One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

by Åsne Seierstad

  Every time Breivik’s lips curled into a smile, he doggedly attempted to moderate it. This time he hid the muscle movement by sucking his lower lip.

  A dialling tone resounded from the loudspeaker system, into the room and into seventeen district courts.

  A receiver was lifted, and a cool voice said, ‘Police emergency line.’

  ‘Hi, there’s shooting on Utøya in Buskerud in the Tyrifjord,’ said a girl in a broad accent. Her breathing was louder than her words. When she called she had just seen her boyfriend shot and killed. It was 17.26 and Breivik had been on the island for ten minutes. He had just entered the café building. The girl, whose name was Renate Tårnes, was hiding in a toilet.

  The policeman asked if there were any more shots. Renate gasped for breath before she answered.

  ‘Yes, it’s going on the whole time. There’s total panic. He’s in here.’

  The girl had lowered her voice to a whisper. She did not say anything more, just held up her phone so the operator could hear what she was hearing.

  There was a sudden scream on the recording. Another. Several more. The courtroom was stock-still. Not a single movement. Not even the tapping of keys. You were there, outside it, yes, safe on a seat in the room, and yet you were there, caught up in the massacre. You heard the sound of Breivik’s weapons. Initially, the shots were sporadic. They rang out singly, then a number in swift succession. Then more and more.

  The recording lasted for three minutes. Holden played it all.

  Three minutes. Fifty shots. Thirteen killed.

  Many in the courtroom were crying.

  Breivik looked down at a fingernail.

  Before he glanced back up.

  The Monologue

  Day two. It was the day he had been preparing for.

  Later, many others would set their mark on the case: the prosecution, the witnesses, experts, the defence. But today, the floor was his alone.

  He walked slowly to the witness box. In his hands he had a pile of papers. He laid them on the table in front of him and adjusted his cufflinks.

  ‘You must restrict yourself to the truth in matters pertinent to your case,’ the judge said severely.

  ‘Dear judge Arntzen, I request that I be allowed to set out the framework of my defence, and I hope you will not interrupt me; I have a list of points—’

  ‘You must lower the microphone a little for the transmission to the other courts to work properly.’

  He was ready. This was the book launch.

  ‘I stand here today as a representative of the Norwegian and European resistance movement. I speak on behalf of Norwegians who do not want our rights as an indigenous population to be taken away from us. The media and the prosecutors maintain that I carried out the attacks because I am a pathetic, malicious loser, that I have no integrity, am a notorious liar with no morals, am mentally ill and should therefore be forgotten by other cultural conservatives in Europe. They say I have dropped out of working life, that I am narcissistic, antisocial, am prey to bacteria phobia, have had an incestuous relationship with my mother; that I suffer from deprivation of a father, am a child murderer, a baby murderer, despite the fact that I killed no one under fourteen. That I am cowardly, homosexual, paedophile, necrophiliac, Zionist, racist, a psychopath and a Nazi. All these claims have been made. That I am mentally and physically retarded with an IQ of around eighty.’

  He read rapidly. He had a great deal to get through. The meaning of the words was more important than how they were read. ‘I am not surprised by these characterisations. I expected it. I knew the cultural elite would ridicule me. But this is bordering on farce.’

  He glanced up and then looked down at his papers again.

  ‘The answer is simple. I have carried out the most sophisticated and spectacular attack in Europe since the Second World War. I and my nationalist brothers and sisters represent all that they fear. They want to scare others off doing the same thing.’

  The judges were watching him closely, listening attentively. How was he when let off the leash? Did he ramble? Was he consistent? This was the first time they had heard him speaking freely. How would he fill the half-hour allocated to him?

  Norway and Europe were suffocated by total conformity, he told them. And what they knew as democracy was in reality a cultural Marxist dictatorship. This was familiar ground now.

  ‘Nationalists and cultural conservatives were broken-backed after the fall of the Axis powers. Europe never had a McCarthy, so the Marxists infiltrated schools and the media. This also brought us feminism, gender quotas, the sexual revolution, a transformed church, deconstruction of social norms and a socialist, egalitarian ideal of society. Norway is suffering from cultural self-contempt as a result of multicultural ideology.’

  The defendant proposed that there be a referendum asking the following question: Do you consider it undemocratic that the Norwegian people have never been asked about Norway becoming a multiethnic state? Do you consider it undemocratic that Norway takes in so many Africans and Asians that Norwegians risk becoming a minority in their own capital?

  ‘Nationalist and culturally conservative parties are boycotted by the media. Our opinions are seen as inferior, we are second-class citizens and this is not a proper democracy! Look at the Swedish party Sverigedemokraterna and what is happening to them. In Norway, the media have conducted a systematic smear campaign against the Progress Party for twenty years and will go on doing so. Seventy per cent of British people see immigration as a major problem and think Great Britain has become a dysfunctional country. Seventy per cent are dissatisfied with multiculturalism.’

  ‘Are you reading from your manifesto now?’ asked the judge.

  ‘No,’ replied Breivik, and went on: ‘How many people feel the same in Norway, do you think? More and more cultural conservatives are realising that the democratic struggle achieves nothing. Then it is just a short step to taking up arms. When peaceful revolution is made impossible, then violent revolution is the only option.’

  He read in a monotone, without any sense of involvement. If he was animated inside, it did not show on the surface. It was like his time in the Progress Party. Even when he was on the podium, he had failed to inspire, failed to generate any enthusiastic applause.There was a bitter tone to his voice.

  ‘People who call me wicked have misunderstood the difference between brutal and wicked. Brutality is not necessarily wicked. Brutality can have good intentions.’

  People in the rows of seats sighed and shrugged. Some AUF members had started whispering together.

  ‘If we can force them to change direction by executing seventy people, then that is a contribution to preventing the loss of our ethnic group, our Christianity, our culture. It will also help to prevent a civil war that could result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Norwegians. It is better to commit minor barbarity than major barbarity.’

  He took a breath and embarked on a discourse about what he termed the Balkanisation of Norway and the witch hunt against cultural conservatives.

  ‘Are the AUF and the Labour Party doing this because they are wicked, or because they are naive? And if they are only naive – shall we forgive them or punish them? The answer is that most AUF members have been indoctrinated and brainwashed. By their parents. By the school curriculum. By adults in the Labour Party. Still these were not innocent civilian children, but political activists. Many were in leadership positions. The AUF is very much like the Hitlerjugend. Utøya was a political indoctrination camp. It was—’

  ‘I must ask you to moderate your words out of consideration for the survivors and the bereaved,’ Arntzen said sharply.

  ‘The certainty of my imprisonment does not frighten me. I was born in a prison, I have lived my whole life in a prison in which there is no freedom of expression, where opposition is not allowed and I am expected to applaud the destruction of my people. This prison is called Norway. It doesn’t matter whether I am incarcerated in Skøyen or in Ila. It is just
as pressing wherever you live, because in the end the whole country will be deconstructed into the multicultural hell we call Oslo.’

  ‘Are you near the end, Breivik?’ asked the judge. He had exceeded his limit of half an hour.

  ‘I am on page six of thirteen.’

  ‘You must start finishing off now,’ said Arntzen.

  ‘My whole defence hinges on being able to read the whole thing.’ He took a sip of water and went on reading in a monotone. ‘According to the Central Office of Statistics, immigrants will be in the majority in Oslo by 2040. And that does not take into account third-generation immigrants, adopted children, people who have no documents or who are here illegally. Forty-seven per cent of those born in the hospitals of Oslo are not ethnic Norwegians. The same is true of the majority of children starting school.’

  The three male forensic psychiatrists sat looking at Breivik, while Synne Sørheim made copious notes on her laptop.

  ‘European leftists assert that Muslims are peaceful and against violence. This is lies and propaganda.’

  ‘Breivik, I must ask you to wind up,’ Arntzen said urgently.

  ‘It is not possible to abbreviate the framework of my defence,’ he replied, adding, ‘If I’m not allowed to set out the framework, there’s no point my saying anything at all.’

  The judge was determined to keep a tight rein from the start. She could not ease off on day two.

  ‘There is a consensus between European elites and Muslims to implement the multicultural project in order to deconstruct Norwegian and European culture and thereby turn everything on its head. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good. In Oslo, aggressive cultures like Islam will increasingly predominate, spreading like cancer. Is this so hard to understand? Our ethnic group is the most precious and the most vulnerable, our Christianity and our freedom. Ultimately we will be left sitting there with our sushi and flatscreen TVs, but we will have lost the most precious—’

  ‘Breivik!’ said the judge. She pronounced his name abruptly, almost without vowels so it sounded like ‘Brvk!’

  ‘I have five pages left.’

  ‘This goes far beyond what was requested yesterday,’ said Arntzen, addressing Lippestad.

  ‘I understand the court, but request that he be allowed to go on,’ said Lippestad, but he also asked Breivik to cut down his text. He stressed that a limit of five days was set for his defence.

  ‘This was originally twenty pages but I managed to compress it into thirteen. There’s a lot of talk about these five days I’ve got. I never asked for five days, I only asked for an hour! That’s this hour I’ve got now. It’s critically important for me to explain all this,’ exclaimed Breivik.

  ‘Go on!’ said Arntzen.

  ‘Thank you!’ said Breivik.

  ‘Then we come to another European problem. Demands such as sharia law. Norway spends its oil money on social security benefits for immigrants. Saudi Arabia has spent one hundred billion dollars on Islamic centres in Europe and financed fifteen hundred mosques and two thousand schools…’

  Public advocate Mette Yvonne Larsen, responsible for liaison between the courtroom in Oslo and the district courts, broke in and said that victims and relatives of victims in the regional courtrooms had taken offence at the fact that Breivik was allowed to go on for so long.

  ‘You have heard how the bereaved relatives are reacting. Will you show consideration for that?’ asked the judge.

  ‘I will,’ replied the accused.

  ‘Is it relevant to you?’

  ‘It is relevant to show consideration.’

  ‘In that case I ask you to do so and to conclude as quickly as possible.’

  ‘I have three pages left,’ said Breivik. ‘If I’m not allowed to read to the end, I shall not account for myself to the court at all!’

  Then prosecutor Svein Holden spoke. ‘We consider it important that Breivik be allowed to continue.’

  He went on.

  ‘Oslo is a city in ruins. I grew up in the West End, but I see that the city authorities are buying apartments, public property, for Muslims, who create ghettos. Many Muslims despise Norwegian culture, feminism, the sexual revolution, decadence. It starts with demands for special dispensations and ends with demands for self-rule. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are heroes acclaimed by the indigenous people of the United States – they fought against General Custer. Were they wicked or heroic? American history books describe them as heroes, not terrorists. Meanwhile, nationalists are called terrorists. Isn’t that hypocritical and highly racist?’

  The judge regarded him intently.

  ‘Norwegians are the indigenous people of Norway! Norway supports those who champion the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and Tibet, but not of our own country. We refuse to accept being colonised. I understand that my info is difficult to understand, because the propaganda tells you the opposite. But soon everybody will realise. Mark Twain said that in a time of change, a patriot is seen as a failure. Once he has been proved right, everyone wants to be with him, because then it costs nothing to be a patriot. This trial is about finding out the truth. The documentation and examples I have presented here are true. So how can what I have done be illegal?’

  The psychiatrist Synne Sørheim was chewing gum as she typed her notes. The three men sharing the table with her all had their chins propped on folded hands, observing what happened in front of them.

  Arntzen’s fellow judges were leaning back, slightly sunken into the chairs with the tall black backs. Their eyes were fixed on the accused, while their faces were calm, revealing nothing. The corners of their mouths slowly sank into a resting position as Breivik’s speech dragged on.

  The accused drank from a glass of water.

  ‘Have you finished, Breivik?’ asked Arntzen.

  ‘I’ve got one page to go.’

  He set down the glass.

  ‘Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron have admitted that multiculturalism has failed in Europe. It doesn’t work. In Norway, the opposite is happening: we’re going in for more mass immigration from Asia and Africa.’

  He looked down at his papers and hesitated for a couple of seconds, then exclaimed, ‘Well I’m censoring myself now, right, just so that’s clear!

  ‘We are the first drops of water heralding the coming storm! The purifying storm. Rivers of blood will run through the cities of Europe. My brothers and sisters will win. How can I be so sure? People are living with blinkers of prosperity. They are going to lose everything, their daily lives will be full of suffering and they will lose their identities, so now it is important for more patriots to shoulder responsibility, as I have done. Europe needs more heroes!’

  His presentation had been polished in advance and his arguments built logically on each other, within his own universe, and he could not resist, as in the manifesto, repeating the best.

  ‘Thomas Jefferson said the following: The tree of freedom must be watered from time to time. With the blood of patriots and tyrants…’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m almost at the end. The political elite in our country are so brazen that they expect us to applaud this deconstruction. And those who do not applaud are branded as evil racists and Nazis. This is the real madness – they are the ones who should be the subjects of psychiatric evaluation and be branded as sick, not me. It isn’t rational to flood the country with Africans and Asians to the point where our own culture is lost. This is the real madness. This is the real evil.’

  He drew breath.

  ‘I acted on the principle of necessity on behalf of my people, my religion, my city and my country. I therefore demand to be acquitted of these charges. Those were the thirteen pages I had prepared.’

  * * *

  ‘What is your own relationship with Christianity?’ asked the public advocate Siv Hallgren the following day. The lawyer, who had herself been a teenage mother, represented several of the bereaved relatives.

  ‘Well, I’m a militant Christian and not particularly
religious. But I’m a bit religious. We want a Christian cultural heritage, Christian religious instruction in schools and a Christian framework for Europe.’

  ‘But what about you personally? Do you profess the Christian faith? Do you believe in the resurrection?’

  ‘I’m a Christian, I believe in God. I’m a bit religious, but not that religious.’

  ‘Have you read the Bible?’

  ‘Of course. I used to, back when we were taught about Christianity in school. Before it was abolished by the Labour Party.’

  Hallgren asked him to define Norwegian culture. The one he had killed for, in order to preserve it.

  ‘You could … yes, you could say that the very heart of Norwegian culture is the Norwegian ethnic group.’

  He hesitated for a moment, reflected and found the answer: ‘Everything that’s in Norway, from door handles to designs to beer labels to habits. It’s all culture. Phrases, ways of addressing people. Absolutely everything is culture.’

  Said Breivik.

  The Heart of the Matter

  At the centre of the court case there was a beating heart.

  The dead.

  The murders had almost been pushed into the background by the discussions of the perpetrator’s psyche and ideas in the run-up to the trial. But it was the murders he was to be punished for, not the ideas.

  Svein Holden and Inga Bejer Engh had been given responsibility for planning the trial the previous autumn. They were both young parents with a couple of children each and lived ordinary, privileged Norwegian lives. Holden went straight from leading a press conference about the first psychiatric report to the hospital for the birth of his second child.

  The two public prosecutors spent a lot of time talking to the bereaved relatives and survivors as they planned the proceedings, fetched their children from nursery, prepared the trial, changed nappies, read interview transcripts, sang lullabies. Their meetings with other mothers and fathers only a few years older than them had a profound effect. Some were angry, others were weighed down by sorrow. Something was broken in all of them. The public prosecutors encountered both aggression and the story of my son. My daughter. Our child.