I'm having to avoid the news today ... I need a processing day or two. I suppose that Breivik's confession is something ... but ...

I remember back when the Port Arthur Massacre occurred, one of my housemates ran upstairs and said, 'Put the radio on, there's something horrible happening in Tasmania.' We sat around the radio, and later the television, for hours, feeling utterly powerless. It was the same feeling that had come a few months before, when Rabin was assassinated, and would come again years later as planes fell on New York and Washington, when clubs were blown apart in Bali, as trains were ripped open in Madrid, and then again in London.

There is something about the willful evil of human beings that is more horrific than the devastation of nature. Which is ridiculous on one level, since even comparatively minor natural disasters often have death tolls higher than those of acts of mass murder. The Asian Tsunami dwarfs all acts of terrorism and mass murder in the last 50 years. And yet ... And yet the idea that people can choose to act so vilely is not one that most of us can understand.

And tragically, it does seem to be terrorism, even though it was one man, not an organisation. The targeting of Labour party workers and youths, coupled with Breivik's anti-Left and xenophobic rantings makes his political intent clear.

I know it's not at all PC to say this, and I await the defriendings, but what makes the attacks in Norway so utterly awful is that they are not even the sort of terrorism that one can get one's head around a bit. Because some terrorism, I sort of get.

I look at Umkhonto We Sizwe, and I think, yeah, necklacing was well out of order, but given you had no vote, that the media was cut off from reporting conditions for your people and that activists managed to beat themselves up in their cells before falling out of windows – I can sort of understand why you had a bombing campaign.

To me, this sort of terrorism makes some sort of sense. It's territorial terrorism, if you like, and it led to the formation of modern South Africa, of the state of Israel, of the Irish Republic, India and Pakistan, too, I suppose. I cannot support such actions, but to this day, when I see groups that lack political power, media coverage or wealth turning to violence, I can at least see some reasoning behind their actions.

The other sort of terrorism, tanty terrorism as I accidentally called it in a term that has stuck in this house, I will never get. It's the sort of fundamentalist bullshit that refuses to acknowledge anyone's rights or views but one's own. From the lone bastards who murder doctors at abortion clinics, to Marc Lépine, who murdered women to 'fight feminism' Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, to Osama bin Laden's decades of utter fuckery against the US and the West in general, and now Breivik, too – it's a list of people who sincerely believed that people who disagreed with them had no rights whatsoever, not even to live.

And of all centuries, in all of history, you would think that ours would see with most clarity just how hollow and hideous that sort of thinking is.