Review: Turrettini, The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer (2015)

[truepenny]

The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer: Anders Behring Breivik and the Threat of Terror in Plain Sight by Unni Turrettini

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book is primarily about Anders Behring Breivik, but it's about him in comparison with Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski, and how between the three of them you have a kind of template of the lone wolf killer: intelligent, narcissistic, alienated, so fanatically devoted to his ideology that he believes he must kill for it. It is also a scathing denunciation of Norwegian society, in which, Turrettini says, no one is allowed to stand out or have different opinions and people sleepwalk through their lives.

I obviously can't speak to the state of Norwegian society, but I think Turrettini is trying to write two different books here, one about lone wolf killers and one about Norway, and the edges of the two don't quite mesh. The parts of the book that talk about Breivik and McVeigh and Kaczynski in comparison, I think are very good. That is, I buy her argument that there is such a thing as a lone wolf killer and that he is dangerous because he is (a) a fanatic who thinks that any number of innocent lives are necessary "collateral damage" for his cause and (b) invisible. He doesn't have a prior criminal history, or a history of mental illness, or a history of being anything worse or more alarming than an oddball, a weirdo who never fits in.

The parts of the book that are about what Breivik did, told in clear, straightforward prose, are also very good. Where things start to come a little unglued is where she starts talking about WHY Breivik did what he did. Because she has two quite different arguments. One is that ANY ideology would have served as Breivik's rationale for a violent outburst that had more to do with his psychology than any of his buzzwords; the other is that Breivik was right to be angry and that what drove him to the massacre of 77 people was the failure of Norwegian society to provide him with an outlet for his unpopular political views. Given that those views amount to white supremacist hate speech, I find it really hard to be sympathetic to Breivik here, and it makes me uneasy about Turrettini herself and whether she's using her argument about Breivik as a kind of stalking horse. Although I think the term "multiculturalism" must be used differently in Europe (or, at least, she doesn't seem to be using it quite in the way that is familiar to me), she seems to me to be saying that multiculturalism is the wrong response to Muslim immigrants because it lets them walk all over the law-abiding citizens of their new country and that that's one reason why Norway's combination of socialism, democracy, and monarchy is a horribly failed, frankly dystopian enterprise. At the same time she denounces Breivik she almost seems at certain points to agree with him, and she doesn't make the distinction clear, so I don't know if the Islamophobic argument about multiculturalism is HIS argument, which she is explicating for her readers, or if it's HER argument as well.

She does at least vehemently reject his claims to be a martyr (going on a hunger strike because the prison won't give you the computer game you want?), and I felt on firmer ground with her argument that the Norwegian courts, in their anxiety to preserve Breivik's rights, forgot about the rights of the victims.

So this was certainly a thought-provoking book, but I'm not sure it was always for the right reasons.



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Comments

[lokifan]

she seems to me to be saying that multiculturalism is the wrong response to Muslim immigrants because it lets them walk all over the law-abiding citizens of their new country and that that's one reason why Norway's combination of socialism, democracy, and monarchy is a horribly failed, frankly dystopian enterprise.

Eeeeek. :raises my eyebrows at her: Definitely for me as a Brit that is a 100% familiar argument that comes from scary people.