3,322 words
Åsne Seierstad
One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
Kagge, 2013
Anders Behring Breivik is a Norwegian who killed 77 people in 2011, at the age of 32. Sixty-nine of his victims were shot on the island of Utøya while attending a summer camp held by a left-wing political party, while a further eight died in a prior bomb attack on government buildings in Oslo. Arrested on the island after his killing spree, Breivik was found guilty of the attacks and sentenced under the lenient Norwegian justice system to 21 years in “preventive custody”, meaning that the state could extend his sentence if he was deemed still to be a danger to the public. He was recently denied parole.
At the time of Breivik’s 2012 trial, the media seemed less exercised by the massacre than they were by the fact that the court was considering incarcerating Breivik in a psychiatric institution rather than in prison, and this illustrates an aspect of the media prevalent across Europe. When a jihadist blows up ordinary people, or a black goes full simian with a machete, the default position of the media is that the perpetrator has “mental issues” and is a “lone wolf”, whereas when right-wing sympathies are suspected, personal moral agency comes back into play, along with affiliation to a larger cause. Breivik was deemed “not psychotic” by the courts during the attacks, and remains in prison in comfortable conditions.
Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who in 2014 wrote the book, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway. Seierstad is best known as a war correspondent, and the Breivik case was the first story she ever covered which took place in her native Norway. The book follows Breivik from his childhood to his incarceration, and has been exhaustively researched from all available sources, including surviving victims from the Utøya shootings. She also uses Breivik’s manifesto, 2083 – A Declaration of European Independence, and his diaries. Some artistic license is employed, of course. Ms. Seierstad could hardly know the last thoughts of the teenagers on Utøya as they stumbled panicking in the dark or bled out on the beach. But the whole has a novelistic approach which makes for comfortable reading of uncomfortable material.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Breivik had something of a troubled childhood. His mother couldn’t cope with him and neighbors called him “Meccano boy” after the famous children’s construction set. Referred by social services to the local Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, experts observed a boy who took no joy from life, had a pathological relationship with his warring parents, and was in a “precarious” psychological condition. When Breivik finally did engage with the world as an adolescent, he found two escape routes from himself: graffiti and video gaming.
Gaming is one of the worst pursuits endemic to white culture, and its empty halls are where Breivik transferred his boredom and dissatisfaction with life. After discovering Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and others, Breivik would play all day, his record being 17 hours onscreen. Breivik lived online. He also made forays into e-commerce, winning some and losing some. He gamed obsessively, joining global campaigns and for the first time feeling a sense of community, of belonging, and of a common aim.
Then came another change. Joining the local chapter of the Right-wing Progress Party, he shifted his online obsessions to a new locus. He had discovered sites which talked about Islamization, something he was starting to note with concern. Ethnic tensions were still relatively new in Norway in the 1990s, but were beginning to flare up as Breivik came of age. In particular, Breivik frequented the anti-Islamic website Gates of Vienna (which is still going) and discovered the writing of the blogger known as “Fjordman”. Emailing his new hero and receiving a reply on one occasion, neither Breivik nor Fjordman (real name Peder Are Nestvold Jensen) could have imagined that their lives would become so intertwined. Fjordman could certainly never have guessed that he would one day have to leave Norway due to revelations made at Breivik’s trial.
As for the graffiti, Breivik, like many of his peers, fell straight into black street culture, with its false promise of easy success and alpha-male dominance. Breivik even called one of his symposiums at the Progress Party, “Get rich or die trying”. Rap music, designer brands, and graffiti “tagging” began to take up Breivik’s time, unremarkable student as he was. The author notes “his boastfulness, his exaggerated hiphop walk and the way he wore his trousers back to front to be cool.” It is extraordinary how “being cool” in black culture seems to require looking as though you are unable to dress yourself. Breivik was a product of mixed cultures, also describing himself as “metrosexual”, and wearing make-up and using expensive hair creams. He had a nose job, giving him “a straight profile, quite simply, an Aryan nose.”
He became Deputy Leader of the right-wing Progress Party, and gradually put aside war gaming and spray painting walls. He also “weeded the immigrant slang out of his vocabulary.” Breivik was changing and becoming more focused, or at least more focused on the real world. That said, he stayed online but this time setting up businesses, and he made money. After one spectacular financial success, he treated himself to a three-day shooting course at Oslo Pistol Club.
Breivik became interested in Freemasonry, secret societies, initiations. He read the Koran, discussing it at length with Pakistani taxi drivers. He spent just as much time on the internet reading Jihad Watch and Stormfront as he once had playing Age of Conan. He was having concrete ideas now and conversations with real people, not sword-and-sorcery transactions on some alien planet, or dodging the police after a graffiti “bombing.” His ideas were taking shape, and he knew he had to write them down.
2083 – A European Declaration of Independence is two-thirds cut-and-paste and one-third an account of why Breivik did what he went on to do. “The murders were planned along the way,” Seierstad writes. “The campaign took shape as he wrote.” In May of 2011, Breivik made some purchases: smoke grenades, laser gunsights, and tire-shredders to be used in an auto chase situation, as well as various protein powders to increase his muscle mass. Breivik began to get in shape.
His bank account was also getting into shape. Bank accounts, plural, actually, as money flowed steadily into tax-haven arrangements in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent, and the Bahamas. He was a young man on the up, and at that point he could have gone in any direction he chose. But he had already chosen. He bought a farm and set to work. From this point in the book, Breivik switches from being a troubled human being to an efficient piece of machinery built for one purpose only, an automaton with a cause.
He supplements his diet with protein powders for muscle bulk and milk thistle to protect his liver from steroid damage. He is taking those too. He does not want the effects of the steroids to affect his application for a firearms license, the training for which he completes in January, 2011. He buys a semi-automatic Glock 17 and orders liquid nicotine from China. Inserting this into the tips of bullets will render them poisonous as well as ballistically deadly. He lives and works to a precise routine, which includes time to watch his favorite program, Eurovision, the vapid song contest representing the lower depths of Western culture. Bi-polar mood swings are becoming common for Breivik. He bulk-buys aspirin tablets and begins the laborious task of crushing them down in order to extract acetylsalicylic acid, an element necessary in the preparation of explosives.
Breivik sees himself not as working alone but as part of a tradition. He knows his predecessors in the amateur bomb-making business. The very first to be used in anger was assembled by students at the University of Wisconsin in 1970. It was intended for use targeting the university for its support of the Vietnam War, and it killed a professor of physics. Other aficionados of the method Breivik was using include ETA, the IRA, Al-Qaeda, and Timothy McVeigh. He feels himself in good company. After a long day’s work on the painstaking process of extraction, he has a reward system involving “good food and candy.”
And Breivik does not forget the importance of symbolism. He names one of his guns after Thor’s hammer and the other after Odin’s spear. He prepares his “Knights Templar coin” to keep in his pocket for luck when he is in the field. Not that he will need luck. Just preparation. And Breivik has two things to prepare, a huge bomb and himself, his state of mind, ravaged as it is by the effects of the steroids. There are now, in effect, two ticking time-bombs, and the time has come for them to detonate.
From the moment Breivik begins his operation, the whole event is marked by the incompetence of the Norwegian police. They could not have stopped the twin attacks – demonstrably so, since they didn’t – but once Breivik was underway they behaved like Scandinavian Keystone Kops. No barriers are in place preventing access to larger vehicles as Breivik, dressed as a police officer, drives his bomb-laden van right up to the building containing the Ministry of Justice and the office of the Prime Minister. It is only by chance that then-PM Jens Stoltenberg is not in his office when the bomb detonates. It tears eight people to pieces and wounds and maims many more. After the blast, the Norwegian police chief did not order Oslo’s arterial roads closed. As the police were arriving on the scene, Breivik was still in a traffic jam round the corner, listening with amusement to radio reports linking the blast with Al-Qaeda. But he soon eased his way out of the traffic jam, and was on his way to Utøya.
The central, climactic chapter on the island is far longer than the rest, and does not give a break in the violence even for a moment. Breivik, with his combination of political determination and video game sense of self, must have seen himself as part avenging angel, part Judge Dredd as he set foot on the island. The description of the killings is graphic and visceral, and strange details stay with the reader. When Breivik shoots a student directly in the head, the sound escaping from the burst skull is like “a sigh or exhalation.” One boy who has been shot many times crawls to the beach. Noting that the fingers of one hand are only hanging on by flaps of skin, he uses his other hand to feel his head, where he believes he has been shot. He wonders why his head feels soft, then realizes he is touching his brain. Despite having been shot through the eye, this particular boy somehow survives, and will be a key witness at Breivik’s trial in Oslo months hence.
Back on Utøya, the killing continues. No one is armed, and for Breivik ending their lives is as simple as squashing the ants he used to when he was a boy, talking to each of them one by one as he crushed them. Some of the victims we know already, as Seierstad introduces some of the characters who make their fated way to the island for the neo-Marxist summer camp earlier in her book. One is an immigrant family from Iraq, and the two sisters are on the island, another is one of those top-of-the-class, captain-of-the-team type kids, loved by all and happy with life, but now alone with death on an island.
Despite ignoring a perfectly serviceable ferry, and using instead a dinghy which breaks down halfway between the island and the mainland, the Norwegian police do finally arrive, overpower, and arrest Breivik. Comparing his efficiency with theirs is one of many compelling aspects of the book. He is cool and articulate as they hold him to the ground. When an officer yells at him to lie down, and another tells him to kneel, he asks, “make up your minds. Kneeling or lying?” Indeed, after the silence in which he carried out the first part of his operation, the second act features the voice of Breivik.
Breivik introduces himself to his captors: “My name is Anders Behring Breivik of the Norwegian anti-Communist Resistance Movement. We have just carried out an operation on behalf of the Knights Templar.”
Throughout his trial, Breivik will stay with the theme of leadership of a shadowy resistance movement. His video game mentality, so long in the making, in which you can take up an avatar at will, kept him gaming throughout the hearing. But he had not lost sight of his actions despite his delusions of grandeur:
“No one could possibly defend such bestial acts as those I have committed today.”
He had aimed, he said, to kill the left-wing leaders of tomorrow, but he is at pains to point out that he did deploy a level of compassion on the island when selecting his quarry: “When I evaluated people, I tried not to take the youngest. I took those who were older. There are moral boundaries, aren’t there? Even if perhaps I didn’t show that very clearly today.”
Some of his victims tried to reason with him. “We’ve got to ask him to stop,” one said rather plaintively as Breivik’s guns spat fire. Seierstad has a theory as to why these young people believed they could talk to and reason with a killing machine: “As [left-wing party] AUF members they had grown up in a culture of words. The debate must be won. It is the strength of your argument that gives you power. The young people on Utøya were used to being heard.”
Breivik was not on the island to debate, however. With the red and green dots of his laser sights flickering from body to body, the young man’s kill rate was phenomenal. In the end, he didn’t use nicotine-tipped bullets as he had discovered that this contravened the Geneva Convention. He wanted to keep the fight fair as governed by international rules of engagement. Rules are important to Breivik.
In custody, Breivik presents his captors with a long list of demands. At his trial, he insists on reading out an edited version of his manifesto, and is critical of his judges and the experts assigned to produce a psychological profile of the killing angel of Utøya. The exerts sign him off as a paranoid schizophrenic. “The subject believes he knows what the people he is talking to are thinking,” writes one. “This phenomenon is judged to be founded in psychosis.”
The judge, curiously, is called Wenche Elisabeth Amtzen, combining the names of both Breivik’s mother and his sister. Breivik makes a Nazi salute to the courtroom. Throughout his trial, he invites the judge and jury to join him on a moral journey: “People who call me wicked have misunderstood the difference between brutal and wicked. Brutality is not necessarily wicked. Brutality can have good intentions.”
A moral appraisal of Anders Behring Breivik’s actions is far less relevant than an examination of the moral framework he had built for himself and within which he worked. The author stays away from cheap moralizing, undoubtedly a professional attitude honed by her years as a war correspondent. And yet she is still covering war in One of Us. Two wars, in fact. The first is that waged by the European Resistance on behalf of the Knights Templar, the second the battle raging within Breivik himself.
The title, One of Us, serves two purposes. Firstly, it reflects the appalled horror a relatively placid nation such as Norway felt knowing that Breivik was one of them. Secondly, it shows the longing of one of the Iraqi sisters to be “one of us”, to be Norwegian. Despite many of his childhood friends being “brownies”, Breivik had decided that she was not, in fact, one of us.
The left were overjoyed, of course, and badly need another Breivik now to revive the corpse of the far right. Everyone assumed the twin attacks were the work of Islamists, which was a useful weapon for the “beware the backlash against Muslims” brigade. When it turned out to be Breivik, they made much of the Norse mythology, the Knights Templar angle, and the Nazi salute in the courtroom. This was the work of the far right, despite Breivik having acted alone.
And what of the far left? Yes, Breivik did cull part of the herd, but there are always plenty of replacements on the left because the roles are not difficult ones to fill, requiring as they do a bias towards emotio rather than ratio, something found in large supply in the present younger European generation. The island of Utøya, graveyard to 69 mostly young people, was given to the AUF Party by the trade unions in the 1950s, and they have held summer camps there ever since. In a sense, what Breivik carried out was a school shooting, only he wasn’t shooting up his old place of education where he was bullied, but a neo-Marxist classroom of the future. He saw the danger, and took action against it in a manner which suited what his personality had become, a syndromic collection of his influences marked with his own singular frame of mind. Breivik discovered what ultimate power is, and the price was his liberty. He was surprised to have survived Utøya, but it is a mere observation. He seemed indifferent as to whether he lived or died when he lit the fuse for the Oslo bomb.
It doesn’t really help us to get Breivik on the psychoanalyst’s couch, or build one of those psychological profiles made famous by TV detective series, and the author minimizes both approaches. What did Breivik do for white nationalism? Slaughtering future leaders of a left-wing party at least has a point to it, this is not just some disgruntled kid sick of being beaten up and having his lunch money stolen, and who winds up carrying a new rifle to school. But what is most surprising about the Breivik case is that it doesn’t happen more often. Why are there not more Breiviks? The original was capable and determined, with the internet plugging any gaps in his knowledge. He was organized and efficient, in bold contrast to the Norwegian police. Breivik, in short, was very good at his chosen career path. How many more Breiviks are preparing, saving, planning?
In jail, Breivik seems to exhibit the precise regimen that enabled him to succeed in his self-appointed mission in Oslo and on Utøya. He is irritated by certain things that break this cycle of order and calm. He is irritated at not being allowed to use his creams and moisturizers from home, having to make do with prison-issue cream which dries up halfway through his day. Warders often bring him one of his Lacoste jerseys, despite his having requested that these stay in storage to avoid wear and tear. These are items to be venerated, items Breivik wore in the field. Sometimes he is only given enough butter for two or three slices of bread, even though his guards know perfectly well that he likes to eat four. This is Anders Behring Breivik now. For a couple of hours, he brought the most intense disorder to his fellow Norwegian townsfolk. Now he craves order, perhaps to balance the equation. He retains his manners and his sense of how the world works, how people engage with one another. Of the lack of butter – so easily remedied! – he says that: “This creates annoyance because I either have to eat dry bread or be made to feel guilty for asking for more.”
Perhaps Breivik does not like to be made to feel guilty. We must remember the human rights of the prisoner, of every prisoner, and Anders Behring Breivik was always a prisoner.
29 comments
Muy interesante. When I was in Norway we drove in this bus across country, and one time they pointed out to this building in the distance and told us that was where Brevik was incarcerated. I don’t know if it was true, but it was this yellow looking building, not very institutional looking at all.
later, when we were in Oslo, there was a Muslim attack at this bar. The media concealed that it was actually a gay bar. In Norway, the gay and straight hangouts are not demarcated, there’s a lot of overlap, but some places are known for being more gay places and it was the likely motive, but the media concealed it.
Brevik’s attacks were terrible, but is what he was trying to protect us from any better?
of course, I make this point not to be woke or anything, but to point out that gays and Muslim immigrants are two darlings of the left, but in reality everything they hate so much about white European conservatives is quadruplely true of Muslims. The left-wing media understands this, and they are smart enough to disguise their cognitive dissonance.
You can point this fact out and it won’t make any difference to leftists. This is true in both North America and in Europe.
“When I evaluated people, I tried not to take the youngest. I took those who were older. There are moral boundaries, aren’t there?” That alone right there is infinitely more compassionate than any muslim, epstein islander, or media swine leftist panderer. Our enemies have no boundaries whatsoever, not even money as long as Whites suffer horribly their dopamine loop is satiated.
Thanks for the good review. I read this book, it is excellently written and reconstructs Breivik’s psychological profile well. Unfortunately, the author of this book is a progressive leftist. She deliberately conceals the crimes of blacks and immigrants. This author stands on the anti-white side. Authentic letters from Breivik are available on the internet. I have his address and am thinking of writing to him!
I wish Breivik chose better targets because nobody likes to see teenagers shot, though I suppose the best targets, like traitorous politicians, aren’t likely to be together in a group without serious security, but I don’t condemn him too harshly. If we all acted like Breivik (or better, Brenton Tarrant), we would win the battle for our survival, although it’s likely that one Breivik is worse than a thousand Breiviks, because just one will see us face the full backlash of the state without having much of an effect on the opposition. It’s like starting a war with only one soldier.
I’ll concur that it was bad target selection. Moreover, by going postal rather than doing something constructive, he handed his opponents a propaganda victory on a silver platter. This is yet another lesson about what happens to those who try to start a revolution when there’s no revolutionary ferment. It applies to any political persuasion, really; this is why Che Guevara’s last hurrah in Bolivia didn’t work.
I like your comparison, some erudite scholar should do an article on Che Guevara, his failures, and the implications for our own movement. 🙃
I’ll leave others to decide my erudition, but I did write a two-parter beginning with this:
Saint Che’s Guide to Asymmetric Warfare, Part 1 (counter-currents.com)
Very good article on Che, you have a clever way of turning a phrase–I am thinking of “dope addled counterculture weenies” specifically, though there are others.
Great article! Did you by any chance do an article on Jerry Rubin? Wasn’t he the rabble rouser in Forrest Gump whom wore the American flag? 🙃
And about Jerry Rubin, I do have this:
https://counter-currents.com/2020/09/jerry-rubins-do-it/
Great article! Did you do an article on “The Haymarket Bombing?” 🙃
Beau Albrecht: July 16, 2025 And about Jerry Rubin, I do have this: https://counter-currents.com/2020/09/jerry-rubins-do-it/
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I enjoyed your review of Rubin’s Do It!, Beau, as well as some of the comments under it, like this one from Ambrose Kane:
Jews, like Jerry Rubin, have created so much chaos and strife among our people. These incredibly divisive people go hand-in-hand with moral and cultural subversion. It’s who they are. It’s what they do. Any nation stupid enough to allow them immigrate will soon discover how disruptive they are to their sanity and health.
I managed to scoff up a remainder of this Jew’s rare 2017 sequel to Do It!, titled Did It! and still have 9 copies available, here: “Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin (Hardcover)” at cosmotheistchurch.org. A kinder blurb about Rubin’s book and and Jews than Mr. Kane’s
Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin An American Revolutionary Hardcover – Illustrated (Hardcover) $25.00
An oversized oral & visual history of the infamous and ubiquitous Rubin – the first ever biography of the co-founder of the Yippies, Anti-Vietnam War radical, Chicago 8 defendant, New Age/Self Help proponent, and social-networking pioneer.
Based upon over 75 original interviews with his co-conspirators, friends and foes, this book not only explores the life and times of Rubin, but the generation that consisted of idealistic firebrands in the 1960s, segued into the Me generation in the 1970s, and became full blown capitalists engaged in the 1980s.
Those interviewed include fellow Chicago 8 Defendants, participants in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement; Paul Krassner, Judy Gumbo, Nancy Kurshan, John & Leni Sinclair, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, Country Joe McDonald and dozens more reveal, in their own words, vibrant stories of the era. Often left out in histories of the radical sixties, twenty women speak out in their own voice! Also chronicled is the 1970’s New Age Movement with commentary from Stella Resnick, Werner Erhard, Mimi Leonard and others.
Bizarre interactions with luminaries including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Timothy Leary, and John Lennon are described via interviews and diaries (found in Rubin’s personal archives and published here for the first time) along with photographs and correspondence with Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Mayor Daley and the Weathermen. Also explored is the oft-misunderstood relationship between Rubin and his partner-in-crime Abbie Hoffman with controversial insights into their Yippie vs. Yuppie debates.
I haven’t gone in depth on the Haymarket statue, but I did write about the Weathermen here:
The Stories Of Two Domestic Terrorist Groups That Were Dropped In The Memory Hole | Return of Kings (theredarchive.com)
Great article! I was referring to the original explosion in 1886, rather than what the weathermen may have done. Did you know that someone set off a bomb on Wallstreet back in the early part of the twentieth century—interesting stuff? 🙃
Great article! Did you by any chance do an article on Jerry Rubin? Wasn’t he the rabble rouser in Forrest Gump whom wore the American flag? That guy was abbie hoffman who later killed himself in 1989. jerry rubin went from yippie to yuppie and I believe was hit by a car and killed in 1994. Kerry Bolton’s book The Psychotic Left deals with the history of these leftist luminaries and they were all deeply disturbed and fucked up in one way or another.
Speaking of leftist luminaries at a party once Alan Ginsburg got naked and put his underwear on his head as he danced on a table. Even John Lennon was put out and told him: not around the birds man!
That is the whole point of catching them while they are together in a group without serious security.
Though in this case it was more like the children of traitors rather than traitors. At best you can say that those children would probably become future traitors, but people don’t like to countenance violence against native children for any reason, let alone speculative ones.
Brenton Tarrant at least directly attacked the invaders.
Great article! What I don’t get is the mindset of the victims, it takes time to shoot 69 people, not one of them thought about “bum rushing” the shooter—such is the state of the white mind after 2000 years of Christianity! 🙃
Brevik macabrely described how strangely he thought they reacted. He said they would freeze in place and pee on themselves and such.
The victims responded exactly as you would expect. Imagine a similar attack on a Texas gun club holiday camp.
Would something like this happen 50 years ago? Heck, 30 years ago? But yeah, Christianity is the cause of the victims passivity.
“Christianity is the cause of the victims passivity.”
I think it has to do more with living in a safe & secure White area, + lefty hoplophobic culture/lack of firearms awareness.
Regarding Christianity & passivity, I’m reminded of those Christian men in 1990s who shot abortionists in order to save the lives of unborn babies who were slated to be killed at the hands of those ‘medics.’ (I’ve never looked into any of their personal stories, but I do wonder if any of them had a girlfriend who killed their son or daughter via an abortion without the father’s consent.)
Not only being safe, I think, but being sheltered from personal physical conflict. It used to be common and accepted that boys and occasionally men would settle their differences with a fistfight, and that the men of the community would form a mob when aggrieved. Fathers’ advice for dealing with bullies was to get better at fighting. This made for tougher people who could employ their own violence when needed (though sometimes also when not needed). Now everyone expects authority to solve these problems, and if authority doesn’t come, they sit by passively, maybe filming on their smartphones at the most, or trying to complain to the authorities…
Thank you, I was not aware of those pro-life “vigilantes”. By the way, I was being sarcastic, blaming Christianity for that is ridiculous.
They themselves said that they felt they were doing God’s work as serious Christians to protect unborn lives with all their might. To them, they were simply reacting in the same way, as if they were stopping a serial killer who was about to butcher several 5-year-old kids, because to those particular folks, a life is a life, no matter how small.
Personally, I think it’s simplest to talk gals into giving a baby up for adoption (something PP never even mentions) but for some of those men, especially back when abortions were surgical & done by docs, they reasoned that by shooting these guys in the arms etc, they were seriously working to end the evil of modern American baby slaughter.
It is the very worst form of Judeo-communist brainwashing, to become convinced that having an abortion is morally on par with going in for a dental cleaning.
As Jürgen Graf correctly wrote in 2011, it is very strange what Breivik had done. He allegedly wanted to defend White people and he killed just White people.It is like someobe of whale defenders deliberately killed many whales to show that whales are endangered species.
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