Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Is the Mass Murderer Anders Behring Breivik Insane? Part 1

Last week the official psychiatric report on Anders Behring Breivik was leaked to a major newspaper in Norway. Below is the first installment of Fjordman’s three-part analysis of the report.

Fjordman

Is the Mass Murderer Anders Behring Breivik Insane?

Part 1: The Nordic Mohammed


by Fjordman

Anders Behring Breivik in two different attacks on 22 July 2011 became the worst mass murderer in modern Scandinavian history. He killed a total of 77 people, 8 with a car bomb outside a government office building in central Oslo, and the remaining 69 with a massacre of unprecedented scope and brutality when he spent nearly an hour and a half methodically shooting people attending a summer camp of the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) on the island of Utøya outside of Oslo. He also wounded many others, mentally and physically.

Oslo aftermath

ABB has confessed to carrying out these attacks, claiming that his actions were “atrocious but necessary.” There is also plenty of technical evidence, with videos and numerous witnesses. This represents a rather rare case where we can be virtually 100% that the man who is in custody really did commit the crime in question.

Other things remain controversial, however. Due to the great scope of the massacre, many people, myself included, initially wondered whether there were several perpetrators. Norwegian police after conducting months of investigation claim that ABB acted alone and was not part of a wider terror network. Perhaps this made him harder for the security services to detect.

This brings us to the first question: What caused him to carry out these horrible acts? In the long manifesto which he circulated on the Internet to justify his atrocities, he quoted a large number of people — with myself among the most prominent — who are critical of Islam and the current immigration policies supported by Western governments. This triggered a lot of public animosity against this community of writers.

And the second question: Is Breivik sane or insane?

This is the subject I will focus on here.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

After careful examination, a panel of experts confirmed in December 2011 that Breivik is to be considered criminally insane. The head of the panel of experts, Karl Heinrik Melle, said there was “no major objection” to the initial report published by the psychiatrists Synne Sørheim og Torgeir Husby. They found that ABB suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and cannot be held accountable for his actions. The panel’s conclusions were submitted to the Oslo district court. In their 243-page report, Sørheim og Husby painted a picture of a person with “grandiose illusions” who is incapable of living peacefully in a modern society in his present state. I will take a closer look a what their report reveals.

In January 2012, an Oslo court ordered a new psychiatric evaluation of ABB after this earlier, contested report found him insane. “Due to the gravity of this case, the criminal responsibility (of Behring Breivik) must be examined again,” Oslo District Court judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen stated. Two new experts, Agnar Aspaas and Terje Tørrisen, were named to evaluate the 32-year-old’s sanity before the beginning of his trial in April. Breivik refused through his lawyer to cooperate with the probe. “He feels the first report was 80-percent wrong,” his main defense lawyer Geir Lippestad said after informing his client of the judges’ decision.

Psychiatric report on Anders Behring Breivik

Verdens Gang (VG), Norway’s largest national newspaper, in mid-January 2012 published on its website the full psychiatric report which had concluded that Breivik is insane, leaving out a few pages that were deemed to reveal too-intimate details about Breivik’s family. This report is confidential, but VG have previously proved that they have access to lots of confidential material related to the Breivik case. The 243-page report published by them looks authentic and is consistent with what was publicly known previously. I have also heard no claims to the contrary from the quoted psychiatrists themselves or from anybody else. For the purposes of this analysis, I will treat it as authentic.

Alongside it the newspaper published some comments from the prison where ABB has been held while awaiting trial. Those who work there can see no evidence that Breivik is currently psychotic, as the psychiatrists claim in their report.

I am unhappy with the many media leaks in this case, which combined have reached a point where they undermine the ability of the police to talk to witnesses and conduct a proper investigation. Nevertheless, it is better that the mass media leak a psychiatric report regarding the terrorist himself as opposed to sensitive testimonies from his many victims. I read this report in its entirety, partly out of genuine curiosity and partly due to my own involuntary involvement in this horrible case. The following page references are to the original Norwegian psychiatric evaluation of Breivik as published by VG, with my own English comments and translations.

ABB came off as polite, but emotionally flat, in talks with psychiatrists Synne Sørheim og Torgeir Husby. He cannot properly describe his own emotions. Breivik claims to be a perfect knight worthy of emulation and to have made a lot of money with his many employees, which isn’t factually true. Evidence indicates that he was a failure in his commercial dealings. The psychiatrists interpret this and other factors as enormous psychotic delusions betraying a grossly inflated ego. His extreme narcissism and exceptionally egocentric mental universe with nearly all-encompassing ideas of grandeur dominate his behavior, regardless of context.

ABB is convinced that he is extraordinary, that he leaves a lasting positive impression on everybody around him, that everybody remembers him with awe, that he stands out from the crowd and achieves great success wherever he goes. In real life, he moved back to his mother’s house after his career failed. He did reasonably well in school and is estimated to have at least average and possibly above-average intelligence, yet he still did not complete secondary school. He describes his own actions in intimate, banal and almost embarrassing detail in his manifesto because he believes his personal example will form a template for others to follow and emulate.

He mentions his favorite candy and ranks this as proper rewards for incredibly brave military operators like himself. Breivik is convinced that his personal habits of watching TV, drinking coffee and eating candy are of genuine geopolitical significance due to his own immense importance, and because they strengthen his battle morale as the perfect knight. He is vain, and had plastic surgery on his face.

On page 183 of the psychiatric report, Breivik is asked if he thinks he has any significant weaknesses. “No, I lack nothing, I am a good builder of alliances, I am interesting, have good looks, and no real flaws,” he replies.

Breivik is, according to himself, very modest and a perfect knight. He’s also extremely intelligent and ranks among the intellectual giants of the political Right. ABB calls himself an “attention-seeking whore” (page 162), representing a rare moment of insight.

He also suggests we should take DNA samples of everybody from the political Right in Norway to see who is most closely related to Harald Fairhair, traditionally seen as Norway’s first national king, in order to appoint a new king (page 185). He says that if he promotes himself as the new regent, people will think he is crazy.

Cynical observers might claim that train left the station long ago.

On a darker note, on page 234 the officially appointed psychiatrists conclude that “He thinks he has responsibility for deciding who should live or die in the country.” Breivik claims (page 201) that if nobody wants to work with him or continue his glorious work after his attacks, he has misjudged the overall situation so badly that he may “self-terminate” after the trial. This is among the reasons why the psychiatrists have classified him as potentially suicidal, although he does not presently display any visible signs of depression and is not known to have suffered any episodes of severe depression in the past. Up until now he has never expressed the slightest regret for the many murders he committed, and shows no remorse for what he has done.

Breivik has been widely labeled as “anti-Islamic” in the mass media because, as an excuse for his murderous acts, he quotes writers who warn against Islamic inroads in the West. However, there is another side to that story. As a terrorist himself he actually displays admiration for Islamic militant groups and is even willing to accept a renewed Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. The latter overlaps directly with the stated goals of large international organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and can hardly be called “anti-Islamic.”

ABB indicates that he wants to glorify death and martyrdom through his words and deeds. Very similar sentiments that have been voiced on countless occasions by Jihadist operatives from Hamas, Hizbollah or other Muslim groups around the world. Breivik says explicitly, as noted on page 163 of the report, that after his terror attacks, what he calls militant cultural conservatives in Europe can now “live in the same way as the Islamists.”

Thomas Hegghammer, a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, wrote in the New York Times that “Breivik goes much further than any counterjihad ideologue has ever done, and his manifesto contains ideas and information that have no precedent in the counterjihad literature. For example, he provides extensive advice on how to build bombs and plan terrorist attacks.” Moreover, “the more belligerent part of Mr. Breivik’s ideology has less in common with counterjihad than with its archenemy, Al Qaeda.”

Breivik believes that he is a perfect example for others to follow, worthy of emulation even down to the most intimate and banal details of his private life. The entire world should revolve around his unique person as a supreme military-political genius and master of life and death. Grandiose delusions of this magnitude are fortunately rare, but not unheard of. If you believe traditional historical sources (not everybody does), an Arab man called Mohammed suffered from comparable delusions in the seventh century of our era.

Author John L. Esposito is widely seen as an apologist for Islam by his critics and ranks as one of the most pro-Islamic writers alive today. In his book Islam: The Straight Path, page 13-14, Esposito reminds his readers that Mohammed serves as the ideal model for Muslim life, providing the pattern that all Islamic believers are to emulate and “guidance in all aspects of life: how to treat friends as well as enemies, what to eat and drink, how to make love and war.” He is the “living Koran” in the sense that practices of the Prophet became a material source of Islamic law alongside the Koran itself:

“His impact on Muslim life cannot be overestimated, since he served as both religious and political head of Medina: prophet of God, ruler, military commander, chief judge, lawgiver. As a result, the practice of the Prophet, his Sunna or example, became the norm for community life. Muslims observed and remembered stories about what the Prophet said and did. These reports or traditions (hadith) were preserved and passed on in oral and written form. The corpus of hadith literature reveals the comprehensive scope of Muhammad’s example; he is the ideal religiopolitical leader as well as the exemplary husband and father. Thus when many Muslims pray five times each day or make the pilgrimage to Mecca, they seek to pray as the Prophet prayed, without adding or subtracting from the way Muhammad is reported to have worshipped. Traditions of the Prophet provide guidance for personal hygiene, dress, eating, marriage, treatment of wives, diplomacy, and warfare.”

Islam is not just a total way of life; it is a totalitarian way of life. Not even Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, representing the most totalitarian strands of European thought, said that everybody in the entire world should from now on visit the bathroom in the same manner they did. Mohammed did exactly that.

Or, putting it in a more provocative manner, one could say that Islam is a creed stating that those who urinate like Mohammed should wage war against the rest of mankind until they, too, urinate like Mohammed.

Theologically speaking, what I write here is exaggerated, but not incorrect. Muslims are expected to emulate all aspects of Mohammed’s personal example or Sunna, including bathroom etiquette, and spread these manners to the rest of planet by any means necessary.

Based on these examples, one could be tempted to conclude that Anders Behring Breivik, with his extreme narcissism and desire for others to emulate his perfect personal example, represents a Nordic Mohammed.

To be continued…


For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting (and well written).

Truthiocity said...

First of all what actually is schizophrenia?

Simply put, it is when the synapses and neurons fire randomly. This sends perceptions and cognitions to where they are not supposed to go, making rational, ordered perception and thought impossible.

A simple example of the results of this is that Schisophrenics often say they "see" sounds.

As you can imagine this causes considerable discomfort. A schizophrenic is unable to tell the difference between internal and external anymore so they externalise it. But they are unable to compose thoughts so their explanations become long associational rants where the end of one sentance leads to the content of the beginning of the next, rather than being an actual theory.

The degredation is a proces, sometiemes fast and sometimes very slow. Nobody just wakes up schizophrenic all of a sudden. Thoughts and behavior get stranger over the course of time.

As soon as I heard that there was a 1000 page "manifesto" I knew that Breivik could only be schizophrenic.

When I heard that manifesto included comments about how slutty his mother and sister were and that they had venerial diseases- that was the clincher. The jornals of shcizophrenics often have such statements in them whereas political manifestos by sane ego maniacs do not.

Jornal keeping is a spontanious behavior amongst Schizophrenics. They keep such jornals as a way to make order or sense out of their disjointed cognitions and perceptions.

They exhibit a general obsession with making order to try and make order out of their increasingly disorderd interanl existance. To this end they often develop a desire for physical improvement and engage in crash diets or intense physical regimes.

Sound familiar?

R D Lang or Anna Freud would say that Breiviks concearn about keeping his country distinct from others is the externalization of his anxiety over his increasingly disorderd interanal life. A breakdown he himself commented upon in his journal.

Brievik didn't wake up one day and become crazy. There are 3 options.

1. Schizotypal Personality Disorder. In which one is extremely eccentric in general, eccentric in interactions with others, eccentric in manner of speach and often holding eccentric beliefs. The person with this disorder can function. They do tend to be loners or antisocial. It can later develop into full blown schizophrenia. In this possibility he was SPD his whole life and had just recently started to become full blown shizophrenic. One feature is grandiose ideas about themselves that are not born out by reality. That sounds like Mr. Brieviks description of his past business success to me.

2. Process Schisophrenia, or Type II. This is a slow degredation over years. The innitial smaller imparments inhibit normal development so the ability to function gets worse over time.

3. Adult onset of Panoid Schizophrenia. The person starts out being "normal" but has a predisposition. It is brought on when the sufferer experiences a highly stressfull change of life. This is why the outset of it is so common amongst those in their first year of college.

Brieviks business failure would be just such a stressfull life change. Of course his business could have failed because he was on his way to schizophrenia.

Narcissism, in it's DSM sense is not the motivating psychological factor here. Rather it is self centeredness and insecurity caused by other factors. It appears more extreme only because Brievik has a disorder.

So he was not yet completely schizophrenic when planning and commiting the atrocity but was clearly on the path towards a full onset of schizophrenia.

The mental health history of the Parents is highly relavant. There has been much research on the relation between various disorders in parents and the incidence of schizophrenia in offspring.

Asger Trier Engberg said...

Dear Fjordman

A brave start, please continue your quest as a true searcher for knowledge and insight. We here in Denmark are very worried about Norway, and we can do little but support you guys morally.

But that we can do. You are on the right track, and honestly, the witch hunt you were confronted with was way out of bounds. I think it was basically the shock of the incident that brought everybody out of their small little holes, and the reaction was not rational.

Now, the war in the Middle East is slowly approaching a state of full engament. The cells in Europe, The US and other pro american allies as Saud i arabia and Turkey are warming up. (www.debka.com)

This will spread to Denmark and Norway as well.

When this happens, the tide of the public opinion will sway once again I think. And in this position we are the avantgarde and hopefully the winners.

If you need a more personal support do not hesitate to write to me, you can find my mailadress at rubicon.dk.

You are doing an amazing work faced by the collected stupidity of norwegian so called intellectual life, which is basically (seen form outside) some remnants of post communist infiltration, betrayers that is.

Hold on, and perhaps in short time you will be accepted again.

Yours sincerely

Asger Trier Engberg

bilbo said...

the sole benificiaries of Breivik's actions are the left and their islamist allies.
i believe it was them that used Breivik as a tool to discredit the counter-jihadists and the right.

that he, alledgedly, kept his project secret for 12 years, is a minor miracle.
one that re-inforces the belief that he acted alone, but i can't help believing that he did not.

Papa Whiskey said...

Bilbo:

It is entirely possible that, indeed, he did not. Your attention is invited to the following:

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/08/breivik-portfolio-part-four-dot.html

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

goethechosemercy said...

ABB has served the Ummah so well.
In the process of studying the differences between Islam and the West, he managed to internalize Islam and Mohammed so completely that they became his own models for action.
The world as he would have it, is truly war without end.

Anonymous said...

I have not read any formal psychological reports on Breivik. I would be curious as to whether they mention his steroid abuse as a contributing factor. Certainly if he had been abusing steroids, one could expect that this would exacerbate any pre-existing psychosis and perhaps speak to the aggression of his acts in way of at least a partial explanation. A report that did not address his steroid abuse, even if that were to simply confirm whether the claim was viable to be presented as a contributing factor, would be remiss to the point of negligence. -- RoR

Anonymous said...

It is irrelevant what is inside
Brevik's head, but his abominable
actions suggest that Norway under
rapid [and unrequested]Islamic colonisation is getting to be a stressful and uncertain place to live.It comes back to the same thing which is happening in all Moslem and part-Moslem countries [even India and China], what are we 'normal'people going to do about the elephant in the room, apart entering a trance and letting our mouths fall open?

Cobra said...

Thank you, Fjordman.
We must continue speaking, despite all the pressure the left puts on us and the truth.
As the left, in the US, at least, supported for some time the Nazi regime in Germany, when it was allied with the commies in URSS, under Stalin, the left is supporting the monstrous islamo-nazis of today.
But we must not fear.
The truth will prevail and, the left will, someday, be embarrassed by their islamo-nazis support as they are embarrassed to be reminded of their support for Hitler .
As a matter of fact this is so embarrassing to them, they are doing their very best to bury and cover it foreever.
If you want to have fun with a "liberal" tease them with that little fact.

terrence said...

Did the possibility that ABB is just "trolling" the authorities with his narcissist act ever occur to you?

Dymphna said...

Sometimes Blogger comments closes the door firmly and won't let you in. Such was the case with this statement, one which deserves to see the light of day.

From our email, Chiu Chun-Ling says some things that I've thought myself. In his comment below I have emphasized those ideas particularly:

The comment form simply rejects every attempt I make to match the anti-spam challenge string. I therefore submit my comment on the first part of Fjordman’s article, “Is the Mass Murderer Anders Behring Breivik Insane? Part 1”, by means of email. Thus the following:

I have to say, the disjunction between the severity of Breivik’s diagnosis (and the evidence supporting this diagnosis) and the facts of his crime, including a long and meticulous planning period and a precise and effective execution style that is extraordinary to anyone familiar with the basic science of how humans respond to violent situations, leads me to believe that it is impossible that both sets of evidence are genuine.

Either all the evidence of Breivik’s insanity is faked, or all the evidence of his crime is faked.

In this case, I can easily see how one could fake the evidence of insanity that has been presented (the little slip-up of Breivik referring to himself as an attention whore is telling, that does not seem quite on script but it is a quite accurate assessment of the character he is playing out -- a bit of self-awareness that undermines the characterization as deeply delusional). I cannot see how the quantity of evidence of his crime could have been faked without any detection, though.

So, did Breivik himself come up with the clinically perfect evidence to fake this degree of total lunacy, or did he have professional assistance in writing his “Manifesto” and being coached on how to represent himself to the interviewing doctors? Has any truly psychiatric (concerning itself with actual neurophysiological function rather than presented symptoms) evidence been gathered?

What does it reveal (and if it has nothing to show, why not)?

In all of this intimate examination of the supposed details of Breivik’s mentality and self-exposition, is there any hint as to why he thought a brutal attack on schoolchildren would be an appropriate way to rally support for his cause? I believe that an attack on some kind of authority figures more specifically important to him than to society at large might have been explained as the result of self-aggrandizing delusion, but how are we to to explain an attack on a group of youth on holiday?

Perhaps most compellingly, is anyone in authority suggesting that exemptions from legal responsibility for their own actions be removed for “clinically insane” but previously reasonably functional people such as Breivik be revisited so as to allow him to suffer the maximum penalties for his crimes?

Is the media reporting an outcry over the probability that Breivik is going to be remanded to a sheltered existence in a care facility rather than punished as a mass murderer should be? I know that such an outcry must exist, the families of the dead cannot be uniformly accepting of the need to make Breivik a beneficiary of social compassion as a result of having murdered so many innocents.

I look forward to Fjordman’s further insights into this matter, which is one of great concern to everyone that seeks the preservation of the essential tenets of Western Civilization.


[from]
Chiu Chun-Ling

Anonymous said...

Chiu/Dymphna: Re: "is there any hint as to why he thought a brutal attack on schoolchildren would be an appropriate way to rally support for his cause?"

One impression is that it appears he considered that had he attacked the current, acting authority, they would simply be replaced in time and that he was inflicting an more effective wound by attacking what he considered to be the "future" of the left's authority figures in Norway (Utoya). One impression was that the blast was in sole purpose a diversion to aid in his plan for Utoya. I believe he thought others would understand this logic, agree and approve of it. That he thought anyone would approve or that these acts would rally anyone behind him, was/is his insanity in part. - RoR

Chiu ChunLing said...

The appeal to the "total insanity" argument of why Breivik's actions make no sense as serving any kind of rational agenda has an important limitation. It must still leave Breivik sane enough to plan and execute his plan without any kind of assistance.

The death toll on the island imposes some profound limitations on how genuinely insane Breivik can have been. He cannot, for instance, have been significantly schizophrenic. Have you ever seen a genuinely schizophrenic person responding to a stressful situation? They 'hear' voices and start arguing with people that aren't there. It would be terrifying to be near an armed schizophrenic under stress, but they almost certainly would mostly be trying to shoot their imaginary enemies rather than anyone else, particularly people who were not attacking them.

Breivik killed almost 70 people, and wounded almost as many, in the space of an hour. Many of them he killed by luring them out with the pretense that he was a police officer there to save them. How badly mentally impaired can he have been to have managed that trick? He had to sound and look sane enough to reassure groups of traumatized youths who were in fear of their own lives and had no particular reason to come out of hiding other than his word. Accounts of his behavior indicate that he was not perfectly cold-blooded, a number of people survived despite being easy targets. Breivik apparently countered his own lack of total sociopathic dissociation by listening to music through headphones, a trade-off in tactical advantage of unimpeded hearing which he apparently found necessary (the need for tactical advantage was non-trivial, as at least some of the older children did attempt counter-attacks).

Also, Breivik called the police to surrender, a strategy to minimize his chances of being killed. This is rather unusual, most insane mass-killers lose all concern for their own survival at some point (often before committing to their attacks), it is not infrequent for them to commit suicide or reject surrender, and those that do must be persuaded. Breivik surrendered as soon as it was evident that further resistance would be fatal to himself.

Continued...

Chiu ChunLing said...

These actions are simply not consistent with what would be possible for a severely mentally impaired individual without a strong sense of reality. There is no evidence that Breivik ever suffered the kind of functional impairments that would result from a psychosis of the magnitude necessary to explain away all need for essentially realistic (even if unreasonable) motivations for his actions. Most particularly, my experience with actual severe schizophrenics and the self-deluded (those with neurotic attachments to unrealistic beliefs used to defend their egos) is impossible to reconcile with this scale of attack being carried out by one.

Schizophrenia is an actual neurological impairment, it doesn't just mean that a person believes 'crazy' things, but that they are impaired in their ability to distinguish reality. Non-psychiatric delusions do not necessarily impair neurological function, but they do significantly limit a person's ability to respond to reality when it contradicts the neurotic beliefs at the heart of the delusion. It is not neurophysiologicaly possible for a severe schizophrenic to carry out an attack of this type and duration. And the proposed architecture of Breivik's delusion does not contain any elements that would motivate an attack on school children. Breivik should also not have surrendered so readily, if his delusions were as they have been described. He would not have believed that he could be defeated, especially after killing so many, and thus would have resisted until it became physically impossible (rather than simply dangerous).

The presented facts of the planning, preparation, and execution of his attacks cannot be reconciled with the diagnosis. One or the other must be false. I for one do not see how the evidence of his crime could all or even mostly be fake. But I cannot see any difficulty about faking the presented evidence for insanity (other than a need for clinical expertise that Breivik may not have had).

Chiu Chun-Ling.

Dymphna said...

Egghead, too, is having trouble signing in to comment, while it appears Chiu Chun-Ling has solved his problem (see above).
----------------------
Egghead says:

I never saw a complete list of victims until I asked repeatedly for one here - despite the fact that I googled for the list myself.

Has anyone from that area of the world actually verified that ALL of the victims actually exist as real people who lived real lives - instead of just pictures and bios?

I read somewhere that a false flag operation would likely murder a few people and 'invent' the rest of the victims. The few would be killed as a warning to 'certain' leaders, whereas the many would be 'invented' so that fewer grieving relatives would ask questions of - or make demands on - authorities.

The murder spree in Norway reminds one of Beslan - without the Muslim element of sexual sadism.

Beslan School Hostage Crisis


from Egghead

Dymphna said...

NOTE:

For anyone who has trouble signing in under his regular nic, just use the anonymous feature and add your name to the posted comment -- top or bottom or both.

TO:Chiu Chun-Ling

Please note the request above the comment box to limit responses to 500 words or so. Those combined comments, which are really one piece, are over 700 words.

Perhaps submitting an essay proposal instead? Long comments are generally m.e.g.o. situations and readers tend to scroll by...

Chiu ChunLing said...

I do have a tendency to ramble on a bit, and have several times ended up over the character limit for a comment. Part of the problem is that it is hard to know exactly how far over I've gone, and whether some editing could allow my comment to fit without impairing the essential sense of what I'm trying to express.

I have decided to obtain a Blogger.com profile, as is suggested in the comment form. I've been relying on the Name/URL option, which differs from Anonymous only in presenting a name, but provides no verification of identity.

On the possibility of there being "faked" victims, I suspect that something of the reverse is more the case here. A variety of factors in this case slowed the response time of the police dramatically, Breivik initially called the police to surrender well before they had actually reached the island. I imagine that he expected them to arrive more quickly than they did. This is only an impression based on a few of his actions, it is entirely possible that this is mistaken. There are however perfectly legitimate reasons to want to shield the identities of the victims of this kind of sensational violence.

Without breaking Breivik himself, there is little useful investigation that can occur. As long as he is able to expect that he will not be held fully responsible for his actions, it is unlikely that he will have any motivation to alter his story.

Chiu Chun-Ling.

Anonymous said...

Here are links to Breivik's call to authorities DURING the attack and a four part documentary with English subtitles.

I find the documentary to be very strange. The survivors seem very detached from the event - no tears - despite the massacre having just occurred.

Am I the ONLY one to notice that the massacre happened on a Friday - the Muslim day of worship?!

Breivik's own phone call to police from Utoya (translated)

Norway Terror Documentary - Part 1

Norway Terror Documentary - Part 2

Norway Terror Documentary - Part 3

Norway Terror Documentary - Part 4

Egghead

Anonymous said...

Chiu: Interesting idea that Breivik thought - perhaps hoped ? - that the police would arrive sooner.

I feel that my point is legitimate. It is legitimate to ask whether all of the victims are 'real' people.

Egghead

Anonymous said...

Re Chiu's good point that Breivik's diagnosis appears to conflict with his alleged functioning level: Most schizophrenics that one would see in an institutionalized setting are low functioning. That's not to say that all are. The numbers of those who are not are near impossible to determine because they don't come into contact with the professionals that would count them. Breivik's apparent psychopathic characteristics perhaps kept him out of the view of psychologists until now. I have my doubts about his diagnosis too. However, considering his relatively young age and that schizophrenia is a progressive illness, usually with onset in mid to late teen years, could he not be just that and yet the condition not be full blown considering his age, leaving him perhaps some degree of at least sporadic "functionality"? Even in advanced cases, symptoms can come and go in an individual over time. And his guards say they don't "see" any psychosis, but he's in a cell with little external stimulation to feed that psychosis. He's caught. He doesn't have the worries he used to have. -- RoR

Chiu ChunLing said...

It is certainly a legitimate inquiry, but I suspect it is a low percentage bet. With less than 80 victims total, it would be hard to slip any in completely unexamined (of course, for the same reason it is not infeasible to make the effort).

The fact that Breivik was able to kill so many in such a short space of time is remarkable enough to raise suspicions, but not enough to be impossible for a mentally competent and dedicated individual with some training. And I believe that the parties responsible for Breivik regarded these youth as rather disposable...not worth the added risk of getting caught just to avoid killing the actual children.

The problem with saying that Breivik isn't completely insane is that if that were the case then he would still be responsible for his own actions. If I have periods of lucidity, when I am able to see that my usual actions are completely out of touch with reality, then I have a responsibility to seek help. And of course if I am lucid during a particular hour, what possible justification could I have for carrying out a totally irrational massacre I planned while I was clearly insane?

Many people you might find in an institutional setting are "acute" rather than chronic, they have a life outside but they occasionally have bad periods. Some are in more denial about their needs than others, but none of them carry out insane acts planned during a psychotic break when they are lucid and functional.

And Breivik was evidently fully functional during his attacks.

Chiu Chun-Ling.

Anonymous said...

Well. ABB said something about Japanese/(South) Koreans and psychiatry. He's playing a game with the cultural marxists which examine him. Just like he stated in his manifesto.

Who benefits from a "crazy" ABB? Almost everybody. Even ABB has something to win with his act.

"The guy is crazy" is so comforting for all of us.

Anonymous said...

Chiu: Review the TV crew footage from that day and look at the lake shore on Utoya in addition to the mainland shore. Do you see 69 dead bodies - plus another 62 wounded people - on either shore? Do you see them anywhere else on the island?

Where are the dead and wounded?!

Then again, in the documentary, the brunette teenager speaks of realizing the scope of the attack after seeing many body bags on the shore - which shore is unclear - but it seems to be the mainland.

Hmmm. All of the crime shows that I watch leave the murder victims unmoved until forensic evidence can be gathered.

Did the Norwegian police just move all of the dead bodies without any forensic evidence being gathered?

Then again, where did 69 body bags come from on such short notice?

Did the COMPLETELY unprepared police bring 69 body bags with them?

How would the police know to bring 69 body bags to Utoya?

Where are all of the ambulances to transport 62 wounded from Utoya to the local hospitals?

Egghead