He had little use for his coat. His room was two steps from the front door, but he seldom turned to the left and opened it.
It’s only temporary, he said when he moved from Tidemands gate in the summer of 2006.
‘He’s hibernating,’ said Magnus, the childhood friend who’d become a fire fighter. He was sorry that Anders had disappeared from his life. Magnus was working full-time and shared a flat with his girlfriend as Anders moved back home and was swallowed up by the magical world of the mages. ‘It’s as if his life has fallen apart,’ Magnus’s girlfriend remarked.
A year into his hibernation, Anders had one of his rare encounters with friends. He told them he was collecting texts.
‘What for?’ they asked.
‘For a book about the Islamisation of Europe.’
‘Can’t you spend your time on something useful instead?’ Magnus asked.
It was important that somebody took on the task, Anders replied.
His friends didn’t believe what he said about the book. They thought he had become a compulsive gamer and worried about him. A few carried on ringing to tell him about parties and pre-parties for some time after he went into hibernation.
After two years in his room, in the summer of 2008, he suddenly felt like being sociable and rang his friends. Andersnordic logged off from the games; so did the other avatars he had created, like Conservatism and Conservative. All at once he was out and about, ordering the sweet drinks he preferred. ‘Ladies’ drinks,’ his friends teased. But he didn’t care. He had never liked beer.
Anders had changed. He had developed a one-track mind.
From always having countless irons in the fire, he had turned into someone engrossed in just one thing. Having launched so many business ideas, he was now monothematic.
‘He’s in a tunnel,’ said Magnus. Hoping he would soon see the light at the other end.
That summer, Anders delivered long lectures on the Islamisation of Europe.
‘The Muslims are waging demographic war,’ he said. ‘We’re living in dhimmitude and being conned by al-Taqiyya.’
‘Eh?’ said his friends.
‘The Muslims will take power in Europe because they have so many bloody children,’ Anders explained. ‘They pretend to be subordinating themselves, but they’ll soon be in the majority. Look at the statistics…’
The words poured out of him.
‘The Labour Party has ruined our country. It’s feminised the state and made it into a matriarchy,’ he told his mates. ‘And more than anything, it’s made it a place where it’s impossible to get rich. The Labour Party’s let the Muslims occupy…’
He started repeating himself. They generally let him go on for a while before they asked him to change the subject. His friends glossed over his peculiarities, the strange behaviour and extreme topics of conversation, because it was good that he was at least getting out. It surely wouldn’t be long before he was back to his old self.
When his friends finally told him to shut up, he generally stopped talking. He could not cope with the transition from didactic monologuing to ordinary chatting. He could only talk about what his friends called his ‘gloomy outlook on the world’.
‘Do you think anyone’s going to be interested in reading your book?’ asked one of his friends.
Anders just smiled.
In spite of everything, Anders’s friends were impressed by all the knowledge he had amassed. He liked discussing the Qur’an with Pakistani taxi drivers and ‘knew it better than the Muslims did themselves’, his friends joked. Anders’s vocabulary was peppered with Arabic expressions and foreign words. His friends grew accustomed to concepts like multiculturalism, cultural Marxism and Islamism.
* * *
Anders had found a new world. It had been lying there waiting for him, close beside the world of gaming.
He could sit in his room, in the same deep, black chair, with the same screen in front of him. He could click his way into Gates of Vienna instead of World of Warcraft. Into Stormfront instead of Age of Conan. Jihad Watch instead of Call of Duty.
One website led to another. He found the sites engrossing, compelling, bursting with new information. Gates of Vienna had an aura of proud, European history about it, with its many colour pictures of great battles of the past. There were Biblical quotations, urbane discussions. Stormfront had a harsher, more brutal style, referencing fascist propaganda of the 1930s. The website called itself the voice of the new white minority that was ready to fight, and its emblem bore the motto ‘White Pride, World Wide’.
Jihad Watch went in for criticism of Islam and adorned its web pages with Islamic symbols. Books promoted on the site were likely to have the words ‘Islam’ and ‘war’ in the title. At the top of the homepage, a green crescent and a pair of dark eyes stared out from behind a chequered Middle Eastern scarf.
Whether it was couched in refined terms or cruder ones, the message was the same. Crushing the influence of Islam in the West.
The websites had a strong sense of solidarity, of ‘us’. It’s us against the interlopers. Us as a group under threat. Us as the chosen people.
Us against them. Us against your lot.
He didn’t even have to do anything to be one of them; there was no need to try to impress anyone. All he had to do was join the mailing list to get the newsletters, or click onto the site to follow the debates. Sometimes they requested donations, to be shared out between the contributors, but nobody demanded anything of him.
Criticism was reserved for others: the state, feminists, Islamists, socialists and politically correct Western leaders. It was the injustices inflicted on Europeans in the past, it was the mass immigration in the present; it was beheadings and castrated knights, mass rape, the destruction of the white race.
The massacre of the European people had to be stopped!
He had found his niche. Again.
The New York Times best-selling author Robert Spencer, who founded the Jihad Watch site, was one of his favourites. So was Pamela Geller, who ran the blog Atlas Shrugs. He paid close attention to what the two Americans wrote. Bat Ye’or, alias Gisèle Littman, was another of the stars in this firmament. Born into a Jewish family in Cairo, she had languished as a subservient subject of Muslim society. Her family left Egypt after the Suez Crisis, and she later wrote Eurabia: The Euro–Arab Axis. Presiding over it all as moderator of Gates of Vienna was the American Edward S. May, using his pseudonym Baron Bodissey.
But the one who shone most brightly of all was a character calling himself Fjordman. He was an apocalyptic figure prone to spreading prophecies of doom. And he was Norwegian. Anders devoured everything that ‘The dark prophet of Norway’ wrote, downloading it for storage. ‘When I was born, Norway was 100% white,’ Fjordman wrote on Gates of Vienna. ‘If I reach a very old age and am still living here, I may be in a minority in my own country.’
There he had it. The truth, revealed in uncensored form. Fjordman wrote about Muslim men raping Scandinavian women, his analyses spanning the centuries as he discussed everything from Plato to Orwell. He predicted the ruination of Europe if the current trend continued and thought, as did Bat Ye’or, that the political elites had thrown in their lot with Muslim leaders in order to destroy European culture and transform the continent to a Muslim Eurabia.
Someone had to offer resistance.
There in the fart room, Anders felt a strong sense of kinship with Fjordman, who came across as uncompromising, brilliant and well-read. Everything Anders wanted to be.
In October 2008, using the profile Year 2183, he tried to make contact with Fjordman via the Gates of Vienna website.
‘When will your book be available for distribution, Fjordman?’ he asked, and then added, ‘I’m writing a book on my own,’ before concluding with ‘Keep up the good work mate. You are a true hero of Europe.’
No answer was forthcoming from his role model. Five days later, he adopted a more critical tone.
‘To Fjordman and ot
hers who are competent on this area,’ he began. ‘I’ve noticed from earlier essays that your solution is to attempt to democratically halt immigration completely and perhaps launch an anti-sharia campaign, or just wait until the system implodes in a civil war.
‘I disagree,’ he went on, criticising the others on the forum, such as Spencer and Bat Ye’or, for not daring to use the D-word. Deportation. Fjordman had only spoken up about stemming the Islamic tide by stopping Muslim immigration to Europe. What about the Muslims already in our country, asked Anders. Before long, half the population of Europe would be Muslim, he predicted, giving figures to illustrate the increasing demographic distortion in countries such as Kosovo and Lebanon, where the Muslim population was growing rapidly while the number of Christians fell.
‘The above is an illustration from my coming book (it will be free to distribute btw)’ he wrote of the statistics he had provided, and then reiterated that it was cowardly not to use the D-word. ‘I assume because it is considered a fascist method in nature, which would undermine your work?’ he wrote to Fjordman.
Deporting all Muslims was the only rational solution, he continued, because even if immigration were halted the Muslims already in Europe would have so many children that they would become the majority.
He never received a reply from the top names in the field, not from Robert Spencer, nor from Bat Ye’or, nor from Fjordman.
How could he make himself heard?
* * *
On the evening of 13 February 2009, there was a ring at the door. His mother opened it.
‘He doesn’t want visitors,’ she said.
‘We just thought…’
Three friends had decided to try to get Anders to come out. It was his thirtieth birthday. The birthday boy was sitting behind the door of his room, a few metres from the front door, and could hear everything they said.
His mother’s second cousin had not completely given up on him, either. As Anders’ sponsor, it was his duty to follow through with the relation he had introduced into the Masonic lodge. But each time he rang, Anders claimed to be busy with his book.
‘What’s that book of yours about?’
‘It’s a book about conservatism,’ Anders replied.
‘All right.’
‘And about the Crusaders, the Battle of Vienna in 1683…’
‘Oh, well,’ said Jan Behring.
On one occasion, Anders was obliged to attend. The fraternity was holding its annual family lodge meeting, at which members would sit with those they were related to, regardless of degree. Anders simply had to go along. It was a long ceremony; he lost valuable hours at the screen. It was no longer computer games drawing him in, but those texts. They took up all the space.
Some two hours later, the rituals had finally finished and everyone stood up and went out to the lobby. Anders followed them and waited for his older companion to go to the cloakroom, put on his coat and drive him home. When he finally offered to fetch the coats himself, the cousin told him this was just a break. The ceremony was only half over.
Anders could stand no more, and left the Armigeral Hall.
He must be disappointed that there aren’t more young men here, thought his relative.
Anders also withdrew from virtual friends he had been close to. Some hardcore players urged him to come back to World of Warcraft. ‘Things are going okay in the guild but new mage sucks compared to you,’ wrote a guy on his team. Several sent messages asking him to start playing again.
He was generally logged out of the games these days. He had stopped paying his monthly subscription to some of them, so he would not be tempted to join one more battle, one more raid, one more fight.
One day when he went out to buy a part for the computer, he ran into an old friend in the street. Kristian, with whom he had shared a business and who, on their last encounter late at night in the city, had accused him of being a closet homosexual.
‘What are you up to now?’ asked Kristian.
‘I’m writing a book,’ said Anders.
‘Great,’ said Kristian. He would finally have a use for all those swanky foreign words of his. But it was a bit weird, all the same, he thought. Anders had been primarily interested in earning money, as much as possible, as fast as possible. How could he make any money out of something as obscure as this? Crusaders? Islam?
* * *
Sometimes Anders consulted document.no, a Norwegian website run by former Marxist-Leninist Hans Rustad, who over the years had become a cultural conservative, distinctly critical of Islam. Document.no kept careful track of the latest news. Its debate forum attracted a steady stream of visitors.
A week before the general election, due to be held on 14 September 2009, the username Anders B posted his first comment on document.no. It was about why the media ignored Muslim riots. There was ‘an increasing trend in Western Europe towards acceptance of the media hushing things up’. He used the unrest in French towns around Bastille Day, 14 July, as an example. Le Monde and other French newspapers had refused to write about the riots, he claimed. But the quotes he used were part of a different story, namely that it was the French local authorities who had refused to answer questions from Le Monde, citing ‘official instructions’.
This sort of quotation out of context was to become a hallmark. Twisting and turning things to make them suit Anders B.
Responses poured in. Everyone replying to him on document.no that day took what he had written at face value. The response whetted his appetite. That first afternoon as a contributor to document.no he dipped into two other subjects: the killing of whites in South Africa – ‘a systematic, racially motivated genocide’ – and multiculturalism as an anti-European ideology of hatred with the aim of destroying European culture and identity as well as Christianity.
Now he was in his stride. He recommended everybody following the thread to read Fjordman’s book Defeating Eurabia so they would realise where Europe was heading. All those who dared to criticise multiculturalism were branded fascists and racists, a political correctness permitting no alternative view. ‘The Progress Party is one victim of this intolerance,’ he concluded just before midnight. His threads continued with a life of their own.
Inspired, the following morning he wrote an open letter to Fjordman, a year after trying to reach him on Gates of Vienna. This time he posted it in the comment section of document.no.
Fjordman,
I’ve now worked full-time for over three years on a solution-oriented work (compendium written in English). I have tried to concentrate on areas a little to one side of your main focus. A lot of the information I have gathered is not known to most people, including you.
If you email me at [email protected] I will send an electronic copy when I have finished it.
Two days later he received a reply.
Hello, this is Fjordman. You wanted to get hold of me?
Anders B answered straight away:
The book is ready but it will take a few months to prepare the practicalities for dispatch, will send it partially electronically. Defeating Eurabia is brilliant but it’s going to take time for books like these to penetrate the censorship effectively. I’ve chosen free distribution as a counter strategy.
There was silence from Fjordman.
* * *
Wenche, on the other hand, heard plenty about ‘the fjord man’, as she called him. Every day over dinner she got a little update. The words he used to describe the fjord man were ‘clever’, ‘my idol’, ‘such a good writer’. Hans Rustad was also part of the dinner talk. But Anders’s mother grasped the fact that the fjord man was number one. The one called Hans was a bit more cautious than the fjord man.
But sometimes she felt she’d had enough of Doomsday.
‘Can’t we just be satisfied with the way things are?’
* * *
Red or blue?
Would the Labour Party continue its mismanagement of the country?
A week after Anders’s debut on d
ocument.no, at nine o’clock on election-day morning, Anders suggested that the powers of good pool their resources to create a national newspaper to ‘wake Norwegians out of their coma’. On his thread, lots of contributors suggested likely collaborators in the project. Names and organisations were tossed out and then shot down. Anders gave an impression of tolerance and readiness to compromise.
‘We’re not in a position to pick and choose our partners,’ he wrote.
Just as in his days on the Progress Party Youth forum, when he was keen to form a youth politics platfrom on the right wing, he now envisaged a community of varying shades of opinion, but all pulling in roughly the same direction.
‘I know lots of people in the Progress Party and some of those with influence want to develop Progress, the party’s paper. I also know of some culturally conservative investors. How about working to consolidate Progress with document.no + get funding from strategic investors? Call the paper Conservative,’ he wrote at 11 a.m.
At half past he added a PS: ‘I can also help by bringing in some funding for the project from my lodge.’
As the polling stations closed that evening, the project appeared to be up and running. He wrote that he could set up a meeting with Trygve Hegnar, founder of the business and investment magazine Kapital, and Geir Mo, General Secretary of the Progress Party, to present this solution to them. ‘This election and the coverage given to it show us definitively that we can’t go on without a national mouthpiece.’
By the time the polling stations had been closed for an hour and a half Anders had drawn up a business plan, which he put on the site’s discussion area. There was Strategy no. 1, which he called the lowbrow model. It would have standard news, a few financial items and plenty of ‘lowbrow features’, like sex and pin-up girls. The problem with that was that you would lose a large number of conservative, Christian readers. Strategy no. 2, which he estimated would generate circulation of about a third that of no. 1, would have a good deal of financial content and minimal ‘lowbrow features’. And then there was Strategy no. 3, a hybrid of 1 and 2. With a substantial amount of financial content he was convinced it had the potential to poach a lot of readers from the business papers.
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway Page 17
