Norway mass killer puts Western ‘sanity’ on trial

IF a picture is worth a 1,000 words, what is the worth of the images of Anders Behring Breivik formally shaking hands with his prosecutors in the Oslo court where he is being tried for committing mass murder?
This is an age when reading “signals” has become a media preoccupation. One may wonder what signal is sent by pictures of an impenitent killer, smartly dressed and not looking remotely like a prisoner, enjoying such official courtesy. Considering that Breivik, the author of voluminous on-line denunciations of immigration and Islam, is nothing if not articulate, there is surely no less reason to wonder about the court’s wisdom in allowing him to lecture the world about the rationale behind his actions.
If many have the impression that Norway represents “liberalism-gone-mad,” it is easy to grasp why. Even die-hard liberals may question what purpose is served by giving Breivik the opportunity to re-affirm his detestation of Islam and European multiculturalism — especially at a time when the Islamophobic far right is resurgent, not least in France where the sharply raised profile of the Front National under its skilful xenophobic leader Marine Le Pen has ominous implications for Europe’s largest Muslim population and the whole future of French social cohesion.
In London, the liberal newspaper columnist, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, was quick to register grave reservations about what in his opinion amounts to handing Breivik a “global megaphone.” And what reasonable person would not share Freedland’s alarm that a caller to a London radio phone-in could be prompted by the coverage of the Norwegian’s fascistic remarks to exclaim that he knew “where the guy was coming from?”
Not, perhaps, that Freedland would have had any occasion to write in such terms had Breivik been a Muslim. It has been said that it is only because Breivik is a white European that the Norwegian legal system is keeping an open mind about whether he was compos mentis when he slaughtered 77 people for being accomplices in liberal policies he abhors — or whether he is a cold and calculating killer. Certainly, the temptation is to assume that a Muslim Breivik would be instantly labeled a terrorist, an ideological extremist driven by revulsion against the West, with the issue of whether the balance of his mind was disturbed scarcely arising.
Yet the hope must be that Norway would have tried a Muslim murderer in precisely the same fashion as Breivik. After all, a Western liberal society stands or falls by the consistency with which it upholds its defining principles, its commitment to the universal values of free speech, tolerance and respect for individual rights deriving from Europe’s eighteenth century “Enlightenment.” What, for good or ill, underlies the inquisitorial judicial system that operates in Norway and other European countries (though not Britain) is the rationalist faith that inquiry can yield understanding, and that in enhanced knowledge may reside the potential to rehabilitate criminals, to rescue them as a civilized human beings, however heinous their conduct.
Norway’s implicit optimistic assumption, in short, is that even an apparent monster like Breivik is susceptible to moral reformation — always assuming that he is in his “right mind.” The troubling feature of the Breivik trial, however, is that it risks testing to destruction the proposition that his fanatical loathing of multicultural society and of Muslims in particular may be exposed as a pathological aberration, the behavior of a person divorced from reality and prey to uncontrollable urges.
His prosecutors are in receipt of psychiatric reports on Breivik, one affirming that he is mentally ill, the other that he is not. With every indication of lucidity, Breivik himself insists that the claim that he is insane has no basis. Some, to be sure, will argue that this just underlines how sick he is — in the process miring the whole discussion in circularity. Yet the uncomfortable thought is that Breivik was simply carrying to a macabre conclusion views about multiculturalism and the malign impact of Islam that are espoused not just on the Far Right but also by established Western commentators who are widely felt to hold legitimate, if controversial, opinions. The anti-Islamic rage of the commentators in question can seem barely containable, and it might be felt that Breivik was merely amplifying their views when he declared that only a devastatingly dramatic event was going to wake up mainstream European society to the evils of “inclusivist” policies.
To Breivik, as to many others, it is multiculturalism’s apologists who deserve to be treated as though they are exhibiting symptoms of mental illness. If Breivik (with whatever justification) is deemed insane, he may be seen by some on the far right as a martyr to his beliefs, somebody whose foul deeds were exploited by the Western political elite to discredit hostility to diversity by stressing its essentially morbid and dangerous character.
None of this means that defenders of Western liberal values have cause to spurn the proceedings of the Oslo court, however outlandish their consequences. Norway’s handling of the Breivik case may be regarded as an exemplary reassertion of what the West purports to stand for — and as such a salutary rebuke to the primeval notion of jurisprudence that found such a voluble champion in former US President George W. Bush.
For all that Norway’s system of justice may induce unease, consider the grisly lesson in the alternative to it afforded by the US in recent times: A world in danger of being remade in the brutish image of America’s nineteenth century Wild West, with its trigger-happy bounty hunters and posters of bad guys emblazoned with the message beloved of the sometime president: “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

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