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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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The prime minister of Norway said today that an independent commission will investigate the attacks last Friday that killed at least 76 people. Jens Stoltenberg also said his country's open and tolerant society will not be intimidated by such violence. But there is concern that authorities failed to recognize the threat from far-right extremists.
NPR: The country's top crime writers.
SYLVIA POGGIOLI: Five days after the bomb blasts at the government district and killing spree at a youth camp, Norway is still gripped in a mood of collective sorrow. Addressing the media today, Prime Minister Stoltenberg vowed that his country will fight back with more democracy and will not bow to panic and fear. But he acknowledged that following the attacks, a different Norway will emerge.
JENS STOLTENBERG: But I hope and I also believe that the Norway we'll see after will be a more open, more tolerant society what we had before.
POGGIOLI: Politicians have been taken by surprise, not so crime writer Anne Holt, who has been tracking right-wing extremism on the Web for years. Her last book, "Fear Not," is about the increasingly strident public debate and rising hate crime.
ANN HOLT: The relation between spoken violence on one hand and actual violence on the other. After the last days' events in Norway the question is more relevant than ever.
POGGIOLI: Holt says politicians would do well to read crime fiction.
HOLT: I would really claim that it's the best genre to reflect society. Crime fiction is a mirror.
POGGIOLI: A mirror that reflects what a society is afraid of.
HOLT: And what people are afraid of says a lot about the society.
POGGIOLI: In low-crime-rate Norway, Holt says, people are most afraid of deranged murderers and hate crime. Anders Breivik fits that crime fiction profile to a T. He represents a new kind of radical right, well-educated, fluent in foreign languages and, thanks to the Web, he doesn't have to reveal himself and risk meeting potential co-conspirators in public.
HOLT: That this guy was absolutely impossible to get into the radar, because of the fact that he has been a law-obeying citizen for all his life. He is 32-yrs old and he has some traffic tickets.
POGGIOLI: Holt is convinced a society cannot protect itself from a Breivik through surveillance or increased security.
HOLT: The only way to prevent this from happening in the future is to turn the mirror, look at ourselves and see what the hell happened. This boy is born in the best and richest country in the world, he has had every single chance of being a happy, perfectly adjusted human being, but something went terribly wrong and we have to ask ourselves why.
POGGIOLI: Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Oslo.
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