Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Month: January 2023

The cost of war

29.01.2023 /

One of the first victim’s of war is, as we know, “truth”: Freedom of the press and freedom of information get throttled. This applies to Russia, and it applies in equal measure, if more subtly, to the West.

One of the latest sequels in the “Twitter Files” is about Hamilton 68, which:

was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.” It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

The tool, launched in 2017, “identified” some 644 Twitter accounts.

There are two components to the dashboard featured here. The first section, “Overt Promotion of Content”, highlights trending content from Twitter accounts for media outlets known to be controlled by the Russian government. The second section, “Content Tweeted by Bots and Trolls”, highlights themes being pushed by Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns.

Matt Taibi addendum

The existence of the tool was revealed by Twitter to a few independent reporters, one of whom was Matt Taibi. Twitter had uncovered that the accounts were held by real, mostly US Americans who held views that the intelligence community disliked, including those of the chief editor of Consortium News, a site I hold in high regard.

The fact that Hamilton 68 has been exposed, does not mean that suppression of information has ceased. You will find few expressions of dissent against NATO’s engagement in Ukraine. Yet, that very engagement is costing not only freezing Europeans and US tax payers – but the entire world – vastly more than most of us realise.

The world, yes, it’s still there, but reading the news in Europe or the USA, you wouldn’t think so.

The arrogance of US/NATO/EU politicians is bamboozling. What planet do they think they inhabit? If I haven’t miscalculated, the population of
USA + Europe (including Russia’s 146 million) + Oceania = 14.3 % of all humans.

Sarang Shidore from the Quincy Institute For Responsible Statecraft writes:

The ongoing Ukraine war has exposed the waning influence of the United States in the vast arc of the world stretching from Latin America to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands known as the Global South.

Most [states of the Global South] are unconvinced or alienated by Washington’s rhetoric of “democracy v. autocracy” and the “rules–based order.” They feel particularly threatened by U.S. policies of secondary sanctions designed to limit or end their ties with U.S. rivals. But the current U.S. strategy is inadvertently pushing the Global South toward Beijing and Moscow. This is an unforced error Washington can ill afford.

But unchecked by popular dissent – since dissent about US and NATO intervention in Ukraine is suppressed – the US/EU merely proceed in suicidal fashion to pour gasoline on the Ukraine conflagration. One “red line” after another has been crossed and before long we may see the gift of F-16s to Ukraine.

There have been many Hollywood films about war heroes… alas, and there are many primitive human beings. There are still men who batter women, and there are still men, and women too, who find war sexy.

Meanwhile there is the matter of social cohesion, the unravelling of it, that is. Have you noticed? There are strikes in France, and massive protests – no wonder! In the UK there are strikes, and in Spain protesters in Madrid recently numbered somewhere between 31.000 and 300.00 (depending on who was counting).

US/EU media hardly refer to this growing social unrest otherwise than playfully: “Man ‘loses testicle’ after being clubbed by police at France pension protests“, “When are nurses next on strike? Full list of strike dates in 2023 as ambulance workers walk out today” and “Spain’s far-right Falange group faces hefty fine for public homage to fascists“).

So who is protesting, and for what? There is no doubt that resentment against “austerity” policies (now called “fiscal restraint”), and anger about the subsequent reduction of living standard, for which none of us feel we are to blame, will benefit political parties of various colours, not least those of the far right.

Traditional leftist parties feel betrayed and confused because much of the anger is often directed at them.

Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about the prominent leftwing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who has become so very popular on the Right. Greenwald explains that the disenchantment with leftwing parties is

a problem she blames in part on the left’s abandonment of class politics in favor of elite cultural agendas that are either irrelevant or hostile to the lives and value systems of ordinary Germans, especially those who are religious.

You will find his extremely interesting interview with Sara Wagenknecht here. (It starts after 12:22 minutes)

In this context, I would also urge you to take a look at Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the protests in France (in English).

You may be able to suppress information, but you cannot suppress – at least not for long – what people feel, if they feel cold and wet and hungry. The unravelling of social cohesion tends eventually to lead to mayhem – or to put it bluntly – bloodbaths.

Finally, on the topic of what this war is costing us all – let me refer to the greatest issue of all, that of accelerating ecological breakdown.

I ask you: Is not the so-called GREEN German Minister of Foreign Affairs one of the most aggressively Neocon politicians in Europe? Under her reign, a village has been destroyed to allow coal mining, universally considered detrimental to environmental requirements. She obviously has personal reasons for hating Russia – we all have personal issues – but she is not representing GREEN interests.

Be that as it may, I fear that Europe under NATO leadership will self-destruct, taking Africa with it down the drain.

Thomas Piketty, on the other hand, maintains that he is an optimist. In his books he has demonstrated that Europe has managed to clean up its acts in the past, and he suggests that it can do so again. See his article: Redistributing wealth to save the planet

Konsekvenser av krigen

25.01.2023 /

Ja, for vi er i krig, viser det seg. “Vi”, nemlig! Riktignok sender vi ikke soldater, men vi er delaktige, i og med at vi sender – vi gir – våpen. Å gi våpen er noe ganske annet enn å selge våpen, og det er i alle fall ikke det samme som å “hjelpe” våre stakkars venner i Ukraina.

For å hjelpe venner sender man klær, mat, medisiner, osv. Nei vi sender våpen som skal brukes til å drepe, fortrinnsvis de som åpenbart ikke er våre venner, til tross for at de kommer fra et naboland som helt frivillig trakk seg ut av Finnmark i sin tid.

Det gjør vi fordi:

  • det er galt å invadere land (noe USA gjør rett som det er)
  • vi vil forsvare vår egen sikkerhet

Et annet tegn på at vi er i krig er at nyhetene som tikker inn på våre kanaler filtreres nøye via de internasjonale nyhetsbyråene som Reuters og AFP, via NRK, av redaktørene i hovedstadsavisene, til og med i Klassekampen, BBC, Al Jazeera og i sosiale media. All informasjon vi mottar om krigen og om bakgrunnen for krigen, gjør det klart at dette er en krig mellom det gode og det onde.

USAs og NATOs rolle siden 1990 og spesielt siden 2014, altså bakgrunnen for krigen, forties. At en stor minoritet i Ukraina er gresk-ortodokse, russisk-talende og russisk-tenkende mennesker forties. (Hva skjebnen til disse menneskene er, vet vi ikke, men jeg ser liten grunn til å tro at den har vært stort mildere enn jødenes skjebne i de berømte ukrainske pogromene.)

Det er som kjent alltid seierherren som får fortelle historien, så det er klart at det står mye på spill for vestmaktene, som kjemper denne krigen på Ukrainsk jord med ukrainere som kanonføde. Norge har enda ikke klart å innrømme at det var feil å gripe inn i Afghanistan og Libya, forresten. Vil vi noensinne klare å innrømme det, mon tro?

At alle stridsvognene NATO-landene nå skal sende til Ukraina vil drepe mange, det er det ikke tvil om. At man bretter opp ermene og ser optimistisk fram til mange måneders fortsatt drapsorgier, er en ting. At man ikke sier “NOK er NOK, nå må dere sette dere ned og forhandle”, er en ufattelig skam.

Det hadde vært mulig å unngå denne krigen, slik jeg skrev for over et år siden. Det hadde i det lengste antakelig også vært mulig å gjøre slutt på den, men ved å sende inn flere (visstnok 3) stridsvogn-brigader bemannet med folk som har gjennomgått trening i UK og Tyskland og Norge (!), har NATO i praksis innlatt seg på en angrepskrig, og ingen vet hvor den vil ende.

Og da, ja da kan det endelig reelt bli fare for selv norsk sikkerhet. Alt dette kunne vært unngått…!

Så til de lokale konsekvensene:

Partiet Rødt har tappert motstått press angående spørsmålet om våpenhjelp til Ukraina. Nå knekker den ene etter den andre av profilerte Rødt-politikere, som følge av en egg- og tomatkastingskampanje jeg ikke har sett maken til i hele mitt lange liv. Den ene etter den andre faller på kne og innrømmer, “Herre, jeg har feilet!”.

Partiet Rødt vil åpenbart bli splittet. Det blir antakelig den eneste eksplisitte seieren som oppnås av NATO i Norge. Det eneste gjenværende norske partiet som enda definerte seg som motstander av NATO-medlemskap og NATO-imperialisme skal nå halshogges. Mange vil fryde seg, mens svært mange flere vil ikke en gang ane hvor mye de har mistet, nemlig et parti som virkelig ønsket omfordeling.

Dette tapet, tapet av det siste norske anti-imperialistiske partiet, volder meg større sorg enn tapet av levestandarden som vi nå alle opplever og som vi vil fortsette å oppleve over mange år. Men jeg nevner det likevel: det de norske skattebetalerne må punge med blir ikke småpenger.

Det kan hende at norske skattebetalere ikke bekymrer seg over det – vi har jo oljefondet – men tenk på de andre europeiske landene! De har ikke oljefond. De har bare gjeld. Skattebetalerne i alle de landene skal betale for en meningsløs og fryktelig krig mellom broderfolk fordi Stoltenberg sa NEI. Nei til Russlands krav om ikke å gi NATO-medlemskap til Ukraina.

Det blir bråk, tro meg. ikke mellom høyre og venstre, men mellom rasende krefter vi ikke enda aner omfanget av.


Change

17.01.2023 /

The very word – change – is a little scary. For a child, moving with parents to a different district means moving away from friends and/or bullies, to potential new friends and/or bullies. As adults we may think we have grown out of such starkly black-and-white notions, yet, we are still vulnerable, maybe as vulnerable as we ever were, because now others depend on us. We have nobody but ourselves to fall back upon, yet we have children, ageing parents, mortgages, etc… The idea that we might not be up to the challenge is chilling.

The prospect of change can invite hope, but the future changes we now see dimly outlined do not.

I imagine myself waiting in the early morning fog at a train station in Germany. I’m on my way to work in a nearby town. A voice on the station loudspeakers announces that the train has been cancelled. The next train will arrive in an hour. The station café is closed, but I get a coffee from a machine. I’m not dressed to wait for an hour outdoors in January, so when the train finally arrives after an hour, I’m shivering and an hour late for work.

Under a cold, grey sky, gloomy confabulations can spiral out of hand: My late arrival at work is deducted from my pay – fair enough – and the subsequent two-week sick leave due to bronchitis is covered by the national health insurance, but my mother, alas…. My mother has been poorly for some time but unable to get a doctor’s appointment, and she dies at the end of the month.

So what do I do? I get awfully angry, for one thing, because I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t have to die. The national health service is a mess. That’s a fact. My dead mother is another fact. Or rather, no, it isn’t, because this was just fiction – rainy-day fiction. Somebody else’s mother will have died, and that will be a fact; not mine, though.

What certainly also is a fact, is that during Covid, nurses and doctors worked their asses off. They are now either ill or on strike, apart from those that have up and quit. The national health service is on its knees here, there, and almost everywhere. As you will probably have noticed.

After Covid, the nurses here, there and almost everywhere, asked for a pay rise. People with wages the equivalent of those of a nurse (R.N.) can afford to live in only 1.5 % of all dwellings in Oslo. The number of dwellings available to nurses has actually decreased, even since 2021 not to mention since 2013. (Meanwhile, between you and me: Who is it, then, who lives in all the other 98.5 % of the dwellings in Oslo?)

Everybody agrees that public health professionals carried more than their share of the burden of Covid. But pay rise? NO.

Prices rise and the cost of living rises pretty much to the point of being sky-high rise-wise, but pay-rise? NO, NO and NO. You see, pay rises generate inflation. Inflation is a magic word these days.

Mainstream media is reluctant about calling “these days” a time of crisis. At a time when the price of petrol has doubled in the course of a year, when the price of heating three rooms has risen ten-fold in the course of a year, when the price of food has risen considerably… mainstream media is not reflecting what at least half the population in most of the western world feels: anger, fear, distrust.

Mainstream media’s main preoccupation now is the war in Ukraine for which Russia is exclusively to blame, of course, Russia on which mainstream media blames just about everything – including Trump. (By the way, did you ever hear who blew up the Nord-Stream cables? It certainly wasn’t the Russians because then you would sure as X— have heard about it.)

But hold on!

What did we learn in Business School? We learnt: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” (Those were roughly Milton Friedman’s words, I believe.) That was what we learned, and this is definitely a crisis.

So rather than self-medicate or spend hours on our knees at our neighbourhood chapel, rather than rant at our loved ones or serve cookies laced with emetic agents to our bosses, let us put this crisis to good use.

  • Let us kidnap our governments, including prime ministers, presidents, finance ministers, etc, etc and, NOT LEAST, all their business cronies.
  • Let us put them all in a very safe place – informing the entire world that if anybody tries to free the prisoners, each of whom will receive three healthy meals a day and a private room with adequate heating and a bathroom (we are not – repeat – NOT sadists), we will instantly liquidate them, painlessly, of course, since we are NOT, I repeat, sadists.
  • We shall give our prisoners two choices:
    • 1)
      • a) for all nurses of the world: a hefty pay rise
      • b) for all other citizens of the world (including nurses, now that I think of it):
        – adequate heating,
        – (healthy) accommodation,
        – three healthy meals a day,
        – first-class, fully functioning public health services,
        – superb lower and higher public education and
        – efficient public transportation

        or
    • 2)
      • painless liquidation of all the rest of us.

I doubt they will chose option 2 because if they do, they will have nobody to feed them and to replenish their bank accounts.

NB: I don’t mean to force-feed people three times a day. I wish to be very clear on that. For those who prefer heroin to food: it’s their life. Nor do I insist that people living near the equator should be subjected to 24-hour heating. Besides, there are issues such as water or lack of it, locusts, fevers, crime, etc. But all those issues – or a sensible approach to them – start with informed decisions, decisions made for the common good, which is not what our governments are delivering.

Inquisition

05.01.2023 /

So what if I were wrong. What if there was no US-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014? What if the Ukraine war is not a proxy war waged by the USA against Russia? Does that mean that such suspicions, such suggestions, such ideas should be banned from all mainstream and social media on the grounds that they are the product of Russian propaganda, i.e. that they are ideas spawned by the “enemy”?

Almost all my compatriots believe that Putin is “evil”, and that this entire war has to do with his personal megalomanic ideas regarding a land of innocent farmers minding their own business. It’s not that my compatriots are stupid: I put to you that the mainstream media can be compared to the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition. Even Jews and Moslems converted, what else could they do?

There are undoubtedly very many innocent farmers in the ravaged land of Ukraine. Quite many of them, however – true, a minority – speak Russian, think and feel Russian. That part of the story has basically been forgotten by mainstream media.

Now the interesting thing about the Spanish inquisition is not that people were burnt at the stake, but that the Inquisition lasted much longer in Spain than elsewhere, until 1834, in fact. The last person to be executed on charges of heresy in Spain, was a Caetano Ripoli in 1826 – he was a teacher inspired by Enlightenment ideas. Nowadays, we all bow to those ideas, those of the Enlightenment. But the powerful Spanish clergy and the nobility – neither the one nor the other paid any taxes at the time, and between them they bled their peasants to the bone – would have none of such ideas, naturally.

All of Europe executed heretics, by the way, also Protestant nations. In Protestant Norway, for instance, more than 300 people (mostly women) were found guilty of witchcraft and executed. These people were considered the Devil’s tools, so the wealth of extant court records of the trials, which by the way are extremely detailed, make no secret of the use of torture. Torture was deemed a perfectly reasonable tool, not only to combat the Devil, but also to salvage the women’s souls: Only if they confessed would they stand a chance of not burning in Hell till Kingdom come.

I add for the record that between 1400 and 1782, some 40,000–60,000 were killed, mostly in Europe, on charges of witchcraft. (Source: Wikipedia as at 2023.01.04)

So my point is not that the Spanish Inquisition executed large numbers of people, on the contrary, but that it was so tremendously efficient. Basically a network of courts, it held the entire population in thrall for nearly five centuries; people feared God, feared each other, feared being denounced or accused by their neighbours, feared life itself.

The Inquisition’s crusade was against freedom of information, freedom of thought. In short, it aimed to arrest the exchange of ideas. Its success was undeniable, in that it basically halted all progress.

Many countries practised censorship. The Spanish Crown did not need to. With the gold and silver from their colonies, Royalty, the Church and the nobility built extravagant palaces to which they invited foreign artists, but look at the paintings of the great Golden Age Spanish painters (e.g. Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera and El Greco. Apart from Velasquez and, later, Goya, they painted mainly “the Virgin”, Christ, Cupids, Angels, saints and clouds.

So what did Inquisition censorship do for Spain?

Spain was a total flop, economically, politically and socially, until very recently. That is censorship for you.

With God on its side, to quote Bob Dylan, the Inquisition throttled growth. Whereas England, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, even Poland, prospered, Spain did not. People were terrified of offending God even after the Inquisition; in fact, way into the 1970s. In a fabulously fertile country, most people lived in abject poverty.

So what if I’m wrong. What if there was no US-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014? What if the Ukraine war is not a proxy war waged by the USA against Russia? Let them – those who deny what some of us maintain are facts – counter those facts with other observable facts. Let us calmly and coolly analyse what happened.

Instead, the US Inquisition ( cf. for instance the Twitter Files) has cancelled us, not only in the US but in all of NATO, suppressing freedom of information and even throttling freedom of thought – since without information no real freedom of thought.

Much good that will do us all.

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