Flowers adorn a statue after an estimated 100,000 people attended a “rose march”in Oslo, Norway, in memory of the victims of Friday’s bomb attack and shooting massacre.The self-described perpetrator of the mass killings in Norway told authorities there that he expects to spend the rest of his life in prison but two other cells in his terror network could still launch attacks, officials said Monday.There is no comprehending the twisted mind of a mass murderer, particularly one whose crime hinges on a deranged ideological crusade to rally public consciousness against a perceived threat to an ideal society by creating a blood bath among that society’s most innocent members.
Still, it’s necessary to survey the mortal carnage and the mindset of perpetrators of such crimes to recognize the sanguine insanity that hovers in the haze of extremism. The massacre of dozens — 76, according to Monday’s revised account — apparently unleashed by a 32-year-old Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, against his own people is a grim reminder of that civic necessity.
Breivik, now reckoned by police to be a fundamentalist Christian extremist, quickly admitted after his arrest that he was the man who detonated a massive 6-ton fertilizer bomb in a government building in central Oslo before taking an automatic rifle to the nearby island of Utoya, where he gunned down scores of people, including many youths, one as young as 12, before a Norwegian SWAT team belatedly arrived. His appointed lawyer, however, said Breivik told police that he rejected the idea of “criminal responsibility.”
“He has said that he believed the actions were atrocious, but that in his head they were necessary,” the lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told Norwegian news media. “He wanted a change in society and, from his perspective, he needed to force through a revolution. He wished to attack society and the structure of society.”
Breivik attacked the governmental pillar of his society. Most of the victims, adults and young people, were attending the annual summer picnic of potential members and leaders of Norway’s governing Labor Party. It apparently was the Labor Party’s support of policies on immigration and multiculturalism, and tolerance for Muslims, that spurred Breivik’s anti-Islamic rage.