Mad or just bad, Breivik is not a harbinger of things to come

Mass-murderer Anders Breivik may or may not be insane, but his actions do not indicate a radical right on the rise, says Jason Walsh.

Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bomb blast and gun rampage on July 22, has been declared criminally insane, angering many who wanted to see him face the consequences of his murderous actions.

We in the press commonly refer to murderers like Breivik as "madmen". This is not because journalists are all secretly experts in psycho-medical diagnoses, but because such murders are so repellant that it is impossible to conceive of them as the work of a sane person.

The specific diagnosis given Breivik of paranoid schizophrenia is open to question, but the result is that he will likely spend the rest of his life incarcerated in a mental hospital rather than facing trial and imprisonment, which could have seen him released after two decades. Frankly, given the shocking scale of Breivik's murders, it is hard to ignore the possibility that such a fact formed part of the reasoning behind the judgement.

Some have speculated that Breivik himself may be disappointed that he won't be able to obtain the status of martyr in prison.

Others are furious and see the diagnosis itself as proof of Norwegian — and European — society being fundamentally racist.

Writing in the Guardian, writer and far left politician Aslak Sira Myhre took the opportunity to slam the decision, saying Breivik was not mad but instead expressed the "white man's hatred that we have known for a century." Making the argument, Mr Myhre cited Norway's post-war decision to declare insane Knut Hamsun — author and supporter of the Quisling Nazi-collaborationist regime — as a precedent of Norway's failure to deal with fascist politics.

Maybe so, but in making charges of widespread racism and casually forming a causal link from this to the acts of Breivik is going much too far.

If anything Breivik's lone wolf actions prove the opposite: that the far right is not on the march in Norway.

There has unquestionably been a rise of populism in Europe, and not just in the EU, but directly linking this to Breivik's spree-killing makes little sense. For a start, populism exists on the left as much as the right and in both cases it is inflamed by a sense of loss of control of democratic politics. In the case of the EU, and eurozone in particular, it is not exactly hard to understand why such feelings should take hold.

What is happening in Norway I shall leave for Norwegians to explain, but it is vital to remember that Norway remains a social democratic country and has refused to join the EU primarily because it fears it would lose control of the Keynesian social welfare system it has built on its massive oil wealth.

In the latest elections in Norway (local government elections held in September 2011) the Labour party won the largest share of the vote, with 31.7 percent. The Conservatives came second with 28 per cent. The Progress party, which has been called far right by some, came third with 11.4 per cent, followed by the Centre party (6.8 per cent) and Liberal party (6.3 per cent).

Breivik had once been a member of the Progress party, but left in 2007 because he felt it too soft for his extreme views. No doubt it was. Although it is undeniably right wing and populist and has made statements about Europe's supposed "Islamisation", it built its support on a policy platform of increasing Keynesian redistributism while also cutting taxes, all to be paid for with oil revenue. In this at least it is well within the mainstream of Norwegian politics and to the economic left of many much more mainstream European parties.

It is also not coincidental that the Progress party lost a third of its vote in the wake of Breivik's killing spree, despite doing all it could to distance itself from him.

Is Breivik insane? I do not know. Certainly his actions were not those of a rational person, but deeply irrational, mentally ill people can perform all manner of complicated feats. The idea that he cannot possibly be mentally ill rests on a prejudice that the disturbed can only ever be gibbering shadows of people, a proposition no psychiatrist would agree with.

Similarly, the idea that all fundamentalists and extremists, even those who do not act on their views by killing others, are insane is clearly bunk. It is wrong to think that because someone holds different views, no matter how odious, that they are somehow sick.

For my part, I think it is a pity Breivik won't have to answer for his crimes in a court of law, but that is a matter for Norway, not me. However, the rush to judge his actions as part of a widespread and rising radicalised racism is to believe in precisely the kind of jackbooted fantasy Breivik himself dealt in.

Image by Surian Soosay. CC licenced.