A statement by Breivil's lawyer can be found in the live updates on the Guardian today:
Breivik said the attacks were 'necessary'
This is not an incompetent unstable man, this is an cold-blooded murderer whose political beliefs are echoed here in the USA on the far right. And here in the USA, the media and the general public have brushed away incident after incident where some 'lone wolf' has killed or was planning to kill "the leftist commies".
His attack on the island, murdering so many young people with political aspirations, was designed to hurt the Labour Party which has supported tolerance and respect.
He's stated that he went to Utøya [where 700 youths in the age of 15-25 were gathered] to give the Labour party a warning that 'doomsday would be imminent' unless the party changed its policies.
I wish I could say something simple and strong, that would comfort and inspire myself and others, but I can't. I'm too filled with sorrow and anger. In the most radical days of politics in the '60's, I was always one who struggled against violence, who said if we on the left took up violent revolution, we weren't acting for the best defense of the Constitution and the ideals of the nation I love so much.
I walked away from several political organizations in those years, left the staff of the underground papers where I worked when those groups supported the Weatherman and other radical groups that advocated violent revolution. When the editor of one paper demanded we all read Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, I declared I was neither Chinese nor Communist; I was an American, and I believed in all the highest ideals we had set for ourselves over the not-quite-two-centuries we had been a nation. Was I being an idealist, or was I being a fool?
When those same men (and they were men) belittled my worth because of my sex, and thought I was nothing more than a hippie chick who should satisfy their sexual desires and make more brown rice and vegetables for the communal dinners, I fought back with my words and my actions, put on my red stockings and turned my power to the feminist movement, only to be ostracized because I was hetero, finding more acceptance and respect at the GLF house than I did at the woman's center I had helped create and literally build with my own two hands in an old and worn-out brownstone in the then-free-republic of Dupont Circle.
I demanded from myself that I turn that anger and the impulse to violence into peaceful and non-violent actions and political activism. I sometimes failed, at least in my heart, to achieve that high ideal. There were times and are times I cannot forgive, let alone love, those who oppose peaceful change with violence and brutal power wielded by so many individuals and institutions. But I have never failed in remaining non-violent myself, not when I was gassed, and hit with clubs, and jailed, and mocked in meetings, and humiliated and harassed and even fired from jobs because of my beliefs and activism. I may have gone home and wept in rage, thrown glass jars against the brick walls in the alley while reciting the names of Nixon, Kissinger, the bar managers who fired me when I objected to them or customers putting their hands on my body, Bush, Reagan and Rove and all the rest over the decades. But I have never raised a hand in anger to those who would, and did, beat me, jail me, tap my phones or add to my FBI file reports of me attending a meeting of peace activists, or considered framing me for a crime I did not commit (yes, it happened, and I'll never say anything else about that incident) because of my beliefs.
And through the years, again and again I saw the hammers of government, political, religious and corporate powers crush those who stood up in a town hall or sat down on the rail road tracks to stop the movement of nuclear weapons, or tried to save the last of the old growth forests, or stood with their neighbors to demand justice for all, full civil rights and respect for every being, or tried to protect the rights of women to choose their own destiny and reproductive health.
Now, I'm wondering if my own political activism and public openness on the web and locally will make me and my loved ones, my associates, my fellow Democrats, actual targets for murder. I know that is one of the goals of the right wing radicals and fascists who cloak themselves in the Bible and The Stars and Stripes; to make us who oppose them too fearful for the lives of those we love to stand up and fight back by peaceful, non-violent methods, by trying to work within an broken system, by using reason and compassion and idealism internalized and demonstrated in our every day lives and work.
How can we fight back? How can we drain this evil from our society? How can I conquer the fear that causes me to think it's time for me to put aside my commitment to non-violence? How can I stop thinking that maybe it's time for me to start taking lessons in firearms training and to reacquire the skills I had as a young person when I was a good target shooter with the ribbons and certificates from youth programs to prove it? Should I start carrying a pistol on my hip to every rally I attend? Every meeting I participate in? Every time I go shopping or take a walk in the park? I know this is the fear talking, I know the fear will pass, Gods willing, with meditation, reflection, with going back to the writings of Dr King, Robert Kennedy, Mary Daly, the Carpenter of Nazareth (although I am not one of his lambs) and the other great advocates of peaceful revolution and change to refresh my spirit, seek clarity, and strengthen my resolve.
At least I hope that is what will happen for me, what I will struggle for, but with a bitterness I know will always rise up again and again as I see so many shrug off these murders in Norway, the 'lone wolves' in the USA that kill people in churches and museums and on the streets of our nation. They are encouraged by the propaganda in the right wing media, political groups and militia cults, in their religious organizations, to kill those 'not of their kind' because they are 'the others', not 'real' Americans, not 'real' Norwegians, or Irish, or British, or citizens in any nation, because we believe in tolerance and respect for all, and demand that of our civil societies and governments. I am branded a 'race traitor' because even though I am 'white' I don't think I'm born of a superior 'race' destined to rule over all my brothers of sisters because of my ancestry for all time until the Second Coming. Indeed, I am branded as unfit to live and destined to be thrown into a lake of fire because I am not a Christian of any denomination or cult.
I believe in a free and peaceful democracy, a society that supports equality, and a world in which the worth of each individual is judged by the content of their character and the value of their work and their lives as human beings. Am I a saint filled with visions? Or a fool who has spent her life thinking she could escape the fate of disillusionment and ruin that opposing oppression inevitably brings?
When Medgar Evers was murdered, my mother woke me, her face covered in tears, and told me to not only pray for his soul and for the comfort of his family, but for the souls of the men who murdered him. When George Wallace was attacked and shot in Maryland, I prayed for his recovery as strongly and as fervently as I had when Robert Kennedy was falling into death's icy hands. Because I believed that violence and murder was not the way to resolve the deep divisions in our nation's society.
Yet, somehow, today, while looking at the news reports and the reactions on the far right in the USA and other countries, to the attacks in Norway, I feel despair unlike any I have known since the murders of Dr King, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, the students at Kent State and Jackson State. Those horrible, bloody years, stained by the shadows of the lost of my generation, to drugs, to violence, of those who went to Vietnam and never came back, and those who did with wounds visible and invisible only to suffer again and again once they came home. Haunted by the ghosts that rode home on the shoulders of our fathers from World War 2 and Korea, the ghosts of Mississippi and Gettysburg and Mi Lai and Wounded Knee.
Perhaps it's all just catching up with me, the decades of struggle and loss, the feeling that we'll never win against the political, religious, corporate institutions of power and control that desire nothing more than complete domination of our nations and even Gaia Herself, for their own benefit and enrichment and their willingness to murder those who oppose them.
Perhaps, after knowing all too well the history of human civilizations, "Kill them all and let God sort them out", the genocides of North American 'conquerers', the Holocaust, the Middle Passage that tore the ancestors of my friends and loved ones from Africa, the coffin ships that brought so many of my ancestors' people from Ireland and Scotland to America, Rwanda, the Balkans, and all the rest, I cannot see a way forward that does not include violence and murder of innocents.
Knowing that times of deep economic and societal stresses can lead to bloody murders of uncounted millions, I fear for us all. Seeing our only home planet be abused in ways that even with the knowledge that our wasteful and damaging industries, governments intent on increasing their war machines and using them against any 'foe' they can create, that ever-increasing populations are overwhelming the balance of life and we must find ways to mitigate and restore our environments so that we humans and all other beings of Gaia will survive and thrive be subsumed in the pursuit of power and profit for the top 1% of the world's population, I find myself filled with despair and the creeping poison of fear and anger.
This is not a diary; this is my cry from my heart; that I find myself falling into the traps so artfully laid out by the forces of darkness and greed, and yes, evil, I cannot find a way to safety, a path to resuming my work and restoring my belief that in the end, the long arc of justice will bring us, our nation, our world, to a place of peace and plenty, with liberty and justice for all. That what I have done in the past and what I will do until my last breath has no meaning, that what little energy I had to affect the ways of the world was all used for nought. That instead of going out and encouraging those I love to be active in our political and civil societies, I should tell them to leave me what ammo they can spare, to head for the hills or another planet, or another yet-to-be-born universe and I'll hold off these bastards as long as I can.
And I find in myself, even after all these years of work and faith, an anger and rage that contradicts all I believe in and all I have struggled to achieve. That when the feather of my soul is weighed in the Balance, I shall be found to be unfit to possess the spirit that I was graced with, that I have failed, and in doing so, I lost my chance to do good, to avoid evil, to make the world a better place for all to live their lives freely without fear, and to gift to those who come after me a peaceful planet full of life, and a sky full of stars and futures yet to be imagined.
All shattered, all hope lost, left only with the desire to rage and destroy those who would destroy me first if they had the chance, or would harm those I love, and would murder the young and old idealists of their countries if by those murders they knew they could conquer the world and make it over in their own image.
I ashamed of myself, of how I feel, that my most primal instincts demand a response that I know is morally wrong, that will only cause more destruction and more violence, adding to the downward spiral into the plagues of blood and madness and hatred spreading across the world.
I have lost my way, all the paths I see before me lead to the Abyss, with no hope of redemption and victory, no final days dancing in the Light and the love of others, no glimpse of the Promised Land, nothing left to hope for, to work for, to struggle for, to sing and pray for, only, a dim little light, going out, consumed by the darkness within and without.
And I weep.