One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (28 page)

It was also important to give
yourself a martyr’s gift, something you really wanted. He himself had laid down three bottles of Château Kirwan 1979. As his martyrdom was approaching, he had taken one of them to a Christmas dinner with his half-siblings, the second to a friend’s party. He would save the last one for his final martyr’s celebration ‘and enjoy it with the two high-class model whores I intend to rent prior to the
mission’. He claimed that you had to be pragmatic in the face of martyrdom and allow ‘the primal aspects of man’ to take priority over ‘misguided piety’.

If you died in battle, your name would be remembered for hundreds of years. Your story would be told to coming generations and your death would help to boost morale in the resistance movement. You would be remembered as one of the courageous
crusaders who said: enough is enough.

If, on the other hand, you survived and ended up under arrest because power still had not been seized from the cultural Marxists, it was up to you to exploit your situation. A trial provided an excellent opportunity and a fitting arena for a Knight Templar to denounce the Marxist world hegemony. Berwick cautioned that on such an occasion you had to speak
on behalf of the Knights Templar as a whole, not as yourself. You had to demand to be released, and for your country’s regime to be brought before a tribunal of national patriotic forces.

‘By the time you are done presenting your demands, the judges and the trial audience will probably laugh their asses off and mock you for being ridiculous. You must ignore this and stay firm and focused. You
will then achieve the status of a living martyr.’ This influential position would allow you to establish a pan-European prison alliance of militant nationalists. Prison was a first-rate arena for winning supporters and recruiting people for the campaign.

*   *   *

And then: the finale. When the civil war was over, the ideal society would be constructed to protect European genes. Factories of
surrogate mothers would be set up in low-cost countries and each mother would be expected to produce ten or so blond, blue-eyed children. The possibility of developing an artificial uterus would also be explored.

Parents who were not suitable to look after their children could place them with patriotic foster parents who would be allowed to have up to twelve children. The most crucial concern
was that of replenishing the Nordic gene pool. He explained that ‘If you go black, there is no turning back.’ Blue eyes were a recessive gene and it was important to prevent this threatened eye colour from steady eradication, otherwise there would be hardly any blond, blue-eyed individuals left on the planet.

The new society would be chaste. Sexual abstinence before marriage would be the norm.
Divorce would be seen as a breach of contract and would be penalised. The patriarchy had to be rebuilt. Fathers would always be given custody of their children in cases of parents splitting up.

Free zones would have to be set up to avoid rebellion and revolt. Every country could have its Las Vegas, where those incapable of containing themselves could live. Here there would be free sex, free marijuana
and uninhibited partying. Liberal, apolitical types could live there. Berwick stressed that even if all Marxists were liberals, not all liberals were Marxists.

*   *   *

Once a day he was torn away from his writing. He had to emerge from his room into life at 18 Hoffsveien.

The eating space in the kitchen was cramped. Their knees almost collided. If they wanted they could take their meals into
the living room, where the dining table stood just inside the door to the tiny balcony, beneath two prints by Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand and a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
.

His mother talked about things people had told her, rumours she had heard. He talked about the world with which he was obsessed. The book he was writing. Norway, Europe, Islam, the world. His mother did not really like
him when he was talking about his book, he was so intense. She eventually started avoiding all subjects that might turn the conversation to politics.

But Anders just ploughed on; after all, he only had his mother to talk to. Wenche sometimes thought: this is nonsense, this is madness and it’s got to stop. Things used to be so nice, now he just went on about his book. He suddenly started calling
her a feminist with Marxist tendencies, her of all people, who had always voted for the Progress Party.

Talking to his mother, he left out the violence. The great thing was that he didn’t have to worry about her snooping about on his computer. She would not even know how to open his files. His sister, on the other hand, would have realised that something was going on if she had come to visit.
But she did not come. Still, on the other side of the Atlantic she was worried and wrote in a letter to her mother, ‘Mum, that’s not normal! He’s thirty years old but all he does is sit in his room!’

Wenche, who was now receiving disability benefits, had her head filled with her son’s ideas. Across the outdoor café table by the Coop she would suddenly say that Norway should turn itself into an
absolute dictatorship. Democracy was bankrupt. The others, a motley bunch who happened to be free in the daytime, would gape at her for a moment before getting back to their coffee refills and pleasant chatter.

Wenche had also grown gradually more opposed to immigration, but often no more so than the others in the café. Whenever it was election time she would go along to the Progress Party’s
stand by the shopping centre. Sometimes she spent the whole morning there, talking to the campaigners handing out leaflets with their message about a bluer Norway.

Some days she dreaded going home. Her son had started suffering from wild mood swings and he sometimes reacted so violently to little things, or he would be distant, abrupt and surly. He accused her of talking to too many people who
could ‘infect us’. When he was like that he did not want to eat in the kitchen but asked her to bring his meals to his room, putting the empty plate outside his door afterwards. He put his hands over his face when he needed to leave his room to go to the toilet. At times he even wore a facemask.

But then he would kiss her cheek all of a sudden. Or he would sit down so close to her on the sofa
that she found it hard to breathe. At times like that she felt he was suffocating her, like when he was a child, when he was so clingy and could never leave her in peace. It was as if he was never really sure where to sit on the sofa and was sometimes too close, sometimes too far away.

Wenche was now single again. She had thrown out the retired captain. When Anders found out it was over, he bought
her a vibrator.

‘That’s taking consideration a bit far,’ she said, and told him her sex life was behind her now.

But Anders kept on asking her if she had tried out the gift.

Wenche often wondered if he was going to move out soon, but she never said anything. She put up with him. He put up with her.

*   *   *

The Progress Party and document.no had rejected him. Fjordman had given him the cold
shoulder. From now on he was on his own.

Alone in his deep, soft, accommodating chair. Alone in front of the screen. He kept the blind pulled down over his window. The world was shut out.

It was time to emerge from his cave. High time, in fact.

He had carefully calculated how to keep himself afloat financially once he had made all the necessary purchases. The schedule was tight.

He wanted
to make a bomb. That meant he would have to move. For the bomb he would need fertiliser, and to buy fertiliser he had to have a smallholding. The year before, in May 2009, he had set up a one-man business called Breivik Geofarm, operating from 18 Hoffsveien. He registered the company with the Norwegian register of business enterprises, giving its objectives as ‘buying, selling and management of shares,
project development including acquisition and development of real estate’.

In the course of the spring of 2010 he started buying equipment on the internet. The first thing he bought was a Pelican case from America.

‘What do you want that for?’ Wenche asked as he took the case, which he had informed her was bulletproof, into his room.

‘In case anyone breaks into the car,’ he answered.

In May
he ordered smoke grenades, laser gunsights and spike strips that would shred the tyres of anyone who tried to chase him. Later he ordered flashing blue lights, a GPS, silencers and firearm magazines.

He took control of the keys to their storage spaces in the attic and the basement. The attic spaces were only divided by wire mesh, so everything had to be well packed up. In the basement their storage
space had a sturdy door, but there was a lot of coming and going down there; people used the communal space for bikes, skis and toboggans.

When summer came he started to look for some kind of farm. He had picked out the local council districts of Eda and Torsby in Värmland, just across the Swedish border.
Seeking an isolated/ vacant/abandoned farm
, he put in the subject line of an email he sent
to the councils’ official email addresses, to Värmland county council and to about ten estate agents in the area. He wrote the letter in a peculiar Swedo-Norwegian.

Hello,

My name is Anders Behring and I have decided to spend the next two years writing a book about share strategies, primarily technical analysis and psychology as related to share trading. With this in view I am trying to find a quiet, isolated location in Torsby district, a disused or abandoned small farm or similar premises.

He stressed that it had to have a
barn/garage/shed
and an
isolated/remote
location.

The following day an employee of Torsby district council wrote back:
Hello Anders, it’s great to hear that you want to come to our district
. One of the estate agents wrote
Good luck with the book!

But nobody
could find a property to suit the Norwegian.

He put the farm project on the back burner for a while; there was so much else to do. Above all, he had to finish his book. The book was the most important thing of all.

It was crucial for him to take control of the narrative of his own life. Where should he start?

He devoted a few lines to his childhood. ‘I had a privileged upbringing with responsible
and intelligent people around me,’ he wrote in the final section of his manifesto under the chapter heading ‘Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the PCCTS, Knights Templar’. Some might consider an interview of this kind irrelevant, he wrote, but personally he would have appreciated the opportunity to read such an interview with a resistance fighter.

So there he sat in the fart room
between the Coderock artwork and the IKEA shelves, posing questions and thinking up answers. He had no negative childhood experiences at all, he wrote. ‘I guess I came from a typical Norwegian middle-class family.’

But the idealised picture soon shattered, the fragments strewn all over the short account of the people he grew up with.

First his father.

‘I have not spoken to my father since he
isolated himself when I was fifteen (he wasn’t very happy about my graffiti phase from thirteen to sixteen). He has four children but has cut contact with all of them so it is pretty clear whose fault that was. I don’t carry grudge but a couple of my half-siblings do. The thing is that he is just not very good with people.’

He went on to libel his stepfather: ‘Tore, my stepfather, worked as a
major in the Norwegian military and is now retired. I still have contact with him although now he spends most of his time (retirement) with prostitutes in Thailand. He is a very primitive sexual beast, but at the same time a very likeable and good guy.’

Then his sister. ‘My half-sister, Elisabeth, was infected by chlamydia after having more than forty sexual partners […] Her chlamydia went untreated
and she became one of several million US/European women who were suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease caused by untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia which leads to infertility. As she lives in the US, costs relating to this were not covered by the state.’

Finally his mother, and his stepfather again: ‘My mother was infected with genital herpes by her boyfriend (my stepfather), Tore, when she
was forty-eight. Tore, who was a captain in the Norwegian Army, had more than five hundred sexual partners and my mother knew this but suffered from lack of good judgement and morals due to several factors.’ He thrust the knife in deep and twisted it. ‘The herpes infection went to her brain and caused meningitis’, so she had to have an operation to insert a drain in her head because the infection
kept recurring. He wrote that his mother had to take early retirement as a result, and her quality of life had been drastically reduced. ‘She now has the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old.’

His mother had not only brought shame on herself, she had brought shame on him and on the whole family – ‘a family that was broken in the first place due to the secondary effects of the feministic, sexual
revolution’.

Morality’s executioner was ready at the guillotine. The members of his family had each been assigned their share of blame for society’s decline and now it was his childhood friend Ahmed’s turn.

His classmate, the Pakistani doctor’s son from the wealthy neighbourhood of Oslo West, never became truly integrated, ergo integration was not possible. Ahmed had Urdu classes as a child
and started attending the mosque when he was twelve. Berwick described how one of the boys he played football with, who later became a business partner, was robbed and beaten up by Ahmed and his Pakistani gang. The Knight Templar invented a story that Ahmed had been involved in a gang rape in Frogner Park. ‘These people sometimes raped the so-called “potato whores”,’ he wrote. Such things had opened
his eyes to the Muslim threat.

He accused his childhood friend of having cheered out loud every time a Scud missile was fired at the Americans during the first Gulf War in 1991. The boys were not quite twelve at the time. ‘His total lack of respect for my culture actually sparked my interest and passion for it. Thanks to him I gradually developed a passion for my own cultural identity.’