Perhaps it would be easier to understand the horrific Norwegian killings if they were committed by someone with a history of mental illness and/or violence.
Or perhaps we could more quickly file away this tragedy into a tidy, little mental compartment if the killing was conducted by someone with far less skill and fewer economic advantages.
And perhaps over time more details will emerge to reveal a picture of someone with a history of hate or unsound mind.
But early portraits painted by people who knew him suggest a rather disturbing alternative, which is that Anders Brievik was a seemingly 'normal' Norwegian.
From one of his classmate friends of four years:
I do not know what drove Anders. But, unfortunately, I do not think he is crazy. It would have created a comfortable distance between us if I thought he was. Nothing I know about him from our school days or what I have read in his so-called manifesto suggests that. Rather, he is cold, intelligent and calculating. The Anders I knew was not a monster.
And as the saying goes, he was not an island. He was product of our society. He was one of us.
Sadly, There is Nothing New Here
If in fact he is a sane, even likeable person as some suggest, who also can kill without concern for those he slaughters, what are we to make of Anders Brievik?
Any student of history is well aware of the unfortunate reality that people like Brievik are nothing new. Many, particularly here in Europe, had hoped the ideologies which fuel Brievik-like personalities, capable of inflicting immense harm to a great number of people not personally known, had been buried decades ago. But the carefully orchestrated supernova of violence conducted by Brievik reminds us that this flame has not in fact gone out yet.
In the wretched corner of history occupied by the Brieviks of the world resides Nazism, which, for better or for worse, has received the lion's share of attention. I say for better or worse because the Nazi-like crimes committed under Stalin, Mao, and others often do not receive the same level of emphasis as those committed under Hitler.
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