Thursday, April 19, 2012

ANDERS BEHRING BREIVIK

As I am sure you already know, Anders Behring Breivik is the miserable lunatic who in my country of birth on June 22, 2011 detonated a car bomb at the government office quarters in central Oslo with the loss of 8 lives, and from where he proceeded by car and ferry to the traditional annual Labor Party youth summer camp at the Utøya island, mercilessly stalking and shooting to death 69 unarmed youth while fronting as a police officer there to protect them.

His stated motive?  Hatred of government institutions for not doing anything to protect pristine Nordic ethnicity from the evils of encroachment by Muslims and immigrants.  If it sounds like Hitler to you, you are on the right track.

Let us draw a parallel with Timothy McVeigh and his Oklahoma City car bomb which he detonated on April 19, 1995 killing 168 and injuring close to 700 people.  McVeigh also hated his federal government and what he viewed as its liberal policies, confessed his crime and expressed no remorse.  He was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

After lengthy jockeying back and forth among psychiatric commissions and other "experts" in the vagaries of the human mind, it was finally settled that Anders Behring Breivik is not mentally impaired to stand trial.  It will however be up to the court to finally decide whether he shall be incarcerated as a criminal or parked in an asylum for the insane.  It's going to be a tough call.

The trial began on April 15 and is scheduled to last for 10 weeks.  A frenzied debate preceded the trial about whether the press should have free access to the proceedings.  It was ruled that the press should indeed be there and the usual circus has ensued, giving Breivik wide latitude to publicly air his sick social theories, insult the judges, claiming to be victim rather than offender and declaring that his only remorse is not having had the opportunity to kill even more people.  In return the mass murderer is not handcuffed, is received in court with cordial handshakes and is generally being treated respectfully as any lawful citizen.  I am not certain whether he also is being treated to coffee with cream and sugar, but I would not be surprised.

Norway formally abolished the death penalty in 1979, the last execution having taken place in 1948.  There is no provision for life imprisonment in Norway.  The maximum sentence is 21 years, although there seems to be some leeway to extend this to 30 years in cases of Breivik's magnitude.  Maximum security prisons in Norway are country clubs compared to U.S. standards -bright cells with large unbarred windows, modernistic IKEA furniture, flat screen TV and private bath.

Here is my dilemma.  Have my fellow Norwegians gone totally bananas with their liberal ideas about polite decency under any and all circumstances?  My gut feeling is that Anders Behring Breivik should be burnt at the stake, but my brain intercedes insidiously with the following:

Are those very same Norwegians on to something that is actually pretty clever?  If we can agree on the concept of justice as a tool of prevention rather than a means of social revenge, what is then more likely to turn world opinion off on Anders Behring Breivik and his ilk - and we know they are out there and only too ready to perpetrate great harm.  Letting Breivik expose himself in all his lunacy for the whole world to see while being treated as a gentleman, or keeping it all under close wraps and let imagination fester?  Breivik has already complained bitterly that the prosecution is trying to make him look ridiculous.

You be the judge.