Insanity

The recent events in Norway triggered plethora of discussions, to put it mildly. One has to reflect on the realities of organised and dis-organised evil, which always surprises with newer and newer manifestations.

Some of the polemic is deeply troubling, though. As a recent BBC discussion highlighted, we very clearly label certain manifestations of certain evils as terrorism and planned acts of individual or well-organised groups of terrorists. However, when something like this double Norwegian attack happens, we speak of... insanity. Madness and acts of madness.

If we look at cold, calculated, politically motivated evil, then history provides innumerable examples. And some of us have lived through some of those examples. If we stick to the last decades of the 20th century, we had plenty of small- and large-scale examples of such evil.

Those were not acts of insanity. And the acts of this terrorist, let's call a spade a spade, in Norway are also not acts of insanity.

He is profoundly motivated politically. He acted with spine-chilling lucidity and felt that executing perfectly innocent people in great numbers was perfectly acceptable as a means of political action.

To call him insane or mad, with the same promptness and ease with which we called all other bombers and assassins terrorists and extremists, is an easy, very easy path. Easy for us, easy for posterity.

We can not write off this pure evil as a sudden act of a madman. Asking the questions on what is the underlying though process that makes a person think: such acts are acceptable for achieving his goal, is a much more difficult process.

Like many terrorists, dictators, abusers of power, radicalised extremists, he carefully and lucidly planned all his acts over a long period of time. Madness was not the key force at work here.

Just because we can't pin the articles easily to an existing board of familiar terrorist patterns, it doesn't mean that it's an outlier for the bin marked 'acts of inexplicable madness'.

And then we have a bigger problem than classification. We need to look how in our 'free' world, political views can end up so radicalised, that regardless of age, gender, education, social background and geography, people can become monsters. Monsters who, as in this case, too, label their own acts 'necessary'.

So... please, let's not view him as mad. 'Mad' is a fantastically easy way out, that allows us to close the lid on that bin crowded with so many despots, extremists and political figures.