Of killers & crusaders

“Time is the trap,” said the sage
“All men are born in the wrong age.”
From Bistara Ballads by Bachchoo

The trial of Anders Breivik in Oslo has resulted in his being sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of 77 people in July last year. The sentence, the maximum available to the Norwegian court, will last 21 years which he will serve in a three-room cell equipped with a TV, a computer and a small gym. He can, after 21 years at the age of 53, be judged to pose no threat to society and released. On the other hand, Norwegian law allows the extension of his sentence by five year terms so he may never get out.
In sentencing him the judges had to clear the hurdle of his sanity. It may be commonsensical to conclude that anyone who kills 77 strangers is by definition crazy. His lawyers insisted he was sane in order to make the ideological point which had motivated his murders. From his pronouncements and behaviour in court and from the testimony of psychiatrists who examined him, he was clearly not someone whose mental processes had overwhelmed him in any form of temporary insanity. His premeditated ideas dictated his actions.
It doesn’t need saying that lawyers and people who work professionally or voluntarily in prisons, and, of course, ordinary citizens outside these professions know or have at some point in their lives been acquainted with mass murderers. I know only one person who can be labelled a serial killer rather than a mass murderer.
Mass murderers and serial killers are significantly different. Individuals like Breivik profess and seem to be sane and ideologically driven despite the possibility that a psychiatrist delving through some Freudian conceit into the depths of their minds may discover a subconscious distortion of the personality in which such a murderous ideology takes root.
So, for instance, the 19 men who hijacked three planes on the September 11, 2001 crashing two into the Twin Towers of New York and failing to hit the Pentagon in Washington with the third, were ideologically motivated. They killed thousands of people they didn’t know, having prepared and trained in surreptitious ways for months or even years to do it. They declared their ideological motives to be those of Al Qaeda. They were committed “jihadis” interpreting the need for such a jihad in the ways of their sect.
The same goes for the Pakistani terrorists who launched their attacks on Mumbai, machine-gunning travellers on a railway platform and attacking hotels and a Jewish centre, even though from the testimony of the one captured terrorist these were more puppets than ideological perpetrators.
One may add to the list of ideological mass murder the attacks on Madrid, Bali, London Underground and others too numerous to mention or more complex and confusing such as the attacks on Shia mosques by people calling themselves Sunni jihadis.
So also Breivik called himself a Knight Templar and declared that he was fighting the Islamisation of Europe and a Marxist conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation by launching his “crusade” — the obverse side of the Islamist mass-murdering coin.
However misguided, primitive, steeped in medieval superstition or plain dumb their ideological persuasion may be, one may clearly trace their motivations for mass murder to these. What is not clear is their strategic or tactical aim. Were the jihadis in all those quoted instances attempting to start a war of the worlds and force the majority of Muslims in the world into an Al Qaeda way of thinking? Was Anders Breivik, in killing teenagers of the Norwegian Labour Party, children with a social democratic liberal ideology, attempting to get Europe to hate Muslims? If he had perpetrated terror against innocent Muslims in Oslo he may have succeeded in stimulating a backlash with other Muslims taking their revenge on random “native” targets and people. He may have thus stimulated a violent division in Norway if not in Europe. By his actions he seems to have isolated both the hateful ideology he espoused and the Progressive (ultra-right) Party, of which he was once a member.
There is a clear line between these crimes of ideological hatred and the methodical murders of the serial killer. Peter Sutcliffe, known in Britain as the Yorkshire Ripper, chose to kill 13 prostitutes on the streets of northern British cities in the early 1980s. He was caught and convicted and was clearly unbalanced. He may have had some animus against prostitutes but no coherent ideology which would explain his murdering them.
If Sutcliffe had been a medieval monk who believed that Satan had infiltrated his spirit into some human beings and that this infestation was manifest in sexual laxity, he may have had an Old Testament ideological stance that dictated his actions. Today, for those of us who don’t believe in good or evil external to the motives and actions of humans, he has to be labelled a maniac.
I have neglected to study the precise ideological stance of Al Qaeda and other suicide bombers but feel strongly that they are impelled by the same sort of nonsense that possessed the Yorkshire Ripper.
Not so the alleged perpetrator of serial murder with whom I claimed acquaintance a few paragraphs above. He is in all his interactions seemingly “normal” and not in the grip of any ideological or psychotic fervour. He professes to have a sense of right and wrong, but if one accepts that he has done what he is reputed to have done, then that sense gets suspended when he has in the past killed for gain. Not much gain either — sometimes for a few hundred dollars, sometimes just for the possession of a passport which could be used in further deceptive transactions.
So unlike Breivik and jihadis and unlike the maniacal Ripper, his acts of murder were underwritten not by ideology or immorality but by amorality — an existential state which abolishes or suspends a belief in right and wrong.