The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  Though eventually judged to be quite sane, this crazed narcissist, the son of a Norwegian diplomat and a nurse, was clearly mad as far as the average observer was concerned, his psychological well-being apparently fatally fractured – assuming it had ever been whole – from an early age. The crack-up had been compounded by personal setbacks in adulthood, his life in retrospect seeming to have traced an inevitable parabola towards destruction of one kind or another (his suicide at some stage in the future would seem to be the natural end point). Breivik was the classic tragic loner, living with his mother, fuelling his racist paranoia by browsing Islamophobic rantings on the Internet, meticulously, nerdishly cutting-and-pasting them into a garbled 1,500-page manifesto detailing everything from his multiple, hate-filled delusions about the Muslim threat, to his preferred aftershave – Chanel Platinum Egoiste – a diatribe that he then mailed to 1,003 people across Europe.

  What could the actions of a mentally ill man tell us about the country that made him? Nothing, presumably. Yet Breivik’s attacks must have shaken the foundations of Norwegian society – the unprecedented scale of his slaughter would have ensured that – but there was also the inescapable fact of his ethnicity to deal with. This unthinkable act of violence had been carried out by a Norwegian, not a non-Western Islamic extremist, not a foreigner – as was the case with the various, thankfully small-scale, attacks in Sweden and Denmark in recent years – but a Norwegian born and bred: Europe’s first anti-Muslim terrorist.

  ‘The first picture I saw of him on 22 July was where he was wearing his Lacoste T-shirt with upturned collars,’ one Norwegian had told me. ‘And, you know, I thought, “I know him. I see him at football games, I’ve gone to school with this guy.” He’s so ordinary.’

  I have to admit, and I am not especially proud of this, but there was the very slightest sense of relief when, in the hours after the first bomb had been detonated in central Oslo and the world’s media had jumped to its default Islamic terrorist conclusions, the real identity of the perpetrator emerged and it transpired that he was as Norwegian as one could be. The relief that this was not the work of Islamic terrorists was, of course, entirely separate from any reaction to the crime itself, relating more to fears of the potential retribution such an attack might have inspired. An Islamic terrorist attack as heinous as this would have seen the political discourse on immigration and race blasted back to the Middle Ages. One presumes life would have become untenable for many Muslims living here, as was the case in the US in the wake of 9/11; and one assumes, too, that the attack would have been used by the mainstream right wing throughout Scandinavia to shore up their support, as also happened after 2001. In the few hours before Breivik’s identity became known, various far-right websites and blogs had already begun to unleash their predictable and violent anti-Islamic sentiments, and several Muslims were physically assaulted in the Norwegian capital.

  Certainly, the Norwegian Police Security Service had not foreseen such an event: in a report written just a few months prior to the attacks they stated that right-wing extremists did ‘not present a serious threat to Norwegian society in 2011’.

  One presumes it would have been at least marginally easier – only very marginally, admittedly – to come to terms with the attacks had the perpetrator been an outsider, someone from an established category of aggressor. Instead, it was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Norwegian ‘patriot’. One of them.

  The Norwegians had reacted to the attacks in various ways: horror, obviously; solidarity, mainly; revulsion at Breivik’s opinions, of course. But some felt there had been too much discussion of Breivik’s mental state and not enough about his views and the extent to which other Norwegians might agree with them. One Norwegian, commenting on an online article on the Guardian website about a Danish theatre production based on Breivik’s manifesto, which premiered, rather tastelessly, during his trial, wrote: ‘Here in Norway there has been very little discussion of what he said. The fact is that it’s much less far from the mainstream than many are willing to accept – whilst most Norwegians are not racist, some hold deeply troubling views . . . Norway does need to ask itself some very serious questions about why the world’s worst single-gunman atrocity happened here, in this apparently peaceful and harmonious country where nothing bad ever happens.’

  Prior to 22/7, as the attacks are more commonly referred to in Norway, the country had the strongest mainstream right-wing party in all of the region, and one of the strongest in Europe: the Fremskrittsparti, or Progress Party. Though its popularity dipped following Breivik’s attacks, in the last parliamentary election to take place in Norway, in September 2013, the Progress Party, led by the pugnacious blond Siv Jensen, won 16.3 per cent of the vote. Its triumph was all the more astonishing given the fact that Breivik was, for many years, a highly active member of the party. Until 2013, the Progress Party had been routinely shunned by the other political parties but, crucially, this electoral triumph was enough to make it a partner in the new centre-right coalition government for the first time in its history.

  The Progress Party’s unprecedented electoral success would appear to confirm the depictions of Norwegians I had heard from their neighbours as just a shade to the right of the Ku Klux Klan. Norway has accepted far fewer immigrants than either Denmark or Sweden, for instance, and has recently taken to repatriating denied asylum seekers at a rate of 1,500 or so a year. Coverage of the Breivik attacks had also mentioned numerous right-wing Norwegian organisations, activists and bloggers, highlighting what appeared to be a disturbing sub-culture of Islamophobia in the country, ranging from Facebook groups for people who refused to ride in taxis driven by Muslims, to those of the so-called Eurabian school, who believed their government was part of an early seventies conspiracy on the part of European oil-thirsty governments to allow Muslims to take over Europe in order to appease the OPEC nations (there are actually people who believe this, the fact that Norway is one of the largest oil producers in the world seeming to have escaped them).

  On a previous visit to Norway I had read in Dagbladet that the Holocaust-denying British historian David Irving was going to be giving a talk near Lillehammer that week. Though the Norwegians proudly boast of having had a more active and successful resistance movement than the Danes, some Norwegians did collaborate with the Germans during the occupation of 1940–5, not least their then prime minister Vidkun Quisling, whose surname was famously adopted as an eponym for traitors everywhere. Norway’s most celebrated literary figure, Knut Hamsun (kind of their James Joyce), gave his Nobel Prize to Goebbels, and wrote a famous obituary of Hitler in the Norwegian collaborationist newspaper, Aftenposten, calling him ‘a reformist character of the highest order,’ adding, ‘We, his close followers, bow our heads at his death.’ Hamsun’s reputation never really recovered. Aftenposten remains the country’s most popular daily newspaper.

  Just how right wing was Norway? How had Breivik’s actions altered the political landscape? Had the black shirts been tucked away at the back of the wardrobes, were the swastika neck tattoos being hidden by high collars, had the Islamophobic Internet trolls withdrawn to lick their wounds?

  Chapter 3

  The new Quislings

  ‘Immediately after the terrorist attack everybody was still in shock. Nobody could have anticipated anything like that happening. It was too atrocious. Many of us had expected violence to come from those quarters, those of us who had been following these websites, and I had been the target of their attacks having been dragged into it as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with Norway. But we hadn’t expected it to happen in that way. Maybe attacks on Muslims or on people like me, high-profile defenders of pluralism, but not anything of that kind.’

  I HAVE COME to the University of Oslo, a bastion of the multicultural intelligentsia that Breivik so loathed, to meet Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of Scandinavia’s pre-eminent social anthropologists.

  I had first met Eriksen during that 17 May trip in 2009, and we had talked about
Norway’s Constitution Day and its meaning. Eriksen often used to be trotted out on the day’s TV coverage to bring a little dissenting balance to proceedings as a member of Norway’s pluralist awkward squad. But he had changed his mind in recent years. ‘I really didn’t use to like it,’ he had told me of 17 May. ‘But the content has changed a great deal in recent years. It’s far more inclusive these days, almost a celebration of multiculturalism. So many minority kids take part and are allowed to do the same as everyone else, for once. It’s often misunderstood but I find it heartening that it’s now becoming a ritual of inclusion, just like Australia Day in Australia. Most of the people who are enthusiastic about Australia Day now are East Asian immigrants who really have a stake in it.’

  This time round, I wanted to know how Eriksen thought Breivik’s atrocities might effect 17 May in the future. He was unsure: ‘Because everyone wants a piece of it, you know. Lots of groups will try to appropriate it for their own purposes – they are already trying, even the Islamophobic right wing, who are portraying themselves as victims. They say the ultimate cause of 22/7 was multiculturalism. It’s like saying the US had it coming to them on 9/11. It’s a fairly tasteless thing to say, but they are saying it. They are just trying to deflect criticism from themselves that they have encouraged violence, not the kind of violence we saw on 22/7, but still violence, resentment, suspicion.’

  Remarkably, the Norwegian right – the anti-multiculturalists and Islamophobes, in some cases the very bloggers whom Breivik had quoted in his diatribe – had indeed managed to turn the post-Breivik discourse on its head. They claimed that the media was now self-censoring when it came to discussions about immigration and Norwegian Muslims (who are estimated to make up about 3 per cent of the population), and that is was they – the right wing – who were suffering oppression. They were using Breivik’s murders to their advantage. One prominent right-wing critic, Bruce Bawer, an American expat ‘Eurabian’ living in Norway, had written a now infamous opinion column in the Wall Street Journal shortly after Breivik’s attacks making just this argument. And that morning I had read a Norwegian newspaper review of Bawer’s latest e-book called The New Quislings: How the International Left Used the Oslo Massacre to Silence Debate About Islam.

  Apparently, Eriksen was named in the book as one of these ‘new Quislings’, not to mention an anti-Semite. ‘That’s a first, you know!’ Eriksen laughed, when I mention this to him. ‘I’ve never heard that before.’

  I asked him if he was afraid for his safety. ‘No, I’m not easily scared. I get a lot of nasty emails, have done for years, but what can you do? You can’t get police protection all day, and I don’t really want it. After 22/7, of course, these personal attacks have taken on a slightly different meaning. People use these very violent metaphors of civil war, traitors and Quislings, and suddenly you feel less humorous about it. I used to see these people as quite comical but it’s become very emotive.’

  As we have heard, since I visited Eriksen that second time, Norway has had a general election. The comedians are now in power – the Progress Party being part of the new ‘blue’ governing coalition. The party started out in the early seventies as an anti-tax movement. Today, it is run on a hybrid right-wing/welfare-state platform of a type which can seem quite odd from a UK or US perspective, blending as it does calls for increased public spending, with emphasis on care for the elderly, together with more conventionally right-wing fear-mongering about non-Western immigrants. It is a similar template to that used by the Danish People’s Party. Just don’t ever make the mistake of mentioning this to the Progress Party, as I did when I initially tried to set up an interview with them (this prior to their 2013 election success). This was the response I received from their press secretary:

  We don’t have any relations with any of these parties, we never have and we never will. I will tell you more about this when we meet. The only thing we have in common with the parties you have mentioned is that we have a ‘frank’ tone in the immigration debate. That’s about it.

  Well, that told me. Nevertheless, when I asked a Norwegian friend about the Progress Party, he said, ‘Everyone knows that when it comes to being mean to immigrants, they are a lot more skilled at this than Labour. So if you want to be mean to immigrants, vote for them.’

  Before Breivik, the Progress Party’s rhetoric had been fairly extreme – a previous leader had claimed that all Muslims were terrorists, for example, and that they were ‘on a par with Hitler in that they have a long-term plan to “Islamify” the world. They are well on their way to achieving this: they have travelled far into Africa and are well on their way in Europe, and we must speak out!’ During a previous election – again, prior to Breivik’s attacks – the party had issued leaflets showing a masked man with a gun and the words ‘The perpetrator is a foreigner.’

  I made an appointment to speak to the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Morten Høglund, and went along to the party’s offices in a building behind the Storting (where there was, I might add, virtually no security).

  How had Høglund felt when he discovered that Anders Behring Breivik had been a member of his party for seven years, chair of his local branch of the youth wing, not to mention the fact that his party was the only one in Norway not included in Breivik’s blacklist of European political parties, thus placing it alongside organisations like the English Defence League (and Jeremy Clarkson) in the list of Breivik’s good guys. ‘He was one of you, wasn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘It was disgusting. But he was upset with our party as well,’ Høglund, a portly man, looking not unlike a provincial publican, replied. ‘We have to think: do we give nourishment to elements when we talk about problems regarding immigration? But when we talk about Islam it is radical Islam, not Islam as a religion. We accept the freedom to believe any religion you want, the freedom to build a mosque.’ (Something, it should be noted, that the Danish People’s Party has consistently opposed.)

  Back at the university the next day I met another of Bawer’s ‘new Quislings’, Sindre Bangstad, a social anthropologist who has specialised in studying the lives of Muslims in Norway.

  ‘Yes, I am apparently against freedom of speech,’ Bangstad laughed, tightly. ‘If you are public about anything involving immigration issues in Norway, this is what you risk. I do get regular hate mail, so it’s not as if this is new to me. In his tract, Breivik sees universities as a soft target – this is in his instructions for potential solo terrorists – but,’ he laughed dismissively, trying to lighten the mood, ‘he seems to be convinced that the sociology department is much worse when it comes to Marxists.’

  I had come to see Bangstad because he was an expert on the Norwegian Right. How much, I asked him, do Breivik’s views represent those of ordinary Norwegians?

  ‘Well, Breivik claimed he had 35 per cent of the Norwegian population on his side, but he is completely delusional about that. There are, though, websites like document.no [a notorious anti-Islamic site] which are read by 50,000 every month. One of the worst groups, SIAN [Stopp islamiseringen av Norge] claims to have 10,000 Facebook followers, although, when they try to mobilise, only about thirty-odd people turn up. Many people would argue that a lot of the rhetoric you see on various websites these days is equally appalling to what was there before 22/7 and, if you look at opinion surveys, attitudes towards immigrants, Muslims and Islam in Norway haven’t substantially changed. That’s not to be expected either.’

  But what of the man on the street? How racist are ordinary Norwegians? I mentioned to Bangstad that I was still routinely shocked by a fairly widespread brand of casual racism from the kinds of sources that should know better, not just in Norway, but in Denmark, and I’d seen it in Iceland too: broadsheet newspaper cartoons depicting Africans in tribal costume with exaggerated lips and bones through their noses, for instance; Asians with buck teeth and narrow eyes; comedy shows that mock immigrants’ language skills; and the use of the word neger, meaning ‘black person’ and, for me (and,
I know, for some black visitors to the Nordic region, too), uncomfortably close to ‘negro’, or even ‘nigger’. I recently read a story about a Swedish town that, for forty years, had been nicknamed ‘Negro Village’ (Negerby – on account, I think, of some or other landmark: black chimneys perhaps), but was at last attempting to change its name to the more neutral ‘Eastern Town’. The locals weren’t having it though, and were sticking to the old name. It is the kind of attitude that can make the Nordic societies seem stuck in the 1950s, and not, for once, in a good way. But when you challenge them on this, their response is either genuine puzzlement that anyone might take offence – usually characterised by a kind of mock-innocent literalism: ‘But they do have big lips!’ – or accusations of overt political correctness.

  ‘Norwegian racism is always a kind of racism that is not prepared to accept it being qualified as such,’ agreed Bangstad. ‘Because we’re the good guys, and racism is what bad people do. Within the last ten years there was a public debate on whether one could use the Norwegian equivalent of neger, and people would get up and say, “I have the right to say this, why should I care about the sensitivities of African youths in Norway.” A couple of weeks ago we had a case where a Swedish artist called Timbuktu contacted editors of a newspaper to complain about a cartoon of the tribal African with the big lips, and the basic argument again was “Why are you so offended?” And then it became a question of freedom of speech. “Here are all these politically correct people trying to prevent this.”’

  Ah, Scandinavians standing up for their right to print offensive cartoons. They have been here before, of course, with the Mohammed cartoon crisis of 2006, when the right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed some boorish, wilfully unfunny cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (with a bomb in his turban, and so on) to counter what they perceived as a mortal threat to their freedom of speech from Islamic rules on the two-dimensional depiction of their spiritual leader.