Lone gunmen and fatal ideologies

Many of the media headlines regarding the recent shootings in Norway have referred to the shooter, Anders Breivik, as a “mad man”. His criminal defence team have also been quick to describe him as being “insane”,  a definition which is likely to benefit their defence strategy. In Australia, our own experience of mass murder involved a man who has since been declared insane and institutionalised.

The labelling of someone who has perpetrated such a horrific crime as “insane” is understandable. The murder of children is something so far outside the ken of a sane person that we can’t help viewing anyone who could commit such an act as being “wrong”. That a person could consciously and rationally develop a strategy to orchestrate human suffering is alien, aberrant, and is so considered insane.

However, Breivik appears to have exercised an extreme degree of premeditation in carrying out his murders. Planning for the massacre, according to media reports, began many years prior to the actual event. Explosives and weaponry were researched, purchased, processed and stored meticulously. Breivik himself kept diary style records, which demonstrate a mind whose capacity for rational processing was in perfect order.

This is not the working of a delusional or deranged individual. This was planned, calculated and carried out with horrific precision. To define these actions as insane takes away from the evil of what was done. Not only that, it prevents us from understanding the fact that his murders are in fact the ultimate and revoltingly “rational” expression of a specific strain of political ideology.

Breivik’s ideology is one of those which advocates the murder of innocents as part of a greater “struggle”, or achievement of “a greater good”. The Islamic jihadists are another example, advocating murder to achieve a caliphate, while extreme leftist movements throughout history have also promoted slaughter of class enemies as a legitimate aspect of the struggle for a socialist utopia.

In this case, the atrocities carried out in Norway were the final and horrifyingly rational expression of the ideology of extreme right wing nationalism. The “greater good” in this case was a Europe “free from Islam”, while the murders themselves were part of the struggle toward this utopian goal as they would dramatically weaken the demographic base of one of the prime ideological “enemies” of the struggle.

To excuse Breivik’s actions as being the lone act of an “insane” man detaches them from the political process which spawned them. Murder is the final and ultimately rational expression of any ideology which sees its final goal as justifying any means of achievement. Anders Breivik massacred children in a wholly “rational” way, using bullets which fragmented inside bodies to cause maximum damage. He did this of his own free will. The ideology to which he subscribed absolved him of any guilt, just as the jihadists who massacred New Yorkers, or the Maoists who massacred Nepalese villagers, were absolved of their guilt by their respective ideologies.

But maybe, if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time, perhaps a more accurate candidate for the definition of insane are these extremist ideologies themselves. Time and time again anarchist, socialist, nationalist, fascist and religious extremist movements have sought to force their repugnant ideologies on others through murder. Time and time again their actions have been met with revulsion, ultimately resulting in their marginalisation and extermination. We can only hope that is what will happen in this instance, and that the evil of the ideology which prompted Breivik to commit murder is recognised, and properly reviled.