Oslo and Utoya: further readings II

[ by Charles Cameron — various angles on Breivik, continuing ]

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“There’s always a mystery.”

Dr. Dalrymple is holding forth on what we can — and can’t — know about the mind of a mass murderer like the Oslo shooter, Anders Behring Breivik. “I don’t think we’ll ever understand” what makes a person capable of this kind of premeditated murder, Dr. Dalrymple tells me over lunch. What’s more, he says, “we don’t even know what it is to understand. At what point do you say, ‘Aha! Now I understand!'” he asks.

That’s a [pseudonymous] British prison psychiatrist, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

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A few things have happened since my previous batch of posts on Oslo and Utoya: some other reading – I’m betting one of them is that a lot of people have arrived that their “Aha! Now I understand!” moment on Breivik, and aren’t particularly interested in alternate views. Their eyes may still be caught by a sensational headline, perhaps, they may still be fascinated by police procedural accounts of the investigation and trial – but they’ve arrived at closure on “who he is and why he did it” and that’s it, case closed.

Dr. Dalrymple’s suggests there is “always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there’s always a mystery, and I think that’s going to remain.”

In this post, I’ll begin to list some of the more remarkable and/or worthwhile reading I’ve come across since my previous post. Let’s begin with Thomas Hegghammer:

When Thomas Hegghammer writes about Breivik, which he has finally done, we get the chance to read one of the world’s finest Al Qaeda scholars writing about one of his fellow Norwegians. I mentioned his tweets as passed along by Will McCants in my first “some other reading” post. Hegghammer’s NYT op-ed, The Rise of the Macro-Nationalists, claims that Brevik’s 2083 manifesto “reveals a new doctrine of civilizational war that represents the closest thing yet to a Christian version of Al Qaeda”. If anyone should, Hegghammer should know.

So that would be my number one pick.

And then…

An American Apology to Norway . . . sorry about that, from MilPub.  Written by Seydlitz, a friend of — and recent guest poster on — this blog.  Personal and touching.

Moving farther afield, this one caught my eye:

Joan Acocella, Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right, on the New Yorker’s Book Bench: “The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway — and, by extension, in Scandinavia and the West as a whole — to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence.” Acocella closes with the words, “Larsson died before those developments, but he’s up there somewhere saying, ‘I told you so.'”

Of all the people on that Scandinavian right, Breivik quoted the blogger known as Fjordman most frequently – so this interview with Fjordman (under his own name, Peder Jensen) is key. Most telling quote, strangely enough: “After the terrorist attack and his blog being cited as an influence, Jensen says he will never use the alias «Fjordman» again.”

I wasn’t intending to use this post to do much in the way of propagating my own ideas, bur many of the items that follow have to do with who influenced or inspired Breivik, and thus with the issues of free speech, inspiration, incitement, and slippery slopes. Earlier today I responded to a ZP comment with an aphorism playing off the phrase “correlation is not causation” – so that phrase was already prepped and ready in my head, and what nudged its way into consciousness as I was tapping out this quick write-up for Fjordman was another:

Quotation is not causation.

I think that’s important in a way that parallels the importance of “innocent until proven guilty”.

Back to my list.

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