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It's all ego and evil

July 25, 2011

Well, he is surely some piece of business. This morning, among other outrages, the Norway slaughterman, pleaded not guilty. Shoot close to 70 people, blow up as many as you can - and plead not guilty merely days later. A piece of business indeed.

And as with all of these types he dresses up a lot – both literally – here he is in the uniform he wanted to wear in his court appearance -- and pseudo-intellectually: his mental raincoat is the so-called manifesto. He needs the “big” statement. He'd be nothing more than the naked little sadistic creep he is without its self-protecting projections and fantasies.

Naturally, the Norway coward states there is some grand cause behind the slaughter of innocents. That's his pathetic intellectual dress-up: he and his Knights-Templar - Knights Templar - you'd laugh at how stupid this is, were it not so grievous) are going to save Europe. How saving Europe involves rigging a massive car bomb, shooting harmless unarmed teenagers, with hollow-point bullets, while being dressed up as a policeman, is something the normal mind will never trace.

How do you “save” Norway by killing its children? By -- in effect -- shooting its future?

But don't be distracted by the mask; look at what he did: it's all-- and nothing but -- ego and evil. Those 1500 pages of his ravings? The ridiculous manifesto ... just a cloud of steam from a sewer of a mind.

Our minds, however, should turn from the perpetrator to the devastation of families whose sons and daughters are no more, to that infinite distress of parents who have lived beyond their children --- they killed by a brutal stranger.

We really should strive to let the event have its own moment...let grief and prayer, and contemplation over those ripped from life and their loved ones, own their respectful time. Norway doesn't trouble the world, but now a troubled Norway deserves the world's finest wishes and deepest condolences.

Nonetheless, as is unavoidable, the times and our natures being what they are, he - this wretch who assumed in his demented arrogance the right to kill and wound – he will keep the world's eyes and ears for more than a while. He's firmly in the pantheon of moral monsters and they fascinate as much as they repel.

Meantime, we should surely not tolerate manipulating this horror, turning the event into football for playing partisan left-right games, or dropping it in the culture wars of the minute. These horrible events are too serious and tragic for these games.

Terrorists always say they have to kill to gain the world's attention. Tell that to Nelson Mandela; tell it to Mother Theresa; tell it to every decent person who's ever done a good thing in a dark world.

They kill because it's the slaughter that draws them, that fulfills them. As said, it's all ego and evil... and the dress-up of reasons and poses is just one more way of drawing out their bitter moment of infamy – their own perverse attempt to escape from how small and twisted they really are.

For The National, I’m Rex Murphy.