_English_version.pdf, p. 11.

19 Ibid., p. 9.

20 ‘Bedre beskyttelse av barns utvikling: Ekspertutvalgets utredning om det biologiske prinsipp i barnevernet’ [Better protection of children's development: The committee of experts' report on the biological principle in child welfare], Report for the Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion, NOU 2012: 5, p. 207.

21 Ibid., p. 16.