After
the Second World War, Scandinavia seemed to create model societies,
free of corruption and intolerance, moral, compassionate and fair. The
Danish people had bravely defied their Nazi occupiers throughout the war
and saved almost all of the nation’s Jews. In 1944, the Swedish
economist Gunnar Myrdal published a groundbreaking critique of the
racism faced by African-Americans in the United States. Myrdal’s study,
“An American Dilemma,” greatly influenced President Truman’s executive
order to integrate the United States military, the Supreme Court’s
ruling on behalf of school desegregation, and the creation of the modern
civil rights movement. In 1964, Gunnar Jahn, a former leader of the
Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, handed Martin Luther King Jr. the
Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. Jahn expressed the hope that
“conflicts between races, nations and political systems can be solved,
not by fire and sword, but in a spirit of true brotherly love.”
Today,
the third-largest political party in Sweden has the support of racists
and neo-Nazis. The leading political party in Denmark is not only
anti-immigrant but also anti-Muslim. And the finance minister of Norway,
a member of the right-wing Progress Party, once suggested that all the
Romany people in her country should be deported by bus. In “One of Us,”
the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad explores a dark side of
contemporary Scandinavia through the life and crimes of Anders Behring
Breivik, a mass murderer who killed 77 people, most of them teenagers,
as a protest against women’s rights, cultural diversity and the growing
influence of Islam.
On
the afternoon of July 22, 2011, at the age of 32, Breivik parked a van
filled with explosives outside the offices of the prime minister and the
Ministry of Justice in central Oslo. He lit the fuse and calmly walked
away. He was wearing a riot helmet, black boots with spurs, and a
homemade police uniform. The explosion killed eight people, though not
the prime minister, a member of the social democratic Labor Party, who
was working from home that day. Amid the confusion, Breivik fled Oslo by
car, drove about 40 minutes north and caught a ferry to the small
island of Utoya, where a summer camp for young members of the Labor
Party was held every year. Gro Harlem Brundtland — a former prime
minister of Norway, the first woman elected to that post, a feminist and
strong supporter of multiculturalism — was speaking there that day.
Breivik planned to decapitate her. He arrived at Utoya too late; she had
already left. Having told unarmed campers and staff members that he’d
been sent from Oslo to protect them, Breivik spent more than an hour
roaming the island and shooting them, often at point-blank range, with a
handgun and a semiautomatic rifle. “You will all die today, Marxists!”
he shouted with glee.
“One
of Us” has the feel of a nonfiction novel. Like Norman Mailer’s “The
Executioner’s Song” and Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” it has an
omniscient narrator who tells the story of brutal murders and, by
implication, sheds light on the society partly responsible for them.
Although those two books are beautifully written, I found “One of Us” to
be more powerful and compelling. For Capote and Mailer, the murderer
loomed as an antihero, a tragic figure defying the conventions and
expectations of mainstream America. Capote became infatuated with one of
the killers in his book, while Mailer had remarkably little interest in
the people whom Gary Gilmore robbed and killed for a few hundred
dollars. As Seierstad weaves the stories of Utoya’s campers with her
central narrative about Breivik — revealing the mundane details of their
family lives, their youthful ambitions, idealism and naïveté — the book
attains an almost unbearable weight. This tragedy isn’t literary and
symbolic; it’s the real thing.
The
Anders Breivik who emerges from these pages is pitiable, weak, pathetic
— a complex, deeply disturbed individual. Breivik’s mother suffered
from mental illness and abrupt mood swings, and yelled at him, “I wish
you were dead,” when he was only 4. She had a “profoundly pathological
relationship” with him, according to child psychiatrists, and Seierstad
implies it may have been incestuous. The darkness of the Breivik
household brings to mind the unsettling ties between Norman Bates and
his mother in the Hitchcock film “Psycho.” In both tales, the father is
nowhere to be seen. Breivik’s was a well-to-do Norwegian diplomat
incapable of displaying affection. He agreed to a divorce when Breivik
was a baby, showed little interest in the boy thereafter, and had not
seen his son once in the 17 years leading up to the massacre.
As
a child, Breivik kept pet rats and tortured them. Little girls were
afraid of him. He was a perpetual outsider, growing up in a fashionable
part of Oslo but lacking the wealth and self-confidence of his
neighbors. He later sought approval from different cliques in high
school: first from rebels and graffiti artists, then from aspiring
entrepreneurs and young activists with the right-wing, anti-immigrant
Progress Party. Breivik never seemed to fit. He was self-conscious about
his thinning blond hair, and got a nose job to look more Aryan. He wore
makeup, took steroids and called himself a metrosexual. A number of
friends assumed Breivik was gay, but he denied it and boasted about
relationships with women.
After
running a profitable Internet company that sold fake diplomas, Breivik
folded the business in 2006 and moved back in with his mother. He spent
most of the next five years in his bedroom. His mother cooked for him,
and he often ate alone in his room. Sometimes Breivik covered his face
or wore a mask when passing her on the way to the bathroom. At first, he
played video games like “World of Warcraft” and “Call of Duty: Modern
Warfare” obsessively, for as long as 17 hours a day. Later he trolled
right-wing and white nationalist websites like Stormfront. And then he
began to write a 1,500-page manifesto. It conveyed his hatred of
Muslims, the “radical feminist agenda” and the politicians responsible
for “cultural genocide against the indigenous peoples of Europe.” He
emerged from his room in 2011 as leader of the new Knights Templar, an
elite (and entirely imaginary) militant Christian group ready to begin a
new Crusade, eager to destroy every mosque in Europe and expel every
Muslim. He rented a farm, manufactured his bomb and prepared to start a
race war in Norway.
The
flaws in “One of Us” are relatively minor. Seierstad’s prose is vivid
and clear, but this translation does not always serve her well. There’s
an excess of exclamation points and the occasional odd phrasing: “He
. . . sauntered across the forecourt.” Some of the bomb-making details
are too instructive; there’s no need to provide the brand name of a
mixing tool that Breivik found essential for the lethal task. And the
author’s brief cameo in the story momentarily breaks the narrative spell
and seems to belong in the epilogue explaining her use of sources.
On
the whole, Seierstad has written a remarkable book, full of sorrow and
compassion. After spending years away from home as a foreign
correspondent in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq, bearing witness to the
crimes of other nations, she has confronted Norway’s greatest trauma
since the Nazi occupation, without flinching and without simplifying.
The complicity of Norwegian society is unspoken. “One of Us” must have
been difficult to write, and yet from the opening pages it has an
irresistible force. At times I wanted to put it down but couldn’t. In
Greek tragedy, the ending is always inevitable. In this one, as in life,
disaster might have been avoided countless ways. Breivik could have
been removed from his mother’s grasp and put in a foster home, as the
child psychiatrists had strongly recommended. A rural neighbor could
have noticed the bomb-making. The Norwegian security forces could have
responded to the attacks with a modicum of competence, erecting
roadblocks after the initial blast, using a helicopter to reach the
island quickly, finding a dinghy for its special officers that wouldn’t
sink. A teenage camper, so full of promise, could have saved his own
life by not trying to save his friends.
Mass
murderers often finish their crimes by committing suicide. Twice,
Breivik found abandoned cellphones, called the police and offered to
surrender. Both calls were somehow ignored, and the killing continued.
“This is politically motivated,” he said, when police officers finally
confronted him on the island. “The country is being invaded by
foreigners.”
The
central issue in Breivik’s trial was his sanity. One group of
psychiatrists declared him insane, a paranoid schizophrenic who killed
while in a psychotic state. A second group decided that he lacked
empathy but understood the meaning and consequences of his actions.
Unlike the typical murder defendant, Breivik desperately wanted to be
found sane, to go on trial and use the courtroom as a political
platform. He ridiculed the psychiatrists, arguing that if it were up to
them, all priests would have been “shut up in lunatic asylums because
they had had a calling from God!”
Seierstad
never speculates about Breivik’s sanity or his true motives, about
whether he’s a madman or a revolutionary. The greatest poets,
philosophers and theologians might never find that answer. The
definition of evil is still subject to debate. Breivik’s crimes took
place in a Western industrialized nation, and they were described on
social media as they occurred — some of the young campers were texting
until the moment they died. But massacres have become commonplace
elsewhere, with victims who remain nameless and unknown. In Nigeria,
Boko Haram has been kidnapping schoolgirls, enslaving them, and
decapitating innocent civilians with chain saws. In Kenya, the Shabab
has been killing Christians and burning down churches. In Iraq, the
Islamic State has been crucifying nonbelievers and proudly destroying
archaeological sites. “Hell is empty,” Shakespeare wrote in “The
Tempest.” “And all the devils are here.”
More
than two decades ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama
predicted “the end of history.” Full of American triumphalism at the end
of the Cold War, he argued that “the universalization of Western
liberal democracy” had come. Those days now seem like a distant era. As
Seierstad so eloquently and painfully illustrates, even in the heart of
prosperous Scandinavia, history has returned with a vengeance.
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