Kind regards,
Anders Behring
Oslo West FpU
Board Member FpU Majorstuen
If Breivik is to be believed, this was a time of great change in his life. Though stretching the law at times, he had proven his capability to succeed financially. And with this came his renewed hope of entering the political arena in some way.
His rules to himself read like a pamphlet titled “How to Become a Rock Star in the Progressive Party.” These axioms appear later in his manifesto, and are listed here in a template he surely had been planning since the time he quit high school. Mainly, they apply to preparing himself to face the minions and deal with the photo hounds. The list is eloquent testimony to his grandiosity. After all, his every moment, he was sure, would be examined and measured by and for history.
Whenever he became lax about his appearance, he would scold himself:
As a Justiciar Knight you will go into history as one of the most influential individuals of your time. So you need to look your absolute best and ensure that you produce quality marketing material prior to operation.
Take a few hours in a solarium [that would be a sun-tanning parlor in the United States] to look fresher.
Train hard [work out] at least seven days prior to photo session.
Cut your hair [and] shave. Visit a male [hair] salon if possible and apply light makeup. Yes, I know that this sounds repulsive to big badass warriors like us, but we must look our best for our [photo] shoot.
[Wear] your best clothing. For example, bring . . . different sets of clothing to the shoot. (1) Suit and tie (2) Casual wear (3) Sportswear (4) Military wear.
Additional notes:
Obviously you can’t bring guns or anything that might indicate you are a resistance fighter. Carefully consider the use of symbols as it might backfire. Cross of the martyrs is fine (St. George) but avoid any symbol associated with Nazism.
Advice:
Don’t let friends dig into your background, or ask too many questions while you are planning a secret military operation.
Say you play World of Warcraft or another MMO and have developed an addiction for it.
Say you’re going hardcore for the year and no one can convince you otherwise.
Say you think you are gay and in the process of discovering your new self and you don’t want to talk about it. And make them swear not to tell anyone.
Warning:
[No] buying wine and hiring whores.
Also, a choice of proper wording:
“Martyrdom operation”
“Demographical genocide and the reverse of the Islamization of Europe.”
STRUGGLE AND CHANGE
So, here was Anders Behring Breivik, a couple of years before his crimes, jotting down notes as to how he should approach the society he lived in. While other young people, a few he lived among as a neutral companion, were in the process of settling down in their jobs, choosing friends, dating, and perhaps making plans to marry, live their lives together, and raise a family, he was writing notes to himself on how to become the great political and historic figure he knew he would be.
Of all his strict advice—much of it toned to a fictional group of people he thought might care about him—this, above all, appears especially pitiful in print. In the axioms, however, there is a tone of warning, so ulterior that it is difficult to read without feeling a chill, without asking oneself: “Is this the chart of a man interested in advancing a right-wing agenda in order to better steer his home country away from what he, and many other Norwegians, young and old, felt was an invasion upon their beloved homeland? Or is this the markings of a man planning something extreme, something so unworldly vicious that it would shock their nation’s very soul?”
For Breivik, this was a time of struggle and change. He wasn’t accepted in the political roles he had envisioned for himself. The Progressive Party he seemed to adore so much kept him at arm’s length. And many Norwegians frowned upon his rapid accumulation of money, something he apparently did well.
In A Norwegian Tragedy, Aage Storm Borchgrevink writes: “In the compendium—his ‘master-work’—Breivik appears as consumer society’s lost son, the loser in the capitalistic war-zone, the player who could not separate reality from fantasies created on the web. The compendium describes two different persons: one awake and political . . . , and one sleeping, passive and unconscious consumer—almost like the plot in Matrix, a movie he refers to often.”
Borchgrevink compares Breivik to a character “walking right out of the novels by Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk.” In Ellis’s novel, American Psycho, Patrick Bateman spends his days working on Wall Street and his nights involved in torture and murder. He is a metaphor for American corporate life gone bad. Borchgrevink calls Breivik the Norwegian Psycho, “. . . the human who is almost completely superficial and empty, whose best friends are not people, but brands. Breitling Crosswind, Chanel Platinum, Egoïste.”
It is not surprising that this Norwegian author can blame capitalism for Breivik’s killing spree or compare him to a fictional character as metaphorically evil as Bateman. Breivik was obsessed with being successful in business, with succeeding in general. He wanted to prove everyone wrong, and he wanted to emerge from the Law-of-Jante state as the premier example of someone who didn’t follow the group.
In “The Norwegian Psycho,” an article by Shabana Rehman Gaarder, published in August 2012 on NRK (www.nrk.no), the author attempts to answer the question of whether the threat to society lies more in a state of mind without inhibitions, such as Breivik’s. “Breivik was not only an extreme rightist. He acquiesced to a culture where many are willing to do almost anything for money and success, to succeed, and to compare themselves with their neighbors.
“He also represents a culture that collects its view of the world from World of Warcraft and other utopias created by the Internet. Maybe the threat is more in a state of mind without inhibitions?
“Maybe this is also a signal of a generation. When Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho, he diagnosed the modern, extreme materialism in the USA. What does The Norwegian Psycho symbolize?”
Breivik saw his life, which had spiraled out of control, grow from “a so-called arrogant self-centered fuck” who didn’t care about anything outside his family and friends, to what he described as “something better.” He writes that, in seeking a more responsible level, he became a better man, but he had to pay a high price for that transformation.
“I left several aspects of my old life behind and had to completely re-establish myself on an existential level,” he writes. “It was hard because everyone I used to know felt I had abandoned them. I never burned any bridges though which might explain why many of them are still pressuring me to come back. Obviously, I do not intend to. If they knew my real intentions, my cover would be blown, and I would risk being exposed. I cannot allow that to happen.”
Breivik’s cover was not blown, and he was not exposed. Instead, he was pushed down by the political system, which would not accept him, and by the anti-capitalistic Norwegian society, which was not responding as he had hoped to his self-perceived business acumen. His options were disappearing, not because of immigration, and not because of the Muslims. He had attempted to break away from a restrictive, repressive, and bullying society, yet he had a need to connect to someone or something, and he was still treading water in this regard. Even he must have known he had failed. He had reached his turning point.
CHAPTER FIVE
MANIFESTO:
INDEPENDENCE FROM ANONYMITY
We are sick and tired of feeling like strangers in our own lands, of being mugged, raped, stabbed, harassed, and even killed by violent gangs of Muslim thugs, yet being accused of “racism and xenophobia” by our media. . . .
—ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO
No one knows the moment that Anders Breivik decided to focus on murder and violence, but we can guess. His future, in his own perceptio
n, went from visions of grandeur to something quite bleak, with limited opportunities. In 2005, after he quit actively participating in the Progressive Party, he was wealthy. According to the police, who investigated his funds six years later, he had fourteen bank accounts in seven different countries, ranging from the Caribbean to the Baltics. Slowly and systematically, he began to bring this money back to Norway through his mother’s account, making her an accessory to the sale of illegal diplomas and the laundering of hundreds of thousands of dollars. After getting away with his fraudulent schemes, he ended it a year later, afraid that if he pushed his luck, his new plans would be shattered. At this time, he moved back into his mother’s home and began writing his manifesto. This overwhelming and depressing document is essential to understanding Breivik’s mind at that time in his life. No other book on the topic has attempted to break down and explain the manifesto in detail—perhaps because of the enormity of the job, or maybe due to the fear that paying close attention to Breivik’s writing will validate him further. And perhaps it does.
However, this manifesto provides a unique understanding of what Breivik was thinking before he committed the killings. Furthermore, if we refuse to even consider what motivates such a killer, we leave ourselves vulnerable to others like him.
One might speculate how Breivik started to collect information for his document, and how radical his viewpoint was at the time he began. Almost certainly, the document was written by a man who planned to kill. When Breivik started writing his manifesto, he had already retreated from the world of politics, from his attempts to lead a professional life, and from most social activity. He was a castaway from society, had failed to make any sound connection with any group, and likely felt like a stranger in his own country. Something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what had gone wrong in his life or how he could change it.
Peter Svaar, a journalist for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), which is state-owned, told how, during these years, he had seen Breivik occasionally in the nightclubs. A former high school classmate of Breivik’s, Svaar would remark, after the massacre, how devastated he was that Breivik had been the one apprehended, declaring that his boyhood pal just didn’t fit the stereotypical role of a mass murderer. But wasn’t that what everybody had been saying?
“He was not a complete loner,” Svaar said, “or a person you couldn’t hang out with.” He describes Breivik as kind, loyal to his friends, strong-headed, and intelligent. Basically, he did not seem that much out of the ordinary to the casual observer, like Svaar. To him, the manifesto didn’t appear to be the work of a madman. “Rather,” Svaar went on, in what could be described as a measured, contradictory tone, “[Breivik] is cold, intelligent, and calculating. What keeps me up at night is the fact that he is not a monster. He is a normal Norwegian boy. He has buried himself in an incredible political analysis, and unfortunately, was resourceful enough to execute his plan.”
Other reports about Breivik during his self-imposed exile aren’t plentiful. Breivik admits in his writings that he had dropped out of society. This was no short sabbatical he had decided to indulge himself in for a few days, weeks, or even months. No, this timeout would amount to years, devoted to what would eventually be his last words to the world as a free man, his final credo. Not isolated from the world completely, he actively blogged on sites critical of current immigration politics, but he rarely physically interacted with the outside world anymore. Alone and secluded, Breivik continued to make attempts to connect with others sympathetic to his cause. His all-time hero in this social-media environment was the Norwegian Fjordman, which was the pseudonym of Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, a critic of immigration and, in particular, Muslim immigrants. Unknown in Norway before the attacks, he had, and still has, a large international following.
Breivik’s manuscript would eventually run to 777,724 words, 1,516 pages. There must have been times he felt imprisoned, shackled to his chair in front of his computer. He admits to playing assault computer games as much as sixteen hours a day when not detailing his ideology and goals. How, one must wonder, was he able to endure such a hermitage? Many metaphors must have been traveling through his brain, like how he had to eventually get out of his favorite chair, leave his mother’s basement, and dive back into the wave of life. But he remained devoted to his new “cause.”
The massive manuscript would go out to his hand-picked audience under the title 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, by Andrew Berwick. Again, this shadow of a man chose to use an alias for no apparent reason. Maybe he was worried that he might be apprehended before he’d be able to set off the bomb and murder the teenagers on the island of Utøya. Maybe grabbing for a fake name was just a habit. Breivik had used so many aliases throughout the years that perhaps he felt as if, through these killings, his old self would disappear and he would finally become his avatar. One thing is certain: his narcissistic side wanted him to take credit for his acts, to become infamous, to matter.
When Breivik’s manifesto was examined later, Time magazine described it as a template for right-wing terrorists. Terror experts wrote that it was little more than a mirror image of a Jihadist/al Qaeda manifesto.
The first two sections of the manifesto, Book 1 and Book 2, are mostly cut-and-paste mosaics of Breivik’s favorite authors, whose work he felt underscored his own philosophies. A great deal of it makes sense and has nothing to do with violence, probably because it’s not Breivik who wrote it. Breivik also copied Kaczynski the Unabomber’s manifesto, without giving him credit. He must have been inspired by Kaczynski’s eloquent writing and arguments about what was wrong with society, and he adapted the speech to his own cause by replacing the word left with politically correct. He also must have felt kinship with Kaczynski and his disillusionment with the world.
There is a difference in Book 3, where the language seems to be less eloquent and the text more disorganized. He himself claims that he was running out of time. One might speculate that when he started collecting information, he was more moderate in his choices of reference, and that through the years he became more and more radical and militant in his views. In this final book, Breivik takes the writings of others and twists their message into motivation for his violence. This part of the manifesto shows how he was able to plan and ultimately carry out his attacks. As discussed, it was a guide to those who followed him, regardless of his own fate, but it was also a way for Breivik to reassure himself and justify his actions.
His title refers to the American Declaration of Independence of 1776—and the essay by the blogger, Fjordman, contained in the manifesto. It is no accident that Breivik compares Norway’s situation to the citizens who broke away from British reign and formed the United States of America. He writes that it is necessary for Europe to break free from Islamic reign, which he believes is taking over the continent. The American Declaration of Independence is also the symbol of the free world, of protection of the basic human rights, such as freedom of property, speech, and the sovereign rights of a country, all of which Breivik felt were being threatened in Norway and Europe.
In Norway, a signatory state to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone is allowed to speak freely, provided they get police approval in advance. Most European countries have hate-speech laws, prohibiting citizens from making statements in public that threaten or ridicule a person or a group of people, or statements that incite hatred for someone due to their skin color, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religion, or philosophy of life. However, statistics show that hate-speech laws do not reduce hate crimes. The United States, unlike Europe, has protected individual rights and freedom of speech in its constitution. Even there, freedom of speech is limited by hate-speech laws. Becoming more “European” by limiting freedom of speech will not prevent more killings, because these killers want to be heard and will do whatever it takes to do so.
This is an example of how Breivik used facts to color and justify his actions. Yet it wasn’t fact that drove Breivik
, and it isn’t fact that drives other lone wolves. Revenge and rage are part of it. So is repression and a need to matter.
BOOK 1
The exhaustive, multi-footnoted document begins with an introduction about political correctness, which Breivik calls “cultural Marxism.” He also presents theories on “radical feminism” through the lens of political correctness. Book 1 is titled “What you need to know, our falsified history and other forms of cultural Marxist/multiculturalist propaganda.” It is a historic description of the crisis in Europe today and what led to it. He begins by quoting George Orwell: “Who controls the future controls the past.”
“I must admit,” Breivik writes, “when I first started the study on Islamic history and Islamic atrocities more than 3 years ago, I really had my doubts about the ‘politically correct’ information available. I started to scratch the surface and I was shocked as I uncovered the vast amount of ‘ugly, unknown’ truths concerning Islamic atrocities. There is a common misconception regarding Islam and Christianity. A lot of people believe today that Christianity still is and was as evil as Islam?! [sic] I can attest to the fact that this is absolutely incorrect. Jihadi-motivated killings, torture, and enslavement count for more than 10 times as [many as] Christian-motivated killings. However, the politically correct Western establishments want us to think otherwise.”
QUOTING FJORDMAN
Fjordman, Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, was forced to reveal his identity in 2011 after the attacks and has since tried to distance himself from Breivik. Like Breivik, Fjordman fills his writing with lengthy quotations from others. It was suggested by Norwegian media during the trial that Fjordman and some right-wing American bloggers such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were somehow responsible for Breivik’s acts. These accusations are ludicrous. Breivik would have taken any idea or ideology to heart. His fight against multiculturalism was really a fight and, ultimately, an attack on his own government.
The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer Page 9
