Audio Recording: One of Us

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb
outside the Norwegian prime minister’s office in central Oslo, killing
eight people. He then drove to the island of Utøya, where he killed
sixty-nine more, most of them teenagers. In her new book One of Us,
journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day, Norway’s
own September 11. She delves deep into Breivik’s childhood, showing how
a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and then
an Internet gamer and self-styled warrior who believed he could save
Europe from the threats of Islam and multiculturalism.

How did
Breivik, raised by a single mother in one of the world’s most famously
tolerant and egalitarian societies, become convinced that feminism and
immigration has destroyed European culture? How did a gifted child from
an affluent Oslo neighborhood become Europe’s most reviled terrorist?

We spoke with Åsne Seierstad and The New York
Times‘s Lydia Polgreen about the psychological roots of right-wing
extremism and about Norway’s struggles to come to terms with homegrown
terror.