I have been silent for a long time. What can you say, when people are being slaughtered on an industrial scale? You can protest, you can scream, you can imagine in your dreams that the words you direct at the criminals are daggers, but in the end, …

In years to come my grandchildren might ask, “And then what happened?”

To be honest, what happened next was that most of us became numb. Yes, numb, alas. How else could we go on?

However, I have now been fortunate enough to see an interview with a 22-year-old Gazan, who was (at the time) alive. Hopefully, he still is. What he said was truly an inspiration.

I have sometimes felt enough generosity to wonder how US and UK sympathisers of the Palestinian cause must feel. Their governments are complicit in a big way. How would I feel if I were a citizen of a genocidal government?

That must hurt terribly, Yet, how much generosity do I truly feel? After all, the US has a long record of running torture camps and murderous puppet regimes on all continents except, as far as I know, Oceania and Europe. US citizens should be inured by now to the knowledge that their government routinely stamps out democracy, justice, and freedom wherever the US elite’s strategic or economic interests are at risk.

But of course, I remind myself, US citizens are not inured, because they have no idea of their country’s sinister record.

Today, everything changed for me, and my sympathy for the hapless US and UK citizens who have no idea of the ghastly mischief their government has been up to, has risen. Today, you see, I got a taste of the medicine they have had to get used to. Yep.

The man who was the driving force in sending Ukrainians to the meat grinder, the man who peddled fantasy, when everybody should have known – and many certainly did know – that Ukraine could never win against such a formidable opponent – yes, that man, that blot on Norway’s history – has now become Norway’s finance minister.

The number of people killed in action vary, of course, depending on your source. Here in Norway, we have been so gung-ho about the Ukrainian war effort, that the Norwegian press tend to quote the US authorities in this, and for that matter most other, matters related to “national security” (i.e. US “national security” which apparently is ours as well).

However, I have more faith in members of the VIPS and other US critics of US efforts to cling to global hegemony, and most of them put the number of Ukrainian dead at around 700 000, at the very least. And the war is quite obviously lost. L-O-S-T. Yet, Ukrainians are still being sent to the meat grinder to die. I just listened to one of the VIPS, Col. Douglas Macgregor, whose outlook about the Ukraine war (from 13 minutes on) was – to put it very mildly – bleak.

Here I need to remind you, in case you have not visited my site before, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not – repeat – NOT unprovoked, as Professor Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly explained so succinctly that he is effectively black-listed by some search engines, which is why I refer you to jeffsachs.org, where you will find some of his articles and talks,

The medicine, then, that I must swallow though it makes me sick, is that Stoltenberg has relinquished his post as co-head of the Bildenberg group, a title he had just assumed in November 2024, to return to Norway as Finance Minister. As an aside, I put to you that the Bildenberg group is about as disreputable as any other virtually secret society of the super rich, the aim of which is to promote the interests of oligarchs. Mind you: Stoltenberg is a “Labour Party” wolf in sheepskin, like Starmer, but unlike Starmer, he is a dangerous one.

Everybody here was thrilled that Stoltenberg, a war criminal as I see it (the Libya debacle in 2011 here in Norwegian, and here about UK participation in English), should be so greatly honoured, so proud of him: our boy: “NATO Secretary General”, “our Jens” heading the elite Bildenberger group. And they are no less thrilled now that he has relinquished this tremendous honour in favour of “us”. Ugh.

Are the Ukrainians pleased? Having lost the better part of their male population, over 20 per cent of their territory and God knows what else…, are they grateful to Jens Stoltenberg, to NATO, to Bilderberg, to Europe for fooling them into taking on Russia ahead of the war US hawks hanker for with China? Are they pleased when they see Stoltenberg’s smiling unabashedly unashamed face in the media?

Are the Norwegian mainstream press proud of having cheered Stoltenberg on, throughout? So it seems. Why didn’t they see, I ask, what so very many independent political scientists, independent investigative journalists, and independent academics saw from the very start: Ukraine could not win? Why? Well, the answer to that question is simple: They turned to US think tanks that to a large extent are funded by the US military industry, which of course thrives on wars. That’s why.

And now the Norwegian “darling” will be finance minister. He will be de facto leader of this country (because the prime minister is politically impotent). I could have screamed, but I don’t want to wake the neighbours.

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I would like to give you an example of how VIPS members deal with unfolding geopolitical events and how they deal with diasagreement. Trump has just stated that he wants to take over Gaza: Discussion.