21 years in prison, which can be indefinitely extended by 5 year stretches is – as all of Europe knows – what Norvegian judges thought Anders Breivik deserved for the crimes committed  on Friday 22 July 2011.

He is indeed the 32 year old white middle class male Norwegian who, having until then lived an apparently blameless life, carried out a carefully prepared act of mass murder in pursuit of a political aim, that of inflicting maximum damage on the Norwegian Labour Party. Anders Breivik had the means, the capacity, the will and the opportunity; the slaughter came like lightning out of a clear blue sky leaving 77 people dead, many more seriously injured and the country in shock and confusion. The self-image of Norway as a close-knit community relatively untouched by the social ills and tensions of the rest of Europe was blown apart.

Breivik began his onslaught by positioning a 950 kg car bomb of his own construction outside the main government complex in Oslo. Dressed as a policeman he then walked to a car and drove away. When the bomb exploded during office hours at 15.25 the force was massive, caused fires in several buildings and left a large crater. 8 people were killed outright and many more hit by the blast.

Breivik then made his way to Utoya island where over 500 members, mostly young, of the AUF, the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party, had gathered for their summer camp. He produced some ID at the entrance and claimed he had been sent to check things following the Oslo bomb explosion. As was normal the camp was relaxed about security and, once inside, Breivik was able to carry out his attack, unimpeded, with a hand-gun and semi-automatic rifle. He fired over 250 shots, some close range to the head. By the end of the slaughter 69 were dead 34 of whom were aged between 14-17; many more were badly hurt physically and mentally. The police arrived while Breivik was still shooting but he surrendered himself without resistance.

Careful planning

Breivik’s planning appear to have left nothing to chance. He had taken an isolated farm ostensibly for a vegetable growing business. Thus in May 2012 he was able to buy in 6 tonnes of chemical fertiliser without arousing suspicion. He had also used the internet to buy other chemicals for bomb making from a firm in Poland. In doing so he had come to the notice of security authorities but the substances were legal, had legitimate uses and the amounts were so small that they did not provoke deep inquiries. He apparently successfully tested his bomb formula in June 2011. His guns were acquired legally. As an individual, Breivik had the advantage of total surprise. He had attracted no security coverage which might not have been the case had he been part of a recognised extremist group, and he blended completely with his social surroundings. He emerged alone from the routine of everyday life to act out his ideological convictions and his policeman’s uniform was the guarantee of acceptance  in Norway’s friendly environment.

Breivik’s planning also included intensive mental preparation for the act of killing. Among his techniques is reported to have been a video shooting game which he played for hours in order to reinforce his will to act. Mass close up killing may seem straightforward on paper, an essentially abstract scenario, or in the virtual world of video games, but in everyday life, whatever the social circumstances, ‘normal’ human beings, at least as civilians, do not go about killing their fellow men in cold blood in this way without there being some sort of fracture in the underlying psyche, unconscious though it may be at the outset. The reality is too harsh, too close to core humanity, and very different from the distant slaughter of innocent people which follows the launch of a drone attack or a missile in a war situation.

It is significant that Breivk described himself as a ‘warrior’ in a war against the spread of Islam perhaps in order to legitimise what he described as ‘cruel and necessary measures’ and enable him to block out any doubts and traces of fellow feeling. Perhaps he had heard somewhere of the ‘psychological burden of mass shootings’ that Heinrich Himmler’s mobile killing units apparently experienced World War II. At any rate he showed no remorse at his trial in September this year and apologised to ‘all nationalists in Europe’ for not killing more of his target.

At the time of his trial it became quite clear that Breivik had given a great deal of thought to exploiting the media to reinforce his ideological message and his self-conceived mandate to protect ethnic Norwegians from multiculturalism and other perceived evils such as political correctness and extreme Marxist attitudes. He blamed the Labour Party’s policies for these things and in particular immigration. He had been active putting out his anti-Islam views on the internet and in various social media networks and just before the June 2011 attacks he had distributed a 1500 page manifesto written in English.

The roots of action

During his trial Breivik came across as right-wing extremist with a mistrust of democracy and belief in force as a means of removing obstacles to his particular vision. Anyone conversant with Europe’s tempestuous history will know that this sort of political activist has been around the continent for some time now and conditions have encouraged the breed in that there has been a growth both in groups who do not conveniently fit the social ‘norms’ of the majority and in perceived threats to the nationalistically minded.

The downside of technological progress in mass communications is their potential for extensive dissemination of partial views and disinformation and their contribution to the rapid intensification of emotions, resentments and solidarity among people who not long ago would have had difficulty being in close contact let alone putting a caucus of opinion together. Soon after the attacks of July 2011 members of the extreme right-wing in Germany were declaring on the internet that, while rejecting the bloodbath, they saw Breivik’s action as a signal against the increasing takeover of Europe by foreigners and a blow against the growing left-wing. British far right extremists have spoken in similar vein.

The political signposts on Breivik’s path to Utoya seem to indicate no more than the common symptoms of a particular range of extreme right-wing reactions and emotions. He had been a youth member of the conservative Progress Party which he criticised for accepting multiculturalism and politically correct views. According to some witnesses he may have attended neo-Nazi events while at secondary school. His internet postings were critical of Islam and he had contacts with extreme right wing groups elsewhere in Europe. Anti-feminist and anti-Marxist views were also part of the pattern.

His long term plans included founding his own national newspaper and setting up a Norwegian equivalent of the English Defence League. Conspicuous perhaps, at least with the benefit of hindsight, were his apparent obsession with things military, the computer game World of Warcraft, war terminology and his self-styled crusader image. According to his neighbours he could sometimes be seen in military style clothing. Breivik saw and presumably still sees himself as a patriot and ‘cultural conservative’. There is no single feature of his profile which might have invited the close interest of the authorities given the climate of the times which is preoccupied with terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and their like. If he had been a subject of prior suspicion his  picture, taken as a whole, would almost certainly have attracted attention.

A product of Cyberculture

Breivik refused to recognise the court which tried him in September this year. It found him guilty and sane, and gave him the maximum sentence, a prison term of 21 years which can be extended by 5 year stretches indefinitely. There are of course psychological and medical definitions of madness and there is respectable opinion that regards madness as a fact of culture, a ‘natural’ part of man’s ontological condition that becomes perceptible through the lens of cultural norms and differences.

Viewed from today’s perspective the mores and ways of thinking of ancient civilisations and ‘primitive’ peoples can look totally abnormal. And no doubt the reverse would be true. Breivik’s actions were clearly foreign to any modern Norwegian and European cultural norms although the obsessive ideological leanings which inspired them have some purchase among his fellow countrymen and elsewhere in Europe. To that extent he is truly a man of his times, but one who, if not mentally adrift, appears to have come loose from his social moorings and metamorphosed into a kind of cyber robot whose orientation consists of www, digital language and computer screen instructions.

Psychologists and social workers will look hard at his childhood, schooling and other stop-off points for micro examination of the individual. But perhaps we should also remind ourselves of the dark depths of human nature and persist with asking what can happen when an individual like Breivik, so profoundly alienated from the warmth of human roots, meets the non-human landscape of computer games and internet culture. Perhaps he merely represents the extreme end of a 21st century cultural shift into values derived from a parallel universe, a purely abstract world of digital skills (and errors) and cyberspace communication with its emotional stimuli, its cross-border ‘bonding’ and total lack of the discipline, checks and balances of the real life human context. Facebook, twitter and their like are remarkable inventions; they offer immediate contact but they also lack body to body, face to face, eye to eye communication, the unspoken signals of raw human reality without which culture is crippled. The scope for misinterpretation and manipulation is huge.

A shadow over the future?

The future is largely unknowable. It would be reassuring to think that Breivik will have no resonance in Europe in the years to come, that people are too sane, too civilised to do anything other than dismiss him as a murderous crank who slipped through a gap in the apparatus of state responsibility. But Europe has never lacked cranks and ambitious motivated men of action. Nor has it ever lacked the witches’ brew of ideology and scarred humanity. There are well over 800 million people in the continent if Russia is included, and they are all crammed together in kaleidoscope of different nations and groupings with different historical legacies, sometimes in competition with each other.

The vast majority no doubt aspire to the ‘good life’ to be had from the all embracing free market economy but there is no guarantee that this will continue to perform without hitting unpleasant obstacles. The management of interdependence among Europe’s many components is an imperative that is bound cause severe strains and provoke fragmentation and capitalism itself breeds its own problems which are exacerbated by racial and cultural diversity Crude nationalism is never far beneath the surface, nor are the community figures and politicians who feed and exploit it. The attraction of the ‘hero’ figure can be as real and convincing to social drop-outs and extremists as it is to the devotees of saints and filmstars and today modern technology offers tempting possibilities.

Caspar Thomas October 2012