Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
The first indication that Norway was under siege took place on July 22, 2011, when Anders Breivik, who had described himself as a “commando wreaking revenge on a too-liberal and complacent Norwegian society,” bombed key government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people.88 In a matter of hours after the bombing, having donned a police uniform, he traveled to a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utøya where he systematically gunned down sixty-nine teenage campers. It was a horrifying rampage that shocked all of Norway and most of Europe.
Days before the Oslo bombing, Breivik released a fifteen-thousand-plus-page manifesto, emailing it to more than one thousand recipients, documenting the preparations he made for his attacks, and setting forth his political manifesto in which he said he was providing a justification for his actions. The manifesto reveals how meticulous Breivik was in planning the attacks and assembling not only the weapons and explosives, but also the logistics for the attack. He acquired a Volkswagen van small enough to avoid requiring a commercial truck registration or license, the requisite amount of weapons and ammunition for his attacks, and enough explosives to set off multiple bombs at the government buildings in Oslo. In a striking section of his manifesto, Breivik copies directly from Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber manifesto, a rant, albeit sophisticated and internally logical, that decried the ultimate collapse of human society because the machines and the “techies” who built them were the enemies of human civilization. Although we now believe that Kaczynski’s visceral hatred for modern machine-driven society might have been instilled in him thirty years earlier at Harvard, it was not until the 1970s that he began his rampage as the Unabomber, operating under the radar and eluding federal law enforcement for over a decade until he disclosed his intentions in his manifesto and ultimately disclosed his identity to those who knew him the best: his mother and his brother.
Kaczynski was methodical as he chose his targets, built his homemade explosive devices, rode them to the local post office on his bike, and then returned to his isolated Montana cabin to contemplate his next attack. It was not until thirteen years after he began his rampage that he finally published his manifesto, giving copies to newspapers such as The New York Times, and the document caught the attention of his brother and mother, who ultimately turned him to federal authorities. Kaczynski had successfully eluded the FBI while carrying out bomb attacks against those in society he saw as his enemies, all the while staying to any agency that could identify him. Breivik tellingly changed Kaczynski’s references from “techies” to liberals and added racial slurs about black people and Muslims. It was therefore clear that Breivik admired and even copied the Unabomber as he planned his attacks.
In Breivik’s convoluted writings, unintelligible to all except a psychiatrist practicing in an institution for the insane, he set forth his political declaration of war on Europe. Writing from his delusion of self-bestowed omnipotence, Breivik justified his own war as Hitler did in Mein Kampf. After reading his manifesto and discussing it with him, Norway’s leading criminal attorney, Geir Lippestad, went public with a statement: under no circumstances would he represent Breivik unless he agreed to plead insane. Lippestad said that Breivik did not think like any of us, presumably referring to people who know the difference between reality and illusion. Because he found the manifesto and Breivik’s YouTube video shortly before the bombing, clear and convincing evidence of insanity, Lippestad could not defend him as a rational person. Lippestad could not refer to Breivik’s political pleadings for a final solution to Islamization of Europe—what in Breivik’s mind was simply no less than a second crusade waged in Europe to eradicate all Muslims from Europe and especially from Norway—as any measure of sanity. Although many Europeans might share Breivik’s belief in ridding Europe of multiculturalism and the values of population diversity, Breivik’s declaration of war replete with unlimited bloodshed is nothing less than a hate crime and act of terrorism on a horrific scale that Norwegians had not experienced since World War II.
As an attorney, Lippestad’s reaction to Breivik’s ravings had to be his concern over the disparate philosophical bases of this manifesto that ran the gamut from Norwegian folklore, including poetry in Old Norse, to neighboring President Vladimir Putin, who referred to Breivik’s citation of admiration for him as “the delirium of a madman.” Of all summary judgments of Breivik’s manifesto, Putin’s came closest to reality for anyone needing to follow logic to survive in this world. Breivik also asserted that feminism has eroded the fabric of European society as well. It has weakened men, he claimed, turned them into followers instead of leaders, and threatened to destroy the very society that he believed was responsible for modern civilization,89 hereinafter referred to as “manifesto.” His response was mass murder.
Of utmost significance in assessing Breivik’s mental state is his grandiose delusion of being the sole member of a cell emerging in Europe for the Knights Templar, an organization that Norwegian authorities unambiguously deny exists. Breivik had tailored a uniform complete with epaulets and claimed he was the Norse epic hero Sigurd and that his mentor was Richard the Lionheart, King Sigurd Jorsalfar of Norway, or Sigurd the Crusader. Breivik even tried to tease the court into revealing the mysteries of his Knights of Templar network throughout Europe, describing its formation by an antijihad crusader organization whose mission is to fight against Islamic suppression. Formed in April 2002, according to Breivik, in England the Templars are nine men: two Englishmen, a Frenchman, a German, a Dutchman, a Greek, a Russian, a Norwegian, presumably Breivik himself, and a Serb. The Serb might have been one of his self-images as a heroic crusader against Islam in the 1990s war in Kosovo when NATO intervened to protect the Muslim population from what the Serbian leadership under President Milosevic referred to as “ethnic cleansing.”90 Breivik put himself on the side of the Serbs.
The prosecution and the court rejected Breivik’s offer to explain the nature of his incarnation of the modern Knights Templar. Breivik’s pseudoavatar, as a Templar knight or a crusader guarding European battlements against the tide of Islam, was his projection of a pseudocommando. The pseudocommando is on a mission of vengeance. He is a warrior whose mission, though unspeakably cruel, is one of purification. He eliminates the threat to whatever society or group in whose defense he believes he is fighting. Breivik donned the trappings of the Templar, and it became his delusional avatar of an avenger, remorseless in his attempt to remake society into his own image and calling it “purification.” In doing so, he convinced himself that the only way to galvanize like-minded thinkers about the dangers of multiculturalism and the threat to Europe posed by Middle Eastern and North African Muslim fundamentalism was to attack the very centers of multicultural acceptance. Hence his targets were Labor Party symbols—government buildings—and the inheritors of Labor Party politics, the teenage children of party leaders.
The bottom line, however, is that Breivik, partly as a result of his upbringing, his failure to socialize with his peers, his inability to relate to a male authority figure during his formative years, and his addiction to violent video games, fell into a world of mental illness where his role as the single shooter became his ongoing delusion. It is as if he never awoke from a dream in which he was the avatar in his game. If there is a danger posed by violent video games to at-risk psyches, Anders Breivik is a poster boy of this form of psychosis. But, for the three psychiatrists brought in under public pressure following the findings of insanity by state prosecutors, Breivik’s omnipotent delusions of grandeur were found real because the psychiatrists were taken in by the methodical nature of Brevik’s fabrication. All this magical thinking passed the reality test of the last three psychiatrists and relieved him of his fears of being held hostage to the system like a Soviet dissident. How these three connected the dots in Breivik’s chaotic conspiracy thesis is unknown, and assuming they actually tried to explore it with him, it would have been a most astonishing work of forensic psychiatry.
Unfortunately, fiery public reaction to the state’s ruling that Breivik was insane played more in these psychiatrists’ diagnosis than pure medicine. Breivik had to be found sane because a guilty verdict at trial satisfied the Norwegian public, who were both shocked and outraged by such carnage in their model of civilized life. As in Colorado right now, psychiatric diagnostics mean nothing to a crowd with pitchforks and torches. Ironically, unlike many failed not guilty by reason of insanity cases, it satisfied even Breivik, who felt that if judged insane he would spend the rest of his life as a crackpot dissident rather than a political prisoner. In his persona of Sigurd the Crusader, he is a political prisoner of war who might one day see freedom. Americans, whose familiarity with the insanity defense comes from the famous “Twinkie defense,” likely believe that Breivik rightly lost his case and did not get off on an insanity. But attorney Lippestad changed his original opinion about defending Breivik and won the case by getting a judgment of sanity for his client.
Politics were at play in the prosecution team as well because they had fought to have Breivik declared insane, despite the public reaction and Breivik’s own wishes. To have him declared sane meant that his political ravings would resonate as reality among extremist groups all across Europe. Breivik would become the political prisoner that he saw himself to be. It would be better for him to be judged insane, his version of reality dismissed as the manic ravings of a lunatic, and that he be shut away in an institution indefinitely. The prosecutors were correct in their insistence of an insanity ruling because Breivik’s manifesto spewed forth with the disruption of thought connectivity best understood in the psychoanalytic interpretations of schizophrenic patients at Chestnut Lodge sanatorium, before the advent of safe and effective antipsychotic medications to clear thinking disorders.
Two state-appointed psychiatrists who listened to Breivik’s neologisms and convoluted train of thought agreed with the prosecution. Breivik was indeed floridly psychotic and insane. Few have had the patience to sit for hours trying to make sense of schizophrenic thought disorder and interpret disparate fragments to the patient so that he could see his illogic and start thinking straight. No psychiatrist today would consider doing this again, but the Norwegian court heard neologisms and twisted logic, quite appropriately embodied in Putin’s words: “the delirium of a madman.” Probably at the instruction of his client, Lippestad defended the sanity as that of an inchoate defiance of reality. After all, had the court not investigated Breivik’s claims of the commanders of the Knights Templar and the organization itself and found them to be a complete fabrication? Even the attempt to track down evidence of a training camp for right-wing militia in Bulgaria, where Breivik said he visited, turned out to be false. An ex-Serbian general had such a camp, but Breivik was never there. He only visited Bulgaria to track down a girlfriend.
As any criminal defense attorney will tell you, the rules of ethics demand that you follow your client’s wishes. If those wishes are so to the client’s detriment that the attorney can no longer mount a satisfactory defense, the attorney’s duty is to resign. This rule should explain Lippestad’s willingness to plead his client sane even though the evidence might really be that his client was insane. The judge, however, was not so convinced of even the slightest possibility of Breivik’s sanity and sent the psychiatrists Lippestad hired to go back to reexamine Breivik, believing they had been superficial in their examination and Breivik might have deceived them. Something had to be wrong because all European intelligence services certainly could not find any evidence of the existence of these right-wing military groups or the reality of his claims of secret cells. Lippestad’s two psychiatrists, however, came back with the same clinical opinion, totally opposite from that of the two-state appointed psychiatrists who found Breivik’s ramblings totally incomprehensible: they again insisted that the defendant was sane. Had Breivik been allowed to stand up without his handcuffs, he would have saluted his attorney’s psychiatrists with a powerful right fist that had to have resonated with perturbing memories of Nazi occupation of Norway for those in the courthouse old enough to remember the terror of Nazi occupation.
Breivik displays all of the characteristics of a paranoid schizophrenic. We know from working with paranoid and paranoid schizophrenic patients that they can plan and execute in detail as long as their plans and execution are encapsulated within their delusional system. They are never social at this time. Thus, being a loner like Adam Lanza or James Holmes does not mean that one’s mind is inactive. Just the contrary; they see themselves as invisible in the darkness of their delusions. Their sick and decomposing minds can be active with voracious appetites for destruction. The psychotic mind is fully engaged in constructing its fantasy, out of which a methodical action plan may or may not come. At Breivik’s pretrial hearings, a professor of psychiatry would be brought in to break the impossible tie between the opposite views of the previous two psychiatrists. Although such examinations with diagnostic conclusions are not rocket science, the court brought in a professor of psychiatry to review all four reports. He never examined Breivik, but with the skills of an academic politician, he carefully appeased the court and assuaged the opposing pairs of forensic psychiatrists, essentially saying nothing in the most ambiguous technical language. Thus, the final stamp of approval for a wild miscarriage of justice and humiliation of the profession of psychiatry was allowed a peaceful exit from that mess under the guise of legal and medical professionalism. Spectators, lawyers, and families of victims could shake their heads in utter confusion with this circus of forensic psychiatry and finally put this bloody and horrific disaster to rest—or maybe not because an act so insane to be beyond human comprehension was judged to be the product of a sane political assassin.
The Norwegian public, as they clamored for the sanity ruling, might have been shocked to learn that as a sane guilty man, Breivik would serve a maximum of twenty-two years in prison for all the deaths and damage to life and Norwegian society he had caused. Despite the findings of his defense-appointed psychiatrists, who claim he was sane throughout preparation for and execution of the attacks on the heart of this small nation, Norwegian authorities know better and prepared a prison cell for him with access to psychiatric treatment—namely antipsychotic medications to manage his grandiosity, social blunting, delusions, and hallucinatory voices. Breivik therefore has special guards who are prepared to take care of a grossly psychotic prisoner for many decades and protect him from other inmates and outsiders who will want him executed.
His moment of reality when hearing the insanity read from his own manifesto, like that of the shattering of grandiosity and omnipotence Don Quixote experienced when he awakened from a dream, was brief. A cameraman in court had caught him at a rare moment when Breivik, again like Don Quixote, had seen himself in the new magical invention called a mirror. Though he saw reality in a flash and was photographed in tears, the delusion soon kicked back in as if he was Don Alonso becoming Don Quixote of La Mancha again. So, though his sanity was declared in public, Breivik would soon rise again in court to deny its authority over him: the martyred knight, defender of Aryan Europe, Sigurd who angrily saluted with his right arm raised Nazi-style, emotionally unaffected by it all, his right fist tightly clenched in defiant but delusional omnipotence. His future—in fact, his very pulse—would depend on guards protecting him as if he were a dependent baby. All of this was a deadly and contagious delusion that infected Adam Lanza as he followed Breivik’s every move in the news. And, like Lanza and most suicidal mass murderers, Breivik was not as invisible to authorities as the Norwegian director of security asserted. Not even the STASSI, Communist East Germany’s dreaded intelligence arm of the KGB (the Soviet Union’s Committee for State Security), could have detected the menace of Anders Breivik.
State security personnel had no explanation when they were confronted with security video films of Breivik walking past the Norwegian equivalent of the White House in a SWAT uniform and armed with assault weapons, only to find out later that he was on the security watch list for importing explosive chemicals from Poland. Wishing she had never spoken so carelessly without knowing the facts—or, perhaps in a state of shock—the state security director quietly resigned. The police commissioner who could not even muster a helicopter to get police to Utøya resigned as well. Impatient with the police response time, Breivik called the police and asked what was taking them so long. He made a feeble attempt to swim away amidst the hemorrhaging bodies he ruthlessly destroyed. But he had no escape and evasion plans and returned to shore, quietly surrendering to the police.
Breivik later said that he had not given himself more than a 10 percent chance of surviving his preemptive strike on Islamo-Europe. He overestimated his enemy, Norwegian security, which was as inexcusably unprepared for Breivik as was the FBI for the Brothers Tsarnaev. Norwegians have to be frightened by the complacency and incompetence of their security services that claimed Breivik came out of nowhere, because, as in all the cases we present, he did not. He was in their faces from the very beginning, but they chose not to look at him even while he strode within their highest security zone fully attired and armed in a combat camouflage uniform and armaments. Security guards must have been dozing as they monitored the cameras.91
Security films depict Breivik walking away from his car, which was timed to explode and rip Norwegian state headquarters to smithereens. He sauntered undetected to the dock to catch the ferry to Utøya and introduced himself as a policeman. Upon his arrival on the island, he opened fire on everything that moved, and, like Lanza, set his sights on helpless children. Had personnel monitoring Norwegian headquarters security been awake, they would have recognized a dangerous man within the highest security zone of Norway, interdicted him, and maybe prevented the lethal explosions just in time. Then, through interrogation, they would have matched his name to their security watch list for importing explosives from Poland. It could have been a shootout, as was the case of Watertown, Massachusetts, in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, but that is security’s job: to watch for suspicious behavior in high-security zones and confront such suspicious people as their images showed onscreen.92
By coincidence, the prime minister of Norway was neither in his office nor on the island with his youth movement for the Labor Party as Breivik might have expected him to be if he was one of Breivik’s targets. Idyllic Norway would never be the same. Anders Breivik will enjoy a short life in his grandiose delusion, although that delusion lived on in the minds of Adam Lanza and perhaps Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
88 Public Intelligence. “Anders Behring Breivik’s Complete Manifesto ‘2083–A European Declaration of Independence.’” Last modified July 28, 2011. http://publicintelligence.net/anders-behring-breiviks-complete-manifesto-2083-a-european-declaration-of-independence/ (accessed December 11, 2013).
89 Ibid.
90 Gardner, Frank. “How Do Terrorists Communicate?” BBC News World, November 2, 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-24784756.
91 Reuters. “Anders Behring Breivik Captured on CCTV During Oslo Bomb Attack.” The Telegraph, September 15, 2011. http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01999/br_1999357c.jpg.
92 Reuters. “Anders Breivik, Making a Salute as He Appeared in Court.” The Telegraph, April 16, 2011. http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02194/breivik_2194965b.jpg.
