Norwegian massacre suspect Anders Behring Breivik’s purported 1 500-page manifesto paints a picture of a deliberative, driven killer — not a rambling crazy person, criminologists said yesterday.
Speaking to CNN after Breivik’s attorney said his client “may be” insane, Brian Levin, a criminologist with California State University, San Bernardino, rejected the suggestion. Based on what is known at this point, “he’s not crazy,” Levin said; he is a “sociopath”, but “not crazy.”
Criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University echoed those sentiments. “The behavior is crazy, but not necessarily the state of mind of the person committing it,” he said. “Mass murderers rarely are psychotic. They know what they’re doing. They don’t hear voices in an empty room. They’re mad, but [mad] in terms of bitter and resentful — not how we often use ‘mad’ to describe mental illness,” he said.
Both said a “crazy” person can be commonly understood as someone who cannot tell the difference between right and wrong and does not understand the nature and consequences of his actions.Â
Breivik, 32, acknowledged carrying out a bombing and a shooting rampage Friday, a judge said on Monday. Authorities said eight people were killed in the bombing of an Oslo building that houses Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg’s offices, and 68 were killed at a youth summer camp run by his ruling Labour Party. Breivik said the attacks were necessary to prevent the “colonization” of the country by Muslims, the judge said.
Experts — who had not met Breivik but have examined materials purported to be from him — had different takes Tuesday on whether the manifesto suggests he was motivated more by ideology or by a desire for infamy. But several agreed that he seems to have more in common with mass killers, from “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski to Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, than with many terrorists and typical right-wing extremists.
“If you see this killer as only a terrorist, you might see him as exceptional,” said Jack Levin, also a criminologist with Northeastern University. “If you see him also as a mass killer, he fits the mold.”
Levin said Breivik’s purported manifesto and the “Hollywood-type photos of himself” — including one in which he is dressed in a wetsuit with a patch that reads “Marxist Hunter” and holding a high-powered rifle — suggest a “personal pathology, the need to be a celebrity, to achieve worldwide infamy may have been the real motive for this crime,” more than an effort to cause terror among a specific population.
Cho, who killed 33 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, also had a manifesto and took photos and a video of himself, Levin said.
Fox, Jack Levin’s colleague at Northeastern, had a similar view. “I think this is more about vanity than insanity . . . and in fact more self-promotion than promoting any particular ideology,” he said.
“The posed photographs, video, and of course the manifesto — it seems to be all about him. And when you consider his background, (he was) fairly unsuccessful, which is something you find commonly among mass murderers. They see, through their crimes, the opportunity to feel like a big shot.”
The manifesto vowed that a “European civil war” will lead to the execution of “cultural Marxists” and the banishing of Muslims. At one point, the writer stated that his “European Declaration of Independence” took him nine years to complete. The document contained a link to a video.
The writer identified himself as Anders Behring Breivik.
CNN could not independently verify that Breivik wrote the document or posted the 12-minute video, and Norwegian authorities would not confirm that the man in their custody wrote the manifesto, saying it was part of their investigation. (CNN)
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