Michael Schlieben, of the esteemed German commentary-newspaper Die Zeit, can’t take it anymore: Stop the Breivik Soap Opera!

Mass-murderer as Superstar: Many in the German media are exploiting the private life of the Oslo-gunman – and thereby making him an icon.

To tell the truth, I’m also getting rather tired of hearing about this guy as well – speaking of course in the context of my own media circles, which include the German only to the extent of my daily trawl through all European media.

I actually wasn’t aware of the lengths to which some outlets there have gone in pursuit of this story. Yes, there’s been some questionable stuff from the Bild Zeitung – oooh, if you click there today you get to see the actual explosion-site of his Oslo car-bomb, with hole-in-concrete and debris all around! And Schlieben says that from the Bild readers have also been able to learn of Breivik’s acne when younger, his continual troubles finding a girlfriend, and even the herpes of his step-father(!). A surfeit of information there, we can all agree – but then that’s the Bild, which for decades has carried on News of the World-type reporting for the German reading public.

No, more disturbing is other papers getting into the act which one would think would know better. This blog and Twitter-feed often invokes Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel, but that publication has seen fit to reproduce all the photos off of Breivik’s Facebook profile. And we all know Der Spiegel, which has displayed on its pages photographs of the mass-murderer in an array of uniforms. Other publications (unnamed) have gone into his tax returns, or plumbed his musical tastes, perhaps from his on-line playlists.

Now, it’s not like this guy should be ignored, and over in the US an interesting debate has touched off about the alleged affinity between his “manifesto” and the extreme views of some evangelicals. Still, the sort of mass-voyeurism that Schlieben describes is all that a mass-killer with an ideological agenda could ever want. Yes: “the terrorist has won.”

OK, the report I caught about this is from the Dutch press (specifically, the Algemeen Dagblad – I don’t routinely cover the Swedish press due to language incapability). But it’s an instructive tale nonetheless: after some guy had announced (anonymously) on an Internet forum site his intention to head to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (a state technical university located in Stockholm) and kill as many people as he could find there, police managed to track him down and arrest him before any harm could be done.

How instructive? First of all, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in a place like Sweden, due to the much stricter gun-control there, but mainly because of what people assume is a more non-violent culture that doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing. (Although one shouldn’t forget how Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down on a Stockholm street back in 1986, in a murder that is unsolved to this day.) Secondly, the authorities did manage to track the proto-perpetrator down – even behind the veil of supposed Internet anonymity – and detain him before he could actually perpetrate. What does this say about how genuine this supposed “anonymity” on the Internet actually is – and how genuine should it ultimately be allowed to be, when lives are on the line? Thirdly: Were lives truly on the line? How can anyone tell whether the suspect really meant to do what he declared he intended to do? That must still be unsure – you commit a crime only by doing it, not by only thinking it or even announcing it. (The latter probably constitutes a crime in itself, but of a different sort and one calling for nowhere near as much punishment as actually killing.)

Anyway: in the final analysis we seem to have here in Sweden one pole of a spectrum whose other pole is Seung-Hui Cho and 32 people shot at Virginia Tech. Where do you, and the society where you live, want to be on that spectrum? “At the pole of the Swedish incident that was prevented in time” may not truly be the answer, given the injury to privacy rights that was an important part of that episode.

Serendipity is once again at work here on this site, meaning that you get yet another piece from Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad. It was the title that caught my eye this time: President of Guinea accuses opposition of bloodbath. That would be the incident from last Monday when soldiers from the presidential guard opened fire on people at the national stadium in the country’s capital, Conakry, who were demonstrating against President Moussa “Dadis” Camara’s intention to take part in the upcoming presidential election. Camara became president in the first place by simply seizing power from his base in the army last December after the previous dictator, Lansana Conté, had died.

An otherwise-unnamed human rights organization based in Guinea estimates that about 160 people were killed at the stadium and more than 1,200 wounded, and other nasty things occurred as well, particularly against women, that I will forbear from detailing here. The government, on the other hand, maintains that only 57 people died, most of them trampled in the stampeding crowd. From President Camara: “It was the opposition politicians who led other people’s children to their deaths, while their own children sat comfortably elsewhere.” Anything untoward that might have happened, he declared, was due to “uncontrollable elements in the army,” which he can’t be expected to take responsibility for. You’ll be glad to know, though, that his government does intend to financially compensate the victims’ families.