Norwegian Murderer

Where do you start with such a horrible weekend? Seventy-six people murdered in Norway by a man who, it seems, had rationalized what he was going to do over a number of years, and planned his actions in detail to be as devastating as possible.

It is very difficult to understand how someone could do what he did. It goes so far against human nature to deliberately kill another person that we cannot comprehend how a murderer  can detach themselves to such an extent, become so alienated, that they can look a person in the eyes and then shoot them. Most murders are crimes of passion, they are committed in anger and rage, when a person has lost control. We can almost understand that a person can react violently and cause death and injury that they did not with malice aforethought intend. But this man gathered children around him - they were drawn by the fact that, dressed as a policeman - he behaved as though he had their welfare at heart and wanted to help, but in fact he simply wanted to kill the largest number of them as he could.

Is this the equivalent of a suicide bomber  who finds the most crowded part of the market in in which to blow himself up?

Or is it more like the killers in Mumbai, India who methodically searched two hotels floor by floor looking for people to kill? They eventually killed 166 and injured more than 300.

The shared patriotic, religious and anti-government sentiments expressed by Breivik suggest a similarity with Timothy McVeigh, who, in bombing a US Government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killed 168 and injured nearly 700.

We think we understand those attacks, we can grasp at a notion thay they were motivated by religious and political extremism mixed with ignorance, cowardliness and desperation. This may be because in cultural, geographic and historical terms, we have sufficient distance between us and them, between here and there and between then and now to allow a degree of supposed understanding derived from rational thought.  

But in Western Europe we are faced with the horror of an educated, seemingly intelligent man living in a mature democracy who can rationalise the mass murder of children in order to further his racist and nationalist aims. We have no distance in time, space or culture in which to process our feelings about what has happened, we are suffering a collective shock.

All we can do today is to feel the sadness and despair of survivors, express the sympathy and support we want to send to those who have lost loved ones and hope that at some point in the future we can learn something good from such a horrible episode.

Rational thought is of little use on days like these.