Making Sense of the Senseless in Norway

Norway's prime minister Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday said that the response to attacks that have rocked his country will be ``more democracy, more openness.'' Norwegians, he said, will defend themselves by showing they are not afraid of violence.

“There is shock and grief, many people cannot comprehend what happened,” says Advisor in the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Politics, Helge Luras, “but my sense is not that people are scared” in the wake of the attacks.

On Tuesday, the lawyer of the sefl-confessed attacker responsible for twin terrorist acts that claimed the lives of at least 76 people said that his client, Anders Behring Breivik, was “probably insane.”

But others disagree. Luras says that Breivik “sees himself as a savior, or at least as the one person who has seen the truth and that exceptional actions are necessary in order to awaken the rest of the world to what he sees.”

“Insanity,” Luras told Vatican Radio, “is not the way we will fully understand” what happened last Friday in the City of Oslo and the island retreat of Utoya.

Listen to Helge Luras’ full interview with Charlotta Smeds: