One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (22 page)

This was the view from the window of his room.

It was an internet
hermit’s room. The black leather swivel chair was soft, deep and accommodating. Just the right height for the screen. There was some IKEA shelving where he kept paper and ink cartridges. On the floor beside the printer were two safes.

The only objects telling another story were three bold pictures on the wall. They were faces, painted with the sharply delineated shadow technique of the graffiti
artist. The faces were grey, the backgrounds dramatic orange or bright turquoise. They were the work of Coderock, a Norwegian artist with roots in graffiti. Once, he had been so proud of owning them, boasting that they had been painted specially for him.

If he left the room he could go left, turn the handle of the front door, go down a short set of steps and be out in Hoffsveien, where the pavement
was separated from the road by a narrow verge with trees. On the other side of the road were a Coop, a flower shop and a café. His mother went to the café every day to meet up with her neighbours, drink coffee and smoke.

But generally when Anders left his room he turned right, into his mother’s flat.

Whenever he wanted to eat something; to get a glass of water; to go out onto the balcony for
a smoke, or needed the loo: always to the right.

He also turned right to take a shower. For that he had to go through another room, his mother’s bedroom. At the foot end of her double bed a door opened into a tiny bathroom with a shower. Beside the shower cabinet, its frosted glass decorated with lilies, was a washbasin, and above that a mirror with a built-in fluorescent light. There was a generous
overhead light that did not cast any shadows. It gave anyone standing at the mirror a good view of their face.

Hanging on the wall was a white shelf unit divided into two sections, one for him and one for her. Standing in front of the mirror like that, there was just room to turn round without bumping against the washing machine in the corner. Everything that was not strictly necessary, like
dirty-washing baskets and piles of towels, had to be kept in their rooms. After a shower, the steam had to be aired out through his mother’s bedroom.

Back in his room, he would don some of the clothes that were folded up or on hangers in the fitted wardrobe that was painted a shade of pale blue, the sort that was popular just after the war.

He had little use for his coat. His room was two steps
from the front door, but he seldom turned to the left and opened it.

It’s only temporary, he said when he moved from Tidemands gate in the summer of 2006.

‘He’s hibernating,’ said Magnus, the childhood friend who’d become a fire fighter. He was sorry that Anders had disappeared from his life. Magnus was working full-time and shared a flat with his girlfriend as Anders moved back home and was
swallowed up by the magical world of the mages. ‘It’s as if his life has fallen apart,’ Magnus’s girlfriend remarked.

A year into his hibernation, Anders had one of his rare encounters with friends. He told them he was collecting texts.

‘What for?’ they asked.

‘For a book about the Islamisation of Europe.’

‘Can’t you spend your time on something useful instead?’ Magnus asked.

It was important
that somebody took on the task, Anders replied.

His friends didn’t believe what he said about the book. They thought he had become a compulsive gamer and worried about him. A few carried on ringing to tell him about parties and pre-parties for some time after he went into hibernation.

After two years in his room, in the summer of 2008, he suddenly felt like being sociable and rang his friends.
Andersnordic
logged off from the games; so did the other avatars he had created, like
Conservatism
and
Conservative
. All at once he was out and about, ordering the sweet drinks he preferred. ‘Ladies’ drinks,’ his friends teased. But he didn’t care. He had never liked beer.

Anders had changed. He had developed a one-track mind.

From always having countless irons in the fire, he had turned into
someone engrossed in just one thing. Having launched so many business ideas, he was now monothematic.

‘He’s in a tunnel,’ said Magnus. Hoping he would soon see the light at the other end.

That summer, Anders delivered long lectures on the Islamisation of Europe.

‘The Muslims are waging demographic war,’ he said. ‘We’re living in
dhimmitude
and being conned by
al-Taqiyya
.’

‘Eh?’ said his friends.

‘The Muslims will take power in Europe because they have so many bloody children,’ Anders explained. ‘They pretend to be subordinating themselves, but they’ll soon be in the majority. Look at the statistics…’

The words poured out of him.

‘The Labour Party has ruined our country. It’s feminised the state and made it into a matriarchy,’ he told his mates. ‘And more than anything, it’s made it
a place where it’s impossible to get rich. The Labour Party’s let the Muslims occupy…’

He started repeating himself. They generally let him go on for a while before they asked him to change the subject. His friends glossed over his peculiarities, the strange behaviour and extreme topics of conversation, because it was good that he was at least getting out. It surely wouldn’t be long before he
was back to his old self.

When his friends finally told him to shut up, he generally stopped talking. He could not cope with the transition from didactic monologuing to ordinary chatting. He could only talk about what his friends called his ‘gloomy outlook on the world’.

‘Do you think anyone’s going to be interested in reading your book?’ asked one of his friends.

Anders just smiled.

In spite
of everything, Anders’s friends were impressed by all the knowledge he had amassed. He liked discussing the Qur’an with Pakistani taxi drivers and ‘knew it better than the Muslims did themselves’, his friends joked. Anders’s vocabulary was peppered with Arabic expressions and foreign words. His friends grew accustomed to concepts like multiculturalism, cultural Marxism and Islamism.

*   *   *

Anders had found a new world. It had been lying there waiting for him, close beside the world of gaming.

He could sit in his room, in the same deep, black chair, with the same screen in front of him. He could click his way into Gates of Vienna instead of
World of Warcraft
. Into Stormfront instead of
Age of Conan
. Jihad Watch instead of
Call of Duty
.

One website led to another. He found the sites
engrossing, compelling, bursting with new information. Gates of Vienna had an aura of proud, European history about it, with its many colour pictures of great battles of the past. There were Biblical quotations, urbane discussions. Stormfront had a harsher, more brutal style, referencing fascist propaganda of the 1930s. The website called itself the voice of the new white minority that was ready
to fight, and its emblem bore the motto ‘White Pride, World Wide’.

Jihad Watch went in for criticism of Islam and adorned its web pages with Islamic symbols. Books promoted on the site were likely to have the words ‘Islam’ and ‘war’ in the title. At the top of the homepage, a green crescent and a pair of dark eyes stared out from behind a chequered Middle Eastern scarf.

Whether it was couched
in refined terms or cruder ones, the message was the same. Crushing the influence of Islam in the West.

The websites had a strong sense of solidarity, of ‘us’. It’s us against the interlopers. Us as a group under threat. Us as the chosen people.

Us against them. Us against your lot.

He didn’t even have to do anything to be one of them; there was no need to try to impress anyone. All he had
to do was join the mailing list to get the newsletters, or click onto the site to follow the debates. Sometimes they requested donations, to be shared out between the contributors, but nobody demanded anything of him.

Criticism was reserved for others: the state, feminists, Islamists, socialists and politically correct Western leaders. It was the injustices inflicted on Europeans in the past,
it was the mass immigration in the present; it was beheadings and castrated knights, mass rape, the destruction of the white race.

The massacre of the European people had to be stopped!

He had found his niche. Again.

The
New York Times
best-selling author Robert Spencer, who founded the Jihad Watch site, was one of his favourites. So was Pamela Geller, who ran the blog Atlas Shrugs. He paid
close attention to what the two Americans wrote. Bat Ye’or, alias Gisèle Littman, was another of the stars in this firmament. Born into a Jewish family in Cairo, she had languished as a subservient subject of Muslim society. Her family left Egypt after the Suez Crisis, and she later wrote
Eurabia: The Euro–Arab Axis
. Presiding over it all as moderator of Gates of Vienna was the American Edward
S. May, using his pseudonym Baron Bodissey.

But the one who shone most brightly of all was a character calling himself Fjordman. He was an apocalyptic figure prone to spreading prophecies of doom. And he was Norwegian. Anders devoured everything that ‘The dark prophet of Norway’ wrote, downloading it for storage. ‘When I was born, Norway was 100% white,’ Fjordman wrote on Gates of Vienna. ‘If
I reach a very old age and am still living here, I may be in a minority in my own country.’

There he had it. The truth, revealed in uncensored form. Fjordman wrote about Muslim men raping Scandinavian women, his analyses spanning the centuries as he discussed everything from Plato to Orwell. He predicted the ruination of Europe if the current trend continued and thought, as did Bat Ye’or, that
the political elites had thrown in their lot with Muslim leaders in order to destroy European culture and transform the continent to a Muslim Eurabia.

Someone had to offer resistance.

There in the fart room, Anders felt a strong sense of kinship with Fjordman, who came across as uncompromising, brilliant and well-read. Everything Anders wanted to be.

In October 2008, using the profile
Year 2183
, he tried to make contact with Fjordman via the Gates of Vienna website.

‘When will your book be available for distribution, Fjordman?’ he asked, and then added, ‘I’m writing a book on my own,’ before concluding with ‘Keep up the good work mate. You are a true hero of Europe.’

No answer was forthcoming from his role model. Five days later, he adopted a more critical tone.

‘To Fjordman
and others who are competent on this area,’ he began. ‘I’ve noticed from earlier essays that your solution is to attempt to democratically halt immigration completely and perhaps launch an anti-sharia campaign, or just wait until the system implodes in a civil war.

‘I disagree,’ he went on, criticising the others on the forum, such as Spencer and Bat Ye’or, for not daring to use the D-word. Deportation.
Fjordman had only spoken up about stemming the Islamic tide by stopping Muslim immigration to Europe. What about the Muslims already in our country, asked Anders. Before long, half the population of Europe would be Muslim, he predicted, giving figures to illustrate the increasing demographic distortion in countries such as Kosovo and Lebanon, where the Muslim population was growing rapidly
while the number of Christians fell.

‘The above is an illustration from my coming book (it will be free to distribute btw)’ he wrote of the statistics he had provided, and then reiterated that it was cowardly not to use the D-word. ‘I assume because it is considered a fascist method in nature, which would undermine your work?’ he wrote to Fjordman.

Deporting all Muslims was the only rational
solution, he continued, because even if immigration were halted the Muslims already in Europe would have so many children that they would become the majority.

He never received a reply from the top names in the field, not from Robert Spencer, nor from Bat Ye’or, nor from Fjordman.

How could he make himself heard?

*   *   *

On the evening of 13 February 2009, there was a ring at the door. His
mother opened it.

‘He doesn’t want visitors,’ she said.

‘We just thought…’

Three friends had decided to try to get Anders to come out. It was his thirtieth birthday. The birthday boy was sitting behind the door of his room, a few metres from the front door, and could hear everything they said.

His mother’s second cousin had not completely given up on him, either. As Anders’ sponsor, it was
his duty to follow through with the relation he had introduced into the Masonic lodge. But each time he rang, Anders claimed to be busy with his book.

‘What’s that book of yours about?’

‘It’s a book about conservatism,’ Anders replied.

‘All right.’

‘And about the Crusaders, the Battle of Vienna in 1683…’

‘Oh, well,’ said Jan Behring.

On one occasion, Anders was obliged to attend. The fraternity
was holding its annual family lodge meeting, at which members would sit with those they were related to, regardless of degree. Anders simply had to go along. It was a long ceremony; he lost valuable hours at the screen. It was no longer computer games drawing him in, but those texts. They took up all the space.

Some two hours later, the rituals had finally finished and everyone stood up and went
out to the lobby. Anders followed them and waited for his older companion to go to the cloakroom, put on his coat and drive him home. When he finally offered to fetch the coats himself, the cousin told him this was just a break. The ceremony was only half over.

Anders could stand no more, and left the Armigeral Hall.

He must be disappointed that there aren’t more young men here, thought his
relative.

Anders also withdrew from virtual friends he had been close to. Some hardcore players urged him to come back to
World of Warcraft
. ‘Things are going okay in the guild but new mage sucks compared to you,’ wrote a guy on his team. Several sent messages asking him to start playing again.