UNLIKE IN THE USA, where occasionally someone packs a few firearms and “shoots up” a diner, restaurant, high school gymnasium, drive-in movie forecourt or, if they are really adventurous, a Ferris wheel or rollercoaster in an amusement park, we do not have a great tradition of such antics in Europe, and much less so in Norway, a country about which hardly anyone to whom I have spoken over the last few days has the slightest clue apart from a restaurant owner friend of mine who used to work on ferry boats going from Hull, in England, to “somewhere in Norway”, as he put it.
THUS THE RECENT EVENTS in Oslo and on Utoya island have come as a dual shock for all of us: A massacre? and Where?
IT WAS ONLY THIS SPRING that I read and then heard with some amazement a statement from a lady minister in the Norwegian parliament who, somewhat gloatingly, told the wider world (it was a slow news day) that Norwegian police stations had started closing at four o’clock in the afternoon as there was “nothing for the police to do” and so they could go “home to their families for early dinner”.
I SUSPECT THAT MANY POLICEMEN in Norway will be spending less time with their loved ones eating the famous Norwegian delicacy of boiled potatoes in salt water over the coming weeks and months. And perhaps they might have spent their time a little better in the past trawling through the websites that we are now discovering have existed in some numbers containing diatribes and tirades against the socialist government’s policy of altering the make-up of Norwegian society over the last five years through all-inclusive multiculturalism and multiracialism, an attitude guaranteed to anger the multitude of right wing nutters who inhabit Norway and secretly long for the SS, the Abwehr and the Gestapo Quislingism to return to their great white nation.
THE TERM “RIGHT WING NUTTER”, along with “lone wolf”, “wayward lunatic”, as well as others, are being bandied about so often by the written and visual media that it is clear there is a plan afoot to make us all – particularly the immigrant communities in traditionally closed countries – feel safe in our beds.
AT LEAST IN THE USA these events are perpetrated (perpetuated, according to Hillary Clinton just now) by maniacs in the traditional sense, who usually have the decorum to blow their own heads off after killing their teacher, the owner of the cinema which isn’t showing the latest Harry Potter movie or the ex-boyfriend who called them “spotty”, thus saving many tax dollars in expensive trials.
YET OUR NORWEGIAN ASSASSIN has made it clear that he wishes to go to court, admitting that he killed all these people but he has broken no laws and that he will make a statement to the public on Monday. The words “copycat” and “lone wolf” in the same sentence suggest flippancy on my part and on that of journalists abroad; yet Anders Behring Breivik hadn’t and hasn’t flipped: no lunatic leaves a 1500 page manifesto on the Internet, in English, Norwegian and Latin. The Norwegian – and more importantly the British – police should be busy trying to find out how many thousands of “nutters” are downloading his writings.
IN NORWAY IT IS NOT JUST boyish, insipid Eurovision hero Alexander Rybak who is in love with a fairytale beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed girlie from Norwegian mythology. At least he only bothered the wider world with his irritating voice and scratchy violin.
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