Ian Thomson

Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree

A review of One of Us by Åsne Seierstad reveals a lonely misfit set on a murderous mission to purify the Nordic race

Self confessed mass murderer Anders Breivik Photo: Getty 
issue 14 March 2015

In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight adults with a bomb attack. His hatred was directed at the children of Norwegian politicians who had allowed immigration to contaminate the sturdy bond (as he saw it) of Nordic race and nationhood. ‘You will all die today, Marxists!’ he hurrahed as he stalked and shot his way to infamy.

Inflated with self-importance, Breivik was a self-styled ‘Justicious Knight Commander’ come to cauterise Norway of bloody foreigners. He advocated the racial rejuvenation of his homeland through the expulsion of Muslims, and to this end he photographed himself in masonic Crusader regalia, sumptuously gold-braided and primed for holy war. Was he mad? In many ways he was a grotesque mirror image of Islamist serial killers like Mohammed (‘Jihadi John’) Emwazi.

Like Emwazi, Anders (‘Holy War’) Breivik despised the culturally mixed-up, mongrel Europe in which many of us now happily live, and called for a nation state cleansed of feminists, homosexuals, Jews and bleeding hearts of all stripes.

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