Todellisuus

Springsteen halukas osallistumaan Utöya-muistotilaisuuteen


Bruce Springsteen on valmis esiintymään joukkomurhan uhrien muistotilaisuudessa.

Oslo. Bruce Springsteen on konserttimatkalla Norjassa, kun maassa vietetään joukkomurhan ensimmäistä vuosipäivää 22. heinäkuuta.

Norjalaislehti Aftenposten tapasi tähden Sevillassa ja sai kuulla, että tämä on kiinnostunut osallistumaan muistotilaisuuteen.

"Minua ei ole pyydetty osallistumaan päivän tapahtumiin, mutta jos minuun otetaan yhteyttä, olen luonnollisesti kiinnostunut tekemään jotain", hän sanoi lehdelle.

Springsteenillä on konsertti Oslossa 21. heinäkuuta ja Bergenissä viikkoa myöhemmin.

Aftenpostenin saamien tietojen mukaan vuosipäivän järjestäjät toivovat, että Springsteen voisi esiintyä Norjan työväenpuolueen nuorisojärjestön AUF:n suljetussa muistotilaisuudessa Utöyan saarella.

Breivik alkoi suhtautua lähes pakkomielteisesti maahanmuuttoasioihin vuoden 2006 tienoilla, minkä jälkeen miehen kanssa oli lähes mahdotonta keskustella muusta kuin politiikasta.

Samoihin aikoihin, kun Breivik mutti asumaan takaisin äitinsä luo, hän myös alkoi kutsua Norjan politiikkoja -monikultturisteiksi- eikä enää hyväksynyt muita näkökantoja.

Verdens Gang ja Aftenposten kertovat, että Breivik on lähettänyt yhdistysrekisteriin hakemuksen, jossa hän ilmoittaa haluavansa perustaa fasistipuolueen nimellä "Norjalainen fasistipuolue ja pohjoinen liitto".

Breivikin mukaan puolueen tavoite olisi demokraattinen fasistivalta tai parlamentin tuen saaminen norjalais-pohjoismaalaiselle valtiolle. ...

Breivikin asianajaja Tord Jordet vahvistaa, että tämä haluaa perustaa puolueen ja lähettänee hakemuksensa myöhemmin uudelleen. Jordetin mukaan monet ovat ilmaisseet toiveensa tehdä poliittista yhteistyötä Breivikin kanssa, mutta vankilan kirjesääntöjen vuoksi hänen on vaikeaa värvätä tukijoita.

Anders Breivik: Did Norway’s unrepentant mass murderer have an unhealthy relationship with his mother?


Anders Breivik with a woman believed to be his sister Elisabeth and his mother Wenche Behring

Stefanie Marsh 

Published at 12:01AM, March 3 2015


Ila prison is a desolate 1930s structure that squats just outside Oslo, untypical in its careworn appearance of the affluent country in which it was built. Somewhere in Ila’s solitary wing, a not quite middle-aged blond man with a receding hairline, a high, reedy voice and a nose that, as a teenager, he had for reasons of vanity, reconstructed by a surgeon’s knife, is planning his great future. He thinks of himself as one of the world’s most brilliant intellectuals.

He has a manner that unsettles the screws here — as a result, their turnover rate is high. “Pleasant,” is how anyone who actually remembers having met the strikingly unmemorable Anders Breivik describes him: the guards find themselves telling him trivial, yet intimate things about themselves. “How was your holiday?” he will inquire politely if they’ve been away for a few days. Then, more unsettlingly, “And your children?” It is often at this point that a guard will start thinking about applying for a transfer.

Four years ago, aged 32, Breivik murdered 77 people – most of them children, many shot in the face at close range, trapped on the small island of Utoya. He shot them dead in the water when they tried to swim to safety and winkled them out of their hiding places behind rocks or pieces of furniture. Dressed as a police officer, he promised to help them — then out would come his semi-automatic Glock 17. He had wanted to fill his bullets with liquid nicotine ordered from China, which would have made death more painful but reluctantly abandoned this special touch because he was worried about contravening the Geneva Convention.

One might hope that, serving his 21- year sentence in solitary, Breivik has nightmares about what he has done, but this is not so. He prides himself on the murderous events of July 22, a pre-emptive dismantling, as he sees it, of the next generation of left-wing enemies of Norway: feminists, “cultural Marxists”, multiculturists and so on. The idea had come to him a year earlier, in the squalid little spare room — the “fart room”, he called it — of the apartment he shared with his mother.

The car bomb he detonated beneath government buildings in Oslo and the shooting dead later that day, on Utoya, of 69 mostly teenage members of the youth league of the Norwegian Labour party were, in his opinion, “the most sophisticated and spectacular attack in Europe since the Second World War”. It had been, he told the police, when they arrested him, “the worst day of my life. Unfortunately it was necessary.” He was pretentious and staggeringly grandiose. As if recalling a great historic event from the vantage point of the distant future, he said: “It’s a nightmare that I don’t think you can understand until you’ve carried it out. And I hope you won’t have to experience it, because it was sheer hell. Taking another person’s life.”

Even this small portrait of the still youthful mass killer poses the question of whether or not Breivik is mad. Two sets of forensic psychiatrists interviewed him before his trial. The first pair decided he was a paranoid schizophrenic, therefore, legally, not responsible for his acts. There was an outcry. The replacement psychiatrists came up with a vaguer diagnosis — something about narcissistic personality disorder — but nothing that would see him escape prison for an asylum. Breivik, more than anyone, was relieved that he’d not been written off as a mad man as all his accomplishments would have been for nothing.

The question as to whether this strange, pretentious, robotic man is mad or sane; how he came to be one or the other, or possibly both has finally been pieced together in a very fine book, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway. You may know Åsne Seierstad for her book The Bookseller of Kabul — her work as a journalist usually takes her to the Middle East. Even the cruellest acts make sense, given their context. This book challenges the notion that the events of July 22 came out of nowhere. Even the worst combination of bad genes and bad luck are usually diverted, in the course of a lifetime, from finding expression in an event such as Utoya. Why, in Breivik’s case, were they not?

A rival book by Breivik’s father, Jens Breivik, was published a couple of weeks ago. Its title translates as, “My Guilt”. Does Breivik’s father still love his son, someone asked him in an interview. The question, you realise when reading Seierstad’s account, should have been: did he ever?

Seierstad discovered in Jens a cold man who had difficulty relating to other people, whether they were colleagues in the Norwegian diplomatic service, where he worked, or members of his own family. Anders was 15 years old the last time he saw his father. Sooner or later Jens would lose or terminate contact with all four of his children.

Seierstad also spoke to Anders’ mother, Wenche Behring. The interview took place only three days before Behring’s death from cancer in March 2013, and Behring spoke more openly than ever before, perhaps unintentionally revealing things about her relationship with her son that seem to provide a key to his pathology. Behring had become her son’s prime care-giver after she and Jens divorced, when Anders was just over a year old. Behring was in a psychiatric hospital suffering from a breakdown soon after her son was arrested — she did not appear at his trial. Within weeks of his conviction, in August 2012, she was in a hospital bed with cancer.

In the final years of her life, Behring didn’t have a bad word to say about her son. She described him to friends as a wonderful person best suited to join the Red Cross, helping starving children in Zambia. Yet her attitude towards her son was far more ambivalent when he was a boy. “Some time, after Anders grew up,” says Seierstad, “the power dynamic between the two of them switched.”

When he was still in the womb, Behring half regretted that she had left it too late to abort him. When he was born, she found him defective. As a toddler, she wanted him medicated for tantrums that only she seemed to witness. Mother and son came to the attention of social services. Seierstad quotes extensively from their reports: one or two of them come close to being clairvoyant. They describe Behring as an unstable mother, thought to be suffering from borderline personality disorder, as exemplified by the abrupt vacillations of her feelings towards her son between overt love and disgust. “I wish you were dead,” they heard her say to him. “Anders’s care situation is so precarious,” a child psychiatrist warned about the boy, then three, “that he is at risk of developing more serious psychopathology.”

When, on July 22, 2011, police confronted Behring about what her son had been doing on Utoya, the first thing she said was: “How could he do this to me?” The second was: “It’s almost worse than being lesbian or homosexual. It’s the very worst thing that could happen to a person. What will people say about me?” Seventeen years earlier, a friend of Anders’ had finally spelt out to him what everyone in their circle took to be self-evident: “Anders,” he said gently to his friend, “come out of the closet.” Breivik was already in the process of carving out a narrative about himself that bore little resemblance to reality. He talked eagerly about prostitutes; complained that feminism had ruined women and emasculated men such as himself; listed as his mother’s carer, he had been exempted from military service. He seemed uninterested in women, then suddenly ordered a mail-order bride from Ukraine whom he fell out with and never married. Shortly before the Utoya massacre, Breivik took photographs of himself for the media to use when the story broke. From his diary, we know he had been on a sunbed. The photographs show a tanned, photo-shopped Breivik wearing home-made paramilitary uniforms or in a scuba suit, bearing a rifle. He looks as if he’s on his way to a fancy dress party, a parody of masculinity.

Jens seems to have regarded his son as a letdown too. By the time he cut him off — after Anders was arrested for the second time for vandalism (he’d styled himself a graffiti artist), he had decided he was a lazy, apathetic creature. The last time father and son spoke was on the phone. Anders had made the call. The conversation went nowhere. Anders was 26. The next year his mother persuaded him to move in with her.

I meet Seierstad in Oslo. She lives in a magnificent house on a wide, proud residential street, which happens to flow directly into the street Breivik used to live in as a child: not such a surprising coincidence — barely half a million people live in tiny Oslo. Seierstad gives me the grand tour of Breivik’s three Oslo residences in less than half an hour.

Today the pavements are slippery with ice and snow, but unsullied by the usual slime and detritus of urban street life. “What’s wrong with Norway?” the foreign press demanded to know when the Breivik story broke. Nothing, is the answer; there being nothing typically Norwegian about what Breivik did. To make his one tonne bomb, he took inspiration from Timothy McVeigh. He studied the bomb-making recipes of the Baader-Meinhof gang; its members had discovered that the best way to pulverise fertiliser pellets was by sticking them in a food blender. Breivik bought 12.

“A mother without boundaries,” is how Seierstad describes Behring. We’ve arrived outside a purpose-made residential block on Hoffsveien, a noisy arterial road in Oslo’s Skoyen district. Seierstad points out a corner apartment on the first floor: it’s where Breivik and his mother lived in the five years leading up to Utoya. We stand staring at the building for clues about its former inhabitants. Whoever lives there now has left a pair of crutches on what used to be Behring’s veranda. It’s the kind of apartment complex that appeals to Norwegians of retirement age. Anders would have been one of the only young people around, though rarely seen, so busy was he on his computer, in the fart room, writing his “great book”, so his mother would half boast to her friends. One of the things her son was actually writing was this, in his diary: “My mother was infected with genital herpes by her boyfriend when she was 48. She now shows the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old.”

The layout of the apartment implies something not quite right about relations between mother and son. There is only one bathroom and, to get to it, Anders would have had to pass through his mother’s bedroom. When he was little, things at home seem to have been more intimate still. In public, Behring, we know from the social workers’ notes, would aggressively discuss her sexual fears and fantasies in inappropriate settings, such as her son’s kindergarten. Seierstad tells me about neighbours of Behring’s during Anders’s childhood who had felt uncomfortable about the number of men coming in and out of her apartment at night. Were they paying her? A woman remembers meeting Behring when she was six. Behring had told her that the geometric patterns on her bedroom curtains “look like people f***ing’’.

There are other troubling stories in Anders’s childhood: Behring complaining to a social worker that her five-year-old son pressed up against her at night and would “force himself on her’’; Behring talking about the undressing game she played with Anders — who can get their clothes off first? There were times when Behring became depressed to the point of near incapacity. Social services arranged for a married couple to look after Anders on weekends but they were disconcerted when Behring asked Anders’s weekend-father to allow Anders to touch his penis as she felt it was important for a boy’s sexuality. On her death bed, Behring hinted strongly to Seierstad that she had been molested by her brothers. Separately she’d said: “Obviously, what happened to Anders has to do with my childhood too.” Shortly after her adult son moved into her apartment, Behring split up with a long term partner and Anders gave her a vibrator.

Breivik’s retreat behind a grandiose false mask, and the paranoia and bitterness that would fuel his attacks in Utoya, began in his teens — he was always the annoying guy who never “got it”. At 18, he joined the far-right Progress party; thwarted in a political career, he played the stock market, then set up a half-baked operation selling fake diplomas online. He felt unfulfilled but his life wasn’t a failure. He made money. Yet when he moved back with his mother he began to degenerate. He stopped working out, his interest in computer games became all-consuming. On New Year’s Eve 2008 he spent all night logged on to World of Warcraft. From computer games, he turned his attention to militant anti-Islamic websites, but failed to build up the following he craved. He became more reclusive, emerging from his bedroom covering his face with his hands or a mask. His mother did his cooking and cleaning. Much later, she would tell police that she thought something was wrong from 2010 but Anders scared her. His half-sister seems to have known something was wrong a long time before that, all the way in California. She wrote to a warning letter to her mother saying that Anders was wasting away his life on his computer. Behring wrote back: “You’re just jealous.”

It’s not true that Behring had the intelligence of a ten-year-old. But a generous person might argue that she had the naivety of one. Among the questions she never asked her son were: Why is there a semi-automatic Sturm Ruger rifle in your room? What’s in the parcels you keep getting in the post? Why are there rucksacks of rubble outside your bedroom door? What are you storing in the communal attic?

In 2009 Breivik registered Breivik Geofarm, allegedly a farming company specialising in melons, roots and tubers. By October 2010 he had started ordering bomb-making equipment off the internet. Seierstad reels off the full list: ethanol, acetone, caustic soda, flasks, glasses, bottles, funnels, thermometers, a facemask, powdered aluminium (to intensify the force of the blast: he told the Polish supplier he wanted to mix it with boat varnish), sodium nitrate, a several-metre-long fuse (“new years’ celebrations”). Most of these items arrived at his mother’s house via the post. Breivik went around pharmacies in Oslo sourcing enough aspirin — kilos of it — from which to extract acetylsalicyclic acid. Via Ebay he bought powdered sulphur from America. It arrived bearing the label “Yellow artist paint dust”. In May 2011 he ordered smoke grenades, tyre-shredding spike strips, flashing blue lights, a GPS, silencers and firearms magazines. Still, his mother didn’t twig. In late June he rented a farm, 140km north of Oslo, and moved there the same month, not to grow melons, but to construct a bomb.

Everyone in Oslo looks healthy and carefree and is tramping around in seal skin boots and woolly hats. It is a charming place, its blue skies unclouded by the threat of poverty that hangs over next-door Sweden, where unemployment among young people is almost 20 per cent. In oil-rich Norway, Anders’s materially comfortable upbringing was normal. What’s wrong with Norway? Nothing except perhaps that firearms are legal. Breivik attended shooting classes at the Oslo Pistol Club to get his licence. His only girlfriend told Seierstad that Anders enjoyed discussing guns. Then again, so did lots of people.

Only twice did the young Anders show a tendency to violence. There’s a story that, as a boy, he once smeared a cat’s anus with mustard. Then, in his self-consciously rebellious teens, he once punched his headmaster in the chest. But generally, he was a nondescript social irritant who was odd in a way never quite strange enough to merit concern. He called himself “a metrosexual”, wore foundation, bronzing powder in summer. For his receding hairline, he ordered Regaine from America. For his puny body, he lifted weights and experimented with steroids. He adopted the rolling walk of a rap artist, the street patois of his Muslim friends. He went through a breakdancing phase. He had a nose job. People found him annoying, vacant, pleasant or empty.

At his trial, Seierstad tells me, Breivik had spoken with grave disappointment about his failed plan to decapitate Gro Harlem Bruntland, Norway’s first woman prime minister. “I spoke to Gro and she had a theory about why he might have wanted to target her. She was prime minister from when he was two until he was 17. Her critics said she turned Norway into a ‘vagina state’. Weak men often hate powerful women. You find that often in jihadists too.”

Certainly Breivik feared women. When the new order was in place, he wrote in his manifesto, divorced fathers would always be given custody of their children; in factories set up in low-cost countries surrogate mothers would produce ten racially appropriate Norwegian children, until artificial uteruses took over the job. Whenever his mother brought up the subject of children, Anders told her he intended to have seven.

His mother and father met in the laundry of a building they were both living in at the time. Jens was divorced, with three children he never saw. Behring had a daughter by a man whom she had deleted from her life. Now she became pregnant again. The couple married. Soon afterwards, Jens was posted to London. His wife joined him at Christmas, her daughter, and six-month old Anders in tow, but she hated it, returned to Norway and filed for divorce. “You feel sorry for Anders when he is a child,” says Seierstad. “Wenche is a bad mother. Maybe it’s not her fault but she doesn’t give him the care that a child needs.”

Two years later the child psychiatric reports on Anders are made: “The whole family is affected by mother’s poor psychological functioning,” reads one. “Anders is the victim of his mother’s projections of paranoid, aggressive and sexual fear of men generally.” There exists a, “profoundly pathological relationship between Anders and his mother’’. His mother lived in her head and couldn’t relate to other people. Her relationships were characterised by anxiety. Her thoughts became illogical under pressure. The boy seemed to be suffering — he didn’t cry when he was hurt, he lacked spontaneity and seemed to take no joy in life. Social services wanted him fostered. Anders’s father, Jens, now living in Paris, stepped in but when his ex-wife threatened legal action, changed his mind about bringing Anders to live with him in France. A nursery teacher wrote a glowing report on the improvement in Anders’ behaviour. The teacher was a friend of Behring’s. Anders remained with his mother.

You would have to have a very hard heart not to feel sorry for the young Anders , says Seierstad. And a very soft one to feel any pity for the adult version. All his life, this empty boy-man was in search of a crusade. In the end he just made one up: the Knights Templar would lead the civil war and construction of new society. Breivik held the highest rank in the organisation and had been asked to write its manifesto, in 2002, at its inaugural meeting, in London. It was all a fantasy.

Fear and hatred of women and Muslims converged. Muslims, he wrote further, would be forced to convert to Christianity, be baptised with new Christian names, forbidden from having more than two children or using their mother tongue. All mosques would be demolished. A ban would be imposed on all correspondence with Muslims outside Europe. Breivik, wrote that “phase one” of his plan would last until 2030. Phase two and three would see successful coups against governments in Europe and the execution of traitors. There would be peace by 2083.

At Breivik’s trial, a professor of psychiatry, Ulrik Fredrik Malt, briefed the court on his impressions of the defendant. “I did not see a monster. I saw a deeply lonely man.” It was Malt’s view that Breivik’s “personality and extreme right-wing ideology are combined in an effort to get out of his own prison’’.

It was a humble reading of Breivik’s motivations, one that seems to fit what we now know about his inner life. A fifth psychiatrist characterised Breivik as “a failure.” Of course, Breivik hated it. “I have never,” he told the court, “been rejected by anyone in my whole life.”

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad is published by Virago