A link to the original article can be found here.
A boy of eleven years turns towards the assassin. The weapon is pointed at him, but he faces it down with childlike courage. He says: “Don’t shoot. You have shot enough now. You have killed my father. I am too young to die. Why can’t you leave me in peace?” The assassin hesitates, lowers his weapon. Then he moves away calmly, towards his next murder. Without anyone knowing why he spared this child, why he abandoned him to his loss and his grief.
For three days, Norwegians have been crying over stories like this. There are sadly too many of them, and we haven’t yet heard them all. Our anger reached measures that I thought incompatible with the Norwegian temperament. Because we weren’t protesting in public. We weren’t crying in the streets: it’s not our style. When we speak of the assassin, it is with bitterness and scorn. And in a low voice.
Anders Behring Breivik: ever since I saw his face and read his name for the first time, I knew that he would be forever imprinted on our collective consciousness. As the incarnation of absolute evil, the worst criminal that our country has known since the Second World War. The narcissism of the photos that he publishes on the Internet, ridiculous in other circumstances, posing in all sorts of uniforms and disguises; his satisfied smile as we bring him to prison; his DIY heroism and his ideology of the superman: all that is intolerable.
After only twenty-four hours, I could no longer bear to say his name. Impossible: he is everywhere. One day, my parents, who were born in 1920 and 1921, tried to explain to me what they felt for Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945), the Nazi “Prime Minister” of Norway, allied with Germany from 1940 to 1945. “It’s difficult,” they said, “to explain to you how much we hated him. We hated him for every minute of every day. We hated him, him and his collaborators. Almost every one of the occupation troops. You can’t understand how much we hated him, scorned him, despised him. We couldn’t even tolerate hearing his name anymore.
Like Breivik, this Norwegian “Führer” felt invested in a grand European mission and, like him, he wrote mediocre works, claiming to be philosophical, that were in part illegible. The poet Arnulf Overland (1889-1968) wrote these two verses about him:
“This people you have betrayed, They will forget all but your name.”
Now, I can say that I understand the intensity of this hatred. These last few terrifying days have been a true history lesson, which was delivered in such an awful fashion, but was important. It clarifies what our parents saw and experienced, what scarred them and scarred the after-war society, the one in which we live today. But not that alone. It also has something to say about what can happen to us all, in any society, when extremist ideas and violent thoughts become legitimate within the framework of small sub-cultures. Even miniscule ones: it only takes one person, we know that now. One Timothy McVeigh (1968-2001, main person responsible for the Oklahoma City attacks in 1995) for example – or yet another whose name I do not wish to mention.
My companion, Erika Fatland, is a writer, like me. But she is also an anthropologist and has spent six years studying the Beslan School Hostages, where, on the 1st of September 2004, 333 people, children and adults, lost their lives following one of the most violent hostage takings in history. That time, it was about Chechen and Ingush rebels.
For six years, the intolerable set the tempo of our daily lives: monumental murders of children and terrorism against civilians. This month, his book finally appears in Norway. In the West, it represents the most complete work on an act of terrorism and its consequences on a little society – nothing less. A theme which is not new, however. I wonder today if we ever imagined this to be possible in Norway? In our little happy country? In Norvegia felix? I don’t think so. I think that, for us, the terrifying description of Beslan could only be conceived of in the Caucus. Not here. In fact, everywhere but here. Not in our little educated and peaceful country. Not in Oslo, a green city, a bit boring but peaceful.
To a foreigner, this can seem inconceivable, like a fairy tale from another planet. Until today my little country and my little city were so peaceful, and especially – this is what’s so moving about it, so much innocence – so naïve and so open. Submitted to minimal security measures, you could walk freely into the buildings of Parliament and government: at most a few bits of symbolic metal and personnel without weapons who only throw you a knowing look while they open your bag.
The ministers, with only a few exceptions, live in Oslo, completely normally, in ordinary apartments and without surveillance. After half eleven, they don’t even have a car: the chauffeurs are gone home. And if one of them has to go anywhere, he takes the tram. Or he queues up for a taxi, like any one of us. Without bodyguards. Have I mentioned that the ministers don’t have bodyguards? Obviously, they don’t have any, with the exception of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The deputies don’t have any either. And even for the highest-ranking personalities, in our little happy country, the protective measures were rather invisible.
So, a few weeks ago, in a park near me, I meet the princely couple. Seated on a bank with one of their children, they are eating ice-cream in the sun. As we have already crossed paths during official receptions, I salute them and catch up a bit with them. I throw a look around me, quickly: there must be police around – it’s always that way. But I see no one. Perhaps they consider the situation so harmless at this point that they stayed in their car, and leave the little family to eat their ice-cream in peace. After having taken a day off, I bought myself an ice-cream. How I ate it while walking in the streets of Oslo the Green and the Peaceful, slightly bored but happy. The city of my childhood, the countryside of my youth. And I thought: what a strange country in truth… And how lucky we are!
Norvegia felix. Lucky from other points of view, too. Because, economically, the country finds itself in a situation that would be close to a mirage for many other industrial societies. While Europe is confronted by new economic storms, in Norway, the milk and honey is flowing. Or rather oil and gas: millions of tons pumped from the marine depths, twenty-four/seven.
Norway is probably the only Western country which can boast of being solvent, of not having public debt, and even of having a little bit of money in its bank account to spend. More precisely, 3.1 trillion Norwegian kroner (403bn euro), 620,000 kroner per citizen – including infants and elderly citizens. Money which we are keeping to finance the future. An enormous amount of capital. To which is added the petroleum revenues which nourish the national budget, permitting the Norwegian state the fulfilment of social promises and goods which, in the rest of Europe, have long ago been put on hold in the hope of better days. Without forgetting, moreover, the long and peaceful democratic history of the country, interrupted only by the Second World War.
Also, the freedom of opinion, which dates back to 1814. A perfect country, so? Not at all. Often prosaic and querulous, sometimes a bit provincial and narrow-minded. But when it comes to a certain art of living in a State of democratic and free law, the Norwegians – like other Scandinavians – are rather proud. And with reason. Certainly, we didn’t invent democracy, but we made it durable. That’s our contribution to history.
And all this, all these quasi-utopian gains, wasn’t enough for this person whose name I do not wish to say. Whose name I wish to forget. All these things, everything that the rest of the world envies us for, were, for him, the symptoms of decadence, of the loss of ancient values (after reading his insane, 1,500 page “manifesto”, however, he does not clearly reveal what values he is talking about). Immigration, with all the problems it poses, represents for him only a menace, and not a challenge. The liberalism and humanism of our press and public debate as a whole: a betrayal. But of what, exactly? Of the country? Of a Norwegian archetype? Of the Norwegian people?
Almost 5,000 members of the Norwegian elite were on his list of people to slaughter. In fact, probably all those who had a public life were on it. The impetus of solidarity in the whole country shows that he could have extended the list to several thousands of people. To bring about this dream country which he calls for in his wishes, he could have – he would have had to – kill us all. And he would have stayed alone, with perhaps a handful of people like him. He would have reigned over an uninhabited Norway. Finally close to his ideal: cleansed to the bone. The chimera dreams of a young man alone and a bit of a failure, in gala uniform in his childhood room, caressing heroic and crazy dreams of a cleansed Europe and who finally acted: history has seen others.
And now what, dear little country? This attack is directly levelled at our way of living. A summer university of young, engaged and idealistic people – there is one for every youth in the Norwegian political parties – is transformed into a bloody battlefield. In Oslo, the government buildings are plunged into darkness, like faded shells under dimmed lights.
My city is no longer peaceful or boring, she is no longer herself. These July nights, in the north of Europe, people are going outside and sobbing without speaking while the candles flicker in a garden in bloom, in front of the cathedral. What will become of our way of living? Are we going to perpetuate our values and our openness, renew the social contract? My little country, what will become of you?
Two-hundred thousand people, a third of Oslo’s population, assembled before the city hotel: a crowd which evokes memories of the 7th of June, 1945, when King Haakon VII came back from exile, after the war, to restore Norwegian democracy. In a heavy and dignified silence, they listen to the words of the prince. Abroad, he is known mainly for his marriage. We, in Norway, know that he is a cultured, respected, and liberal man. “Today, the streets are full of love,” he says. “We have decided to respond to cruelty by coming together. We have decided to confront hatred together (…). No one will take our Norway from us.”
It’s beautiful, it’s intelligent. But is he speaking truly? He adopts the same dignified tone as the young survivors of Utøya, in the hours which followed the tragedy, inconceivable juvenile pride. The Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg did t he same when he spoke. Warm, dignified words. But yet? We know now that a paranoiac and oblivious hatred of the story is flourishing on the Internet – even if only within a few small groups.
But all it takes is one minority, one single person. And even if we ignored it beforehand, even if we never thought of it, we know it now. We know what potential danger there is in tolerating the intolerable and tolerating xenophobia. The scorn of political men and the hatred of others, whom we call “rats” or “traitors”. We must open a debate on this rhetoric of hate; the whole of Norwegian political parties needs to do it.
The behaviour, the measure and the respect for the motivations and the opinion of all are the foundations and the condition of all social systems and all democratic debate. If these virtues are lost, the door is opened to hatred. It’s something that we have known for a long time, in Europe. It’s our communal and bitter historical experience.
The events of Norway remind us of that which we did not wish to relive. But what must become of little Norway? The troops in combat uniform in front of the official buildings, they seem like a defeat – even if we recognise the need for them. The machine gun is not a part of our ideal of society. When I saw those 200,000 roses stretched toward the sky, however, I thought: it will work. We are going to succeed. Our society has overcome poverty, class wars and occupation. When I saw these strangers hugging in the street and crying, I think of the words of the poet Nordahl Grieg (1902-1943) in 1940: “There are so few of us in this country. Every death is a brother or a friend.” That might be the strength of a little country, the distance so short between each other. When I see the photo of the person whom I wish to forget at any cost, I wonder if this distance is so short. How could this individual who has no name get so far from the values that surrounded him for all of his life? He lived near us, within arm’s reach. Are there others like him?
I don’t know. I worry and I hope. But today, I cry for you, my little city, and for you too, my little country, well loved and boring.
Translated from the Norweigan to the French by Nils C. Ahl. Translated from the French to the English by Darren Gillen.
