(Not a good diary, just a diary to express some feelings and random thoughts, and I may write more such diaries during the trial).
As a Norwegian the massacres July 22nd. 2011 were so shocking and surreal, in addition to totally heartbreaking of course.
Today the trial started, and many feelings came back. The television was broadcasting all day, as well as several media were livestreaming.
The prosecutors went through the case in a formal, neutral, judicial way. I got a more specific picture of how the murders at Utøya happened. Who is killed where and when. When the names are read, I recognize most of them from different news articles and memorials. I know how they looked, a little about how they life was, who their family is.
Two telephone calls Breivik made to the police during the horror are played. He is quite calm and formal. And after those calls, he goes back to killing more youths.
I am not used to televised trials on Norwegian tv, so I was surprised how much that was broadcasted today.
When I first got to the live stream, almost immidiately I heard Breivik speak for the first time. He style was kind of polite and upperclass, a little nervous. He was given the word to comment on the hability of the judges. In a brief comment he then said he didn´t accept the court as legitimate as it was set up by political parties who support multiculturalism. He added that the judge was a friend of Hanne Harlem, sister of Norway´s former Labour prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland (and who was herself involved in politics for a while). But no formal complaint was raised.
Later Breivik got the word to answer a few personal data. He objected to the judge´s presumption that he was unemployed, stating that he was "a writer, working from prison".
To the question on whether he pledged guilty, he said he admitted having committed the massacres, but didn´t consider himself legally guilty, as he claims self-defense.
The last statement is of course just gimmick like the two others as well, and the lawyer will not seriously base the defense on that. They will however fight to have Breivik considered legally sane, and hence sentenced to prison and not psychiatric ward. Which there is a great chance will also be the outcome, due to a new psychiatric report, recently presented (I will write more about this in another diary).
These are probably the three only statements we will see and hear from Breivik in this trial, as broadcasting is not allowed when he will explain himself about the criminal acts. He will start being questioned tomorrow, and his explanation is expected to take 5 days.
The prosecutors chose to show one propaganda video made by Breivik and uploaded to youtube shortly before the attack. Breivik who had been pretty unemotial when the criminal acts he committed was told to the court, started crying when this video was shown.
He starts crying in the third section of the video, featuring different people he considers European heroes, from Charles Martell and forward. The fourth and last section deals with the future when all Muslims and "Cultural Marxists" are either deported or eliminated, and people like Breivik are going to be in charge of a new conservative (or rather fascistic) and patriarchic Europe.
The self-made propaganda video that made Breivik cry: Mainly tidbits collected from the internet, some of it pretty common far right stuff.
UPDATE: The video has been removed from youtube. Here is a link to it. The voice you hear is a Norwegian professor commenting on it, not part of the original.
Breivik is said not to have been this kind of emotial during his time is prison and during interrogation. While he probably cried out of a bizarre proudness or something, I also think it might indicate that the trial is stressing him, and I wonder if he may get a total meltdown at some time, either during the trial (10 weeks) or some time after. Maybe some place deep inside he knows that he has lost everything and is and will forever be the most lonely man in the world.