One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (23 page)

He was generally logged out of the games these days. He had stopped paying his monthly subscription
to some of them, so he would not be tempted to join one more battle, one more raid, one more fight.

One day when he went out to buy a part for the computer, he ran into an old friend in the street. Kristian, with whom he had shared a business and who, on their last encounter late at night in the city, had accused him of being a closet homosexual.

‘What are you up to now?’ asked Kristian.

‘I’m
writing a book,’ said Anders.

‘Great,’ said Kristian. He would finally have a use for all those swanky foreign words of his. But it was a bit weird, all the same, he thought. Anders had been primarily interested in earning money, as much as possible, as fast as possible. How could he make any money out of something as obscure as this? Crusaders? Islam?

*   *   *

Sometimes Anders consulted document.no,
a Norwegian website run by former Marxist-Leninist Hans Rustad, who over the years had become a cultural conservative, distinctly critical of Islam. Document.no kept careful track of the latest news. Its debate forum attracted a steady stream of visitors.

A week before the general election, due to be held on 14 September 2009, the username Anders B posted his first comment on document.no. It
was about why the media ignored Muslim riots. There was ‘an increasing trend in Western Europe towards acceptance of the media hushing things up’. He used the unrest in French towns around Bastille Day, 14 July, as an example.
Le Monde
and other French newspapers had refused to write about the riots, he claimed. But the quotes he used were part of a different story, namely that it was the French
local authorities who had refused to answer questions from
Le Monde
, citing ‘official instructions’.

This sort of quotation out of context was to become a hallmark. Twisting and turning things to make them suit Anders B.

Responses poured in. Everyone replying to him on document.no that day took what he had written at face value. The response whetted his appetite. That first afternoon as a contributor
to document.no he dipped into two other subjects: the killing of whites in South Africa – ‘a systematic, racially motivated genocide’ – and multiculturalism as an anti-European ideology of hatred with the aim of destroying European culture and identity as well as Christianity.

Now he was in his stride. He recommended everybody following the thread to read Fjordman’s book
Defeating Eurabia
so
they would realise where Europe was heading. All those who dared to criticise multiculturalism were branded fascists and racists, a political correctness permitting no alternative view. ‘The Progress Party is one victim of this intolerance,’ he concluded just before midnight. His threads continued with a life of their own.

Inspired, the following morning he wrote an open letter to Fjordman, a
year after trying to reach him on Gates of Vienna. This time he posted it in the comment section of document.no.

Fjordman,

I’ve now worked full-time for over three years on a solution-oriented work (compendium written in English). I have tried to concentrate on areas a little to one side of your main focus. A lot of the information I have gathered is not known to most people, including you.

If you email me at [email protected] I will send an electronic copy when I have finished it.

Two days later he received a reply.

Hello, this is Fjordman. You wanted to get hold of me?

Anders B answered straight away:

The book is ready but it will take a few months to prepare the practicalities for dispatch, will send it partially electronically. Defeating Eurabia is brilliant but it’s going to take time for books like these to penetrate the censorship effectively. I’ve chosen free distribution as a counter strategy.

There was silence from Fjordman.

*   *   *

Wenche, on the other hand, heard plenty about ‘the fjord man’, as she called him. Every day over dinner she got a little update. The words he used to describe the fjord man were ‘clever’, ‘my idol’, ‘such a good writer’. Hans
Rustad was also part of the dinner talk. But Anders’s mother grasped the fact that the fjord man was number one. The one called Hans was a bit more cautious than the fjord man.

But sometimes she felt she’d had enough of Doomsday.

‘Can’t we just be satisfied with the way things are?’

*   *   *

Red or blue?

Would the Labour Party continue its mismanagement of the country?

A week after Anders’s
debut on document.no, at nine o’clock on election-day morning, Anders suggested that the powers of good pool their resources to create a national newspaper to ‘wake Norwegians out of their coma’. On his thread, lots of contributors suggested likely collaborators in the project. Names and organisations were tossed out and then shot down. Anders gave an impression of tolerance and readiness to
compromise.

‘We’re not in a position to pick and choose our partners,’ he wrote.

Just as in his days on the Progress Party Youth forum, when he was keen to form a youth politics platfrom on the right wing, he now envisaged a community of varying shades of opinion, but all pulling in roughly the same direction.

‘I know lots of people in the Progress Party and some of those with influence want
to develop
Progress
, the party’s paper. I also know of some culturally conservative investors. How about working to consolidate
Progress
with document.no + get funding from strategic investors? Call the paper
Conservative
,’ he wrote at 11 a.m.

At half past he added a PS: ‘I can also help by bringing in some funding for the project from my lodge.’

As the polling stations closed that evening,
the project appeared to be up and running. He wrote that he could set up a meeting with Trygve Hegnar, founder of the business and investment magazine
Kapital
, and Geir Mo, General Secretary of the Progress Party, to present this solution to them. ‘This election and the coverage given to it show us definitively that we can’t go on without a national mouthpiece.’

By the time the polling stations
had been closed for an hour and a half Anders had drawn up a business plan, which he put on the site’s discussion area. There was Strategy no. 1, which he called the lowbrow model. It would have standard news, a few financial items and plenty of ‘lowbrow features’, like sex and pin-up girls. The problem with that was that you would lose a large number of conservative, Christian readers. Strategy
no. 2, which he estimated would generate circulation of about a third that of no. 1, would have a good deal of financial content and minimal ‘lowbrow features’. And then there was Strategy no. 3, a hybrid of 1 and 2. With a substantial amount of financial content he was convinced it had the potential to poach a lot of readers from the business papers.

‘The main aim is an increase in political
influence by means of unofficial support for the Progress Party and the Conservatives,’ he declared.

At midnight he saw the result of the election. It was depressing.

*   *   *

Fifteen hundred kilometres further north, Anders Kristiansen was jubilant. ‘Four more years!’ He had dipped into his savings so he could stay at a hotel in Tromsø and join Labour’s election-night vigil. They’d done it!
Viljar was up in Svalbard with his parents and younger brother, Torje; the Sæbø family was celebrating in Salangen. The Norwegian people had spoken and wanted the red–green coalition of Jens Stoltenberg to carry on.

The three comrades had not cast votes themselves. Viljar and Anders were still only sixteen. Simon had just turned seventeen. But next time, at the 2011 elections, they would finally
be old enough to vote!

*   *   *

‘Norwegian journalists won their war against the Progress Party,’ Anders B wrote that night. ‘They were able to bring down the vote by 6 per cent after four weeks of concerted warfare.’ It was the media’s blockade of news about the Muslim riots in France, Britain and Sweden that ‘set the seal on our fate and cost the right-wing parties election victory’.

He
nonetheless awoke the next day with his fighting spirit undampened and wrote an email to Hans Rustad about the need for a culturally conservative newspaper. Within the hour he had a reply from his role model.

‘There is no doubt that your analysis is correct. If we are to win the election in 2013, we need more effective media. This puts the Progress Party at a real disadvantage. It gets pushed
around and there’s no third force to mobilise,’ wrote Rustad.

Anders replied at once that the first thing he would do was ‘to arrange a meeting between myself and Geir Mo’, to discuss the Progress Party’s view of the matter.

Months passed and he heard nothing from the General Secretary of the Progress Party. Nor did he ever quite bring himself to contact the editor of
Kapital
. He did not approach
any of the investors he had boasted that he could contact so easily, nor was his lodge ever informed of his newspaper initiative. The only thing he did was to ask a print shop how much it would cost to print a glossy monthly magazine.

In November he started ‘email farming’. Via Facebook accounts, he issued invitations to cultural conservatives and critics of immigration all over the world to
become his friend. It was time-consuming, because there was a limit to how many invitations one could send per day. Fifty friend requests went out from each account every day.

About half accepted.

He had set up his profiles in such a way that it would be quite natural for cultural conservatives to accept his invitation. But he steered clear of any who seemed too extreme and deleted all those
who had dubious symbols on their websites. He did not want any neo-Nazis as friends.

It was people’s email addresses he wanted. After a few months, he had a database of eight thousand addresses.

Only at the end of January 2010 did he receive an answer from the Progress Party; a rejection from the parliamentary group. They wished him the best of luck with his newspaper project, but could not
promise anything beyond giving interviews.

Anders wrote to Hans Rustad in disappointment. He also informed him that his book was finished.

I shall be leaving for book-promo before the end of February and may be away up to 6 mths. Regards Anders.

The Book

He began with a quotation.

‘The men the European public admires most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.’

He continued with a plagiarism.

‘Most Europeans look back at the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were
generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two-parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school.’

He had no inhibitions about stealing for the good of the cause. He credited hardly anyone. They were all subsumed into a higher entity:
Andrew Berwick
.

What was going wrong with Europe?

Andrew Berwick blamed it on the ideology of Political Correctness which, he wrote, was the same as cultural Marxism – Marxism transferred from the economic to the cultural sphere. He wanted to recapture the values
of the 1950s, when women were housewives and not soldiers, children were not born outside wedlock and homosexuality was not glorified.

‘Those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it,’ urged Andrew Berwick. ‘They must shout from the rooftops the realities it seeks to suppress, such as our opposition to sharia, the Islamisation of our countries, the fact that violent crimes are disproportionately
committed by Muslims and that most cases of Aids are voluntary, acquired from immoral acts.’

One of the prominent features of cultural Marxism is feminism, wrote Berwick. It is ubiquitous and all-consuming:

It is in television, where nearly every major offering has a female ‘power figure’ and the plots and characters emphasise inferiority of the male and superiority of the female. It is in the
military, where expanding opportunity for women, even in combat positions, has been accompanied by double standards and then lowered the standards, as well as a decline in enlistment of young men, while ‘warriors’ in the services are leaving in droves. It is in government-mandated employment preferences and practices that benefit women and use ‘sexual harassment’ charges to keep men in line. It
is in public schools, where ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-esteem’ are increasingly promoted while academic learning declines. And sadly, we see that several European countries allow and fund free distribution of contraceptive pills combined with liberal abortion policies.

He went on: ‘The man of today is expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.’

It was great
to sit there cutting and pasting. Lots of the stuff he had been brooding about, but had not put into concrete form, was all thought out for him.

‘Who dares, wins,’ he wrote at the end of the introduction.

*   *   *

‘We are deceived by our own governments into thinking that Christian and Islamic civilisation are of equal value,’ he wrote. Obviously, they were not.

The book veered between polemic
and pedagogy. He listed the five pillars of Islam – faith, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and the giving of alms – at times presenting the Qur’an as though he were a primary school RE teacher: Allah’s commandments to Muhammad via the Archangel Gabriel; the great battles for Islam; the taking of Mecca and introduction of sharia.