So some are shocked, shocked by Anders Behring Breivik's words in a Norwegian courtroom recently (http://news.yahoo.com/court-shock-norway-gunman-describes-massacre-124453974--finance.html). Personally I find his tales not unlike those stories told by those many soldiers who have, at various times in their lives, been at war with some "enemy". And remember the Breivik thinks that he is at war.
Anyway, I suspect, though I don't have direct empirical evidence for this, that there is an inconsistency in how many on posting boards including Yahoo are reacting to the tales Breivik is telling about his "war" and their reactions to how some American soldiers are behaving in their war: American soldiers urinating on dead Afghan "enemies", American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead "insurgents". And that difference, one obviously impacted be socially and culturally manufactured nationalist ideologies, is, to me, endlessly fascinating. Nationalism is clearly a meaning system, a meaning system that creates realities, realities which, in some cases, allows individuals and groups to demonise the behaviours of some and either ignore, praise, or explain away similar if not the same behaviour of their own.
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