Hello,
My name is Anders Behring and I have decided to spend the next two years writing a book about share strategies, primarily technical analysis and psychology as related to share trading. With this in view I am trying to find a quiet, isolated location in Torsby district, a disused or abandoned small farm or similar premises.
He stressed that it had to have a barn/garage/shed and an isolated/remote location.
The following day an employee of Torsby district council wrote back: Hello Anders, it’s great to hear that you want to come to our district. One of the estate agents wrote Good luck with the book!
But nobody could find a property to suit the Norwegian.
He put the farm project on the back burner for a while; there was so much else to do. Above all, he had to finish his book. The book was the most important thing of all.
It was crucial for him to take control of the narrative of his own life. Where should he start?
He devoted a few lines to his childhood. ‘I had a privileged upbringing with responsible and intelligent people around me,’ he wrote in the final section of his manifesto under the chapter heading ‘Interview with a Justiciar Knight Commander of the PCCTS, Knights Templar’. Some might consider an interview of this kind irrelevant, he wrote, but personally he would have appreciated the opportunity to read such an interview with a resistance fighter.
So there he sat in the fart room between the Coderock artwork and the IKEA shelves, posing questions and thinking up answers. He had no negative childhood experiences at all, he wrote. ‘I guess I came from a typical Norwegian middle-class family.’
But the idealised picture soon shattered, the fragments strewn all over the short account of the people he grew up with.
First his father.
‘I have not spoken to my father since he isolated himself when I was fifteen (he wasn’t very happy about my graffiti phase from thirteen to sixteen). He has four children but has cut contact with all of them so it is pretty clear whose fault that was. I don’t carry grudge but a couple of my half-siblings do. The thing is that he is just not very good with people.’
He went on to libel his stepfather: ‘Tore, my stepfather, worked as a major in the Norwegian military and is now retired. I still have contact with him although now he spends most of his time (retirement) with prostitutes in Thailand. He is a very primitive sexual beast, but at the same time a very likeable and good guy.’
Then his sister. ‘My half-sister, Elisabeth, was infected by chlamydia after having more than forty sexual partners […] Her chlamydia went untreated and she became one of several million US/European women who were suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease caused by untreated gonorrhea and chlamydia which leads to infertility. As she lives in the US, costs relating to this were not covered by the state.’
Finally his mother, and his stepfather again: ‘My mother was infected with genital herpes by her boyfriend (my stepfather), Tore, when she was forty-eight. Tore, who was a captain in the Norwegian Army, had more than five hundred sexual partners and my mother knew this but suffered from lack of good judgement and morals due to several factors.’ He thrust the knife in deep and twisted it. ‘The herpes infection went to her brain and caused meningitis’, so she had to have an operation to insert a drain in her head because the infection kept recurring. He wrote that his mother had to take early retirement as a result, and her quality of life had been drastically reduced. ‘She now has the intellectual capacity of a ten-year-old.’
His mother had not only brought shame on herself, she had brought shame on him and on the whole family – ‘a family that was broken in the first place due to the secondary effects of the feministic, sexual revolution’.
Morality’s executioner was ready at the guillotine. The members of his family had each been assigned their share of blame for society’s decline and now it was his childhood friend Ahmed’s turn.
His classmate, the Pakistani doctor’s son from the wealthy neighbourhood of Oslo West, never became truly integrated, ergo integration was not possible. Ahmed had Urdu classes as a child and started attending the mosque when he was twelve. Berwick described how one of the boys he played football with, who later became a business partner, was robbed and beaten up by Ahmed and his Pakistani gang. The Knight Templar invented a story that Ahmed had been involved in a gang rape in Frogner Park. ‘These people sometimes raped the so-called “potato whores”,’ he wrote. Such things had opened his eyes to the Muslim threat.
He accused his childhood friend of having cheered out loud every time a Scud missile was fired at the Americans during the first Gulf War in 1991. The boys were not quite twelve at the time. ‘His total lack of respect for my culture actually sparked my interest and passion for it. Thanks to him I gradually developed a passion for my own cultural identity.’
He boasted of his close ties with the two most powerful gangs in Oslo at that time, called the A gang and the B gang. Everything was framed in Islamic terms. He described the gangs’ raids on Oslo West to impose their authority on the kuffar – the non-believers – and collect jizia – tax – in the form of phones, cash or sunglasses. The Muslim gangs taunted, robbed and beat up the ethnic Norwegian youngsters who lacked the right connections. Anders had ensured his own freedom of movement by entering into an alliance.
‘Alliances with the right people guaranteed safe passage everywhere without the risk of being subdued and robbed, beaten or harassed.’
Why did you have so many non-ethnic Norwegian friends?
‘If I ever got in trouble I expected my friends to back me 100 per cent without submitting or running away, as I would for them. Very few ethnic Norwegians shared these principles. They would either “sissy out”, allow themselves to be subdued or run away when facing a threat.’
Those who stood up for each other were either Muslims or skinheads. Back then, he preferred the Muslims to the militant whites.
Then they fell out. Anders wrote that he had been knocked down without warning by a huge Pakistani outside Majorstua station and believed Ahmed had ordered the attack. ‘This concluded, for my part, my friendship with him and I re-connected with my old friends. However, this restricted my territorial freedoms, as I was no longer under the protection of the Oslo Ummah. From now on we would have to arm ourselves whenever we went to parties in case Muslim gangs showed up, and we usually chose to stay in our neighbourhoods in Oslo West.’
Fifteen years after being frozen out of the graffiti community he tidied up his younger years, adding a new gloss. He could finally shine the way he wanted, write over the bits he did not like. ‘At fifteen, I was the most active tagger (graffiti artist) in Oslo as several people in the old school hip-hop community can attest to.’ He called himself one of the most influential hip-hoppers of Oslo West, a focal point, ‘the glue that held the gang together’. He referred to his friends by their tag names and their real ones interchangeably. ‘Morg, Wick and Spok were everywhere. The fact that hundreds of kids our own age all over Oslo West and even Oslo East looked up to us was one of the driving forces I guess.’ He described the way they would go out on graffiti raids at night, their rucksacks full of spray cans, and bomb the city with tags, pieces and crew names. If you wanted girls or respect it was all about being a hip-hopper, he recalled in this reconstruction of his life.