New Orleans Reading the tales of migrants struggling to flee civil wars in the Middle East is becoming a classic definition of the daily downer: unwanted, feared, and shunned. Women fleeing with children seem under constant attack, including sexual abuse. Countries erecting US-like walls and barriers of concertina wire at their boundaries. Even the Nordic countries, long liberal bastions of hope and support for oppressed migrants, are backlashing. Benefits in some countries are being halved. In other countries they are being warehoused far from cities with little support besides room and board. In some they are being deported once the host country feels that the coast is clearer in their native lands. Families are being separated and not allowed to unite.
I’m not pointing fingers given the current record in the United States and, other than Germany, most of the European Union as well. This is not our collective finest hour. I just had hoped the bar would be higher, rather than everyone racing to the bottom set in the US.
Reading One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad about the horrific killing, first by planting a bomb at the center for government, Oklahoma City style, and then coldly and meticulously gunning down teens at a political party’s summer camp on an island not far from Oslo, prepared me for it a bit. I had resisted the book for the obvious reasons, though the reviews had been lavish in praise, because who really seeks out a book on mass murder for holiday reading. Unfortunately, the book is so well written and the story told so compellingly that even knowing the horrific ending, the reader is trapped in the hopes and dreams of the future victims and the nightmare of the delusions, egotism, and aspirations of the future killer.
The Norway story is not Newtown, Connecticut on steroids, but is a deeply disturbing political and personal tale as Breivik’s trajectory bends from youthful support and ambitions within a right wing conservative party in Norway to the phantasmagoric vision of an apocalyptical event that he expected would trigger a coup d’état supported by a mass movement on the right. All of this delusion came complete with a Unabomber-like manifesto where he was the self-anointed the leader of this hypothetical revolt. One thinks this is only possible in America, land of the two main parties and thousands of secret cells and “parties of one,” but no country, not even Norway is immune. The author’s “one of us” is a title taken from the eulogies for the victims, but Breivik was also “one of us” in terms of Norwegian society and the upper middle class, and though that theme is not pursued as diligently, it is also hard to ignore.
His whole fantasy was based in the same mainstream that is now flooding Nordic countries and the world. Norway for the Norwegians! Stop the Islamification of the country! Keep them out! Deport them! Stop the Muslims from raping Norwegian women and girls! This is not “Lillehammer” on Netflix. We have the classic conundrum where too many may agree with his goals, even as they disagree with his tactics.
It is worth worrying that the Breivik’s in country after country are not just one of them, but also one of us, unless we get a grip, lower the volume, and learn how to embrace, rather than shun the outsiders who will always be coming and have a place among us.