A few hours ago a young paperboy had gone around at dawn and tossed newspapers on the doormats in the Skøyen neighborhood of west Oslo. Now the doors are opening at short, regular intervals. One woman emerges, bends down in a blue dressing gown and picks up Aftenposten, takes it with her into the kitchen, and reads the first section while she eats a cumin cheese sandwich and drinks freshly squeezed juice. She reads about how lower interest rates and a longer repayment period will save Greece and keep the euro zone intact. The front page confirms that there’s not much happening in Norway. The financial crisis in southern Europe is the dominant news. The news in Norway on July 22, 2011, is about the new semester starting soon and a Christian center in Vestfold County that has ambitions of becoming Europe’s largest.
It’s a normal day in the Skøyen neighborhood. The weather is gray on the west side of the city. Each and every person has his or her own plans for the day—someone is taking the bus into his office at the Ministry of Justice; others follow their children to kindergarten; some are returning from their vacation; many will start theirs; most will rent a family movie and eat tacos for supper, while a few will go downtown to chat up girls. If there’s one event that can unify Norwegians this Friday, it’s the afternoon’s decisive stage in the Tour de France. Yesterday Luxembourg’s Andy Schleck won convincingly in the tough stage up to the Col du Galibier, 2,645 meters above sea level. The Norwegian cyclists took it easy and came in thirty-six minutes behind the winner. Today the winner will be decided from among the four favorites: Andy Schleck, Frank Schleck, Thomas Voekler, and Cadel Evans.
A young man wakes up in his mother’s first-floor apartment at 18 Hoffsveien Street just before eight. He doesn’t really stand out with his light hair, blue eyes, round and slightly plump face, stained teeth from cigarettes and snuff, muscular upper body, and height of around 183 centimeters. In fact he often seems anonymous in the company of others. Neighbors find the man polite, kind, and intelligent, but lately they have seen little of him. The thirty-two-year-old has no plans to watch Thor Hushovd and Edvald Boasson Hagen, the Norwegians in the Tour de France, in the afternoon. Nor will he spend the day with his sixty-four-year-old mother, who, in a few hours, will take the tram to run some errands in the city center and buy shrimp for their dinner together in the evening. At eight o’clock, the young man makes himself breakfast at the kitchen counter. He also makes two packed lunches with the same bread toppings—cheese and ham—and drinks a protein shake. Of late he has been drinking four a day to increase his muscle mass.
He has told his mother that he’s writing a history book about Norway and Europe in English. He has also said that for it to be as complete as possible, he’ll have to start from 600 BC. When mother and son have discussed politics at the dinner table, she has found him uncomfortably intense; plus he has also dismissed her as a “small-time Marxist” and “feminist.” The young man has talked about an impending civil war. He has increasingly shut himself up in his room, and in the last year he has become more and more strict and strange. The mother hasn’t been allowed to sneeze in her own apartment. He has often complained about the food and that there are too many spiders in his room. He has refused to get up in the morning. He has kept bags of dietary supplements and backpacks filled with rocks in his room. Several times he has worn black and green clothes, which he calls survival gear. He has also been wearing a red uniform jacket with insignias. In April he told his mother that he was going to become a farmer. He had rented a farm with 9.1 hectares of arable land. The mother was happy that her son had finally found something to do and looked forward to visiting him on the farm, but it was never convenient to do so.
Two rented cars are parked outside the apartment in Skøyen. The night before, he parked a Volkswagen Crafter van outside Olsens Enke garden center on Sigurd Iversen Street, a few hundred meters from his mother’s apartment. Then he went back to the farm he has been renting since April. The farm, Vålstua by the Glomma River, is an idyllic place with a farmhouse, barn, outbuildings, and flowerbeds. From there he fetched a gray Fiat Dublo. It was late before he came back from the farm in Rena, but now both cars are parked within walking distance of the apartment on Hoffsveien, in a quiet and child-friendly Norwegian neighborhood. Right in front of the block, on the other side of the road, is the Coop Mega supermarket. A little down the road in the direction of the highway are the Volvat veterinary clinic and the GymClub training studio. Inside the van is a bomb made from about 1.5 tons of fertilizer mixed with diesel.
The young man was born at Aker Hospital in Oslo on Tuesday, February 13, 1979. His diplomat father already had three children aged nine to fourteen from before, while his mother, a nurse, had a six-year-old daughter with a Swedish man. During the young man’s first year the family lived in London, where his father worked at the Norwegian Embassy. His parents divorced in 1980, when he was one year old. The mother took custody of the boy and settled in Nedre Silkestrå, the newly built Oslo Housing and Savings Society (OBOS) housing, not so far from Hoffsvein, while his father moved to Paris as a member of the Norwegian OECD delegation. His father was mostly abroad when the thirty-two-year-old was a boy, so they didn’t have much contact except during the summers, when the young man visited his father and stepmother in France. He had an average middle-class upbringing, and he himself thought he was in the company of responsible people. But the mother didn’t have an easy time raising the boy and a daughter as a single parent. She had to work long hours to be able to afford to live on Oslo’s west side, and the children were often home alone until late at night. In 1983 she went as far as to ask for help from the Norwegian Child Welfare Services for him and his half-sister, who was six years older. A psychologist examined the passive and timid boy and concluded that he had been a victim of neglect. The psychologist reported that if the conditions of his upbringing did not change, things could go wrong. Child Welfare Services took no action despite his father’s having fought for custody after the report. Those were different times with different standards. The boy stayed with his mother and started to go to the Vigeland Park nursery.
He attended Smestad Elementary School. The resource-rich school is prestigious, not least because among its former pupils one can count the crown prince and princess, Haakon Magnus and Märtha Louise. Here it’s important to have the proper logo on your jacket, and your dad’s pockets should be deep. With a single mother who didn’t earn a high income, it wasn’t easy to live up to the standards of the school. He was moderately good in school, went around in his own head, could be dorky, but could also focus when he had decided to carry something out. He was teased because he lived alone with his mother. At Ris Middle School, where he started in 1992, it was tagging and sports that occupied him. During that time he got up at six every day to train before school started. He kept his anonymity there too, in a school characterized by distinctive social class signifiers. But he got some short-lived attention when he was accused of vandalism and responded by hitting a teacher in the chest. The yearbook from the ninth grade says: “Before, Anders was part of the gang, but then he fell out with everyone. Anders’s goal is to have a perfect body, but we have to say that it’s a long way away.” In 1994 Child Welfare Services got involved again after he was arrested three times for tagging. They held discussions with the family, but the case was closed without any measures being taken.
In 1995 there was a break in communications between father and son. The young man himself blamed this on the fact that he listened to hip-hop music and dressed in sagging pants and a hoodie, all of which the more bourgeois father disliked. When, at the age of sixteen, he and a friend from the graffiti milieu were caught tagging and had to pay a sizable fine, there were rumors that one of them had snitched to the authorities. He was ostracized by his classmates and beaten up. He responded by escalating his training regimen before and after school. He ate raw eggs for lunch and did push-ups before he went out. He longed for some social redress, and it would come in the form of money. “Get rich or die trying,” was the way he put it some years later.
Hartvig Nissen School was abandoned in favor of Oslo Commerce School after the young man’s first year of high school, but the change in environment did not do much for his motivation, and he dropped out before the final school year was over in order to devote himself to politics. The companies he started, such as those in telephone sales and advertising boards, were forcibly dissolved or closed down. The advertising company, called “Media Group,” went bankrupt in 2007. Although the firm that he established failed financially, the part of him that was socially engaged benefited from the company’s sojourn at Nedre Slottsgate in Oslo. His company shared a lunchroom with a law firm that represented Ole Nicolai Kvisler, who was suspected of killing Benjamin Hermansen, a fifteen-year-old boy from the Holmlia suburb, in 2001. The young advertising entrepreneur took note of the defense efforts of Geir Lippestad, the lawyer for the right-wing extremist.
Neo-Nazism flourished in the Oslo suburbs of Ris and Bøler in the mid-1990s, with slogans such as “White Pride” and “Norway for Norwegians.” Through his gang, Boot Boys, Kvisler fought against immigrants, Jews, and miscegenation, and just a few weeks before he stabbed Benjamin, he was supposed to have warned an acquaintance of his that something historic and memorable was about to happen. Joe Erling Jahr, his sidekick during the racially motivated killing in Holmlia, just before midnight on January 26, 2001, was called “Hollow” in the neo-Nazi community because of a sunken chest that was used as an ashtray at parties. Jahr’s childhood had been difficult. Even though his mother could be away from home for months at a time, Child Welfare Services did not intervene. He was twelve years old when the police first knocked on the door. Veronica Andreassen, Kvisler’s girlfriend and the third defendant in the case, had an equally troubled childhood, with divorce, fights, and domestic violence. She started doing drugs at age thirteen and ended up in foster care two years later. Compared with Jahr’s and Andreassen’s family background, Kvisler had had a harmonious adolescence, but all three were loners, and on at least one and perhaps more occasions they had felt threatened by immigrant gangs. They got protection from the neo-Nazis.
In Oslo forty thousand people, with Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit at the helm, marched in a torchlight parade to show their revulsion for the murder of Benjamin Hermansen on a cold winter’s day, February 1, 2001. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg addressed the issue of everyday racism from the stage at Youngstorget Square: “Today all Norwegians must look inside themselves. Are prejudice and intolerance going to gain a permanent foothold in us?” he asked. The thirty-two-year-old on Hoffsveien dislikes immigrants but has never sought out Viking Vest, the skinhead gang on Oslo’s west side. According to him, the Holmlia killing is the only example in Norway where a white Norwegian man has killed a dark-skinned man. He claims, however, that Muslims have killed between one hundred and two hundred Norwegians in the last twenty years. But the media have deliberately hushed these killings up.
A friend from his youth came from a Muslim background. They had a close friendship. They tagged, listened to hip-hop, and were rebellious and anti-authoritarian. According to him, when he decided to break away from the milieu after the episodes with the police, a bitter rivalry developed between the two youths. Today he says that the friend was hateful and bitter and backstabbed him. The friend, who knew people in the Norwegian-Pakistani gangster milieu, is supposed to have threatened him with violence. He was witness to what he now calls “a low-intensity jihad”: Pakistanis came to the western edge of the subway line from Furuset or Holmlia and raped, robbed, and beat up white Norwegians. His Muslim friend had allegedly developed a hatred for all things Norwegian and wanted him to convert to Islam. The breach not only led to his losing his habitual milieu, but it also caused him to seek out pure Norwegian values. He moved away from the leftist tagging milieu to the other extreme and joined the Progress Party’s youth wing (FpU), where he eventually became a deputy at the party’s Oslo West branch. His fellow party members did not see him as an impressionable character but rather as an outgoing, confident, and sociable guy who wasn’t afraid to voice his opinions.
FpU offered him an ideological community, but it wasn’t bold enough. The party members turned out to be politically correct career politicians who let polls and PR agencies decide policy. He lived with insights that he could not share with the others. He maintained a calculatedly pleasant exterior to gain benefits while his thinking became increasingly dystopian. He had realized something that the others had not: there was a secret Muslim invasion of Europe, and no one was trying to stop it. No one but him. Before, he was part of the gang, and then he fell out with everyone. In 2007 he canceled his membership in the FpU.
In scattered discussion groups online he found like-minded people, but he had no power to act. In 2010 in a post on the immigrant-hostile website document.no, he argued with politically correct Norway and all those who believed that just possessing a Norwegian passport entitled one to be called Norwegian. “Sorry, but it doesn’t work anymore. Many are increasingly immune to your control techniques due to the massive inflation of rhetoric. I think the majority of Norwegians require the full cultural assimilation (European culture) of the immigrants for them to be considered as true Norwegians,” he wrote. The target of the post was Gro Harlem Brundtland, who he believed was responsible for the dilution of Norwegian culture. In the post he gave the former Norwegian prime minister (who was known as the Nation’s Mother) the new title of “the Nation’s Murderer.”
In Ingvar Ambjørnsen’s novels about the neurotic dreamer Elling, Gro is the symbol of everything that the loner admires and misses. She’s determined, authoritative, caring, courageous, and wise. Elling is convinced that all is safe and well in Norway as long as Gro is in power. For the thirty-two-year-old on Hoffsveien, these very same qualities are a reason for hatred. They have feminized the country and feminized him. Feminism has diminished the manhood that is needed to protect society from immigrants, crime, and pornography. Feminism has made Norwegians soft, cowardly, and conformist. The ideal social norm that he seeks stems from the gender stereotypes of the 1950s, when mom looked after the kids at home, cooked a proper dinner, and aired the bedsheets twice a day. The streets were safer then. The schools were better. Nobody divorced, married immigrants, or was homosexual. The man was the boss. Dad could smoke cigarettes, drink at the office, and pinch secretaries’ bottoms without being accused of sexual harassment. Everyone was well dressed, pure, and God-fearing, and no one swore.
He blames society and the feminist revolution for the fact that children today will grow up in female-dominated, fatherless homes. Child benefits, public housing, and other support mechanisms have not only made it affordable for a woman to be a single mother, but the welfare and consumer society has also made it possible for women to shift the responsibility for their children’s upbringing to the kindergarten, school, and television. He calls such developments “cultural suicide.” He directs his hatred toward these social trends, which have affected his parents and which in turn have affected him. He was left to himself; he has become feminized; he stands as a warning to people of what can happen to children who grow up in a dysfunctional family. Social contempt and self-loathing go hand in hand.
In 2006 he moved back in with his mother on Hoffsveien to save money. Over the past five years she has washed his clothes regularly. She has shopped for groceries and cooked for him. She has cleaned, vacuumed, and tidied his room. In the meantime the thirty-two-year-old has acquired ten different credit cards to finance his large-scale projects. He has also joined the Oslo Gun Club, rented a farm, and bought fertilizer. He has stepped up his exercise regime at the Elixia training studio in Sjølyst, Oslo. For a while he stayed home and played World of Warcraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In the latter game you can simulate a terrorist attack and shoot civilians. His mother is worried about his isolation and thinks he’s obsessed with the virtual world. Furthermore, he has gone around with a mask indoors and gotten angry about trivial matters. Friends and acquaintances think he’s suppressing his homosexuality. In reality he’s been preparing himself to become a martyr to save his people from ethnic cleansing. The civil war has begun. You are either a nationalist or an internationalist. He believes it’s not possible to be both.
The young man on 18 Hoffsveien Street is scrupulous with his hygiene and vain about his looks. For him the body is a temple. He believes it’s important to look one’s best every day and especially so this Friday. He has made the effort to enhance his appearance before the mission by going to the solarium, pumping iron, and shaving and putting on makeup. Although he went to the hip celebrity hangout Skaugum, by Solli Square, after he came back from the farm in Rena at about eleven in the evening, it’s not a hung-over man who’s making preparations at the apartment. At Skaugum he ordered a sweet raspberry drink that the bartender served with a slice of lime. He drank the Bacardi Razz at leisure in the back patio of the bar, in the midst of a loud, inebriated crowd comprised of the cultural, economic, and political elite. The bar’s motto on its website is “Our philosophy embraces the informal, and we are open to all who are open to us.”
The thirty-two-year-old put on a brown polo shirt, brown sweater, and brown pants. He’s delayed. The mail program for doing a mass mailing of documents, which he installed on the PC in the morning, took longer than planned. The plan was to be in the city center by 10:00 a.m. He doesn’t leave his mother’s apartment until half past ten. He opens the door at Hoffsveien, gets into the Fiat, and drives into Oslo. The last thing he says before he leaves is: “I’m just going to the Elkjøp electronics store to buy something for the computer. We’ll eat dinner together when I get home.” His mother was planning to serve spaghetti with meat sauce that afternoon.
He parks the rented car by Hammersborg Square. The parking spaces slope down from Grubbegata Street toward Møllergata Street, interspersed by shrubs, parking ticket dispensers, and bike racks. The cars have to park crosswise, coming in from each one-way street so that they are standing bumper to bumper. One street runs past the turquoise OBOS building while the other goes past a building with the address of 39 Møllergata, where it says “Norwegian Police Federation” on the façade. At the top of Hammersborg Square, next to Grubbegata, is Margareta Church, where one can “attend services, drink coffee, read Swedish newspapers and books, or meet other Swedes.” At the bottom of the square, on Møllergata, stands St. Edmund’s Church, a red brick building in the Gothic style for those who prefer the services, food, and newspapers in English.
Today, a Friday in the middle of the vacation period, the parking lot is relatively empty. He drives down from Grubbegata and finds a spot about half way along, in front of the building at 39 Møllergata that for many years housed the Dagsavisen newspaper office. He gets out of the Fiat and locks it with an electronic key. He then goes over to Oslo Cathedral, where he hails a taxi at Stortorget Square, and it takes him back to Hoffsveien and the van by the garden center.
A stone’s throw away from the cathedral, in the prime minister’s office, hangs a painting titled The Way to Soria Moria. When government negotiations among the Labor Party, the Center Party, and the Socialist Left Party were concluded after the elections in 2005, the three party leaders were presented with the painting by the artist herself, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the new Norwegian coalition. Jens Stoltenberg has held two New Year’s speeches in front of this painting, the last one in 2007. In May 2011 the artist, a former apprentice of the artist Jakob Weidemann, packed up her painting equipment and four cats and moved from her studio by the Glomma River in Skarnes to the famous Languedoc-Roussillon wine district in France. There the sixty-year-old artist currently paints Expressionist-style flowers and lives the sophisticated, carefree French life. Last weekend the Norwegian cyclists Hushovd and Boasson Hagen cycled past there. By her side in the garden is her husband, who’s a retired economist and diplomat. He hasn’t talked to his son for sixteen years.