Whatever Anders Breivik is undergoing in Oslo’s criminal court this week, you might not really call it a trial.
In Canada, he wouldn’t even get one; after his free (even gloating) admission that he murdered 77 people in a bombing and shooting massacre, authorities here would send him for psychiatric testing, after which he would be stored for life in a prison for the criminally insane.
Whatever it is that he’s doing in front of a panel of judges (which includes three lay people serving as judges), it doesn’t appear likely to affect what any sane person would call the course of justice or the pronouncement of a just verdict on this obviously misguided soul.
Breivik is making use of a statue in Norwegian law that says he cannot be punished for any act intended to save people from an unavoidable danger, when that danger is more significant than the harm caused by his actions.
The danger — in Breivik’s mind — is immigration, and the influx of “cultural Marxists” (whatever that means) in Norway. He decries that his predominately white, protestant nation is being undermined by the surplus birthrate of the Third World.
That danger, he says, justifies mass murder, because the youths he shot at a summer camp were “people who worked to actively uphold multicultural values.”
More, he’s been given four days to rant on this theme — and anything else that might spring to mind.
Commentators the world around are questioning why Norway would give Breivik this much time to spew his hateful bile in public court. The world does not need to see this, they say, the world does not need another self-proclaimed racist martyr to poison the minds of others.
When the world is your audience — as it is in this case — it is statistically probable that a fair number of susceptible and like-minded people might be inspired to do even worse things, in the name of racial purity.
Therefore, the thinking goes, better to let him argue his case in closed court, let judges rule on his sanity, and then have him shipped off to a small cell far, far away. At least control the message.
But that’s not how you deal with evil. You deal with evil by exposing it, and you deal with evildoers compassionately and publicly, if only to show that you know the difference between justice and revenge.
Four days after Breivik finishes delivering his manifesto, he will cease to be news. He will be transformed into an object lesson on why the world cannot flinch in the face of hate.
He will join the pantheon of haters and losers who blame their failures and their own sense of uselessness on the colour of other people’s skin, or the text of other’s beliefs. And for the most part, he will be forgotten.
Breivik hates Muslims, yet he says he was inspired by al-Qaida. The world needs to know this.
The world also needs to know that some of his intended victims are alive and sitting in court, witnesses to the failure of Breivik to stop the flow of human progress.
They are proud to be labelled as enemies of Breivik, and long after the world has forgotten about him, these young people will be standing forward to make their country a place where freedom applies to everyone.
The determination that no country can isolate itself racially will continue. There really is no such thing as racial purity anymore, any more than there is no purely “Canadian” or “Norwegian” economy.
The people who want to silence Breivik’s lies are more likely to make him a martyr than he is himself.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.