The ideology of madness

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid and close to meaningless, in either Norwegian or English. Utoya lies in the Tyrifjorden Lake about 45 minutes north of Oslo and it is where the Labour party’s ‘Workers’ Youth League’ once held its summer camps — until one afternoon in July 2011 when a man called Anders Breivik turned up, heavily armed.

Breivik murdered 69 people on Utoya, 33 of them under the age of 18. Hours previously he had killed eight people through a car bomb detonated beneath a government building in the capital. The consensus among Norway’s understandably shocked public and polity was that Breivik was insane, and this was indeed the first finding from a team of psychiatrists. But as time progressed this view was challenged for reasons which can only be described as political. The left argued, with some force, that Breivik was not mad, he was simply very right-wing. His murderous actions were the direct consequence of his own repulsive politics: that, said the left, is where a dislike of immigration leads you. The politics of hate — hence that dim-witted inscription on the obelisk. Breivik was re-examined and pronounced to be sane. He is now banged up for 21 years.

I thought of Breivik when I read about the latest outrage in Norway — the ‘bow and arrow’ killer, Espen Andersen Braathen, 37, who murdered five people at random in the town of Kongsberg, having shot them with his arrows and finished them off by stabbing them, it seems.