Fjordman Interview, Part 2: “Reality Surpasses the Imagination”

This is the second excerpt from a January 11 interview with Fjordman. Previously: Part 1.

Watching this interview and then looking up the posts from that time really brought back the horrible events of the summer of 2011. After the grueling live-blog of July 22, I was awakened in the wee hours of July 23 by a phone call from Europe — a colleague in the Counterjihad Collective frantically informed me about what was happening to Fjordman.

In this interview Fjordman refers to some of those events. Here’s the initial live blog on the Oslo attack. Then came this report. Early the following day there was this.

I recommend clicking through to the other posts from those days in July and August. There are too many to link here.

Below is the second installment of the Document.no interview, recorded on January 7 and published on January 11. It was translated for subtitles by Fjordman himself. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

8:33   I believe that in July 2011, nobody truly expected the attack that Anders Behring Breivik launched.
8:41   That includes me.
8:46   I had lived in Oslo for eight years at that point.
8:51   I heard the explosion when the bomb went off.
8:54   I lived near Ekebergsletta and Brattlikollen.
8:58   That is far away from the city center of Oslo.
9:01   Yet I still heard the explosion, indoors and with the windows shut.
9:05   My initial reaction was that I thought lightning had struck somewhere in the vicinity.
9:11   This is psychologically interesting, since I have lived and worked
9:15   in the Middle East, Israel and Egypt.
9:18   If I had been in Israel and heard that explosion, I would have thought of a bomb.
9:23   However, in Oslo, this was not my initial reaction.
9:26   You thought perhaps this was an accident, a lighting strike or something like that.
9:29   When did you first understand that you were being implicated in all of this?
9:36   I was at home at this point, as I also told the police during questioning.
9:43   First, I believed this was a lightning strike.
9:46   Then I got a text message from a relative.
9:49   We had been planning to visit a cinema together that afternoon.
9:52   It stated that there had been an explosion in central Oslo.
9:56   I began searching for information on the Internet.
9:59   Then we started liveblogging with Gates of Vienna and other websites that I had been writing for.
10:04   In order to follow what was happening in Oslo.
10:10   We then started realizing that a bomb had probably gone off.
10:15   A lot of people, myself included, at this point believed
10:18   we were dealing with an Islamic terror attack.
10:21   This turned out to be wrong, but it wasn’t stupid.
10:25   There was a suicide bomber in Stockholm only a few months earlier.
10:29   Fortunately, he just blew himself up, nobody else.
10:33   An Islamic organization also claimed responsibility for the bomb
10:36   at Regjeringskvartalet [the Government Quarter] in Oslo. Many people have forgotten this fact,
10:39   but it is true.
10:42   Later in the afternoon, we started getting news that something was happening at Utøya.
10:49   This was a bit confusing at first.
10:52   We were not sure whether this was connected to what had just happened
10:56   at the Government Quarter in central Oslo.
10:59   Yet the information gradually became increasingly serious.
11:02   There were rumors that a person was shooting at people there.
11:06   Several reports claimed that a white, Nordic-looking man had been spotted at Utøya.
11:15   I then started realizing that this might be something other than what we initially thought it was.
11:21   I then interrupted the ongoing discussion at Gates of Vienna.
11:25   I stated that this could actually be a Timothy McVeigh-like character, not a Muslim.
11:29   Oklahoma….
11:33   Yes. I further stated that it would be a disaster if this was indeed the case.
11:36   He would damage the country for years to come. Sadly, this turned out to be true.
11:40   The information from the island of Utøya kept getting worse throughout the evening.
11:45   I don’t remember everything that happened over the next couple of days.
11:51   I was in a kind of shock.
11:54   I believe TV2 stated that 80 people had been killed at Utøya.
11:59   That number was later adjusted downwards slightly [to 69].
12:03   This was a massacre on a scale that nobody had expected in Norway, and which nobody understood.
12:09   It exceeded the scale for what was considered possible in Norway.
12:14   Yes. PST [The Norwegian Police Security Service] received some criticism afterwards.
12:18   Perhaps some of this criticism was justified.
12:21   However, I believe that literally nobody expected Breivik in July 2011.
12:27   Nobody. Not him.
12:32   I remember, I was in Denmark at the time……
12:36   Deputy police chief Roger Andresen said that the suspect [Breivik]
12:41   was a young white man who was a “Christian fundamentalist.”
12:47   I remember that, too.
12:50   When was this during the evening?
12:54   I cannot recall exactly when…
12:57   Well, it was at some point during the evening [of July 22].
13:00   This was the first specific identification [of the perpetrator].
13:07   How did you… we perceived that the arrow was now suddenly pointing at us.
13:15   How did you experience this?
13:18   I was essentially in a state of shock during the next couple of days.
13:23   I therefore do not recall every detail.
13:27   However, in the early hours of July 23, we were made aware that
13:31   some long text or so-called manifesto was circulating online.
13:35   I had not read it myself at this point.
13:38   I did not read the manifesto until 2012, prior to the trial.
13:43   However, it gradually became clear that among those who were quoted in it
13:48   were me, Robert Spencer, Diana West, Andrew Bostom and others.
13:52   These were people who I knew personally, and had met.
13:58   Now, the dynamics suddenly changed radically.
14:01   That was a truly massive shock.
14:04   When did you learn of this?
14:07   As I said, I cannot reconstruct all of these details.
14:10   But it would probably have during the night between July 22 and July 23.
14:14   The manifesto surfaced quite early.
14:18   And then these authors were mentioned.
14:22   What I remember vividly is….
14:25   In the afternoon of July 22, I very briefly considered traveling down to the city center of Oslo.
14:30   However, this would have served no purpose. There was chaos, and public transport was disrupted.
14:37   I did travel to central Oslo the day after, on July 23.
14:41   It was surreal. There were military personnel
14:45   in front of the Royal Palace and the Storting [Parliament].
14:49   At that time, rumors were circulating that Breivik was identical to me [Fjordman].
14:56   That rumor circulated publicly for several days.
14:59   I still have not understood who was spreading that rumor, and why.
15:07   It was obviously erroneous. I was commenting publicly
15:11   during the attacks, and after Breivik had been arrested.
15:15   And then the hunt for Fjordman began.
15:18   Yes, then that hunt began.
15:22   For me, this situation was completely surreal.
15:29   I received questions later about my thoughts that summer.
15:36   The comparison that I usually draw is the following: There are certain things
15:40   that you hope you will never experience, but which you can nevertheless prepare for.
15:44   There could be a fire. You therefore get smoke detectors, fire alarm, insurance and training.
15:52   You cannot prepare for being smeared with false accusations of heading a terrorist organization
15:58   that does not exist, because of the actions of a person you have never met.
16:04   That is too much.
16:09   If my life in the summer of 2011 had been the script for a movie,
16:14   it would have been rejected as being too improbable. It could not happen.
16:20   This is an example of the saying that “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
16:24   Reality surpasses the imagination. That was the situation I was in.
 

For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.

4 thoughts on “Fjordman Interview, Part 2: “Reality Surpasses the Imagination”

  1. And how many people directly in Norway supported Fjordman? Did Norwegian publicists come out in defense of him?

    If a person of this magnitude appeared in Russia, I think that the authorities would have poisoned him with “Novichok”, but he would at the same time become an icon and a ruler of thoughts among a part of the population.

  2. I suppose they needed someone to blame besides themselves for the carnage, but the way they went about it defies realism and bespeaks a pre-determined agenda, much like what is occurring today.

  3. The word scapegoat comes to mind, the powers that must not be named saw an opportunity to smear everything right of Lenin and they took it, no matter the damage they cause.

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