Criminally Demented, But Legally Sane

"You are not the ones I am targeting.  I consider you as brothers.  It's a coup; I must save Norway from Islamization."  Anders Behring Breivik

The Norwegian police whose response and behaviour had been so dismal on that fateful day of July 22, 2011, have come under great scrutiny and criticism from the public.  Their pathetic handling of a dire emergency that left 69 mostly young people dead from the deliberate slaughter imposed on young leftists whom Anders Breivik accused of being traitors to their country seemed inexplicable.

It can hardly be a comfort to them now to receive fulsome praise for their professional performance, during his trial for mass murder of the man who, to make a political/ideological point, decided to bomb a government building in Oslo, killing eight people there before decamping to the island of Utoya where the Workers' Youth League had a summer camp.

The testimony given to the court in Oslo by the head of local police operations outlined the picture of  a man who was fully self-possessed, calm, and determined to carry out a plan he had practised to perfection.  He was psychically removed from the bloody carnage, fear and mayhem he had committed, feeling fully justified in his choreographed play as the Grim Reaper.

While dealing deserved death to the youth wing of the ruling Labour Party that he loathed, holding them responsible for the influx of Muslim immigrants into the country of his birth, and which process was transforming Norway from a white, Christian country to one more resembling the Middle East, he co-opted tactics he so admired that were perfected by Islamist jihadists to make his point.

His point was to startle the country into a realization that the Muslim invasion was altering Norway beyond recognition.  And he would be the one to mobilize action against the invading horde.  His actions would prompt a change of government, an insistence that Muslims be expelled from the country, and all would be well, Norway returned to 'normal'.

What he succeeded in doing was to shock and horrify normal human beings at the vileness of his actions as the entire world condemned his act of brazen, inhuman butchery as the actions of an unbridled lunatic.  In that way he utterly resembled those he both detested and admired; jihadist Islamists.  But it was also his craven self-awareness and narcissistic personality that strikes those watching his trial unfold.

His personal fears for his own secure, physical well-being even as he was brutally butchering terrified teens who attempted to flee for their lives.  And he, with the greatest of composure, in the assuring uniform of a Norwegian policeman, carefully and with great precision killed them.  Bemoaning the fact that he hadn't killed more.

He is sane, and he is demented.  He is sanely demented.