Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree

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. According to the Oslo-born journalist Åsne Seierstad, Breivik was a compulsive computer-gamer. The shooting game Call of Duty had, he thought, improved his firing accuracy no end: the world would have to take Anders the Crusader very seriously indeed.

Why grant Breivik more publicity? He is now almost as famous as his compatriot Henrik Ibsen. In recounting the life and times of this wretched inadequate, Seierstad risks providing a platform for his mono-mania. Better let him fade into insignificance. Yet her point is well made: Breivik was one who preferred to be noticed and infamous rather than not noticed at all, and to that extent he was very much a product of 21st-century celebrity culture.